Bring Your Four Children to Work Day

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.