busy weekend

saturday:
i was so happy that valentine's day fell on a saturday this year. steve had the day off (FINALLY!) so we were able to hang out in the morning together with brynn and give her a little gift (a wooden german puzzle, some stickers, and some dora candy).

we aren't those types of people that go absolutely crazy over this hallmark holiday and spend a fortune on over priced flowers. i actually tell steve to NOT get me any flowers on this day as they are always ridicously overpriced and i rather have something that will last more then 3 days. but we did make plans and got a sitter for brynn. i had originally wanted to go to the movie theatre in luxembourg and find a place to eat before, but the movie selection was a little lame and we didn't feel like driving 50 minutes each direction to see something that we weren't crazy about. so we decided to stick around the area and catch the movie that was playing on base (paul blart, mall cop). we asked a few couples from our ward if they wanted to get together for the evening and ended up having a blast. the raybon's were super awesome in opening up their place for dinner before the movie, as we knew every restaurant around here would be crazy busy, and i ate my weight (again...) in bread sticks, pasta and alfredo sauce. they also had a "how well do you know your spouse game?" and steve and i ended up winning! crazy considering some of the questions were tough and i was totally clueless on them. but we came away with a sweet prize (edible candy bra and underwear....nice) and laughed about it the rest of the night. i'm soooo hitting the german store that the raybons went to to get this sweet gift! hello! future white elephant gifts and bridal showers! hilarious stuff. i was trying to convince steve to wear the candy thong to church today for his birthday, but wasn't successful....dangit!

after the movie, all 4 couples went bowling on base. i'm HORRIBLE at bowling and have discovered the harder i try, the more gutter balls i get. at one point i added the bumpers option when it was my turn and that STILL didn't help me out! but it's all good. i'm not a competitive person when it comes to any type of sport (as i'm not good at any of them) so i just laughed at myself and had fun anyways. we were lucky enough to be right next to a few young airmen, one of which was plastered, who were bowling as well. the dude that was drunk kept spitting on the table in a pile of napkins and acting really weird and falling out of his chair. i really have never understood why people drink like that. why would you let yourself be that out of control and stupid? i guess to each their own...

i took some boudoir pictures for steve back in november with annie p, and she made them into an AMAZING book which i gave to him for valentine's day. i was so nervous to take these pictures (and don't worry, none of them were nasty) as i HATE my body and wearing anything besides sweats. but thanks to photoshop and lots and lots of makeup (thanks again valerie r!), i looked ok. steve said that he got me something online thru overstock.com, but it hasn't shown up. i will NOT miss this part of living overseas! nothing is more frustrating then getting things you have purchased online AFTER the holiday that they were meant for. steve didn't get his christmas presents until the middle of january and i bought them online in november! i felt awful but he was cool about it.

as we were passing our landlords courtyard on our way back home, we noticed a huge boar hanging upside down by their shed. this is a normal occurance as egdar is a huge hunter. steve of corse had to go over after i dropped the babysitter off to google it and tell them congrats. its so nasty! i hate hunting...

but we had a great valentine's day!

sunday:
steve turned 29 on sunday, and we had plans to go to brugge belgium overnight while my friends watched brynn for us. steve ended up having to teach his sunday school class plus the one ahead of his, and i had to sub again in primary so we decided to forget about it and stay home as we knew finding people to sub for us would be hard as a lot of people were out of town. i had a hard day attempting to teach the ctr 5 class (since i was released from the primary presidency, i volunteered to sub for a few weeks until they got a teacher for that class as the teacher before is now the current president) and seriously decided after that, that we are done having kids! now, i understand that at that age, its hard to listen for more then 30 seconds at a time. but these kids were AWFUL for me! at one point i just sat there starring at them, while they pretended they were dogs and talked and took off all their shoes and socks, hoping they would notice i had stopped talking and get the hint that i wanted them to be reverent. of course they didn't get that, and continued to roll around on the floor and hide under their chairs. one of the boys told me that i "looked funny" (thanks jerk...) and that i always have boring lessons as i never feed them any food. nice.

on a better note, brynn said something during sacrament that cracked me up. now, steve and i always stress the 1st hour in church as brynn is always getting into everything (i now have to keep her bag and my purse out in the foyer as they are too distracting) and never listens to us. i hate being that "one family" that always has the noisy kid in sacrament. we try so hard to keep her busy (quietly) and good, but its so hard! most sunday's, steve has to take her out so at least one of us can get something out of sacrament. well, the program this past sunday had a picture of jesus on the front, so we tried to keep brynn's attention by asking her questions about him. we first talked about how we can all make jesus happy in church by being reverent and sitting still, but that didn't work too well. we then started talking about all the things in common that we had with jesus, like our eyes, ears, hair and hands. i then said, "and jesus had a beard and moustache too. but daddy can't have those at work though". so then brynn grabs my face, looks at me all serious and says, "mommy has moustache too". THANKS BRYNN! so right when i got home, i busted out the nair.

i was so lame and didn't get to the commissary the day before to get some things to make steve his favorite meal, so we had canned soup for his birthday dinner! i felt awful. i did make him a cake, but forgot the candles. luckily i had a package of 16 pink ones, so we used those instead (real men like pink...).

too bad that when i was lighting them, they were leaking wax like crazy all over the cake so i only lit 3 of the 16 so he had a few to blow out. steve had mentioned a few weeks before that he wanted a bose ipod sound dock for his birthday, so i grabbed the last one at the bx, and put it on layaway. i knew that if i bought it all at once, steve would know exactly what i got him from looking at our statement, so i thought i was being real sneaky by paying it off slowly. we are so awful at keeping secrets from each other, but i did manage to not blow it this time! although im pretty sure he knew the whole time (he swears he didn't know), he was happy to get it. and can i say, dude?! why didn't we get this badboy sooner?! steve and i love music, and since our stereo is in his office at work, but always have to listen to it on our laptop when we are at home. this system is awesome!

and nothing says "happy birthday" like getting your picture taken with a DEAD FROZEN boar! ahhh! i did not want steve to drag brynn with him, but supposely she wasn't scared. i stayed home as im not found of the stank of death.

monday:
there is an antique store in belgium that everyone talks about around here called slegers (http://www.slegers-antiques.com/) and i really wanted to go to it before our stuff was packed up. they are only opened during the week, so i knew i would have to go without steve. luckily, steve had monday off, as it was president's day, so we decided to go there and do brugge a different weekend. i felt awful asking my friend emily to watch brynn (as her and ethan together cause major damage), but am sooo glad that i did as this place was sooo not kid friendly! it took us about 2 1/2 hours to get to the massive warehouse, and most of the driving was in the netherlands. this place is right next to the belgium/netherland border so we were able to do a three country tour in a day! this is not at all uncommon in this area as we live right next to the border of belgium and luxembourg so don't get too jealous!

we were so confused as to where the entrance was to this place, so we drove around for a good 15 minutes looking for a door or sign. i even went to a business next to the warehouse to ask someone where the store was (and we've found that the dutch are the nicest people around here! seriously. so helpful and most of them speak perfect english). we finally got brave enough and opened a door that looked like was for employee's only, and discovered that it was in fact the right door. c'mon people, could you at least put a sign on the door?! anyways, this place was HUGE and packed full of old school shrunks, beds, tables, side boards, chandeliars, a merry go round, and lots of decorations. some of the crazy pieces looked like furniture that i have seen in local castles. i am not personally into all the intricate wood carved antique furniture, but had a great time looking around. my decorating idol out here, kayla b, found some sweet treasures at this store so i was hoping to get lucky. steve and i found a few dough bowls (i will post pictures later as they are hard to describe), a sleigh, an old school rooster iron, a cigarrette plank (coolest thing ever! and don't worry, i'm not taking up smoking), and a red holland antique tin that looks so cool! i found a few other items that i wanted to get, (a few old school suitcases, a steel milk jug from amsterdam, and a wooden cart) but they were pretty pricey. steve was happy to see a nasty boar head on a plaque (which he says he wants to put on the wall over our bed...uh, how romantic) and a weird bicycle attached to a truck bed.

on the way home, we stopped by a road side "frites" restaurant and shared a thing of fries. i think its gross, but people out here normally eat their fries with mayo! i think its so disgusting. steve thinks im crazy as he was raised on utah's fry sauce (aka pink sauce. mix of mayo and ketchup) and to him, thats the only way to eat fries. and i also hate out here how you have to pay for every single friggin condiment! it was 50 euro cents to get a glob of ketchup!

this, i will not miss. i used to keep packets of ketchup in my glove compartment, no joke, when we traveled as i refused to pay the extra when we got hamburgers or fries.

i love how close we are to so many awesome countries. it makes me so sad that we leave in 5 weeks! i really really hope we can be stationed again in europe.

koln zoo

first of all, i am so sorry i have been awful about blogging lately! things have been pretty busy around here so i've neglected this. steve just put brynn to sleep so i'm going to take advantage of this alone time! its hard to do anything on the computer when brynn's awake as she loves to pound on the keyboard and begs me to show her dora and wiggles clips from youtube.

we had never been to koln (cologne), which is pathetic since its a little over an hour away, so we decided to see the city and take brynn to the zoo before we moved. i heard mixed reviews about the zoo, so i wasn't expecting much. some exhibits were under construction, so there were a lot of animals that we didn't see like the panda's and penguins. brynn was pretty bummed about this as she has been talking about panda's non stop (thanks to kung fu panda), but she got over it pretty quickly once she saw all the other animals. the weather was awful as expected, but we brought our umbrella's and tried to stay in the indoor exhibits when it hit hard. brynn always had to be in front of us leading the way, so we used her stroller to cart around all our crap.

we also were "lucky" to see a few things. first, it involved the hippo's. nasty nasty hippo's. the hippo's were housed in an indoor pool surrounded by a little mote with a friggin little rope that was 12 inches off the ground to prevent them from getting to the innocent bystanders (i've noticed that european zoo's/wildpark's have extremely low safety features). there weren't too many people in this exhibit, so we had no problem getting front row seats to the three fatty hippo's. steve pointed out all the brown marks on the walls around the hippos and claimed that it was nasty poo. i didn't believe him, and told him it was probably mud marks or something from them going outside in their court yard area and getting dirty. when we first approached them, they were all under the dark murky water with only their ears peaking out. so we stood there for a while watching them, and got all excited when the largest one started to come up higher and higher out of the water. brynn's stroller was in front of us with all our paraphernalia, including our nice cannon and my purse, and i was behind it watching the hippo's while brynn and steve squealed at how huge it was. well, THEN something not cool happened. as this fatty beast was standing up, totally exposing its nasty butt towards us, it starts wagging it's tail back and forth really fast and flinging POO all over towards us! we all scream and run for cover, totally forgetting to grab the stroller which was 4 feet away from this hippo's fat A. of corse the people that were in there, didn't see the nasty animal crapping, but saw 3 american's spazzing out and running away. they probably thought that this was our first time seeing hippo's and thought we were ridiculous.
so i return to the stroller expecting the worse, but luckily (considering there was TONS of nastiness flying our way) only saw some nasty poo on one of the wheels. i've been begging steve for a quinny zapp for a long time, so i took advantage of this situation telling him it would be easier to just buy a new stroller rather then clean the one wheel. i failed miserably. (after we got home, we checked out youtube and there were a ton of video's on poo flining hippo's. i guess that's how they mark their territory. nice huh? i'm so grateful that we got to experience that...)

next, it was onto the elephants. as everyone knows, elephants are huge. really really huge. by this time, the weather had started to clear up so we went to the outdoor elephant area to watch them. they had a ton of them out, including cute little baby elephants that brynn went crazy over. as steve and i were walking around the huge outdoor exhibit, we noticed two elephants paying really close attention to one another along with tons of people lining up to get a closer look, so we grabbed the camera and camcorder and followed their lead. i got a short video of what was going on, but i'm having a really hard time uploading it to youtube at the moment. i will try again later.

brynn checking out the jaguar.

pulling gum out of brynn's hair.

yeah...it didn't work out too well. but camels ARE yummy.

we were exhausted after the zoo, and decided to drive throughout the city instead of walking all over again as planned. it was getting a little dark by this time, so my pictures of the famous cathedral didn't turn out too well. but here are some pictures to give everyone an idea of what it looks like there. its absolutely beautiful and reminds me so much of notre dame in paris with the spires and flying butresses. koln is rad, and i'm so bummed that we didn't come out sooner! we have some really good friends that were stationed here a while ago that would go to koln almost every month to this argentinean steak resturant. we promised them that we we go, but failed to! i'm sure we will get yelled at now by julie and joe...sorry guys!

mango's visit to the vet

today i had the privilege of taking our sweet cat mango to the vet (and if you have had the pleasure of meeting ms. mango, you know just how sweet she is) for her shots and getting the ball rolling for all her paperwork needed to get to alaska. kids are not allowed at the vet, so steve was able to get away from work for 30 minutes and sit in the car with brynn which seriously saved me. i also had to bring a friggin stool sample so they could check to see if she had worms so that was fun to tote around. mango HATES her kennel and knew she was going somewhere when i took it out last night and left it in the hall for her.

mango cried all the way to spangdahlem so brynn thought it would be nice to sing to her. ya, i had a headache listening to "twinkle, twinkle little star"and "popcorn popping" combined with mango's nasty deep moan's. poor brynn was trying to help and kept getting frustrated whenever mango would cry, so she kept singing louder and louder to over power mango! ahhh, i was happy to arrive and get out of the car.

it took 3 people to hold my grumpy, spit flinging cat in order to give her the 4 shots. there is this video online that im sure everyone has seen, that basically sums up how mango was behaving during the appointment. just picture a longer haired cat and ta-da! you've got mango! we are so sedating her this time around when we fly back...