Erica Holland Photography »

First, I meant to publish this picture in my last post, and I forgot. Annika has been waiting for months and months and months to go to primary. It seemed to intensify once Lucy and Elise started nursery – I think she was wanting her own space again. She got to visit for sharing time through December, and her nursery teacher told me that should would look expectantly towards the door throughout the day and continually asked “when are they coming to get me?” The day before her first official day of primary she could hardly sleep and when she woke up she exclaimed “Today is a big day!” She got dressed all on her own before anyone else was even close to getting ready, she brushed her hair and put in a headband, she packed her little bag and made sure she got her scriptures, and even let me take her picture (it was a big day, of course!) We’re proud of our new sunbeam, and are having a hard time believing that we have a primary aged child already. We sure love you, Annika!

On our first family home evening after the new year, we sat down at the computer together and looked back over all of our pictures from 2011. We were surprised to see how much snow we had last year at this time. Since that last snowfall the week before Christmas, we’ve had nothing but rain and wind. I’m kind of a homebody, and enjoy days that don’t require me to leave the house, but after a couple weeks of near-freezing temperatures, wind, and rain I was feeling ready to spend some time outdoors. So, when it warmed up a bit and the sun peeked out from behind the clouds on Monday, we went for a walk.

The drained the lake this winter, which I guess the only do every 20 years. Apparently they dig out a lot of the silt, and then they’ll fill it back up in the spring? Anyway, taking a walk around a big muddy puddle is not quite so nice as walking around a pond. However, it was nice to be outside, the girls enjoyed running around and around, and the ducks seemed especially hungry. Plus, we put Elise on Annika’s lap, and I got a nice workout pushing all three of them home. It felt so, so great to spend some time outside, and got me itching for spring.

This new year brought another “last” for us here in Germany. I remember Brad and my first New Year in Europe. We were staying in a hotel in Austria, and true to fashion, we had gone to bed before midnight. Suddenly I was awoken by extremely loud explosions all around us. I jumped out of bed with my heart pounding. It literally sounded like we had entered a war zone.  When I looked out our window I could see the entire valley lit up by fireworks. Growing up, my family was never very into fireworks, so the fireworks I was looking at seemed like the pyrotechnics reserved for big public shows – not personal fireworks out of your own backyard. And yet, for the next half hour I watched explosions of light and color from the backyard of every house in the town. It was truly like nothing I had ever seen in the United States, even on the Fourth of July, and five years later I am still just as amazed as I was then. Annika was eagerly anticipating fireworks this year, so we had to make sure we bought some ourselves.

A month or so ago Brad and I made the pizza dough recipe out of my favorite cookbook – Artisan Breads in Five Minutes a Day.  Not only was the recipe great, but we got hooked on making our own pizzas, and it became a Friday night tradition. We load them up with all kinds of good stuff – so its ok to have it weekly, right? We pushed our pizza night back to Saturday and all the girls got in on the fun. (With new aprons from Nani!)

After about a minute of letting Lucy and Elise help with the real dough, we found them some playdough instead. They didn’t know the difference.

Mmmm……

It gets dark around here at 4:00, so Annika had been telling us for hours that it was dark outside and we could do fireworks before we finally made it outside. We started with sparklers, which everyone enjoyed, and then moved on to Roman candles and bottle rockets which Annika only tolerated and Lucy and Elise did not like at all.  I think Annika had the most fun with those little “pop-its” Does anyone else have fond memories of those?

We promised Annika we would wake her up for the big fireworks at midnight. She sat in her window for only a few minutes before she said “When are they going to stop!? I want to go to bed!” We can add New Year’s celebrations to the long list of things I am going to miss about Germany.