Getting ready for the trip

Only one more week before we head for Germany again. I can not believe this is the second time this year. While I try to get everything ready, we as well transformed the house from Halloween/fall to Christmas. We want to give the girls a notion that Christmas is not only something to be celebrated at any of the grandparents houses. We put hour tree up last Saturday. The ornaments are pooling on the upper part this year, because Amelia is very interested in them. She loves the lights and has figured out how to plug them in. Oh the joy of so much help! Marlene is more focused on the Adventcalender business and keeps reminding everyone to open the doors. "Chocolate" is finally a word in Amelia's vocabulary (with her parentage, it's about time). I am pretty happy that it is not so cold anymore; it really cuts back on the time we need in the morning to bundle everyone up and get going. We have, as well, made some cookies, which Marlene is pretty good at by now. My biggest struggle is to teach Amelia to cut the cookies next to each other and not make a random puzzle of cut pieces by going over them time and again. We even managed to visit the reindeer at Swansons (a local nursery) and see the lights downtown. My favorite was the Nikolaus-Feier at the German langugage school, where all the classes performed little skids and in between everyone sang Christmas songs. So far for today. I don't know if we are going to have an other blog before Christmas. In any case I wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.