KissKus

We celebrated Queensday yesterday

Yesterday all the Dutch were merry, because we celebrated Queensday!! Hurray, hurray, long live our Queen!!!

Everyone is (almost) obliged to wear something orange, so the children were dressed appropriately.

We ventured out to the free market as early as we could (which was after 9 a.m. but still!) and already there were quite a lot of people there, but a little later it was so busy that at places the crowd was hardly moving anymore.

Luckily we decided to carry Linus around instead of taking the pram with us.

It was a very successful morning. We all scored some great bargains, the children payed games and Linus behaved very well.

It's so much fun to see that people sell the strangest things on Queensday... I just had to take a photo of this mountain of ugly dolls.

This was my modest haul:

Fabric (love the teapot fabric!)

And two adorable prints. I fell in love with the one on the left immediately. These will definitely be reframed and hung somewhere nice.

So all in all a very good day that we ended with an indoor bbq.

Read more about Queensday and what we did previous years here and here.

Hello winter!

After a very mild winter without any snow or ice at all, look at the view that greeted us when we opened the curtains this morning! Even though it was only a thin layer of snow, everything was white!

The children were very excited of course. We put on their clothes and at 7.30 a.m. they were already playing outside. They had a great time until noon when most of the snow had melted.

The rest of the day was very relaxing. I made wentelteefjes and even managed to take a nap. I also made a good start with the travelcot and a matching blankie. Hopefully that project will be finished tomorrow.

The day ended appropriately with a fire in the garden.

Oh, and the obligatory 39 weeks-bellyshot of course :)

Back to normal

The Christmas decorations have been cleared away, Amber's back in school, I'm back at work and tonight we're having hutspot for dinner... finally things are back to normal and what a relief it is!

Simon and I are no longer sick and thankfully the flu seems to have passed the other two by.

It's time to concentrate on our house now, we have exactly two months to get everything organised and to get properly prepared for baby's arrival. It's do-able, but we have to get a move on.

Photos are of some felt tissueholders that I made last week... don't they breath "seventies"?!

A Christmas wonderland

The weather has been very obliging this year and has provided us with a beautiful winter wonderland. Just in time for Christmas. Everything looks gorgeous!

Today the four of us spent a lovely quiet day at home. Michel took the kids out for a refreshing walk, while I stayed at home sewing. I managed to sew up four Christmas presents and I'll be finishing three more tonight. I never thought I'd be able to achieve so much last minute... I suppose it's a handmade Christmas for me after all!

Tomorrow morning I have to go into work for a couple of hours and after that we'll start the Christmas festivities at my parents' house. I'm looking forward to it.

I hope you'll all be able to enjoy the next couple of days, wherever you are and whatever way you choose to celebrate. Happy Christmas!

Gezellig!

It is often said that there is no real translation for the Dutch word gezellig.
Gezellig means homy, comfy, cosy, intimate.
It may refer to activities, situations or people.

It means lighting the candles at night

It means playing with your best friend

It means peeling the Brussels sprouts together

It means decorating the Christmas tree

It means feeling lots of tiny toes and fingers wriggling around, but no photo can be taken of that!

Things have been very gezellig around here lately!

Off to see the neighbours

Today we're off to visit our nextdoor neighbours.
The ones that live to the right of us. The right of our country that is.

We're off for a long weekend to Germany with family.
We'll be celebrating Sinterklaas, we'll go to a Christmas market and we'll undoubtedly enjoy the good food and drinks of Germany.
I'm really looking forward to it. I think I deserve a break after a whole month of blogging, don't you?!

Amber made a list of what clothes to pack... she did it all by herself; the mistakes are just delicious!

Traditional festivities

I've already talked quite a bit about Sinterklaas on here, but there's even more to tell... I hope you don't mind ;)
Sinterklaas is a very old Dutch tradition that is fortunately still very much alive in Holland... and old traditions are something to cherish, right?!

On Saturday the good man arrived in our hometown and yesterday we celebrated Sinterklaas at my work. In between the children were allowed to set their shoes as I told yesterday. It was one big Sinterklaas celebration!

When Sinterklaas and all his helpers (Zwarte Pieten) arrived in our town on Saturday he was greeted by many excited children (and parents). Everyone was singing and cheering and all the children were hoping for a handful of pepernoten. Amber was lucky enough to get some.

The Zwarte Pieten (Black Petes) are Sinterklaas' helpers. They are black because they climb in and out of chimneys at night to put presents in all the children's shoes. They carry with them big bags filled with pepernoten which they scatter around them.

Sinterklaas has a white horse called Amerigo. At night Sinterklaas rides his horse on the roofs of the houses to distribute all the presents... no mean feat for such an old gentleman!

The reason why he hands out all these presents is that he celebrates his birthday on December 5th. That's the day that we call Pakjesavond (presents' evening) in Dutch. This year we'll be celebrating with Michel's family. For the adults we buy a couple of small presents and play a game, for the children we buy some presents for them to unpack. It'll be fun... it always is.

This last photo was taken at my work yesterday... spot the 7 differences with the other photos ;)

Read all about the Sinterklaas traditions here on Wikipedia.

Guestblogger

To lift the pressure a bit, the usual quiet Michel has something to say to Mirre's fans.

It's great to see Mirre is doing so swell with the blogging, selling and mothering. But this NaBloPoMo is pressing hard on her.

Nevertheless I find it every time worth reading, and mostly I review some of it like a foto album.

Except for the fact this month I've had to read what happened instead of being told everything, I'm very proud of my 'busy bee'.

 

With my new job I have the luck I'm every weekend off. Last saturday Mirre had to work and I took the opportunity to take the children to Harderwijk , my birth place, to watch the traditional Sinterklaas arriving. Brad (my soon-to-be-brother-in-law) was going with us and it was his first encounter with the feast.

 

On the way to the harbour I saw the best windowstil I ever saw. It was a bit Jugendstil, like the bookshop I worked in until recently, but brand new. A nice surprise, and Sinterklaas had not yet even begun! Worth a picture and some lingering from my side (which earned much grumping from the rest). We were just in time to see Sint's ship mooring.

 

We went to the marketsquare to wait for Sinterklaas to come. Luckily a hot chocolate was easily purchased to fight the cold we were standing in. After many minutes (hours for the children) waiting, Sinterklaas finally came AND I MISSED HIM! I don't know how it happened, I just did. I'm glad my sister had the camera (but she could also have nudged me when he passed at the moment she pressed the button).

 

It was nice going out all fatherly with the children. Especially because we went by train, for Mirre took the car to work.

Next saturday Sint is coming to our little town, the day our daughter is swimming for her diploma. Busy day all over again!

Camping is fun/not so fun

Last week after we dropped the children off at the oma's, Michel and I had five days to ourselves. No work, no children... what were we going to do?!
On Monday we decided to go camping in Limburg, which is in the south of Holland (a looooooong way down, an almost two-hour drive!). We brought a little tent and a couple of books and not much else.

The campsite was lovely and almost deserted. We set up our tent... it was perfect!
On Tuesday we spent the whole day reading in the sun and we both finished our book (this was mine, very enjoyable).

Unfortunately, it started raining in the late afternoon, but we decided to take advantage of it and had a wonderful meal in a cosy restaurant.

However when we arrived back to the tent our bedding was damp, the mattress had already proved to be uncomfortable the night before. There was nothing to it than try to get some sleep. All through the night it continued to rain and our bed and duvet went from damp to downright wet. When it was finally time to get up and we looked under under the mattress it turned out that we had been lying in a large pool of rainwater... nice! Apparently, the bottom of the tent wasn't water-resistant.

There was no way we were going to stay another night in an even wetter tent (it was still raining), so we packed everything up and went to the most southern city of our country: Maastricht.

It was an 8o km drive, but because of the rain, accidents and roadworks it took us three hours to get there! When we finally arrived we comforted ourselves with a piece of traditional Limburger cake.

However, Maastricht was lovely and we enjoyed ourselves there and when we came home that evening we still had a good feeling about our little break.

And the best thing was that our own bed never slept so nice!! We have once again proven that there's no place like home!

When men go wild...

The other day we went to a woodcutter's festival in a village near us.

First there was a Jack Russel-race which was great fun since both the kids are terrified of dogs (Michel and I aren't fans either).

Then we watched the chainsaw woodcarving contest. Simon thought the sound of the saws was too loud.

What he did enjoy were the tractors that were parked everywhere.
This was definitely the largest, awesomest tractor we've ever seen:

We also enjoyed watching a demonstration of the fire brigade.

When we cycled back home, we were all pleased with a day well spent.

And it managed to stay dry....

... until we sat down outside to eat our homemade pizza.

That's summer in Holland for you all!