Our Jack-O-Lantern…

Designed and co-carved by Tobias Quinn de Pee .

Trik R Trit

Like I said, we had a Halloween party on Saturday. We did not go outside to go trick or treating. We did have lots of treats of course. Today was the real Halloween, so we did some additional Halloween stuff tonight. Tobias came up with the idea to go trick or treating (“like we did the year before last year” he added). So, we put his costume on and went outside. We pretended to go around the block, but the turned back to ring the doorbell. I had to hide while he waited for the door to open. It was so sweet!

After that we went inside and did another Halloween thing: we watched a Halloween movie (“Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space”) while enjoying the treats .

Before he went to bed he did not want to read, but draw on his white board. We do that sometime, we take turns drawing a picture and then the other person has to guess what it is. The first picture Tobias drew was of trick or treating. He drew himself and Lisa, each with a speech bubble. Tobias’ said: “Trik R Trit”…

As you know he is learning how to write, in Dutch. He is doing really well with reading and also with writing in Dutch. He is starting to be able to distinguish between Dutch and English reading-wise. As you can see from this example he uses the Dutch sounds to spell an English word. Very interesting development… oh, and kind of sweet too, right?

Vampire…

Halloween, always exciting. Tobias had his idea for a costume long before Halloween this year: he wanted to be a Vampire. Good thing they have good costume stores in the US. Aunt Shelli did some serious Halloween shopping and got him this Vampire suit. I did not put the best picture of the suit on though, but I did put the coolest picture on. I love this picture.

We had a party on Saturday and this picture was taken just before that party. Tobias and Lorelei we both so excited and Tobias was waiting to open the door to our first guests and scare them good! They were kind of running through the house and I was just kind of taking some pictures… And then I took this one.

I love it! I hope you do too .

PS: The costume came with make-up. Tobias had that on, of course, but the next day his face was all red… some sort of allergic reaction… That was a bit unfortunate…

Artwork…

Tobias does quite some artwork for us. He calls them surprises… Most of the times it is a picture with some form of fighting going on. He draws super heroes, dragons, monsters, pirates, knights etc. It started out as some of these creatures doing something that needed explaining. So, the pictures would come with a story.
Soon, the picture not only came with a story, they included graphics to tell the story, like arrows and “shadow” pictures, or, in other words, the result of one of the arrows. For example: one pirate shoots the other, one arrow would indicate the bullet flying from one pirate to the other, the other arrow would indicate the other pirate falling in the water…. The other pirate would be captured on two pictures: one on the ship, one in the water.

In this picture you can see an example of that style of drawing in the top picture. You can see a boxing match. You can see the one who wins with four arms and some arrows indicating punches to the other. The other is depicted standing up and fighting and then of course lying down. As you can see some text goes with it stating the boxer lying down being KO.

So, after receiving one of these works of art, the top one to be exact, I suggested that maybe Tobias could depict the course of events in more than one picture, like the comic in a kids magazine that he subscribed to. Sure enough, that night I receive one of his surprises… the bottom part of the picture, depicting the same story in more than one picture… comic style .

I hope to receive many of these surprises in the future. I love them!

Sunday Morning…

No picture in this post, just a story. Why? Well, the story will tell you. We are quite lucky with both our kids. They sleep pretty well. We used to have a pretty decent guesstimate as to when each of them would get up. Well, we gave Tobias an alarm clock, and now we know exactly when he gets up… I have a feeling he waits until it goes off…

Anyway, on the weekend this alarm clock it set for 8:00 am. So, he is in our bed by 8:02 . For quite a while he would come down and ask if he could watch boomerang, but not this past Sunday. This past Sunday he wanted to just cuddle. Lorelei had already come down and was in bed with us, also cuddling. Tobias asked if he could feed the cats. So, he went downstairs and Lorelei went after him. We heard some playing going on and some silly stuff. They were downstairs, but then followed the cats upstairs, so they were just kind of playing together while we were snoozing. Then, at one point from the room next to our bedroom we hear Tobias go: “Wait Lorelei, I’ll be right back.”. He goes up to his room and comes back down. We hear him say: “Ok Lorelei, I got a book, do you want to hear it?”. And then he starts reading to her… SOOOOOOOO CUTE!!!!!

So, he reads for a while and then he goes: “Hold on Lorelei, I’ll be right back.”. He comes into our room and asks for a bookmark… Apparently Lorelei did not want to read anymore, but play something else instead… But, she listened to quite a big part of the book…

I think watching, or in this case hearing, your kids play together and do things for each other, like reading, is just one of the most wonderful things… ever!

Making Perfume

Tobias is in Group 3 now and once a week they watch a TV show made for school. We even call it SchoolTV here… The show is called “Huisje, Boompje, Beestje” (House, Tree, Animal) and addresses various topics that kids his age might be dealing with. One recent one has been allowance, but another one was flowers. In the flower one they talked about how flowers grow, why they have colors, why they smell etc. During that episode they made perfume from flower petals and Tobias was fascinated by that! So, he wanted to try that for himself. He had been talking about it for like two weeks now and today we finally did it.

After school we went into to town and got the necessities: Coffee filters and flowers (roses, as you can see). Tobias also brought a friend (Dico) home with him, but that did not deviate him from his plan… Dico was allowed to join the fun . So, here they are cutting rose petals into small pieces to put in the  coffee filters… Then you trickle warm (not hot) water over it and squeeze the filter. What comes out is the perfume. We put it in a bottle and saved it as a surprise for when Lisa came home . It was quite cute, actually…

Camping

This past weekend Tobias and I went out together on a camping trip, or, a biking vacation as Tobias called it. We strapped everything on our bikes… well… technically we strapped everything but a sleeping bag and a pair of shoes on my bike… and took off for a campsite near Oudewater, about 12 km from Gouda. Not a long ride, well, not for me anyway, but a ride all the same. We even stopped to have lunch on the way there, a pancake, just before we got there . It took us about an hour and a half including lunch to get there.

I had been wanting to do this for quite a while but we haven’t had quite the summer or the time to do it so far. Well, this past weekend was really nice so I took the opportunity! And I am so unbelievably glad I did. Tobias was sooooooo excited about the whole thing, everything about it really…

Of course, when we got there, we first put up the tent. We have a small tent, kind of igloo shaped, which is relatively easy to set up. Tobias helped of course, so we took our sweet time doing that. Then we had to put our stuff in the tent, including a large airbed. We brought a pump and much to my surprise Tobias pumped pretty much the whole thing… By the time we were done we sat outside our tent and rested a while.

Our next job was the groceries. We biked into Oudewater to get our stuff. I wanted to get an instant barbecue and we did find that. So, some meat, some bread, and some veggies, drinks and some snacks and we were set! Before we returned to the campsite it was spoiling time, eh, I mean ice-cream time .

Back at the tent we played some soccer and some games before we lit up the cue and started our dinner. We took our sweet time with that too, we basically took our sweet time doing everything… While we were taking our sweet time having dinner Tobias got up and started running around in circles, and jumping saying: “Oh papa, I love this biking vacation, this is my favorite hobby!”. That gives you an idea about the level of his excitement… .

By the time we were all done it was getting dark, the moon came out, the fields (because that’s where we were, in the fields…) were getting hazy, and the hares were coming out. So, we watched the hares, the moon, the stars and everything before it got too dark and too cold to stay outside. We went inside.

Of course being in the tent was very exciting as well. We played some games, talked, read some books, and cuddled. Tobias repeated his excitement statements like “favorite hobby”, “love this biking vacation” many times throughout the evening. We were both asleep at around 21:30 (I was really tired too, apparently, I didn’t even read…). It was not my greatest night of sleep, but I did get a reasonable amount of sleep in the end…

We woke up around 8:00. We stayed in the tent for quite a while before we got up. We talked and read some more and played some games again. Oh, and we had breakfast in the tent (we had gotten some rolls the day before…). After getting ready we biked into Oudewater again to get some drinks. We went back to the tent an played some soccer and some more games before we took the tent down again, strapped everything on the bikes again and headed for home, much to Tobias’ disappointment… He would have loved to stay a bit longer, and so would I…

We agreed to go again next year, and then stay out for two nights. But, even though it was only one night and very brief it was very nice, wonderful actually! I guess this is what they call “quality time”…