nach Hause

After Joey finally fell asleep last night, I crept around the room, doing my best to pack everything to be ready for the morning.  I have to say, I slept terribly: I always do when I have to wake up early to an alarm, but last night was particularly bad, because Joey, twice, woke up and screamed at me: "HEY! OUT! MY! BED!"

Alex's "Wizard House"

I mentioned this to Dennis this morning, and he walked over to Joey. "Joey? Were you nice to mommy last night?"  "Yeah! I good boy! I..." he started, and remembered the truth of the matter and confessed, with an embarrassed smile. "Nooooooo. 'Out my bed.'"

He was in a considerably better mood this morning because I woke the boys up, at 6:00, using an episode of Garfield and Friends as their alarm clock.  Effective: we had all the kids dressed and out on the pavement (where Boobs was still doing brisk trade) by 6:30.  The kids and I waited for our train and eventually hauled on all the bags, while Dennis found us all enough coffee and croissants to get us through the five-hour train ride home.

Ella, building an airplane

I pulled out our lego souvenirs, and the kids had fun with those for a time. I also had some little games that kept the kids happy, once their phones had run out of batteries.

Dennis would say that I'm overly excited about these games, and maybe I am. But I'm an unabashed geek when it comes to board games. A couple of weeks ago, at a visit to the toy store, I picked up these little freebie give-aways and set them aside for this trip.  They're perfectly complete, teeny-tiny versions of full-sized games, which generally sell for between $50 and $75 dollars: Kosmos Games seem to accept that no one is going to spend that much money on a toy without a test-drive. And they're perfect travel games. The only problem is that the instructions, of course, are entirely in German.  But Dennis was a good sport and painstakingly translated them all.

Okay, Ella may be overselling it a little, but they did have fun.

Four days was long enough for Alex
to miss his toys. He curled up in
his room and read stories to his
stuffed animals when we got
home.

The good part about having a 6:00 wake-up call is that it was only noon when we got home.  Plenty of time for Ella to do the homework she'd been avoiding all weekend, and go for a swim, besides.

Dennis and the boys left for the pool a little before Ella and me, an incentive for her to finally finish those last few problems.  But we caught up to them at the water fountain, where an elderly lady, charmed by my little tow-heads, stopped them to practice her English.  When I joined them, she was in the process of paying Dennis the ultimate compliment: "When I see you walking down the street, I am thinking to myself, 'He is a Swiss man.'"

She also praised my sons, who were sticking their finger in the fountain, making the water squirt and spray, something I'd told them dozens of times not to do.  Nonetheless, Joey's reached the point where he can direct the water stream perfectly, hitting the target of his choice. (Like, say, his older brother.) The woman nodded approvingly, "That, it is not easy to do," and then asked Alex to teach her how to make the water spray.  Okay, fine.  That battle, I guess I've lost.

But the boys got to play with water at the pool, minus the frowning mommy, until their teeth chattered, and so we eased out of our very full, very long weekend.