Backyard adventures

Our backyard has turned into a tadpole habitat. When we moved to this house, we brought the sandbox, empty of sand. We haven't gotten around to filling it yet, so the boys took the matter into their own hands. Both the lid and the box are now home to hundreds of tadpoles. At the time I took this picture, we had about 10 or so. They started extremely small, and have slowly grown. No legs yet, but we're hoping to see them any day. You can see them here as little black dots.

And how do they catche these tadpoles? With this scoop, that comes from a ball game.

When we moved in, this retention pond was bone dry, and the boys played football in it. Now, we've had almost double the normal amount of rain, and it sits, a perfect place for frogs to lay their eggs.

This day Alexander and his friend Nick were out there looking for tadpoles. After I put the camera away, they found a bunch of tadpole eggs, which were subsequentally put in the habitat. A week later, the eggs hatched, which is how we now have hundreds of them.

When the pond is full, we have a beautiful backyard view.
Jonathan loves putting on his boots and wading through the water. Then he keeps them on while he plays in the grass.
He spent about an hour driving his truck through the water. Better than his bike, which he had done the week before!

Dr. B's Last Concert

So sad to miss this...we must have sung this at least 100 times while we were at Wittneberg.

Our Berlin Hotel

Check out the hotel we found in Berlin. They have a family room that will fit all of us, and 100Euro per night even includes breakfast!! We stayed in a similar pension in Copenhagen and loved it.

http://www.pension-peters-berlin.de/

Europe bound!!!!!

Well, it's official. We're Europe-bound again this summer, leaving June 15th. This time, we'll be going with a group of 35 from Chris' high school (including 7 chaperones - yea!). We land in Rome and end in Athens, with a 4day Greek Isles cruise included. Now, until I looked at a map, I never realized how far Athens is from the rest of Europe. In fact, it's almost in Asia! One of our ports is, in fact, a Turkish isle, which means we'll have visited a new continent (sort of). Afterwards, we will put all the travelers on their airplane and fly the 5 of us to Berlin. We'll stay there for a few days and then head to our favorite place, Ottersberg. We can't wait to see our relatives again. We'll end in Amsterdam, flying home mid-July.

In honor of Germany, I've reposted some of our favorite Ottersberg pictures.Here are Chris and I, watching Germany play in the World Cup.

Alexander and Elias at a museum in Bremen, eating from the chocolate exhibit.
Jonathan riding Elias' training bike in Ottersberg

Alexander in front of one huge door in Bremen

And finally, Benjamin, getting crazy with candy at the World Cup party.