Happy New Year

Wishing you all a very happy, healty and safe New Year!

Arrived in Austria

When we arrived at the Gerlospass we needed to put our snowchains on the car. Guess who of the tree persons is an engineer?

Finally a lot of snow... This is in front of the chalet. Wow, the snow is great. The kids are loving it.

This morning we left for Augsburg, Germany, our stop before driving to Austria. Since tomorrow is the last day of the year we wanted to arrive on time in our chalet, so we decided to leave today.
At noon, we still had good nice weather, cold but dry, so we decided to have a break for lunch. A good idea, because the weather turned on us.

This and worse was the rest of the trip... But we arrived safely in Augsburg, we had a bite to eat in an old brewery and now we are back at the hotel.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas

Homemade present

Son #1 needed to make a homemade present for a secret santa party in his class. So he checked out the different patterns and his choice were these christmas lights. He crocheted the string and I made the lamps. I hope his secret santa bussy likes the lights. If you like the pattern, it is a freebie from ravelry: you can get it here.

Flowers

This morning a van from the florist stopped at our place and a guy comes out with a big bouquet of flowers... For me???
Yes, they are from my colleagues, thanks guys, they look and smell wonderful.
Yesterday and the day before I still had doctor´s appointments, so today I am taking it easy.

Lucky

Yesterday evening when I wanted to go home after school, I was hit by a car.
The ambulance took me to hospital and I returned yesterday evening.
So today, I am just going to take it easy and stay on the couch, as my whole body hurts...

Christmas market in cave

The boyfriend of our au pair visited her this weekend and we thought we would visit an original Christmas market. The one in Valkenburg (there are actually two) are held in the two local man-maded caves.

The temperature inside is always 12 degrees Celsius, so quite nice. And it is a lovely market to visit. One word of advice, come early! As we left the caves, there were no more people allowed to enter until people left, so the amount of people in the caves is regulated. So outside were huge lines with waiting people...

In the above pic you can see that people used to make sculptures in the caves... In the older parts, you can see wonderful sculptures and paintings, you can even find fossils.

Christmas tree

Our christmas tree arrived last week but we waited with the decoration until sunday, because we celebrated Sinterklaas on Saturday.
And now that it is decorated the christmas sprit has arrived, the whole houses is decorated, the wreath is hanging on the front door, so all we have to wait for is snow...
Hmm, since it is still 5 to 8 degrees Celsius, I don´t think we will have a white christmas...
Oh well, we will not let it spoil the fun, as long as it snows in Austria. More about that in a later post.

Idea = 8, performing it = 2

Since the weather was poor yeaterday, a lot of wind and rain, and the kids were indoors all day, we thought it would be a good idea to take them to the beach. We also took our nephew with us since he stayed with us last night so his parents could have a quite night.
When we drove on the boulevard, I noticed that there were not many people on the beach...
So we unloaded all the boys and walked towards the sea... and were sanded by the wind. Not a real good idea, so we packed them back in the car and had some pancakes for lunch.

Sinterklaas

Yesterday evening, Sinterklaas paid our family a visit. Alle our cousins, nieces and nephews were present and we had a great time.
DH was called to Sinterklaas; because he learned son #1 a dirty Sinterklaas song, so he was naughty...
All the kids got great presents and the ones they wanted, how does Sinterklaas knows what they want???? Son#3 was so excited that after he spoke to Sinterklaas, he fell asleep in Opa´s lap.

That time of year...

How quickly did December creep up on me...

I have so much to do before the holidays, so this will be a busy time, want to crochet some more hats and our au pair made a wonderful scraf for herself, so I am a bit envious, I also want one, oh well, start crocheting Margy. You can do it.

Our christmas tree arrived yesterday, I went to look for one on Saturday, saw the perfect tree, which was way too expensive...(think €245), then looked some more and found the perfect tree within our budget. Will make some pictures when it is decorated. Decorating the tree... will have to put that on our TO DO-list.