Last Thursday I lost my last grandparent. Grandma Hutchens was almost 90, still lived by herself, and kept very busy. She made it out to visit us earlier this year, which was a treat for the kids. Mason especially had a good time chatting with her.
Since we're missing the funeral, we spent some time in the woods doing a little memorial. My sister did a project for a college class that involved doing a life sketch of my grandma. We used it to help our kids (and even me) get to know more about her and her life. I wish we could have made it to her funeral, but I'm glad we were able to do something. I like to imagine the happy reunions she is having with so many people she loves who were waiting for her on the other side.
Mason and Grandma Hutchens
After our memorial service, we did a little hike and played hide-and-go-seek in a meadow with the kids--but not Megan. It turns out my niece is not fond of open meadows. Because they might contain "free-range cows" (is there a word for that phobia?). Or snakes. Or bugs. She has a fantastic imagination, which comes in very handy when telling stories. Not so much when going for a hike or playing in tall grass. We didn't know this the last time we went on a hike, and I was very confused when she kept subtly and not-so-sublty suggesting that perhaps we had gone too far and should turn around. Especially if we ever veered from the path (which is NOT ALLOWED). I also mistook her phobia for enthusiasm when we were playing hide-and-go-seek on Monday. She kept sprinting across the meadow (wow! she really likes this game!). Turns out she sprints because it lowers her chance of any bugs getting her along the way since she's a moving target. Which she likens to being chased by someone with a gun. I see quite a big difference between the two, but her--not so much. For the record, we are laughing about this together as I write, so we've come along way in a week.
And I attempted to squeeze in a couple of family photos, since I haven't managed to get a good shot with all four kids looking at camera. I was trying to get them all to smile at the camera, but when I ask them the smile on command, this is what I get:
You know those families where all the kids smile perfectly at the camera? Perhaps you are one of those. We, on the other had, are not.
This shows Andrew's favorite pose: the eye roll. Which kind of makes him look like a zombie. Or like he's possessed.
So we gave up on the photos, and headed up to play. They're much better than that.
Racing off for hide and go seek. Just watch out for the stinging nettle (see below).
The woods around our house continue to be enchanting. One thing I had noticed was the sound of cowbells coming from somewhere. We heard them when we were on a hike, and decided to go investigate. We got up to a little village where the sound started getting clearer. Megan and I went around a house to get a better view, and Ryan veered straight up the ("that's where the sound was coming from").
By the time Megan and I had found the cows, taken this picture, and gone back to find Ryan, he had made some new friends at the house by the cows. I think they don't get a lot of random people walking up their driveway, so Ryan was a little bit of a surprise. They told him all about how cows in Switzerland wear bells so that they are easier to find, and invited us in to visit. Before going in search of cowbells, we had sent Andrew and Chloe back to the house on their own--so making sure they made it home in one piece took precedence over chatting with our new Swiss friends. But I'm sure we'll be back up there soon. Because you can never have too much cowbell.
We piled in the car on Saturday and drove 30 miles east to Austria. The idea of the trip was to do something fun and get a haircut and a tie for Ryan. We ran out of time to get the haircut, but 2 out of 3 isn't bad.
There is a gondola that takes you to the top of the mountain. It will take you back down again as well, and I had almost bought a round-trip ticket, but Ryan thought it would be "fun" to walk down. The person in the office said it would take about an hour and you should have sturdy shoes. The shoes I had on were sturdy, but not hiking shoes. Since Ryan doesn't go with us many places, I didn't want to be bossy and make all of the decisions. Well, inside I did. But I managed to keep that under wraps (okay--it probably peaked through just a tad) and went ahead and bought the one-way ticket up the mountain.
The views from the top were amazing
There was a great playground at the top as well.
After we let the kids play on the playground for a while and enjoyed the views from top, we walked down to a small alpine zoo they had. It was pretty simple with some mountain goats, wild boars, deer, rabbits, etc. At the end, there was a small stadium area where they do a "birds of prey" show, so we watched that. It was all in German, so we didn't actually understand anything, but the birds were amazing enough to make up for it--at least for Mason and Katie. Chloe and Andrew weren't that impressed.
Vultures are surprisingly cute and funny when they aren't circling/picking apart dead animals.
The eagle was the highlight.
Staying for the bird show put us a little behind schedule. We had to get home at a certain time because we had invited the missionaries from our church over for dinner and we were supposed to pick them up at the train station. We had one hour to make it down the mountain--so off we went.
Just to make things a little more challenging, we had forgotten our backpack that had our water bottles at home. The woman at the ticket office said we could by water at the top, so that was our plan. When we got to the top, I went to buy it and instead of normal water, all they had was mineral water. In small glass bottles. For $3 a bottle. So we got one bottle to share, let each of the kids try mineral water (they won't be requesting it again any time soon) and then refilled it with normal water from an outdoor faucet. That's all we had between the 7 of us.
Ryan was the only one gung-ho about the forced march down the mountain, so the lack of water gave everyone one more thing to complain about. My feet hurt bad enough in the shoes I was wearing that I attempted to hike down barefoot--which was just painful in a different way. But the scenery was beautiful and we built a whole lot of character doing it this way. So overall, we'll call it a huge success.
We ended up being 15 minutes late to the train station, but everything worked out and we had a great night. Our one failure of the day was the haircut, but I have some haircutting scissors here--so maybe we'll give that a try for Ryan. It's been a while since I cut his hair, and I've never done it with just scissors, so wish me luck. Or maybe he's the one that needs the luck.
Friday, we woke up and headed out before 8:00 to go to Legoland. It’s about a 2 hour drive to get there, and it opened at 10:00. The drive was a combination of great scenery, a 4-mile long tunnel, and a lot of fast driving on the autobahn. I’ve learned that once you pass someone, you need to go right back to the right lane. Even when you’re going over 85 mph, someone can still come screaming up behind you out of nowhere.
Part of our drive included listening to our new “learn German through jazzed up children’s songs” CD given to us by Ryan’s officemate. I attempted to learn German before coming here and got through the first Pimsleur course...and then life got in the way. And I found out that the entire first half of the course lead up to me being able to ask someone if they wanted to have a drink together at my place or at their place. Clearly I’m not their target audience. So we’ll give it a try with “she’ll be coming round the mountain”.
We got there pretty close to opening time, and stayed until it closed at 5:00 p.m. The last time we did an amusement park was when we did Disneyworld a year and a half ago. Chloe was only 2, so she was too small for almost everything, and Andrew was too scared to even ride Dumbo. We’ve come a long way since then. For the first time ever, I had four kids who all loved going on rides. And with the exception of a few, Chloe was tall enough to do the rides with us. The day couldn’t have been nicer, and there were almost no lines--which is a great recipe for success in an amusement park.
Sheer terror. Riding "Bulgy the Whale" scarred him for years.
Our one little glitch came when Mason lost his iPod touch. He remembered having it on a ride, and then 2 rides later he realized it was gone. This is his miracle iPod that survived an entire wash cycle that was followed by a good 10 minutes of thumping around the drier before I stopped it to see what was making the noise. And it lived to tell about it.
We retraced our steps, asking first at one ride and then going to the next. It continues to be the miracle iPod, because at the second ride, it was sitting in the little office where the controls are. I don't know who it was that turned it in, but I hope there's some good karma coming their way. After that, it got locked in my purse.
We had a great time together, everyone had fun, and no one got sunburned. And most important for me, I didn’t spend my day waiting in lines. Hooray!
We got home in time for Ryan and I to go to watch the Avengers. Movies in general require you to suspend belief, but this one really took it to a new level. Even so, it was a fun movie to watch. Expensive ($25/person for the movie and 3D glasses), but fun. Just as memorable as the movie was walking the 1/4 mile back from our house through the pitch darkness at midnight. Over the bridge, up the trail, etc. A little freaky, but I didn’t get eaten by wild animals so I’ll consider it a success.
We had good timing today, since we chose “bring your child to work day” to come in and visit Ryan for the first time at his office in St Gallen Univeristy. No, they don't have that going on here--but still good timing nonetheless. We checked out the sights before heading up to see him. It’s a beautiful city:
The Convent of St Gallen
Please take note of Mason in the picture below with his green umbrella on the bright sunny day. We had a little falling out before leaving that had to do with the fact that I’m not on board with him saving up to buy himself a laptop (he is an ambitious kid). Somehow he had gotten it all worked out in his head that it would be the source of eternal happiness if he were to get his own laptop, and I was ruining everything.
When I told him that if he didn’t come to St Gallen with us, he wouldn’t get to go to Legoland tomorrow, he came out. But he was.not.speaking.to.me. And to enforce that point, he brought the bright green umbrella as a visual reminder that we were not on speaking terms. It was held up as a barrier so that he didn’t have to see me or talk to me.
Fortunately, a little time and some ice cream pulled him out of it, and the umbrella got put away. I’m going to be honest that I’m not looking forward to how things might be when he’s a teenager and ice cream isn’t enough to get him back to his usual fantastic self. Hopefully I have a couple of years before we get to that point.
Our only glitch in the day (with the exception of another adventure in an underground parking garage with my gynormous van) was when we were trying to drive through the city. I entered an intersection that was kind of confusing, and somehow must have missed either a yield or a stop sign. Either way, a car had to slam on it’s breaks to keep from broadsiding me in the intersection. Aaahhhhh. It’s hard to get over those moments when you almost have something REALLY BAD happen.
I had one other incident in Spain when I was driving in the left hand lane on the highway thinking it was a 4-lane highway and I was on one of the two lanes heading the same direction. It turns out that the middle/dividing line in Spain is white, not yellow like in the U.S., and I was on a 2-lane highway and there was oncoming traffic. That one wasn’t as close of a call as the one today, but both experiences make me very grateful for the guardian angels that I’m sure are working overtime during our expeditions here.
So moving on from near brushes with death, here are just a few other random shots of life in Switzerland. The left shot is the view out my kitchen window of the kids playing in the yard (they are the colored blobs amidst the green lawn), and the right is the view of the mountains as we walk over the river and through the woods to our house.
And one last random photo. The only thing I've seen advertised as "American" here is square sandwich bread. This is particularly patriotic sandwich bread, so of course we had to buy it. And it does make super sandwiches, as promised.
Today was our first really warm day since we left Virginia. I finally broke out a short-sleeved shirt and left the umberellas at home. Hooray!
Originally, I was planning on going in to the city of St Gallen where Ryan works. I couldn't figure out exactly what I wanted to do, and I have found that not having a really solid plan on where I'm parking and what we're doing once I get there is a recipe for disaster when I am the tour guide.
I remembered about some waterfalls nearby, and we headed that direction once I had figured out my plan. It's the biggest waterfall in Europe (by volume)--but it's no Niagara. Even so, there are places you can walk to where you can get right up close to the waterfall and it is pretty spectacular to be that close. My pictures don't really do it justice.
Overlooking the falls
After that, we went into the historical diplays in the castle above the falls, which was entertaining for the kids. They made some strange choices in how to portray things: a fancy dining table that was set up nicely for 6 people had voices playing in the room as if they were eating at the table. For some reason that I didn't understand--since the conversation between the ghosts was in German--the plates moved around on the table (did they like to swap dishes because they didn't like what they ordered?) And one ghost must have been hot, because there was a fan rigged to move up and down to cool her off and a bottle that tipped over a poured her a drink. The whole thing was a little creepy, but Andrew was entranced.
And although I don't think creepy was what they were going for, they definitely achieved it in the portrait room where all of the paintings had the eyes that were layered (the top of the painting was cut out where the eyes were, and had a second layer of paper underneath that had the eyes on them). Think Scooby Doo style where the eyes start following them as they cross the room. I never saw these move, but my niece swears they did. I kept waiting for one of them to start laughing maniacally as we went through the room--which I'm glad never happened, since children with nightmares do not rank high on my list of favorite things. I wish I had gotten a better closeup of the eyes--but as I was afraid they were going to suddenly move, I just headed out and had to hunt down this photo off the internet.
Afterward, we headed to a playground that was made out of long logs strategically attached to each other. It wasn't clear at first that it was a playground, since it looks suspiciously like a pile of leftover wood--but any playground is better than no playground and we left splinter-free.
We stopped in the souvenir store afterward, and I let them each buy some chocolate. Megan used it as a lure to get them to go to the car. What I didn't get a picture of was when Chloe smacked her head into one of the signs because she was so focused on the bag of chocolate.
Once we got home, I had a new problem to deal with. Last night I had noticed some sort of bite on my leg that was feeling a little painful--but not too bad. By the time we got back from the waterfall, whatever it was had become a whole lot worse--my lower shin/calf area was red, puffy and hurt. And it was getting progressively worse over the day. I would have taken a picture of it...but I'll just let you use your imagination. And lets just imagine I had recently gotten a pedicure and shaved my legs as long as we're at it.
I texted Ryan something like "my leg looks infected...could you ask around about a doctor in case I need to see someone?" He translated that text into something much more serious than I had intended ("Ryan...I think I might need to amputate my leg") judging from the way he texted/called me 5 or 6 times trying to let me know he had found a doctor and they could see me right away. But I'm glad he did, because I ended up going in to get it looked at and came home with a $40 pack of penicillin (really? I swear it's $5 at home). But it was a well-spent $40, since my throbbing shin is completely on the mend and I will not be admitted to the hospital with systemic infection any time soon.
And I need to give credit to Ryan's officemate, a Polish PhD student who made phone calls to track down a doctor for me. When you are in a foreign country and have no idea how to figure things out, people who step in and make it easier are invaluable. He told Ryan that when he was a grad student in Cambridge, no one had helped him out--so he resolved that he would never leave others to feel that way. And he has definitely done that in many ways during this past week for Ryan.
In the end, my aching leg gave me an excuse to elevate my leg for the evening and work on learning the guitar chords for Ricky Gervais and Elmo's "Celebrity Lullabies", thanks to my niece's recommendation. It was a well-spent evening.
The woods around our house continue to be enchanting. One thing I had noticed was the sound of cowbells coming from somewhere. We heard them when we were on a hike, and decided to go investigate. We got up to a little village where the sound started getting clearer. Megan and I went around a house to get a better view, and Ryan veered straight up the ("that's where the sound was coming from").
