zauber-a

Well, not really, but just for you, Cynthia...I don't know what was up with the past week. I have been so exhausted and then got sick and then Georgia got sick and we even went to the doctor, but she just had a nasty flu bug that gave her a never-ending fever and made her just want to sit miserably on the couch and do nothing - NOTHING.

I haven't felt like doing anything, just have the blahs I guess.

How about a story?

There was this gal who really wanted to BBQ hamburgers on the grill, right? She wanted to last weekend and couldn't convince her family that it was a good idea so she gave up. She still wanted to this past weekend and so she just bought the goods to make the food and hoped. She told her family that the BBQ Grill needed to get started by 4pm so that it would be hot enough to grill and they could eat by 6pm and the baby could go to bed at her regular bedtime...

At 3:30, her family took off for a walk and a play on the playground (the far-away, couldn't get farther walking, playground) and left her at home. Around 4pm, they were NOT home. The BBQ had NOT been dragged out of the basement, nothing had been prepared...but this girl WANTED a BBQ hamburger! So she got the food all ready to grill and at 4:45pm, her family finally arrived home.

It took until around 5pm for them to get down to the basement and start looking for the grill and charcoal and then the bad news. Despite having ASKED at the grocery store on Saturday (because they are closed on Sundays) whether they had everythign necessary to grill with...it turns out they had no charcoal fluid to light the grill. So they dug up an old bottle of POTT, which is about 50proof and took it along with the grill and charcoal out to the backyard.

It wasn't until 5:30 or later, that the BBQ grill was successfully in one piece and the charcoal could be lit. You might have guessed...that the POTT wasn't strong enough to catch the charcoal on fire...by this time, the girl was getting irritated, tired, and hungry. So she went upstairs and set up the raclette on the balcony and once it was hot, she called down to find out whether the grill was working and got a resounding 'no!' in return. So she threw the hamburgers on the raclette (which basically means they started frying in their own fat, as the raclette has no place for the fat to drip off) and got the table ready.

At some point, she called down again to say the burgers were half-done and to come upstairs, and that is when she heard: "The grill is working! Bring the meat down!" Frustrated, she removed the burgers from the Raclette, gathered the baby up for the 4th time, and trekked downstairs, only to discover that the charcoal was lit, but not hot, and it was not getting hot anytime soon (remember her saying to start the process at 4pm?). So eventually, she took the meat back upstairs, turned the raclette back on and finished cooking the burgers, and not without a number of 'i told you so's'.

The meat was terrible, but the girl needs iron, so she ate it, trying to cover the taste in plenty of ketchup and avocados...and in the end, she wasn't even hungry for the brownies they had for dessert.

End of Story.

Now, just so you don't think this family is all terrible - I will say they had the most delicious Sate with peanutsauce on Saturday, with all parties helping. She made the sauce, and he did the marinade and meat and rice and they feasted so well on Saturday, she slept through the night for the first time since being pregnant, without waking up hungry!

Next weekend, assuming good weather, the family is going to try again...and they are looking into getting an electric BBQ...

Currently reading:
The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, Book 3)
By Philip Pullman

Posted at 08:00 am by zauber-a
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My daughter may look nothing like me, but she certainly shares my love for chocolate...

credits can be seen HERE. The layout was done for the Saturday Scraplift Challenge at Designer Digitals. yup, that was today. This time around, I was all speedy gonzales!

Posted at 12:08 pm by zauber-a
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just a few days late!!! not a lot to say - we went to the zoo, along with every other family of at least 1 in Munich...it was insane. Pictures HERE

And a layout I did especially for Sven and that succeeded in making him laugh over and over. He even read the journaling (which has some mistakes I need to fix, I know) and another one I did today of the same event (petting zoo). Plus, two of Easter Sunday, just because she's so cute:

click to view larger. Credits can be seen HERE

Posted at 03:07 pm by zauber-a
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Well, Georgia was awake just before 7am this morning, to an unexpected dreary, grey morning...and we had to keep her in bed until after I'd finished baking the muffins for our Brunch at 9:30am....! Left her in her sleeping bag and Sven stayed in bed with her as long as possible. He was going through the cassettes for the video recorder to see if there was a blank one we could use as we finally, after 1.5 years of off-and-on-filming, used up the first one!

I wanted Sven in the living room before her to catch the first look on her face with the camera, so had to shut the door to keep her out. She busied herself in the kitchen, I think she was curious where all her colored eggs had gone, as the egg carton was empty! Turns out, the whole thing was a farce, as there was some sort of security thing on the new cassette and Sven missed pretty much the whole easter-basket event. He did get the egg-hunt on camera though plus some (hopefully) great shots of her showing off in her sunglasses. As soon as he hooks the camera back up to the computer, I'll see what I can do to share some footage with you.

Let me point out one thing - check out her right arm in the middle photo. See the red streaks? That's from dyeing eggs yesterday...she insisted on sticking her hand in the glass of vinegar water to get the egg out herself...

I think we can safely say that Georgia is a camera ham. Sven was videoing, and I was taking pictures while she modeled her new sunglasses (which she loves). That girl was dressed to the nines this morning (and within 1 minute of being dressed, she was already full of chocolate) with cinderella dress, purse, shoes and sunglasses, which she wore all the way to Sandy's...no seriously, check this out:

We've just arrived at Emma's and Sandy put them both up on the couch for pictures. Look at Georgia, purse in hands, sunglasses perched on her nose. Neither Sven nor I are sure exactly where she got that from - must be a little girl thing!

Brunch was lovely, sooooooo much good food. We're talking typical German fare (rolls, cheese, sliced sausage and of course, Easter Eggs!) plus a veggie tray with cherry tomatoes that were generously dribbled with the most deliciously creamy balsamico ever and topped with fresh basil and mozarella (is your mouth watering yet?) two homemade dips Kylene wouldn't have touched, to eat with the red peppers, cucumbers, kohlrabi and carrots, a fuit tray with fresh strawberries and pineapples, and for the fish-eaters, smoked salmon with another homemade dip of some sort. And that was just the stuff Sandy provided. I showed up with lemon-poppyseed muffins and a very yummy strawberry-spinach salad, both of which I'd made for Easter last year, but with some practice behind my belt - they turned out much better this year. Heavenly.

And then we sent Daddy's and girls upstairs while we played the Easter Bunny and hid Emma's gifts around the backyard. Sandy was a sweetie and had some chocolate for Georgia as well. Plus, I hid some of the hard-boiled eggs because she got a kick out of finding those this morning at home...

The Easter Bunny in Germany (and maybe in America too sometimes?) hides not only eggs, but the easter baskets as well. So Emma ran around the yard looking for presents (no actual basket, just scattered goodies and chocolate) and Georgia wandered a bit lost to and fro...

No matter, she still had a fabulous time (i think) and when I pointed something out to her, she hurried to get it. I thinks he wa sa bit overwhelmed by the new surroundings (she'd never been in Emma's backyard before) and the next-door neighbor's dog. She couldn't stop staring at the dog! And after everything had been found, and Emma had gone inside to play with her new toys, Georgia refused, she wanted to watch the dog and ride Emma's tricycle around the yard...

Eventually though, she did come in to check Emma's toys and then we all tried to finish as much of the food as possible before taking off so that the girls could have much-needed naps. In fact, Georgia slept nearly 3 hours, and is right this minute, whining in bed because she doesn't know just what she wants. Maybe she's hungry. I'd better go see.

And for my dear blog readers who want to see more pics than the ones I shared (including egg dyeing pics which are not on the blog) then please run over to my Easter 2007 set at flickr, where you will be overwhelmed with the sheer number of photos (we took 192 photos over the past two days, no worries though, I did NOT upload all of them!).

Happy Easter!!!

Posted at 03:56 pm by zauber-a
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Posted at 11:01 pm by zauber-a
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Thought we'd celebrate the last playgroup before Easter doing a little mini easter-egg hunt. We each brought a little chocolate goodie or 10...and then tried to convince the kiddos to go out of the room for a few minutes so we could "hide" them. When they came back in, they all went right for the toys so we had to sit there and point out the hiding places: "look over there, what's THAT?!" and then they'd take off and grab the little chocolate eggs. I tried to get pictures, but unfortunately, this is all that I got:

We then went over for breakfast and I spent most of the time having to tell Georgia "no" to more chocolate...she loves it so!

After breakfast, the kids were playing and we just started snapping photos. At one point, Georgia had set herself down on a cushion and was pretending to eat from a spoon. It was hard to get a shot of her without her arm in front of her face until Emma came along and took away Georgia's spoon. Then I got this shot:

On that note, Happy "Green Thursday" to everyone. I hope your Easter Holiday is filled with chocolate and fun and family! We'll hopefully be back to post pics of our Easter morning sometime this weekend. We'll be doing Easter Brunch with Emma and her family and the girls will get to go egg-hunting in their backyard. Should be an interesting time!

Oh, and a p.s. I guess. A number of people asked for more details regarding this pregnancy. I'm at 13 weeks, due date is October 9th. Anyone remember Georgia's due date? Yah. Morning Sickness has been plaguing me since before day 1, I swear and still hasn't let go. Plus, Georgia gave me her cold so I've been tired, sick and exhausted this week. I have one ultrasound picture - must get it scanned so I can share. Feel free to ask any other questions if you feel I'm not being very forthcoming.

Happy Weekend!!!

Posted at 02:13 pm by zauber-a
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for me anyway! Participated once again in a contest over at Designer Digitals and this time, I won! I get to be a guest Design Team Member for the month of April. I am very excited, though already dreading the end of the month when my stint is over and I get kicked off the team and life goes back to normal. Until then - it's lots of inspirational goodies to play with and I can't wait to get started. Getting started is going to have to wait however, as Georgia has caught another cold and can't sleep - keeps waking up and crying. In other words, I am sneaking in a blog entry right now when I should be in there with Georgia so Sven can have a life too!

All About Me

Posted at 09:43 pm by zauber-a
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I hope you had fun! In answer to the much-asked question: what does Harry Potter have to do with anything:

the last 3 harry potter books were published the summers of 2003, 2005 & now 2007, always just in time for me to quickly read it before a baby arrived.

Posted at 07:53 am by zauber-a
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Is orange a bad color for moods or what? Someone is so whiney today I'm ready to bang my head against the wall! nap was interrupted and too short (I had to join her to get her to sleep at all), she keeps throwing down that phone on purpose and won't stop crying, er, whining. grr. and of course the start of amazing weather turned into rain...anyway. if you wanna see cutie-pie whiney baby, click HERE.

Posted at 02:34 pm by zauber-a
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Thank you, thank you, everyone who took time to comment and let me know that you are here and actually reading. I have a very good reason for asking and wanting to know who is here that has nothing to do with my ego. Like, I'm not going to go bragging about how many blog readers I have, no no, that wasn't the point of my last post.

It was this.

No no, that's too easy. Let's play a game instead.

What happens when you put the following things together:

1. I have been seriously slacking with the updates this year.
2. The newest (and this time last) Harry Potter book is due out this summer.
3. I've been awfully sick this year.
4. It's an odd-numbered year.
5. We have to cancel a much-anticipated trip to Seattle this summer. (which includes missing out on an even more anticipated wedding)

Answer = If you take a guess, (just make one guess) I will Email you a link to the correct answer. If you want to take a guess, but want it to be the RIGHT ANSWER, ask me for more clues. If you are one of the few people who already knows the answer, please please abstain from commenting until further notice.

So, make a guess and let me know.

Posted at 07:18 pm by zauber-a
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