Sunday Duties

Picking up Andrian from his Sunday office duty is always a big highlight for Karl. Not only can he ride the subway AND the train to get there, then run through endless hallways, check out the train depot from the 19th floor, rummage through all the desks in the empty offices and charm the three other employees that are on duty as well. No, he also gets to spin around on daddies task chair after having eaten a whole bag of gummi bears with Alfred Hitchcock watching from the photo in the back.



Luckily we had lunch with a lot of healthy pancake-and-jam vitamins at his usual weekend hangout Kaiser Otto. They have a great kids lounge where he usually chooses to read some more books. Because we don't have enough reading material at home, you know.

Subway, Where Are You?!

After Karl's buddy Leo moved away from our neighborhood, started going to a different kindergarten and had had a little baby brother we haven't had the chance to have a play date with him even though we made several attempts. Yesterday we finally managed to catch up with Leo, Patty and now three-month old Moritz. Karl and Leo picked up where they had left right away and took apart all of the toys as well as the library in Leo's room.



Before we left we tried to tidy up together with the boys in order to teach them to be organized and helpful, but as usual that didn't really work out. In those moments I'm trying to teach Karl the word 'counterproductive'. Something he doesn't seem to understand... We all still had a lot of fun catching up though!



Please notice redheaded baby Moritz all the way in the background of the picture. Yea, I guess he's really hard to see.


On our way back home we had to wait for the subway for quite some time which apparently bored Karl after a while so much to everybody's amusement he screamed out loud: "Subway, where are you?!"

Reading Supplies

Not a whole lot has happened over the past couple of days. The weather has been grey and cold, play dates have been cancelled and even a long promised trip to Omi didn't take place. Ergo: Not all that much to blog about. Most of our fresh air intake was done during grocery shopping at the market and most of our spare time was spent reading books – since drawing, play dough, lego or any other kind of constructive play doesn't interest Karl at all these days.



But we had to exchange a book anyways and Karl had begged us to buy Barbapapa On Mars for a while now, so we got it. It's totally psychedelic, he was thrilled and I think I've read it to him about a gazillion times since Saturday. If anybody has any questions concerning the culture of the Barbapapas, please feel free to ask. By now our household has gained quite an expertise in that field.

Geese Attack

Every now and then you get a gentle reminder of how incredibly dangerous life in a city can be. Or is it that we actually do live in the country side? Whatever the case may be, we had a very exciting trip back home when I picked up Karl from his daycare place yesterday.



It started out with the close approach of a huge raven who might have picked up the scent of pretzel in my bag. Karl was torn between enthusiasm and fear, but let the latter win: no pretzel for the raven.



We also met a big flock of grey geese a little further into the park. I thought it would be fun to feed them a little as we have done so many times with the ducks in the same place. These birds seemed to be very, very hungry though! Only taking a piece of Karls pretzel made them run after us. I threw some of it at them to distract them a bit, but they still came running after us.



Some of them even tried a flight attack! I had to hide Karl's pretzel-holding hand in his footmuff and start running towards the safety of an underbridge...

Inventory

Because it's the new year Karl started out this Sunday bright and early by taking a full inventory of all of his books. Here you see him pointing out the evil hunters in his favorite book of the moment Barbapapa rettet die Tiere (Barbapapa's Ark).

Holiday

Bavarians treasure their catholic holidays, so we got with a day off today (3 Kings' Day, go figure...) we took a trip to the country. Went to the Fischmeister restaurant by Lake Starnberg (the one we took "Onkel Ritz" to a few weeks ago). We had some amazing food (a few menu items is everything that's traditional about this place, it's actually quite hip, especially the kitchen). Afterwards we had a stroll down the pier and went to the beach for some pebble throwing. With serious sub-zero weather we did get to explore what water looks like in it's frozen state, but we also decided that taking a nice holiday cruise kinda beats the whole walking and hiking thing, so we toured some of the nicely powdered Bavarian landscape, before venturing to the great indoors with some cake.

Happy New Year

We hope everybody had a great start into the new decade – it will be another exciting one, that's for sure!



Just like for the past three (!) New Years Eves here in Munich my friend Maria from the beautiful city of Frankfurt came to town together of course with son Paul and husband Tim. We're taking it supereasy and there's a lot of reading and bathing...



...and pillow fighting...



...and some more reading going on.