Super Fruit

It is a bit embarrassing to admit, but today - the last day of April, over one month into Spring - we finally disposed of our large Halloween pumpkin - a holiday celebrated on the last day of October, over one month into Autumn.

That's right, this pumpkin lasted OVER 6 months! It looked a bit saggy and black-spotted at the end, but it held up wonderfully for the first 5 months that we kept it indoors. No joke! It looked brand new.

That pumpkin was some kind of super fruit (yes, a pumpkin is a fruit, not a vegetable). In case of WW3, I think the best source for long-term food supply could be a pumpkin patch. Just remember that you heard it here first. ; )

To the right is the super fruit as it appeared on 18-Oct-2006.

Don't let the funny face fool you - the pumpkin is the round orange thing on the right, not the roundish pink thing in denim overalls on the left. ;)

Castle-hopping

Our recent family road-trip through Bavaria into Austria could fairly be described as a castle-hopping tour of spectacular Germanic fortresses. That wasn’t our original intention. In the beginning, we had hoped that both my mother and her mother would join us. Both had lived in Germany for a few years in the early 1970s and my grandmother was interested in having an authentic meal in a German gasthaus again. But my grandmother wasn’t feeling up to the trip, so she remained in the US.

We knew we wanted to visit two or three locations over the course of six or seven days that were easily reachable by car and had something our boys might enjoy. As we looked into it, the trip began to shape up around Füssen, Germany on the front end, because we really wanted to see Neuschwanstein, and Salzburg, Austria at the tail end because we love that city and have a friend who owns a summer apartment there above Café Tomaselli that we could use. I had been interested in seeing Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest for some time and, when Steph mentioned the forthcoming trip to a friend, he highly recommended the natural beauty of Berchtesgaden. So that completed the triumvirate.

We saw and experienced a lot on our trip – the stunning landscapes and natural beauty were breath-taking, the trip into the salt mines under the mountain was fun, the churches and cathedrals were spectacular, and so on – but the grand fortresses of past rulers definitely served as the spine of our trip.

In Füssen, our hotel looked out on the Hohes Schloss, beneath the walls of which our boys picked flowers and rolled in the grass, and we toured two of King Ludwig II’s palaces - Hohen Schwangau and the famously striking, Neuschwanstein.

In Berchtesgaden, we intended to visit Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, but it didn’t open until the following week (poor planning on my part), so we had to ‘settle’ for the Konigliches Schloss.

From there, we stopped by Hohenwerfen fortress in Austria for a bird-of-prey show against a misty mountainous backdrop over a lush valley on the way to Salzburg.

In Salzburg, we saw the opulent Residenz of the former Prince Archbishops and the surrounding cemeteries and catacombs. We also toured the imposing fortress, Festung Hohensalzburg, arguably Salzburg’s most identifiable landmarks overlooking the city and surrounding vale. We considered visiting the beautiful Mirabell or surprising Hellbrunn, again, but we had seen them on a previous visit and were all castled-out by that point.

For all our friends or family interested in visiting, all of these places are within 2-4 hours of our home by car.

Road Trip through Bavaria & Austria

We just returned from a week-long, family road trip through Bavaria and Austria with my mother, centering on the German towns of Fussen and Berchtesgaden and the Austrian city of Salzburg. The boys were (mostly) wonderful and it was my mother's first time back on German soil since my father was stationed there in the Army back in the early 1970's.

We all had an outstanding time, including among many other things a couple underground wood-rail slides in a salt mine that required leather pads to keep our pants from heating up and an outdoor, dry, toboggan run. We took in spectacular castles, churches, and fortresses at each destination plus all the breath-taking views you could ask for. The weather could not have been any better were made-to-order. Our traditional meals were outstanding and we washed them down with very tasty local beers and mediocre local wines (the climate in Germany and Austria isn't fit for good wine).

I may write more later, but in the mean time here is the obligatory photo of King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein ("New Swan Stone") Castle in the Bavarian countryside. It was intended to honor the great operas of Wagner, whom even non-opera fans will recognize from his Hallelujah Chorus and Ride of the Valkyries, which was perhaps most famously sung by Elmer Fudd.

If the castle looks familiar, this is the castle that inspired Walt Disney to design the Sleepy Beauty Castle as the centerpiece of Disneyland. In case you are wondering, we did not cut and paste that photo from the internet. We saw it with our own eyes and took it with our own camera.

Spring has arrived!

Yes, it's been about 3 weeks since I've posted anything to the blog -- since the first post. So goes the story of my life. It is fast forward from the moment I get up, and suddenly a week has gone by. And then, my inspiration for creating a blog, Angel, posts to her blog each week, and I think "I should do that!"

Presently, I am hoarse, which for a radiologist isn't good news, since I dictate all of my reports. So, I typed my reports today and will likely type them for the next 2 days until my voice comes back. This makes for especially succinct reports, which I'm sure all the participating hospitals in the U.S. are appreciating. I should really keep up the "just the facts ma'am" approach when I get my voice back. I mean who needs "blah, blah, blah" when "blah" really say it all just fine?

Aidan and Asher are finally well (pretty much). We had a week of fever for Aidan, with no other symptoms, which was kind of disconcerting on Day #4...am I missing something? Perhaps a strep throat that doesn't hurt? Am I going to be known as "that lady doctor that didn't take her kid to the doctor for a week and as a result her child got rheumatic heart disease?" (strep related complication). But, just like our neighbors' kids who had the same thing, the fever relented on day #5 and thankfully, Asher didn't get it. Asher is still suffering from a slight runny nose. They don't give vaccines here if you have a runny nose, and is currently due for one, so let's hope there is at least some lull between this runny nose and the next one.

Asher has now been in preschool for about 3 weeks. We decided to enroll Asher in preschool because we heard of one that was (1) near our neighborhood, (2) takes kids that are in diapers still and (3) has very small class sizes of 6 or so kids. He goes on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday mornings. He did pretty well his first couple days, but the last few days has been turning on the tears full bore, to which we say "bye! have a good day!" The teacher is Swiss, and teaches in High German and English. Interestingly, she is a psychologist who is trained in the Adlerian ways of child psychology, which we happened to attend a one-evening course on last winter. Their ideas center around the idea that a lot of your personality is fixed by about age 5 (no pressure there on the parents!), that you should consider the child's drives and thus why they behave the way they do, finding logical consequences for their actions, and other good stuff.

Anyway, she thought it would be good for us to meet after 2 weeks to talk about how he's doing. The first thing she asked us was "what is your philosophy on education?" Hmmm -- I was going to say something about how parents are the first teachers and that learning through play is good at a young age, and Matt responded with "we're going to let the boys go to the local Swiss schools for kindergarten, that is our goal for them." I think he didn't realize she meant more generally 'what is our philosophy.'

So she then goes on to say that we should really think of a few rules for Asher and stick to them -- like when he sits at the table, that he can't get up; he cannot knock over someone's block creations (apparently done 3 times that day at school before he realized that wasn't cool), etc. It sounds like Asher has wrecked havoc on the peace of her preschool community, running around at lunch time and knocking over others' creations.

But, we did realize that we don't sit down and teach Asher specific things at home and that now is the time -- we tend to put his shoes on for him, and so it's time to start the process of him doing it himself. We also walked away feeling like we got the "Swiss" talk from a true Swissy, as some Anglo ex-pats call them in the privacy of their own homes. I mean, they have rules like no others. This is why this place is such a great place to live. Trams run on time, things are clean and orderly, there is a procedure for most things, and don't EVEN think about not doing it the way of the procedure (you should have seen me trying to return my electric toothbrush that wasn't used to a clerk that didn't speak English...).

I have to say that I was a bit taken aback, because I expected that Asher, the more easy going of our 2 offspring, would blend right into preschool, and I was going to get the "he's doing great!" report, rather than the "we need a few rules" talk. But, I think this psychologist lady will be a great asset to have, as I can tell she does have a lot of insight into their little minds. And I think she enjoys these little parent-teacher therapy sessions.

Until the next entry on our adventures in parenting... have a good week!