I'm trying to get caught up!! The weeks after getting back to Italy were hectic but fun filled. The girls got settled back into school and we ended the first week with a birthday party for Dayna with 15 friends. Fortunately the weather was beautiful so we managed to have it outside. It could've been disastrous as that many kids in our tiny living area would have been chaos had it rained. The kids played on our playground and we played egg and dress up relay races and strung some beads. I couldn't understand a word the kids said to me nor could they understand me but with the help of a few friends and Karissa we got through it. We had a blast and Dayna got her first bouquet of flowers from a boy (a Russian no less)! Grandma Treece came to the rescue with jelly beans, a Betty Crocker cake mix, candles and cupcake papers!
The next week I went with the ladies from our International Tea here in the apartment complex on an outing to a small town nearby that has an Easter Egg Museum. Sounds kind of odd but the collection of eggs was phenomenal. It is quite an art in much of Europe and each country/area has their own techniques. There were even cross stitched eggs - real ones!?? Some of them were amazingly intricate - not your plain old dyed in a coffee cup variety. (Although we did get to introduce our Icelandic friends to that tradition before Easter! They had never dyed eggs before!)
The following weekend was crazy. Karissa and I took Flat Ryan downtown for some pictures, her first gelato in Tuebingen for the year and gymnastics practice. The gelato doesn't compare to Italy's but she sacrificed! I walked around the old city during Karissa's practice and got some spring pictures of the downtown area - something I've never gotten to do by myself since Dayna was at her first German birthday party (Geburtstag Fest). They hid a treasure chest in the woods and the kids had to find it with clues (no Chuck E Cheese here!). It was so nice to see her so happy compared to earlier in the year when she "had no friends".
The next day we rode our bikes to the Botanischer Garten for some spring photos. The flowers are gorgeous - I think spring is here!! The girls managed to discover hundreds of little tadpoles in the lily pond. Later that day the girls competed in their very first Pinewood
Derby with
their Awana club at church. They started with a block of wood and we
had to design a race car. It was a lot of fun and both girls did quite
well - each winning a few heats. Dayna came in 3rd in her age group.
The next day, Karissa competed in her first gymnastics competition. Her little group came in 3rd and it was fun to see her with her game face on doing the short routines. We finished the night back in Stuttgart at Awana. The pace was a little "too American" for us!
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