Soaring Like an Eagle...

...or maybe more like a baby bird first dropping out of the nest. Jimmy and buddy Jim Busch (who's fault it is we live in Holland) went to England for a boy's weekend to learn how to paraglide by day and to survive life in a British pub during World Cup at night. Unfortunately, Jimmy didn't get any action shots, but here he is getting ready to hike up the hill for his first flight over the rolling hills. The flights only lasted about 30 seconds, but they both loved it.

Raising Adventure Girls...

So glad that the girls are taking after their daddy when it comes to athletics--not necessarily the best at any one sport, but not afraid to try. Here's Veronica at buddy David's 10th birthday party at an outdoor survival course. She may have been the youngest there, but she had fantastic balance and wasn't afraid at all as she scrambled across rope bridges, under simulated barbed wire and up & over a variety of obstacles. She's looking forward to Ashlynn being tall enough to take her along sometime.

Love those Traditional Costumes...

One of the highly anticipated events at school is International Day. We didn't think to bring Pilgrim, Native American or Southern Belle outfits with us and didn't want to just use the traditional dress of the average American kid of jeans and a Disney shirt, so Ashlynn was a cowgirl and Veronica was a hula dancer. Their school is truly international and their were a lot of great costumes. Ashlynn's the only American in her class and Veronica has just 2 others, 1 of which was born in Holland. Many of the children are true expats moving from country to country every few years. Shown here is Iyala who was born in London, but only knows her parents' native Kenya as a place to vacation. Ashlynn had to give her first speech, a culture talk to explain where she's from. We just love that the girls are being exposed to so many different cultures.

Valuable Lessons Learned - Part 2

* Don't let your husband borrow your cell phone and put it in his pocket (granted this technologically advanced Roman Gladiator isn't wearing pants, but I thought it was a cute photo). You might be surprised to learn that an unlocked phone in a pocket can use up an entire 40 Euros prepaid card by sending SMS messages (300+ calls) to a friend's landline and lock up their phone for 2 weeks.

* Don't listen to a Dutch classic rock station unless you can handle regularly listening to Meatloaf (apparently he didn't really die in "Rocky Horror Picture Show").

TV in Holland...

It took a few months to get a digital receiver so we can watch TV. For $10/month, we get CNN, BBC, Discovery and Animal Planet as well as many Dutch channels. Dutch TV has a lot of game shows and reality shows (no doubt from the ads that shows like “Temptation Island” are much spicier here than the US counterpart). In honor of The World Cup, TV station Veronica has been interrupting movies to air 15 minutes of “Hot Shots” which features these bimbos kicking footballs; a more appropriate name would be “The D Cup”. Jimmy (who obviously picked the photo) encourages any non-female with a pulse to click here to check out the US team.

The local channels also air several US shows such as our favorite “Lost”. Lucky for us, all shows are aired in the original language, except for kiddie shows, since this country is small enough not to require dubbing like in Germany, France or Italy. Most nights there are 2 or 3 uncut US movies to choose from; it still freaks me out to see a movie ad complete with nudity and swearing. I asked my Dutch teacher why all English profanities are translated to the same word on the Dutch subtitles and she said that’s because everyone already knows those words so they don’t need to be translated.

A Day in Paradise...

After 2 days of the madness of Naples, I was ready to escape to the calm and beauty of the island of Ischia, a 1-hour ferry ride away. While we never made it to this castle, we enjoyed this view from the little beach cafe that we hung out at for the day. At first glance we thought the beach was covered in trash, but were happy to discover it was mostly sea glass, which made for a great souvenir along with local limoncella (a lemon liqueur best served chilled).

Lesson from History--Don't Live Under an Active Volcano

While Jimmy was busy working in Naples, I took the girls to Pompeii, my favorite place we visited during the week in Italy. It's hard to describe how amazing it was to walk down the streets of this ancient Roman city. This photo was taken in the Forum, which was the main business and political area of the city. We especially loved seeing mosaics and frescoes in their original locations after almost 2,000 years (we saw many others the following day in the Museum Archaeological in Naples). This place is truly immense and we made it through less than half in the several hours that we were there; definitely somewhere worth visiting again. Luckily we made it back to the train right before the skies opened up.