Einem ruhigen Sonntag

Joey's joke: he spent most of the
morning with two legs in one
pantleg. He thought it was hilarious,
and he kept saying it made him look
like a horse.  Maybe because the
other pantleg looked like a tail?

After all of the excitement of yesterday, we had a quiet, very average day at home today. But both Ella and Alex told me, at the end of the evening, "Thank you, Mom, for a wonderful day!"

I'm guessing that a good part of the reason Ella enjoyed today so much was that we let her play video games for large portion of the day.  Alex, too, would have vegetated with his sister for most of the day, but like most little boys, he doesn't do well after a day full of screen time.  So I took him out with me after lunch, for a fresh milk and cider run at the farm.

When Joey saw what we were up to, he begged and begged to come along. He did pretty well on the trip there, but he grew very sleepy on the ride home.  Toward the end of the trip, he ended up standing on his scooter, face resting on the bar, while I bent over, pushing him along...while carrying over six liters of fluid on my back.  Ow!

Alex, however, was exceedingly easy on this trip.  Just to see if he could, I asked him to lead the way to the farm.  There's only one bus at the stop, and you have to take that bus to the end...and he navigated the sidewalks perfectly on either end. Amazing.

Apart from that outing, I, like Ella, spent a good part of my day in front of the computer. I've spent at least eight hours, all told, trying to arrange the hotels for our trips in October and December. But I think we've got it all arranged, now, and we have a deposit down for our Christmas vacation at this hotel.

There's a really fun little children's snow playground next to it, and we're planning on throwing the kids into ski lessons with the relentless Austrians.  Since Joey will be three by December, he could, theoretically, take a week's worth of ski lessons as well.  I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I suppose he could handle it: the child can scoot one-legged, after all.

Dennis and I figure we'll try to keep the kids awake a little later each night that we're on vacation, to help them adjust for the massive 9-hour time shift when we head back to Kirkland.  We'll be back in Zürich on New Year's eve: if all goes well, the'll be able to stay up late enough for the midnight fireworks. I hear they're pretty fantastic.

We did eventually extract the children from the house toward the end of the day, walking down to the pool for some splashing and a dinner of hot dogs. I took a little video of Joey, flying down our crazy waterslide, and also some of him getting swept off his feet by the pool water jets.

Alex got to end the day with a wonderful treat, a long video conference with his friend Kevin. For those of you who have never witnessed a video conversation between two kindergarten boys, it's pretty fantastic.  The spent most of the time cracking each other up with the funny faces they were making at the video cameras, with a few nonsensical knock-knock jokes thrown in for good measure.  Kevin's mom and I tried to steer the boys toward conversation, but it quickly dissolved into the boys running two and from the camera, enthusiastically showing each other all the new toys and treasures they'd accumulated over the past year.

Toward the end of the conversation, Alex ran off and painted his nails pink to make Kevin laugh.  Alex thought it was pretty funny, too, until he tried to wash his hands and discovered that nail polish isn't water soluble. Then, unfortunately, it wasn't funny at all. The things we do for our friends.