Home Sweet Michigan

The holiday parties have ended momentarily, so I finally have a bit of time to update here.  For those of you who haven't seen us in Michigan yet, we made it to Grand Rapids safely.  Our car rides and planes all worked out safely and easily, so we got into Michigan on Wednesday evening.  We hit up a few stores on the east side of the state before heading over to the west side. 

Thursday morning we had breakfast with Brian's friends while they were all still in town at Russ'.  The refills on the hot chocolate were amazing!  We spent the rest of the day running last-minute errands for a few Christmas gifts that we weren't able to buy online before coming.

Friday was a pretty quiet day because we didn't really have anything planned and many stores were closed because it was Christmas Eve.  We did make our first trip to Meijer and kind of just stood in awe at the great variety of food in the grocery store. 

Saturday we went to church in the morning, relaxed in the afternoon, and had the Pfruender family Christmas party in the evening.  We had fondue for dinner, opened presents, and then played a few games.  We also got to meet our nephew-dog, Widget!  He is much calmer than Pixel ever has been and did great while we were opening all our presents.  Brian and I got some much needed bike stuff along with lots of other stuff.

Sunday we went to church in the morning and had lunch with Brian's parents (chicken lasagna!) before heading to Holland for the Branderhorst Christmas party.  It was great to see all my cousins again since we had missed all the previous get-togethers this year.  We also got to meet my cousins son, Owen, for the first time. 

Monday we got new driver's licenses in the morning, I had lunch with a previous boss and co-worker, and we went to see Voyage of the Dawn Treader with my family.  In the evening, we had the Ponstein family Christmas party.  It was wonderful to see all our nieces and nephews again and see how they've grown!  It was lots of fun to see the excitement they had while opening their presents.

Today Brian helped my dad blow in insulation into the attic.  Brian claims that the house is so much warmer now, but I'm not quite feeling it yet.  :)  My mom and I went to the funeral of a friend's grandpa and then went to check out the new Kentwood Public Library.  I got some audiobooks and discovered how I can get them online so that I can continue to use the library when we go back to Germany.

We are here through the 8th of January, so if we don't already have plans to see you and you would like to see us, shoot us an e-mail and we'll see what we can do!  We are enjoying ourselves here and the time we get to spend with our families.

Michigan...here we come!

It is finally almost Christmas and that means we get to go back to Michigan for 2 1/2 weeks!  Tonight we packed since our plans with friends for dinner fell through.  They are Germans who work for MTU in Detroit.  They flew yesterday from Detroit here to visit family for the holidays and ended up spending a half day and overnight in the Paris airport...yuck!  They also don't have their luggage yet, so it was just going to be too much to go our for dinner with us.  There has been a lot of snowy weather across Europe the past few days that has delayed and canceled a lot of flights.  We're praying that everything gets cleared up for us before Wednesday morning!

Packing was quite interesting because we plan to take more back to Germany than we are taking to the States.  We have one suitcase packed and then put it inside another suitcase so that we have an extra for when we come back.  Brian has a very small carry-on that will probably go inside another one on the way back so that he can have a bigger carry-on. 

We each took our clothes out and put them on the bed so that we could figure out which suitcases we needed to take.  Here's the results:

Can you guess which side of the bed belongs to who?  :)

We are pretty much all packed now and ready to go.  Here's our itinerary:

1:30am Wed. (7:30pm Tues. MI) - drive from FN to Stuttgart and park our car to take a shuttle to the airport

6:30am Wed. (12:30am Wed. MI) - fly from Stuttgart to Amsterdam

8:10am Wed. (2:10am Wed. MI) - arrive in Amsterdam

2:20pm Wed. (8:20am Wed. MI) - fly from Amsterdam to Detroit

5:15pm Wed. - arrive in Detroit where my parents will pick us up to go out to dinner and then drive to Grand Rapids

We are definitely looking forward to being in the States and seeing our families again.  This is the longest that either of us has been away from them and it will be good to see them again (and see how big our nieces/nephews are and meet our new nephew-dog!).

Merry Christmas!

Bird Feeder

Last night we went to the store to get some better mats for our car.  We came home with those and a kit for Brian to make me a bird feeder!  We have a lot of birds in the tree right outside our windows because the neighbors below have a bird feeder.  I like seeing and hearing the birds and wanted to have my own bird feeder.  We tried these bird feed balls, but haven't had a lot of birds.  When we were browsing the store yesterday, we found these kits for a child to make a bird feeder with a parent.  Brian said he would make me one.  It definitely didn't take him long!  Here's the finished product with the bird feed ball hanging from the side of it.

In other news, we tried to go cross-country skiing today!  We found a place with a route and thought that there would be a rental place nearby.  We got there and drove all over the town and even asked a few people, but there was definitely no place to rent skis there.  We knew of a place in the town where we live, so we drove back and asked there, but they were out of skis for my size, but not Brian's.  We're going to try again once we get back after the holidays to do it again.  It was very pretty driving though, so it wasn't a complete waste.

Christmas "Wreaths"

My task on Wednesday was to make Christmas wreaths to go with the candies I had made on Tuesday.  I've always liked eating these Christmas wreaths, but had never made them before.  Germany makes it a bit more interesting.  :)

First, here is my bag of marshmallows.  I didn't know marshmallows came from the Rockies!

I needed a lot of Corn Flakes and could buy a double-box here!

And from there the wreaths didn't go the greatest.  The first batch wasn't very green because I didn't put enough food coloring in.  They didn't make it to wreath shapes because they got hard too fast.  Instead, I made holly lumps.  It worked out okay when I put them onto plates though because I lined the outside with them and it looked like one giant wreath on the plate.  They taste great though, so hopefully people can get past their looks!

Candy Making

Yesterday was candy making day for me.  I want to give our German teachers something for Christmas and I'm doing the snack for church on Sunday night, so I had a good excuse to make some candy.  I made peanut butter balls and chocolate-covered caramels.  The peanut butter balls were pretty basic and this was the first time I had ever made them.  The caramels are just caramels that I bought and then dipped in chocolate and some in nuts.

Today's task: Corn Flake Christmas wreaths...pictures to come!

Das Handy!

Brian finally has a work cell phone!  This is quite an accomplishment because he has been working on getting one since we got here in August.  He is on a business trip today and tomorrow and used that as an excuse for IT to give him the phone sooner than they were planning on.  They had the phone, but wanted to do classes for all the people getting cell phones.  Brian was sick of waiting and knew that if he had a good reason for getting the cell phone, they might give it to him early.

He flew this morning to Dusseldorf, Germany and then had to drive about 2 hours to someplace in the Netherlands and then was also going to Belgium at some point.  This means he's adding 2 countries to his list!  He's quickly approaching having been in more countries than states at this point.  I'll have to count sometime.  :)  He comes back tomorrow night.

We are also very excited to have his work cell phone because it means that we will be able to communicate with my family when we fly into Detroit (next week!) to let them know we are there and they can come and pick us up.  This makes things a lot easier!

I wouldn't recommend calling Brian's phone if you're in the States because it's a German number and will cost you a lot.  Plus it's a work phone, so he should probably keep it mostly for that.  :)

Christmas Markets - Lindau

This past Saturday we went to the Lindau Christmas market.  We had hoped to go skiing, but there were no lessons on Saturday and I'm not quite ready to throw myself down the Alps without any training.  :)  Lindau was a very nice Christmas market!  It was the biggest one we had seen and had some different things that we hadn't seen at the other ones yet.

Before we made it to the market, we had to take some pictures of the mountains because they were gorgeous!

We loved this last picture the best because it looks like there is a big floating mountain in the distance. 

Once we made it to the market, we loved the entrance.  It was definitely the most elaborate one we had seen.

Brian liked the center of the market where they had pedal tractors for kids to ride in a little area.  Too bad he is too big to ride them!

The market had lots of interesting things to see.  One of my favorites was a booth with things made out of tree stumps.  They were carved out, but the bark was still on the outside.  There was also a boat that you could go on and order food, but we stayed in the regular market and had lunch there.

There was no Nativity at this market, but they still had animals!  This time it was goats.

They did have an area that I thought was pretty creepy.  It was made from evergreen branches draped over wood to make a place that you could walk into.  Inside, there were displays of different animals, but they were all stuffed (like taxidermy).  There were signs by them all, but we couldn't read them because they were in German.  There were also other displays with characters from different fairy tales.  I thought these were pretty creepy too, but Brian still took pictures of them.

After having lunch and stopping at a store in the town, we headed back to our car, but had to take some more pictures of the mountains on our way out!

Advent International

Brian and I had quite a pleasant night out tonight.  We went to the Bodenseehof's Advent International Concert/Service.  The Bodenseehof is a Bible school in English just down the road from us that we attend on Sunday mornings for church.  They have over 100 students this year around college age that study there from September until March with different teachers who come in.  It has been a pleasure to be able to worship with them.

Tonight they put on their annual Advent International concert.  Different groups of students performed different Christmas songs with their voices and instruments.  They were quite good!  The director of the school also gave a sermon, but it was all in German, so we didn't understand any of it. 

It was wonderful to see what the students can do and see the support that the school gets from the community.  The place was packed!  We thankfully got 2 of the last seats available and were able to enjoy the concert.  Most of the people who were there are people from the community.  We do not see most of these people on Sundays because they speak German and the Sunday morning services are in English.

It was wonderful to celebrate Christ's birth in this way!

European Driving Licenses

Yesterday Brian and I did the last thing we have to do yet to get completely into the German system - we applied for European driving licenses!  Our US licenses are only good here for 6 months and we are at about 4 1/2 already.  Since we have a car now, we decided that it was time to finally get this.  We also wanted to wait until it was close to when we were going back to the US because we will also have to get new US licenses.

The Germans don't want you to be able to show your US driving license if you have any problems once you have your European one, so they take away your US license.  Since we need those to drive in the US (which we will be doing over Christmas), we wanted to make sure that they wouldn't take them before we went back home.  It takes a few weeks for the licenses to be ready, so we should be able to keep our US licenses until we get back after Christmas.  We plan to get new US licenses over Christmas and then hand over our old ones to the Germans when we get back.

The next step - I have to learn to drive the car!

Surprise!

Last night we went to bed listening to pouring rain.  This is what we woke up to today!

It is so beautiful!

Church Christmas Party / Goodbye to the Collins

This past Saturday we had our first Christmas party!  We attend a church on Sunday evenings that is a group of English-speaking ex-pats who do church together in the building of a German church.  We have been a part of this group since we moved here and truly enjoy the people and the fellowship we can have with them.  This is the same group of people we celebrated Thanksgiving with.  On Saturday, we had a Christmas party with them which also doubled as a goodbye party for the Collins family.  They have been ex-pats here for several years and are moving back to Arizona over the next few weeks.

The party was at Dave and Brenda's house which Brian and I had never been to.  They are originally from Zimbabwe and have 3 boys.  Dave is a teacher at a boarding school and they live on the campus.  It was wonderful to see their house and be shown all their animals by the boys!  Here's just some of the animals...Brian saw the rest of them, but didn't take any pictures.

Mama Cat

Birds

Snakes...ewww!

One of the three kittens

There was also a gecko, more snakes, more lizards, and tarantulas!

We started off by playing a game where each person in the circle writes a line of a story and then we read through the stories at the end.  It was quite hilarious!

(Dave, Carter, Brenda, Lisa, Jim)

 (Brenda, Lisa, Jim, Steve, Gus)

The boys had a great time putting wooden puzzles together.  Watch out...they're thinking!!

(Steve, Brian, Gus)

 (Carter, Jim, Lisa, Gus)

We made a book of pictures and notes to give to the Collins as they were leaving us.  Here is Lindsay working on the book.

And here is Jim and Lisa enjoying it after we gave it to them.

We had a wonderful potluck spread of food for dinner!  And very yummy desserts!

Ladies first!

(Lisa, Lindsay, Brenda, Kurt)

The kittens were everywhere and sooooo cute!!  If I wasn't allergic, I would have taken one home!

(James)

Lindsay and I brought some crafts to make for Christmas and only barely broke into them!  We started to learn how to make the German Christmas stars from my previous post.  Here is Brian with one in his hair. :)

Since it was a Christmas party, we had to sing carols!!  Dave played the piano while we all sang along.

 (Brian, Brenda, James, Lindsay)

Near the end of the party, one of Dave and Brenda's friends came over and brought Mark a late birthday present (his birthday was on Thanksgiving) - skis!!  Gus is a big skiier, so he helped Mark get them on and try them out.  They were practicing tricks in the living room and then headed outside to try them down a hill.  It was so much fun to watch them. :)

Gus then thought he should try on the skis himself...they didn't quite fit. :)

We had a great time at the party and will definitely miss the Collins!  We wish them God's blessings as they move back to Arizona!