High Time

Okay, so it's time already for a New Post. I've been thinking about it daily and just haven't made the time (and now this post has been sitting in my drafts for 5 days). There are grandparents dying to see pictures and videos of the munchkins, right? I promised I would post them...oh about 14 days ago...two weeks behind isn't too bad.

It's been another busy week. The Jimmers has become a pro at the potty. We "got serious" about it on Monday and he went ALL day (13 hrs) with absolutely NO accidents!

Three 300 cheers for Jimmy!

He's been doing excellent ever since and I cannot believe how good it feels to have only one child in diapers. Now I have to worry about finding bathrooms when we are in public. OH MY! That is SO difficult here. And when you do find one you often have to pay to use it. I better go scout out all the public bathrooms beforehand and make sure I have lots of change on hand.

Well, other than going without heat in our home for a day and a half, our week hasn't been too out of the ordinary. We've experienced first hand that the customer service here is horrible compared to the US. You have to pay at least .10/min to talk to (& to wait on hold for) any customer service rep or even just to call any store in general and then most reps will say just about anything to get you off the phone. Boy is it frustrating. We had to wait a whole day before anyone could come out to fix our heat and then water was running down our wall ten min after the repairman left. We called back and again were told it would be another day before anyone could return...even though the problem was never fixed correctly in the first place. UGH. Anyway, it's over now and I am very grateful to have heat. Speaking of heat, I was talking to a Dutch friend the other day. I thought you might enjoy this...

Him: "Do you keep your heat on all night?"

Me: "Oh yes. Of course."

Him: "Americans. So wasteful." (Have I told you how blunt people here are? VERY. I'm used to it now...for the most part.)

Me: (chuckle) "Wait. You don't?"

Him: "No. And we open our windows at night."

Me: "Really? Why?"

Him: "Fresh air."

Hmm, I'm willing to sacrifice the fresh air for the comfort of being warm. Okay, well here are a few Christmas goodies for you.

Waiting to come downstairs...poor things had to get dressed before coming down since we had a church breakfast that morning.

The following video shows how pretty much the whole present unwrapping went...Jimmy opened all his gifts and his brother's. Glade didn't care to open anything but rather liked to eat everyone's candy while watching Jimmy open gifts.

What kid likes to get crackers in his stocking? Jimmy!

Jimmy's big gift = tool work bench (to replace his beloved one that I sold before coming here) Glade's big gift = lego table

Both boys also got a puzzle, movie, Dutch pic book, Nerf gun & of course candy (of which Jimmy ate ALL of his on Christmas day. There was no way I was going to stop him. I believe that's part of the fun of Christmas candy...it's all yours and you decide when to eat it. I'm sure I deserve a parenting award for this!). We had a wonderful break from the norm. Here's proof it was time to get back to the norm... Hehe, actually none of us were ready to get back to the norm. We all enjoyed the break so much and wished it could've lasted longer. We were planning on going to Paris but that never happened...hopefully it will soon. It was too cold and we chickened out when thinking about wandering around in the cold with two little boys. We did however finally get chairs for our dining room table and I consider that to be a huge accomplishment. I still can't believe we went without them for 2 months.

Sorry grandparents...more videos later. It took me days to get the one video on here. I'm not sure why. We took mainly videos on Christmas and didn't take many still pictures.