Dylan's "Cars" Obsession

Dylan is completely obsessed with the Disney/Pixar movie Cars these days.  When Bryan went back to the States in September he returned with the Cars DVD, which we watch in 30-45 minute installments with Dylan, usually during dinner time so Dylan doesn't interrupt us while we try to enjoy our meal.  The unintended outcome is that Dylan is bonkers about this movie and all its characters.

Since Dylan speaks 1/3 English, 1/3 German and 1/3 unintelligible-Dylan-speak, he references all things Cars as "Auto Movie."  I'm pretty sure if you said to him "Dylan, do you want to watch Cars?" he'd have no idea what you were talking about, but if you said "Want to watch Auto Movie?" he'd go completely bananas.  He also only refers to Lightning McQueen (the red one) as "Daddy Auto" and Sally (the blue one) as "Mommy Auto" which is just pretty darn adorable. The only character he gets right is "Mater" the tow truck.

Do you see the theme here?

He also does a really funny thing with his toy tractors after seeing the movie.  If you haven't seen Cars, the characters go tractor tipping (like cow tipping), which Dylan thinks is absolutely hilarious.  He now does this with all of his tractors:

He even pretends his Tonka Tow Truck is "Mater" from the movie.  

This is the scene from Cars or 'Auto Movie' that he is constantly trying to emulate.

St. Martin's Day Lantern Parade

Last Friday, November 11, was St. Martin's Day (Martinstag) in Germany.  This was a completely new holiday for us to celebrate and we had no idea who St. Martin was and why we should celebrate him.  In fact, now that the holiday is over, our education about St. Martin and why the German Kindergarteners love to celebrate him is still a little fuzzy, but I'll give it my best shot at explaining.

St. Martin was a Roman soldier who was baptized as an adult and later became a monk and eventually the Bishop of Tours (whatever that means).  His is famous primarily for two things.  1) Cutting his cloak in half and giving it to a street beggar to save him from freezing to death and 2) not wanting to be a bishop so badly that he hid in a barn, but a bunch of geese made too much noise and he was discovered.  This is why Germans traditionally eat geese on St. Martin's Day, I guess, to eternally punish them for outing St. Martin's hiding spot.

I'm still not really sure why children make paper lanterns and go on a little around-the-block parade in the evening - maybe it's to symbolize the hunt for St. Martin while he was hiding in the goose barn?  Not sure. Martinstag is also the official beginning of Karneval season, so perhaps the children's parade is a precursor to the many Karneval parades in the future.  Maybe a German reader can comment on this post and clarify the reason for the parade and the lanterns.

Anyway, I was determined to take part in a Martinstag parade with Dylan, primarily so I could blog about it since I promised our readers for more frequent updates.  I didn't start out very well, though, because I completely blew the assignment to help Dylan make a lantern for his play group.  The day all the kids were supposed to finger paint their lanterns (two paper bowls that will be stapled together to make an orb) Dylan flat out refused to participate.  I guess art projects just aren't his thing.  So the teacher sent me home with the bowls and told me to get Dylan to decorate them somehow and bring them back to the next class.  Since I'm terrible at understanding German, I comprehended the "Get Dylan to decorate these" instructions, but missed the "and bring them back to the next class" part.  So when we got home, I knew the only thing Dylan was going to do with these paper bowls is wear them on his head and pretend they're hats, so I threw them away.  At the next play group, another mom asked me if Dylan's lantern was ready and I just looked at her blankly as she held up her son's two decorated bowls and then it dawned on me that I had thrown away Dylan's first-ever homework assignment.  They managed to find some surplus supplies and make a new lantern for Dylan, which he had completely destroyed along with the battery powered lantern light that I had bought him by 6pm that same night - 3 days prior to the actual Martinstag.

I still wanted to see what this parade was all about, so our local tourism office told me when the Kindergartens were having their parades, so one evening last week Dylan, Oscar and I just showed up to a random school's Martinstag parade and pretended like we were supposed to be there.  I'm pretty sure the other parents were whispering to each other:

"Who's that lady over there?  Why doesn't her kid have an elaborately decorated lantern like ours?  Is her son in your kid's class? No?  Mine either. That's really creepy to show up at a nighttime children's parade at a school where your kid doesn't even attend.  Let's move over here and get away from her."

The parade wasn't all that exciting.  There was a high school kid dressed in a red cape wearing a silver helmet who was supposed to be St. Martin, and there was a brass band that played music while all the kids and parents sang songs about lanterns. We then took a very cold walk around the neighborhood and when we got back to the school all the kids and parents went inside for refreshments.   I was tempted to crash the refreshment party too, but since I had Oscar with me I thought it would be better to just go home.  Here are some photos:

Here is Dylan eating pretzels in his stroller watching all the kids with their lanterns.

Everyone getting ready for the parade.

St. Martin in the red cape.

Parade of lanterns.

Back from Hiatus

Well, this is embarrassing.  It's been almost a month since anything new has been posted here, and definitely a month since I've contributed.  I wish that I could say the absence of blogging has to do with all of the awesome things we've been doing, but alas, that is not true.  Truthfully, the reason we haven't been posting much is that we just haven't really done much - but that's going to change!  We have a lot of things lined up from now through the end of the year, so stay tuned.

But until those things happen, here's a lame recap of what we've been up to:

Bryan
Bryan is never sure what day it is - he is just working all the time.  He has school/work all day and basketball every night.  Starting yesterday, Bryan will go about 25 days without any days off.  Don't expect to hear a lot from Bryan.

Dana
I got a new Kindle for my birthday and haven't been doing much of anything now that I have an endless supply of books at my disposal.  This is probably the primary reason why I haven't been blogging.  That, and we were kind of broke in October and didn't have any money to do anything worth blogging about.  We saved money by becoming "Weekday Vegetarians" and we only ate meat on the weekends.  Bryan was so busy with work, he didn't even notice that he was a vegetarian.

Dylan
Dylan keeps us occupied with his 2-year-old nonsense.  He's ridiculously fussy about his clothes and somedays just flat out refuses to wear pants altogether.  I bought him a bunch of new clothes recently because he grew out of all his old ones, but he will only wear about 25% of them.  I can usually find a shirt that he is willing to put on, but pants are a big challenge and it's nearly impossible to hold him down and force pants on him.  He's a strong little kid.

His favorite thing right now is anything that has to do with Disney's Cars movie, which he refuses to call "Cars" and instead calls "Auto Movie."  He goes around the house all day pretending to be a race car and saying "Ka-Chow!" over and over again, like Lightning McQueen does in the movie.

We're also working on potty training Dylan, which so far is going really well as long as Dylan doesn't have pants on.  If he runs around here completely naked on his bottom half, he will go in the "Big Boy Potty" every time and not have any accidents.  So his refusal to wear pants most days is actually working in our favor, unless there is somewhere that we really need to go.  In that case, his screams from being force-dressed are really brutal and our neighbors probably think we're torturing him.    

Oscar
Oh yeah, we still have a dog.  I almost forgot.  We call him "Oscar Afterthought" for a reason - he doesn't get much of our attention these days, but all in all Oscar is good.

My little man in his all-time favorite shirt.  Tie-dye with tractors on it - classic! 

Dylan was learning how to use a baseball glove.  We've taken the baseball away from him, though, after he ran into a room where I was using the computer and flung it at me, nearly smashing the computer screen.  

This might be the first picture we've taken of Oscar since Dylan was born 2 years ago.

Running around the castle moat...

Dylan was very proud of himself to ride on the back of a Lion while wearing his Lion's sweatshirt.

I also took a photo of Dylan in the same spot as one from last year to see a good comparison of how much he's grown ... take a look:

Last year, October 2010

This year, October 2011

Foltice Fehlt (Missing)

Our local newspaper here in Borken hit the nail on the head with the headline last week, ‘Foltice Fehlt’ (Foltice missing.)  That has been the story of my life over the last few weeks. 

It all started with the news that my Grandpa Foltice passed away.  After hearing the news on a Friday, I became really homesick for the entire weekend.  It was the first time truly becoming homesick and, after spending a full year in Germany without travelling back to America, it finally hit…hard. 

That Monday afternoon, I received permission from my boss to go to Michigan and booked a flight to Detroit that had me leaving the next afternoon.  Unfortunately, the flight left so early in the morning out of Düsseldorf that I had to spend the night in Düsseldorf the night before (trains don’t go out that early in the morning.)   Monday evening, after running home and packing, I was on a train to Düsseldorf.

Fast forward to Tuesday night, after 23 hours of travel, I found myself in Byron Center, Michigan, trying to remember which townhome is my brother’s girlfriend’s house is.  I made 3 guesses, all of them wrong, to which house was hers.  At 11pm, I am sure I was an instant hit with the neighbors.  My brother finally heard my voice through an open window and let me in.

Most of my week was spent either with family or doing work at various Biggby Coffee shops around town.  I was still able to get a lot of work done on their free WiFi Internet while drinking a lot of their strong coffee.  Between the jet lag, busy schedule, and sleep deprivation, the rest of the week was kind of a blur. 

Sunday afternoon, I was back on a plane to Düsseldorf.  I landed in Germany at 8am on Monday morning after the ‘red eye’ flight from Detroit.  I took the train directly to Münster and went straight to work.  I made it back to Borken late in the afternoon on Monday and somehow got to basketball practice on time at 8pm. 

I tried to see Dana and Dylan as much as possible over the next 2 days, because on Thursday, I was back on a plane to Münich (Regensburg) for the German Finance Conference. 

Regensburg

More Regensburg

Regensburg was beautiful (about 1 hour south of Münich) and the conference was very interesting.  By the end of the conference, I noticed that all of the young (and female) student assistants would blush and smile when I would walk past them.  I thought, for a moment, maybe by comparison to other finance academics, that they thought I was cute. 

I was quickly reminded that, on Friday night, as we were heading into a meeting, I said in German to one of the assistants holding a sign close to the entrance, ‘I am getting warm.’  As in, her sign was helping me get warmer to the ultimate hiding place.  ‘Red Hot!’ ‘Red Hot!’ ‘You’re on fire!’

What I didn’t know was that ‘I am getting warm’ to a German is a highly sexual phrase that I would rather not elaborate too much on it.  Apparently, that comment was passed on and that’s why they would blush/laugh at me. 

I missed the first basketball game of the season on Saturday night.  Both teams (the team that I play for and the team that I coach) ended up winning, though the team I play for had to forfeit the game due to a 'clerical' error.  Evidently, one of our players wasn't registered with the league, so we had to forfeit our win. 

Sunday morning, we left Regensburg and tried to take the train back to Münich.  The train was so full of Oktoberfest revelers (it was the last day of Oktoberfest) that we couldn’t even step onto the train and were forced to share a taxi (there were 8 of us) to get to Münich.   Although it was more expensive to take the taxi, about 25 Euros each, it was a much more comfortable ride compared to the packed train of already drunk people. 


We made it to Münich in time for our Oktoberfest tent reservation.  One of my colleagues reserved a table for us from 11am to 3pm in one of the tents,  (die Armbrustschützenzelt) or ‘crossbow shooting’ tent, to be exact.  4 hours was more than enough to capture the Oktoberfest mood and I was happy that we weren’t there for any longer.  We made it back to the train station just in time to pick up our luggage and get on the direct train to Münster within one minute of its departure. 

Heading into the 'Cross-Bow Tent'

Inside

For some reason, we thought it would be a good idea to ride the really high swings.   At least I was able to take a good  picture. 

Heading out on the way to the train station

Overall, I was pleased that Oktoberfest was not totally a tourist trap, overrun with drunk American tourists.  Although it wasn’t nearly as fun as Karnival in Cologne, it was still a good experience to do one time (for four hours).

Sunday night at 11:55pm, we arrived in Münster.  Monday was ‘German Unification Day’ so the first bus that ran from Münster to Borken wasn’t until 10 am.    Finally, around noon, I made it home to Borken to see Dana and Dylan.  I think Dana was just as exhausted as me after the last two weeks of taking care of Dylan without a break.

Since then, we’ve gotten back into somewhat of a routine (that involves me in some capacity) and life is back to normal…(well, as normal as it possibly could be, all things considered.) 

German Children's Books Are Weird

What's going on with the cow and the goat?

I got this book for Dylan at the library so he can learn both the English and German names for animals.  We were going through the farm animals and Dylan said "P-U moo-moo-cow!" I said to him "Yes, Dylan.  Moo-moo-cows can be stinky." And he said "No Mommy, P-U moo-moo-cow!" and he pointed to the cow's rear end where it is clearly peeing.  We had the same conversation about the goat.  The German children's books certainly don't gloss over the details about bodily functions, especially with farm animals.