Thanksgiving in London

We went to London Saturday morning via the Euro Star (high speed train).  It is less then 2 hrs on the train; total time door to door, is about 4 hours or so.

My parents were already in London.  Mom arrived at the beginning of the month to help prepare for baby India's arrival.  Dad arrived a week before we did.

We were all so excited to meet baby India.  She was only 8 days old when we got to meet her!

Grace was pretty gentle with her, as a seasoned big sister.

Audrey just wanted to pull her socks off.

India casting a magic spell on Audrey!

 

Aunt Katie and Uncle Terry hosted the perfect Thanksgiving dinner for all of us!  Thank you!

And on our last morning, we tried to get a picture of all the Alley Caspermeyer Rawlings Ladies.  Uh, yah.... good luck with that!

Grandkids!

New Thanksgiving Traditions

Thanks (once again) to our slingbox/tivo host family, we were able to watch the parade.  It started at 4pm our time, and ended at 7pm.  So when Daddy got home from work (not a holiday in Belgium!), we set up to have a picnic to watch the end of the parade.

Our picnic was Sloppy Joes and french fries!  Yum!

Be careful what you wish for....

We've never had a full fledged crawler before.....  so I'm having fun with Audrey at the moment.....but I know I need to be careful about what I wish for! ;)

She is not crawling by any means, but when I go to put her down on her belly, she is kind of in position.  So I leave her that way to see what happens.  Yesterday, she watched the full intro to Super Why like that (you can hear Grace in the background 'announcing herself' to the Super Why team), did a slight crawl like movement, and then gracefully lowered herself down.

Usually, however, she face plants and it's a big mess of tears.  Another reason to hate these wood floors!!  Luckily, it was graceful this time, and I caught some smiles......

G-R-A-C-E

Stay Puff Marshmallow Girls

Chilly today, so had to break out the winter coats for our trip to the pirate ship.

Raking Leaves

Daddy and his Mini Me raking leaves

Playgrounds

Grace is finally digging sliding....  and the weather has been pretty decent this past week, so we've been doing our best to be outside as much as possible!

Audrey's 6 Month Stats

Well, we're just back from the doctor, and I'm not happy.  :(

Weight:  6.320 kg = 13.93 lbs. - 25th percentile
Height: 65 cm = 25.6 inches - 50th percentile
Head: 43 cm = 50-75th percentile

Audrey only gained 300 grams or a little more then half a pound.  She stayed on the same growth curve, but did not get back to where she was..... so I guess it's ok that she didn't decrease any further.....

So she wants me to add potatoes to the vegetables.  She had advised to do that all along.  I guess that's what they do here.  And I tried it one time, and it was just a gummy mess.    I'll try again.  And the servings must be 200grams.  We'll have to buy a scale to figure out how much that is.  But at the moment, I am feeding her two large ice cubes of whatever the vegetable is.  I thought that was enough, especially because Audrey nurses 5 times a day.  Which I thought was actually about normal.  Here, babies nurse or have a bottle 2-3x a day and then the other two feedings are REPLACED by food.  We never did that with Grace.  It was a totally separate thing.  Not how they do it in Belgium, apparently. 

Ugh.  Her height was down a little too, but not concerning.....  and she's not making any ma, ba, da, ga sounds....guttural sounds.  If by 8 months she isn't doing that, she'll want us to go for a hearing test.

Sigh.  Just not happy about all this.

Audrey is 6 Months Old!

Wow!  Can't quite believe it......  and doesn't she look happy about it, too?

 

I got a lot of smiles in a relatively short time frame when taking pictures this morning.  The lighting wasn't the best, but I didn't really want to tempt fate and fix the lighting and then have a grump face.

Because, although she is now 6 months old, her mood can flip on a dime.  She is not nicknamed 'Extreme Baby' for nothing.

So 6 things....

1.  Food.  Audrey can count 6 food items that she is eating now.  Carrots, squash, green beans, peas, avocado, and cereal.  Although, we've recently cut out cereal due to some constipation issues that caused her to spit up out her nose.  How's that for a visual?  :)  She eats twice a day.  In the morning, about 9am, and in the evening about 6pm. Going to start fruit this week - tomorrow, if I can cook up some pears today.

2.  Sitting pretty well.  Doesn't sit herself up by herself, but can stay sitting for a while. 

3.  Gives kisses.   To me.  I tried to get her to do it with Matt, and she just sucked his face.  :)

4.  Sleeping ok.  The time change hasn't helped....  I hear her making noise at random times in the night.  Sometimes it's 2am, sometimes 5am.  But she isn't really fussing, so I don't bother going to check on her.  She's also starting to get a two nap a day schedule down.  The first right after she eats at 9am, and then the second about noon.  And she usually goes down for 1 1/2 hours for the second nap.  And I put her down awake.  She is sleeping with a lovey and her thumb inserted.

5.  Not making any distinct babbling sounds.  She sounds more like Mrs. Pteranodon from Dinosaur Train.  Haha.  If you don't know what that is, check here:  http://www.pbs.org/teachers/dinosaurtrain/characters/.  It basically sounds like squawking.

6.  Drooling.  A lot.  But I don't really feel any teeth.

Heading to the doctor tomorrow morning, so I should have some stats then.  Really hoping we're back up in the weight department.  The white onsie in the pics is 9 months size, and big.....I don't have any 6 month size with long sleeves.  But anyway, she looks/feels like she has packed on some pounds, so we shall see!

The WWII Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial

What a powerful place to visit.

I don't think I can adequately put into words how amazing this place is.  When you arrive, you go into a small museum that depicts parts of the war with a lot of personal stories of the men and women that gave their lives.

After the museum, you walk along a beautiful path that hugs the edge of the bluff overlooking the beach below.

And then you come around a corner, and you see the crosses and Stars of David, and you just catch your breath.

 

There are 9.387 American men and women buried here.  After the war, the families of the soldiers could decide whether their loved ones should remain with their comrades or be brought home.  61% opted for them to come home.  There are more officers then enlisted men; the families of the officers knew they would want to be buried alongside the men with whom they fought.

Memorial

What a beautiful and amazing place.  A definite must!

D-Day Beaches

We spent Monday looking at D-Day sites.

Driving into Arromanches, France.  You can see the Port Winston Artificial Harbor in the distance.

The small town of Arromanches was ground zero for D-Day. 

On the cliffs above the town, you have a good vantage point of the area.  To the left, you have Omaha and Utah beaches (the American sector).

To the right, and more level terrain, the British and Canadian sectors.

More of the harbor....

We had to keep our visit pretty G rated, as in Grace rated.  Some of the museums warn of a graphic nature, so we skipped a lot of that and did most of the outdoor sites.  Thankfully the weather cooperated.

The next site we went to was the Longues-sur-Mer Gun battery.  Four German casemates, built to protect against seaborne attacks, have the only original coastal artillery guns remaining in place in the region.

From there, we went for a drive along Omaha beach.  Kind of reminds us of driving along in Fernandina (fletcher ave)....

And from here, we went to the American Cemetery.....I'll do a new post for that......

Sippy Cup

We take a break from our Normandy posting to bring you this video of sippy cup drinking......

I think she got it on the first try!  I don't think Grace caught on that quickly......

And now we'll resume our Normandy posts.  I have a couple more to do still!!

Apple Ball and Cows

Villers-Bocage, France

Our B&B/Farm for the next few days of our trip was actually in a tiny little hamlet near Villers-Bocage.

What's a hamlet, you ask?  Well.... something smaller then a village.  And I would say that there was probably 4 or 5 other homes near the farm where we stayed, just outside the village of Villers-Bocage.

The farm has been in the owners family for over 400 years.  We're guessing the wife got bored of farm life and wanted to make it into a B&B.

Here is a link to the site:  http://www.bandbnormandie.com/  and you can see for yourself how beautiful it is.

This is the cottage where we stayed.

There was a photo album that showed the total remodel.  Pretty impressive.

We stayed in the red room; it had a Queen bed and two twins.  When we put the girls down for the night, we were able to go downstairs and use the living/dining area.   There was one other lady from Australia staying in the cottage one of the nights we were there, but we didn't really see her much - she had just traveled 35+ hours and went to bed early.

This was the view from one of our windows.

 And this was Grace's favorite past time.... picking up apples that had fallen off the apple trees and playing Apple Ball.

We loved this place.  Every morning the table was set for breakfast, with cheeses, breads, pastries, coffee, hot chocolate, fresh, local honey, jams..... and then the owner came and made us omelets, too!  And she encouraged us to take whatever leftovers we wanted from the massive breakfast spread for picnic lunch, too.  And we did!

Audrey enjoyed breakfast, too.

Old, french high chairs do not come with wiggle bottom restraints, so we improvised, and Matt took his belt off and tied it around her waist.  Did the trick! ;)

The last morning we were there we found a book showing Villers-Bocage before and during the war.  We had remarked several times driving through the village that the building were all so new...relatively speaking, like 1950s new.   And this book showed why (not that we didn't know).....  the town was almost completely destroyed in the war.    I wish I could find some pictures from the book online showing what it looked like in 1930.  There are a lot of images of what it looked like during the war....  but seeing the before pictures had quite the impact.

But it's a beautiful place now, too.

Honfleur, France

Ok, so I might retire to Honfleur, France.  I believe we said...it's like Highlands, North Carolina with water and less hills.

So picturesque and beautiful.  I don't think my pictures can really do it justice.  So you'll just have to plan a visit! :)  I'll be your guide.

 

The building in the middle in the picture below is the Sainte Catherine Church. 

You can't really tell from this picture, but the ceiling looks like the hull of a boat upside down.  They built one, and found that it was too skinny, so they built another and placed it next to the other.

The bell tower was too heavy, so they had to build it across the street.

We took a walk along the jetty to where the Sienne River meets the English Channel Sunday morning.  It was kind of overcast, but not overly cool out.  And the rain held off.  The walk was lined with a beautiful park, with a really nice playground where Grace got to play for awhile, and where she FINALLY decided she likes to slide.

 

We drove to the top of the hill in the above picture for this view....

This is the Normandy Bridge.  It is the longest cable-stayed bridge in the Western world.  We drove across is later in our trip, and it was quite impressive.

 This was our hotel.  Cute, huh?

 Let me be clear, this is not a 5 star hotel, by any means.  And when you start traveling in Europe, you start to realize that expectations set by American hotel room standards need to be thrown out the window.  But this place was BEYOND perfect for us.  I wish I had a better picture of our room, but this will have to suffice, with some imagination.  (This was taken Sunday morning, as Grace watched French cartoons brushing her teeth, and Audrey was taking her morning nap.)

When you walked in, there was a Queen (or was it a full!?) bed, and a small bathroom.  At first, our breath caught in our throat, thinking....oh no, what are we going to do!  We can not all fit in here!!  And then we spied a door, and a staircase leading up to ANOTHER room, with two twin beds, decorated in bright colors, with Dora blankets and loads of children's books.  And then we spied ANOTHER staircase, and up another flight of stairs was an identical room with two twin beds!  We could have easily slept 6-8 people in this room. Perfect!  Both girls stayed on the floor directly above us, and did great - we brought the PNP for Miss Audrey - we don't usually let her sleep in big beds...

From Honfleur, we drove to Villers-Bocage.......