Anna's Blog

Friday, September 30, 2011

Pregnant Barbie...err Barbie's German cousin Steffi.

Yes. I bought a pregnant Barbie..err Steffi and I think it's pretty much the most epic thing ever. I saw her at Kik (think Dollar General or something similar) for 8 euro. At first I was a little freaked out "WHO WOULD BUY THAT FOR THEIR KID?!!" I thought. 35 minutes later I was walking out the door with Steffi. Done. I used my handy dandy iPhone to do a little Amazon research on the real pregnant Barbie seen HERE.

I saw the $120 price tag and decided Steffi had to be mine. I think Steffi will come in handy when baby #2 comes along.

Since then I picked up an AWESOME German (it has a German license plate, how cool is that?!) Barbie VW beetle. My friend Pam and I hit up a few German kindergarten sales (each town's kindergarten has a yard sale twice a year). I scored the Barbie car and the ever awesome Little People Farm - the older style one like my sister, Jenni, told me I had to get. Which is worth every penny of 9 euro I paid for it. Anna hasn't stopped playing with those two things ALL week!

Since I haven't given her Steffi yet, she's been..well...making it work. Sophie is a great driver!

Since I've picked up these two items, I've been searching ebay for all kinds of Barbie things and it's AMAZING the fantastic stuff that you can find on ebay. Like THIS AWESOME Barbie house that my sister had.

OK OK enough about Barbies...on to DINOSAURS!! We went back to the Ludwigsburg Pumpkin Festival again this year. This years theme is dinosaurs. I'll be honest, I was pretty disappointed. Especially with the T-Rex. I expected a two story T-rex.
Not only was it smaller then I expected, look at those WEAK ARMS! WEAK!

Brian chasing our buddy, Ryan, and Anna chasing both of them!

Saturday, September 10, 2011

Lucky you x2!

Anna eating her chicken sushi

Anna and mommy in Norway

It rained a lot in Norway

Anna putting on her house shoes at school - first day!

Lucky YOU! :D

Two blogs in one week!! ;)

Anna is having a great time at school. She has three teachers Mrs. Annette, Miss Sandra and Mrs. Claudia. Annette and Sandra both speak perfect English, but only to me, they speak German to Anna. Currently I'm working on her birthday book, which I need to take to school this week before I get in trouble. I'll take some photos before I take it to school. For right now Anna is only staying 4 hours in the morning, so she doesn't eat lunch at school, just snack. I was warned (by friends and her teachers) no sweets aka. no fruit roll ups, no gummy snack packs, no packaged pudding, etc..aka no junk. I can totally jump on board with that. I would actually prefer they didn't give her juice at snack (they offer a fruit tea - very common for kids here and juice - I honestly think they would give her water if I requested it, but I haven't). A lot of parents send a piece of bread or a soft pretzel with fruit and veggies...or maybe a small sandwich. I got in "trouble" this week for sending (homemade of course) banana bread!!!! ...and I don't even use that much sugar in my bread! Life lesson learned, no banana bread for snack. They take my kid for 4 hours a day for 5 days a week for less than $100 a month, so we'll keep our banana bread at home!

These photos were from her first day of school in the afternoon.

We started out in the yard:

Anna climbs up on her slide to see the horses over the fence (she does this pretty often, but this was the first time I got a shot of it)

I wanted to get her on the porch with a little sign saying "first day of German Kindergarten" but she wasn't having any part of the sign...it went something like this:

Someone was tired

It got better

A few weeks ago we went to our friend Ryan's birthday party at http://www.spieloase-jola.de/Bildergalerie.htm . The photo I posted of Anna in the last post eating the cupcake (aka zucchini muffin with cream cheese icing) was at the birthday party. Here's one of Brian, Ryan's little brother, Trevor, and Anna on the 'race cars'. This place is a fantastic place to have birthday parties. I have a feeling Anna's #2 will be there! The kids love it and you can bring your own food!

We love going to Spieloase! It's fun for parents and kids and this particular day we had the whole place to ourselves for awhile (not that it was planned - it just worked out that way) which made it even more fun for Anna. She's a big fan of the XL trampolines and the fast slide. I'll post more photos from the day when I get them from Erica.

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Norway and new photos

Some people find it odd that I have so many friends living in Europe. Brooke in Norway, Emily in Greece, Matt in Munich, Dave in Prague and my friend Britta just moved back to the states from Sicily. All of them I've known since grade school or high school. Over Labor Day weekend we headed to Oslo, Norway and just South of Oslo to the island of Tjome.

We hit almost every mode of public transportation in our first day...car (ours, so not really public), bus, train, boat, and bus again all before we arrived at Brooke's house. The Bakken's prepared an awesome dinner for us while Anna got to play with their daughter, Klara and 8 month old, Liam (who btw is bigger then Anna).

It rained most of the weekend. It wasn't until we got back to Moss (the city we flew in and out of), that the sun came out for a short visit.

The long story short is we only have photos off our phone. I'll get them loaded soon...to tide you over here are a few photos of our cute kid.

Pants, diapers and underwear are all overrated!

First day of REALLY doing pedals all on her own...the downfall of being short!

She wants to eat EVERYTHING with a fork or spoon. Which is awesome! She's such a big girl! Oh and she's drinking out of a big girl cup most of the time now. I still give her a sippy when we're in the car, but I didn't even take a sippy cup to Norway this past weekend!