The leaning tower of Snowman

We were at our neighbors house today.  He showed us this photo of a HUGE snowman that his kids made.  They have a huge picture window in the living room that overlooks the garden, and the snowman was built behind a large bush.

In the night, he was in his living room and was a little frightened to see ......

this guy, peeking out from behind the bush right into their living room.

In the morning, he was still there...staring boldly into the living room.... leaning even more dramatically than before.

 

The next day.......

                                         Despite the sharp lean... he never fell over!

Lately Aaron has been saying things like
"Timmy!  Timmy!  I have a problem....let's trade cars."
or
"Mom!  I have a problem.  We can play this game."

We realized early on that he was trying to say "I have an IDEA...." but despite our corrections, he keeps saying it...which I don't mind because I think it's cute. :)

Timmy was frustrated at something at bedtime and was getting angry.  Scott said, what do you want?"  and he responded in an exasperated tone "I just want you to stop making me hate you!"

Karnival and Catching up

So we celebrated our first Karnival last week, and it was crazy.  I wasn't a huge fan of the whole everyone being drunk for multiple days thing, but I got 2 days off work and we got a vast amount of candy.  We went to the Lüth's house in Mausbach, and saw the parade.  The floats were pulled by tractor and the occupants threw out candy, sometimes in quite a violent candy-throwing way.  The kids made bank, way better than Halloween (although we confiscated most of it, and we're trying to release it into their systems in a more controlled fashion).

The aftermath:

The next weekend the kids and I were booted out of the house while KT prepared for a mondo baby shower.  We went into the city and, to the enjoyment of all passer-bys, Aaron was donning a stick-on mustache from Timmy's pirate party.  I caught many people stealing a double take: unsure if they really saw what they saw.  A little dude with a mustache.  Doesn't get much awesomer than that.

 Then we spent over an hour at a slide.  I couldn't believe it, an hour at a single slide.  Nothing else to entertain us, just a slide.  Crazy.

And here's a little clip of what we did over, and over, and over again.

The next day, KT was jealous of our downtown funness and we went back and flew paper airplanes from the top of the stairs at the Rathaus.  A little windy, but there's potential there for a really fun summer activity.  

Drachenfels

So last Saturday, KT was actually free of all possible obligations, so she forced us all out of the house and dragged us out to Königswinter, which is right outside of Bonn.  There we took a train up to a castle on the oldest cog train in Germany.  We got all the way up there, and lo and behold, it was mighty foggy.  Mighty foggy.  We had a beautiful view of evaporated water.  Boo.  

So we headed back down and went to the aquarium, Sea Life Park. 

Then when we got out, lo and behold, the clouds had lifted and there was a frosty blue sky.  It was starting to get late, but we decided we wanted to salvage our castle trip and give it another try.  They wouldn't give us a free ride up to the top, so we decided to do it the old fashion way: zum Fuß.  I doubted whether the kids would make it, but KT was full of faith.  We made it, but not without a lot of coaxing and crying and carrying.  But it was worth it.  Drachenfels (Dragon Rock): check.  Check indeed.