Since the beginning of April I have been going to the Dallin School with Ivan where all U6 Arlington boys play in the Soccer Clinic. Today the entire family went and Ana and myself brought the ‘sillas de capitan’ (camping chairs) which we bought maybe ten years ago when we were still living in Chicago. They were Ana’s idea and have gone with us on every camping trip and on many excursions since.
The clinic consists of a master coach (Dinelli) and a helper coach who will spent the first 40 minutes to let the kids play with the ball, performing a number of cool games, most of them involving the kids running around with the ball and someone chasing them. The kids enjoy this and they have their regular water breaks and the round of instructions. In the last part of the hour the teams play against each other by splitting each team in two and play two separate games with the teams playing next to them. On the Dallin field there are about ten teams in total nicely separated by their shirt color. Ivan plays in the royal blue team. Eric — a good friend of Ivan — plays in the orange team and Cal — another good friend of Ivan — plays in the green-blue team. I am not sure what the color is officially called, they must have a more snappy description of the color.
Ivan enjoys his soccer, fully dressed up with cleats, shin guards, long blue socks and his royal blue Arlington soccer shirt. He just loves to play around with other kids and he has some reasonable skills. If no one encourages and instructs him he would just run around on the field without paying too much attention to the ball. Once I remind him to look out for the ball and try to kick it he even makes some nice plays. He always scores one or two goals and he is a good team player. These games are not competitive and nobody keeps the score except sometimes the boys secretly wisper the score to each other 🙂 Boys will always be boys I guess.
‘Seta y Pete’ are gone
While most people think video games have only negative effects I wanted to share an experience with Markus these last two weeks. Markus went to the dentist for the first time in his life and behaved very well, as Ana reported. The dentist was very happy with the state of his mouth, teeth, gum and all, and showed Markus his x-ray. He showed him that his new teeth are already coming. When the dentist saw that he was still using a pacifier — pete as we call it — he was alarmed and told Markus that he was already very big and needed to kick the bad habit. Ana was delighted and of course supported the suggestion full heartily. Markus was equally convinced that he was a big boy but the ‘pete’ still had a large attraction. So, Ana promised him Wii-Lego-Batman if he could stop using a pete for at least one week. Since that day Markus has slept without a pacifier and without his beloved top from Mummy — seta, short for camiseta.
Today after almost two weeks I went together with him and we bought the video game together, which was a very happy event for him. He also enjoyed playing the game with his brother.
Recent Events worth Mentioning
Blake rolled over for the first time last Friday. We did not see how he performed the rollover but he definitively changed back-to-belly. He is starting to become dangerous 🙂
Ana enjoyed her real birthday with a good glass of cava at the evening camp fire.
‘Opa and Papi’ cut down the two trees, which covered our front view and we have now a nice lucid boys room and dining room as well as even more light in the sun room. The sighting of the house has really made a big leap forward. We also of course now have a lot of wood to be dried and burned in the not so distant future. To perform the lumber-jack action I bought a manly chain saw with a 20 inch (50 cm) blade. For the wood splitting I have now a real ax. I hope we can make further progress on the remaining wood cutting action.
Finally, Pups, in an effort to keep our kitchen organized, carried out the garbage in the dark of the night and fell off our retaining wall. Well, he tried to step down in total darkness and did not realize the size of the step. Luckily, he seems to have a very alert guardian angel and good coordination to avoid serious injury…. he just scratch off some skin on his thumb. It looks like all the praying has paid off.
That is all for today, keep connected 🙂
The Tree Project – How it all started
It really started when my father visited in May 2010. He wanted to check out Blake and during his visit I started to cut down the first somewhat larger but relatively easy to cut tree.
Pup with the simple tool we used.
You can faintly see the tree trunk still in the back.
Happily sitting on what was before the tree.
Well, these are only the branches.
We talked a lot about all the trees that still needed cutting on our property to protect the house form growing over but it looked like a humongous task at the time. Pub was listening (which I did not really notice much) and on my birthday I received a very thoughtful birthday card (as usual) but also included a small fortune to buy proper equipment to do the cutting by performing a real arborist’s task. I was impressed but never spent the money until finally end of July I bought the equipment and started to implement the master plan. All trees I could do without I had completed over the years.
Picture of the house from advertisement.
Here is a picture how the front of the house looked like before we bought it. The two trees on the left and right hand side of the house both had to go. They were not nice to begin with and they were taken a lot of light from the house. It was reasonably straight forward to get ride of those. The cedar tree (probably a red one) on the left side of the house had carpenter ants in it as I found later. An interesting fact is that the flowers somewhat in front of the stonewall in the front cover actually a part of the wall which is out of shape. They seem unmotivated when you look at them but did not catch our eye originally. Of course when we visited the house we noticed the somewhat decaying wall.
Later I started to severely trim down the trees shading our driveway right at the right side of our house. It was the first higher climb and without any safety, but is was easy enough. The last simple tree action was late fall last year the trimming of all low hanging branches of all trees in the street in front of our house and the most annoying ones over the driveway. Looking again at it now, I should have taken off much more, but that is for another time.
Pup in Arlington
Monday May 3 — Martin’s birthday — I get a phone call from him. Apart from accepting my congratulations he tells my that my father is about to come to visit us for 3 weeks arriving Wednesday May 5. Surprise…… we knew he was planning on coming but we had not agreed on anything more concrete than summer. Well, I should have expected this, as usual nothing happens until finally it cannot happen quickly enough 🙂 That’s how it works with my dad.
We had to wait for more than an hour at the airport although the plane landed 15 minutes before schedule and about the same time before we reached the gate. We were on time. Finally he walked out and after some explanation we understood. The process at the entry into the US took a little longer due to incomplete forms and some complications filling the additional forms. We arrived quickly at the PausHaus in Arlington which got excellent critics reviews, mostly because of the nice location and the great garden….. we knew that.
On the first day after the arrival we were not able to locate a mass in time but everything was set from then on: the church of choice was Saint Eulalia [speak: julalie (German pronunciation)]. St Eulalia is located seen from the PausHaus beyond the wonderful golf course along Hutchinson Road and is part of the neighboring Winchester. Pups has quickly made contact to the priests and the parish members, which offer themselves to drive him back home after the rosary sessions. He is excited about the openness of the US American and only the fact that they speak to early at the end of the mass and that they are maybe not pious enough gets some negative mentioning. Well it looks like that he is enjoying his stay here quite a bit and he has found some nice spots to help out in the house.
For example the roof rail on the East side of our house was first cleaned by him, I did not finish the cleaning after last fall…. he also tried our very very heavy electronic lawn mower. The battery makes up a good fraction of the weight. Also very much appreciated was the sweeping action on the patio and our driveway. Raking of the backyard was on the program as well, while I was cutting large quantities of wood for our regular evening camp fires. After the summer, I hope, we will have burned all the large pieces of dead wood on our property while having excellent camp fire evenings.
Opa made friends quickly with Blake, Ivan and Markus, but with Gisele it would take a while, But finally ‘Vulcana’ also had to give in, another victim of Opa’s charms.
Meatballs!!!!
Markus had another creative moments when he coined a wonderful new term for the buttocks.
Ana and Markus where chasing each other through the house pinching each others buttocks. There was lots of yelling and laughing and suddenly, Markus was running after Ana trying to reach for the object of desire, he started screaming: meatballs!!! meatballs!!!
I found this a wonderful expression, probably motivated by the movie ‘Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs’ which we recently enjoyed. Checking with my native colleagues nobody had heart the expression used before in this context. So, I have to conclude that this is another of Marki’s creative moments.
Spring Update
Even as the posts have not been very regular from the Paus Haus, life has gone on. Blake is still doing great, growing quickly and developing his skills. By now he can hold on to something given to him, he stands when given two supporting hand he can grab on to and he is smiling like a little ‘Futzemann’. When Ana talks to him he starts to make noises trying to formulate a response. His bothers and his sister simply adore him. There seem to be very little jealousy issue with neither Gisele not Markus. At the moment Blake is sleeping between Ana and myself because we decided the old crib was not really good enough any more. We will by a crib/bed for him very soon.
Meanwhile our main work in the garden is really finished. The terrace is dug including the building of the retaining wall and putting in some rugged grass seeds. There were a whole bunch of spots which needed some more grass. The first patch in front of the house has by now a whole bunch of little grass plants starting to peak out. The kids have pretty strictly stuck to my ‘orders’ not to walk over the freshly seeded spots. It is interesting to see that they really listen. Our little vegetable garden though has not the smallest plant yet. I am interested to see how long it will take.
Today we went with the kids to the Wilson Farms which is mostly one big store, where one can buy fresh fruit, vegetable and other ‘organic’ products. It also has a small gardening part where we saw some nice blueberry, raspberry and blackberry bushes. They are not ccheap but also not too expensive. We will plant some 4-5 blueberry bushes on the property line which is right in front of the sun room. Ana likes to create a little more privacy on that end. At the upper end of our property, where the forest starts we will plant some raspberries and blackberries to contain the leaves and make the view on the upper end even nicer. The plants should gow up there and we just have to worry that they do not spread out of the forest line 🙂
Spring has started, last week we had three days with 28-32 C which was like an explosion for the plants. Meanwhile the temperatures have gone back done but we had today a beautiful day at up to 18 C. I am in fact right now enjoying the sun room with open windows, a cigar and a good calvados. Leonard Cohen is singing his greatest hits which always reminds me of a trip to the black forest with Christoph Klemp, who lead the older folks of the catholic youth in the St. Evergislus parish.
I remember there were Georg Voelzgen, Martin Wolf, Ralph Wingendorf, myself and our fearless leader Christoph. We drove in his old VW beattle with Leonard Cohen and excellent conversation. The backpacks were loaded on top of the car. We got excellent Spaetzle with cheese and tomato sauce from his aunt in Freiburg, if I remember correctly, and went to have some great hiking. The interruptions at the Kneipp stations I will never forget. They were even in the summer very very cold and Ralph and I had a contest who could stay inside longer, watching our feed and lower legs turn red and blue, but the walking got so pleasant afterwards. We found and ate a whole bunch of wild blueberries. Poor Martin Wolf did not take them well and the blueberry incident on the stairs has become history, when they all came back and fell down the stairs…. This long hike was also the first time I remember that I was completely destroyed a few kilometers before we arrived at our destination. Luckily we had some wine gums, the ones with sugar, and they saved me. That was probably the first time I experienced a recovery from too low blood sugar. I was fine and full of energy again after a 15 minutes break.
Now that we have decided to stay in the US — I had gotten an excellent offer from the ETH in Zuerich to become the successor of Felicitas Pauss — Ana and I are thinking about all the things we would like to get done in our house and garden. There is a long laundry list but we have time and we will start soon to knock off the most important things. I think the new table for our dining room will come first, followed maybe by our master bed room layout. In the summer I would like to build a deck in front of the sun room to make use of our rather large garden. We are really blessed with a wonderful property which we can improve over the years to give the kids a great place to grow up. They often do not even want to leave the house because they are so comfortable here.
Slow Saturday: Our Favorite Frogs
Today we were wiped out: Ana and myself of course, the kids were bouncy as usual. Unfortunately it was another pretty cold day with -6 C around noon and we stayed inside quite a bit. We watched ‘Aliens in the Attic’ which was okay but not really great either. Afterwards we had a yummy lentil lunch which took me out for a while — dosing off on the sofa — but afterwards the beautiful sunshine tricked me and I bundled up the 3 kids and went with them for a ‘parque and muffin’ trip. The Brackett school playground was of course deserted but we got out and played ‘Bodenmonster’ and ran up the hill once and down again. The Bodenmonster game consists mainly of me growling and trying to catch the kids while they are on the playground installation and I am not supposed to mount. This kept us busy for quite a while until I noted that Gisele’s hand were freezing. So we packed up and went to Jam’n Java where everybody got a muffin and a hot chocolate. It was obvious that the kids still had not had enough active playtime because they were all over the place in the coffee shop. Gisele and Ivan did not really finish their muffins (Ivan really had a chocolate chips scone, which was not as good as he had thought) but Markus went all the way. When we were driving back home Markus asked where we were going and mentioned that he would love to go to Chipotle. I asked him ‘Are you really still hungry?’ and he replied ‘YES’ ecstaticly.
When we got home I sat down at the computer and again stared at the frogs in my desktop. A while ago Markus and I were browsing the web for cool frog pictures. We stored Markus’ favorite pictures and finally today, as it is very cold outside we sat down and posted them in our blog. The top favorit is of course orange and black, Markus favorit colors. It is a poison dart frog.
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Of course I also looked through the Web and found together with Ivan his favorit frogs. They are not all that different, meaning they are exotic frogs, but the colors do differ and reflect more of what Ivan considers cool colors.
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Watching Blake
While Ana is cooking lunch I am supposed to watch Blake. He is sitting here in front of me on his little chair and I am watching the little man. He is not happy when his hat gets over his eyes o I decided to take off the head.
I am sitting here in t-shirt on my favorite seat, legs up on the ottoman, it cannot be too cold for Blake. It could maybe be a little too loud as Van Morison is playing for me a wonderful set of songs… ‘Best of Van Morison’ or something like it. Anyway it is awesome. Ana also made me a lemon-green tea which is surprisingly good, too. Blake dosed of for a few minutes but is now searching, probably reminded by some feeling of emptiness in his stomach. Luckily our lunch is just cooking and Ana has come by to make Blake happy.
Now will have to convince my older children to come with me and cleanup the play room …. one of my ‘honey do’ duties as I just being instructed.
Looking at the pictures I find this one from yesterday night, me and Blake, and noticed that my hair is really getting long. Hmmm, but winter ain’t over yet.
Blake is now Four Weeks Old (Time Flies)
Blake today passes the four weeks and he is doing very well. He has almost lot all his yellowish skin color and his eyes are almost white as well. He is also already following what is going on to some extend. He can look at something and stay focused.
When he is sitting on his little rocking chair he seems to be watching the least interesting part of the chair, not the flashing lights or the wonderful little goldfish inside the turquoise fluid…., he looks at the blank metal structure (as he is becoming an MIT educated engineer, it is the most obvious thing to watch of course). He loves to take a bath with me and he also enjoys bonding with his Papi.
His brothers and his sister love him very much and always want to take him, just for a minute 🙂 Ana and I are very happy that this part works out so well this far.
Just as a little update on everybody else, here are the most remarkable things to remember: Markus is still not excited about his pre-school experience, but he does now go there without a big scene in front of the Fidelity Building. Once in the past it was so bad that a policemen at the scene helped struggling Ana. He took Markus in his arms and carried him into the building. It left an impression, Markus got all quiet and watched the policeman attentively, just a little scared. Good he did not hit him 🙂 as you remember Markus hands sit pretty loose.
Markus is going to the bathroom by himself, but he is having some issues. Wiping can turn into disaster and he does not call for help, at times he does not get his pants down quickly enough and a distinctive smell of urine clouds him as he does not tell anybody about his little mishaps. Sometimes he tries to fix them himself (you will find the damp clothes in a corner of the wardrobe) other times he leaves his clothes on saying it is not so bad: ‘Das ist nur ein bisschen, das ist nicht schlimm Papi’. But don’t get me wrong here, he is an adorable little happy fellow speeding around on his race track through the entire first floor (kitchen-living room-sun room-living room-entry-dining room-kitchen and so on).
Gisele on the other hand is a sweet girl, completely different from the boys. She loves to drink tea with her mum or even with Papi, but at times she throws a fit and that with all her forces. She has definitively a dark side: her voice becomes very dark and full and she screams with every fiber of her body, getting all stiff, clenching her fists and throwing herself on the floor. It can go on for a while. My best way to get her out of it is to let her be for a while and then giving her to opportunity to snap out of it by offering her the favorite pillow…. often it works, sometimes not.
Ivan is doing great all together. He is the oldest and most reliable. He does not need help with pretty much anything. He likes to go to school and the teachers in Kindergarten love him, pretty much as they did in Geneva. The homework though does not excite him too much — _boring_. Also it seems that he has a slightly week stomach. He has been having some troubles at times and vomits at nights (well correlated with excessive eating).