Tea in the sun room
Saturday with the Kids
Today we spent a great day together with the family. The official program started at 10:00 in the morning where we all went together to the Scout’s visit of the Historic Schwamb Mill in Arlington on Mill Lane. The Mill is just off Mass. Avenue at the height of one of my favorite Dunkin Doughnut stores. This store is just on our way when we go to soccer practice on Sundays and therefore I have bought a coffee or two there. So not surprisingly we swung by, got a bunch of doughnuts, munchkins a green tea and an ice-coffe and off we were to the Schwamb Mill. We were not the first but also not the last so once we arrived the visit started pretty soon. It turned out that the Mill did not stay a Mill for long and in fact the main operation was soon based on a steam engine and later on an electric motor. The ‘Mill’ specialized in frame making and one of its staples, the oval frame. The Factory itself was build the time when Abraham Lincoln was the president. It was about to go out of business because it would not run economically anymore in 1969 when a woman from Arlington decided to take it upon her to preserve the beautiful sight. All the old machines are still there and there is a small production of selected frames, in particular old style frames sometimes requested from a museum and restoration work ongoing. The first floor houses the production hall while on the second floor there is some art exhibition and storage. The guide showed us around and had lots of interesting things to report. Most of the kids of course just watched the machines and were most impressed when our guide switched on the machinery and one of the big work tables started to spin keeping a tool on an elliptic path which made the table wobble quite a bit. Ivan enjoyed Cal’s and Connor’s company while Markus was running around and was difficult to control.
Later in the evening when it was bedtime we did a little nightwatch. Gisele wants to watch a mouse, to be more specific she would like to look at some pictures of a baby mouse. Ivan wanted to look for a cool Harry Potter image, but we did not find anything he liked. So we started to look for some Star Wars picture. And after some initial browsing he decided Luke Skywalker was the most interesting one, but pressed to choose one picture he chose…. R2D2 the awesome little robot, oh sorry he is a droid.
Fruit stick
Nothing like a good fruit stick in my chair when Ivan has to kick the ball.
Monsters in our bed….
Nightwatch with the two little Ones
Today I had a long long day. I had to be at MIT for my first meeting at 7am. So I got up at about 6am and got my morning routine out of the way and mounted my freshly serviced bike to hit the road and get to the office on time. The meeting would not finish in fact I spent until 3pm without interruption in 5 meetings. Even with a professional this is rather exceptional day. When I was close to a completely flat brain activity diagram I even launched some calls to my most beloved collaborators. Finally around 5:30pm I headed of to the courts and I spent a good 1 hour and 30 minutes on the courts. I was mostly very un-energetic but I succeeded in beating up my standard opponent, “John the Greek”.
Ana picked me up and finally we ended up home where Markus and Ivan decided to watch a movie instead of doing the Nightwatch… Blake and Gisele stayed and now we will start our night watch. Gisele wants to watch a bunny… let’s see what bunnies we will find with google.
Nightwatch Freestyle
Tonight I came home not too late, a friend dropped me off after squash. I did some homework with Ivan and realized that Ivan reads very well: even difficult words! Blaki was very excited to see me, he came running was smiling all over and literally threw himself to the floor because he was so excited, I have never seen something quite like it.
Today we decided to do a freestyle nightwatch, everybody could think of what they wanted to see and they got it. Markus wanted to look at blueberries…… weird but I think he likes blueberries. Gisele continued in her quest for baby animals, today it was a baby duck. Ivan thought gangsta bean would be cool so we took some nice picture from this relatively new online video game.
Click here to see the song….
Nightwatch
Today everybody could decide what they liked. Ivan liked the teaser youtube clip from firebreather.
The music is actually pretty heavy metal, but even Blake is taking a liking to it, must be good.
Gisele wanted to look at nice penguin pictures.
Markus wanted to look at favorite video games for the WII….. imagine that. He loves the lego Harry Potter game.
Big tree
Visible just for very few days a year…. spring time in the neighbourhood, a beautiful cherry tree.
Spring really started!!!!
Sunday Nightwatch — Blaki’s First
Today Ana is taking off a little time with Ivan they are not scheduled to be back before the kids go to bed. So tonight it is just our three little ones on the night watch. Blaki did not want to miss out on the nightwatch so we were all cramming on one chair searching for our preferred animal pictures. Tonight we had no fixed topic we just invented them while we were at it. Markus wanted to look at snails, Gisele thought of cute cat babies and Papi searched for a butterfly fish, and Blake’s picture just popped up while we were browsing the pages of the zoo in Cologne.
Markus was desperate not the sleep alone in his room so I let him sleep with Gisele. She was happy to do so. Recently the two are making a pretty good team. They like to play batman pretend with each other and run through the house hand in hand going through daring adventures, I am guessing 🙂 .