Hurricane Tankersley

I wish I made more time to write, I really do.  Because there is alway something really wierd going on.  Rather than regale you with how much poop I had to clean up today because my daughter decided that pooping is rather NOT for potties, I’ll show you what is sitting in front of my house.

I came home the other day and I couldn’t get to my house because my street was blocked off and a carousel was being built in, well, basically my front yard.  Today food booths are popping up, and I can hear the oompa loompa music being tested.  There is a big kid’s festival tomorrow.  I guess these are the advantages, or downfalls of living directly in the middle of town.  Advantages being, well, it’s kinda fun to have a carnival in your front yard.  Disadvantages are I HAVE to now take my kids and then they’ll get a taste of 2 Euro a pop carnival rides and beg to go on said rides all day.  All day, the rides will torment them, and me.  Ahhhh, maybe I’m being pessimistic.  It’ll probably be awesome.

We’ve lived in our house in Otterberg for a while now, and we have a small garden area that frankly has looked pitiful since we moved here.  It has needed some TLC that brown-thumb here probably won’t be able to provide.  It’s so sad, I really love beautiful things and beautiful gardens, but I don’t seem to have the skills associated with having said things.

Imagine my surprise when my garden magically appeared this month.

I have no idea where they came from, but thank you!

We went to Disneyland Paris this weekend.

I had the great idea to take a trip that was fun for the kids before Randy leaves for a couple of months.  Randy also booked our trip by telling Disney we were French.  Um, can you say 40% cheaper?

We stayed at the “New York Hotel”.  It was walking distance from the parks which was awesome.  We were able to enjoy a couple of decent meals this way… of peanut butter avec jelly a la Mommy.   The view from our room was nice.  It was also right on top of the ice skating rink.  Yes, I said ice skating rink.  That sounds cool, right?  No!  That’s weird in April.

So, we did the Disney thing.  We fought the crowds and we waited.

and waited

and waited

We also had a ton of fun.

at least Randy and I had fun?

Just joking.  Everyone had a great time even if they dislike taking pictures.  Lula LOVES rides.

I was hesitant going in.  In graduate school, or at least in my graduate school, we really didn’t have textbooks, but rather large volumes of “case studies”.  Case studies are involved write ups of real life companies in real life scenarios.  They’ll give you more information than you could possibly use and as a student, you decipher what went wrong, or went went right, or where to go in the future.  There are a host of places you could go with a case study and in a multitude of disciplines.  Well, Eurodisney was such a disastrous example of “what NOT to do” in business that I am quite positive I have read every case study ever written on it.  Seriously.  So, it was fun to see if the problems had been fixed first hand.  I already knew the name had changed to Disneyland Paris!

If you are now waiting for my opinion… well, it ISN’T Disney World, that’s for sure.  I mean, how could it be?  It’s in FRANCE!  Have you been to France?!  I was pleased to see Disneyland Paris wasn’t TOO clean.  There were more than acceptable numbers of smokers everywhere and plenty of cigarette butts on the ground.  We even were greeted with room service plates and cups outside of our room and they stayed for TWO days.  The staff were acceptably disgruntled, but not full-out rude.  I mean, Disney World is really a weird place when it comes to perfection and cleanliness and HAPPY CAST MEMBERS!!!!  Even by American standards.  These things have no place 20 minutes from Paris.  Really.  We really loved the shows at Walt Disney Studios, but it was just painful to watch these French people try to put on the wildly enthusiastic song and dance routine.  Randy and I kept on catching each others’ eyes as we had to look away.

In the end, here’s what got me.  The food.  The food was so incredibly bad.  Expensive I can handle, but bad food in France is just unacceptable.  It was all really, really, really bad.

We were so excited they had special menus for those with allergies.  Here is what they brought my poor five-year-old to eat for dinner:

The best part was it all came out with the plastic still on top.  All you had to do was peel and enjoy!  I felt terrible for Jack.  What kind of parents feed this to their kids at Disney?!  I think it is pureed carrots, pureed meat, pureed apples and something else we weren’t sure about?

Thank goodness I brought peanut butter and jelly and fruit, but the provisions didn’t last in this hostile environment.  This morning we had one more day in the parks.  Randy and I didn’t even need to discuss it.  We just packed up and left for greener pastures without lines.  We felt we had really done all we came to do.  We decided en route to explore around the Champagne region.  We picked an exit and…..

We didn’t know what we would find open on a Sunday, but we drifted onto the “Champagne Road” and it was really beautiful.  We stopped in a tiny village and were looking around when I see Randy talking to some lady at her door.  Then he’s gone.  After a while I look in the doorway I saw him at and he’s sitting in this lady’s living room drinking Champagne.  He motions me in and the lady pours me a glass and there is another couple inside with their baby.  They are from Paris.  The champagne is delicious, but the kids are getting rowdy and Randy goes outside with the kids so they don’t destroy the place.  In the meantime, I’m alone in this house now and I DON’T SPEAK FRENCH by the way.  I can say the following:  bibliothèque, discothèque, pamplemousse, croissant, assiette de frites, jus d’orange, poulet rôti, un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq, Oui, Merci, and Merci beaucoup!  Oh, and Champagne.

These words don’t get you so far in conversation.

I pretended to be really in love with the baby while I waited for Randy to come back and rescue me.  Randy came back and asked where a bank machine was (we had no money… went ahead and announced THAT to the lady pouring me a second glass of Champagne, heh heh).  We found out there was no money machine in town, we’d have to go to the next village.  Randy said he’d be back shortly.  OH NO!!!! I’ll go WITH you!  I didn’t even know why I was sitting in some lady’s living room drinking champagne yet!  So, we leave and I find out he had just peeked in because there was a sticker on her door that said seller of Champagnes somehow and she invited him in and asked if he’d like to try some.  He said, sure!

So, we set off in search of money and a decent lunch.  We found both.  And we went back to that lady’s house after lunch and bought some of her Champagne.  She was doing laundry and her husband was watching the game.  It was really really weird and really really funny.  PRETTY sure Smej-Vely Champagne is only found in a few places, including our wine cellar, but it’s delicious!

You know that feeling you get when your personal Earth shifts?  Maybe you were just broken up with or found out about an infidelity or someone close to you dies.  You look around and people are still driving their cars and going to work and laughing and basically going about their lives.  The world looks really weird from broken eyes.  The scene doesn’t line up with your reality.

We knew Ed, Randy’s Stepfather, wasn’t doing well.  In the late Fall, he was diagnosed with Pulmonary Fibrosis after a year of constant coughing and very quickly went downhill.  We got a call last month that Ed was in the hospital.  He was struggling to breathe and there was nothing the Doctors could do except breathe for him.  He made the informed decision to go on a ventilator for five days.  Enough time for us all to come home.

We bought tickets around midnight and left for Texas at 4:30 am the next morning.  We spent the next few days in the hospital.  We sat in Ed’s room and we talked to him though he couldn’t answer back with words, and we visited with each other.  And when I say “we” I mean to say there were enough family and friends in and out that we had to actually organize the chaos.

The staff at Brooks Army Medical Center never said a word about how many people we had in their ICU and they were kind and loving and they prayed with us, and every one of our nurses from that week cried when he died and so did Ed’s Doctor when he came in to confirm that Ed had indeed passed.  Most of the staff at the hospital never knew Ed when he could speak.  They just listened to us all week and they saw the constant stream of visitors and they felt the love, and they couldn’t help but love him (and us) too.

That’s the funny thing that I’ve been contemplating these past few weeks.  It didn’t happen the way I thought it might.

I was so weepy when I knew Ed would not be with us forever, when he got his diagnosis and went into the hospital for the first time.  But when we got to San Antonio, when it was time to be sad, it felt different (to me).  I know there are a lot of reasons why this happened, mainly there were probably a thousand prayers of comfort upon his family.  Ed knew where he was going, he was happy to be rid of his “earth suit”, and I think that regardless of any past problems, everyone knew he loved them.

One day Bev, Randy’s Mom, stopped what she was doing and looked at me with horror, like she had forgotten her purse in a restaurant.  ”You know how much Ed loves you, don’t you???”.  Of course I did.  And I didn’t assume it.  He told me.  Never held back a compliment, and when he told you, you knew he meant it.

Here’s what’s awesome.  Ed wasn’t perfect.  He just wasn’t.  He was as imperfect as any of us.  But he loved a lot of people wholeheartedly, and in return he was dearly loved back.  There were hundreds and hundreds of people at the funeral.

The world did actually stop that week.  At least through my own eyes.  And cried along with us.

And I’ve been pondering that question.  Thinking, who do I matter to?  Who loves me?  What have I done?  Will I be remembered?  Because times like these make you wonder.

And now I’m really thinking, who do I love?  Who do I serve?  I wonder to myself if I can freely give love like that, and why I don’t?  Because I really like to receive it.

I think of Ed and of all of the people I know who will probably fill a stadium at their death.  What do they have in common?  They serve others, and they love others unabashedly.  Others’ accomplishments and happiness bring them only joy, never jealously, and others’ sorrows are their own.

I’m working on living that kind of life.

I will miss your tacos, your backup turkeys, your 3-meat-course dinners, your bible and large stack of devotionals never beyond arm’s reach, your smile that showed joy in your heart, your constant praise of my Mothering skills, and your love of our children.  Jack’s wondering if you are watching some really awesome TV shows in Heaven?

My friend Stacey shared this blog post with me.  I might tape it up in every room of my house.

Yesterday was rough.  I was supposed to put on real clothes and wake up before 8am in order to get my son back to school (before 8am).

Well, no one woke up until 8am when Jack came in and hopped on my bed.  I noticed it was light outside.  In Germany that’s a bad sign since it doesn’t get light until around 8am.  You guessed it, we were off to a bad start.

Normally I wouldn’t have panicked but Mondays are forest days (they leave around 8:30 am and come back around 1 pm), so Jack would have to be on time and you have to pack a backpack and snack for forest days.  Oh Lord, and I’d have to find his cold weather bibs and his waterproof mittens and a clean hat… had I even finished our ski trip laundry?  NO!

So, thank the good Lord, we had bananas and I had the good mind to make some GF cranberry strawberry muffins the night before.  I found a hat with questionable origins, but it fit him, threw his bibs and mittens in the car and I turn the car on to heat up.  It’s 11 degrees.  When my car is running I cannot make myself shut the driver’s side door.  I’m afraid of the car locking itself or the kids locking themselves in.  So, the car door is open and I’m buckling the kids in, then I run back across the street to lock the front door.  I jump in the car and shut the car door.  No I don’t.  My car door won’t shut.  My brand new car door won’t freakin’ shut!  I see the notch that catches the door frame and try to pry it in a different direction.  Nothing.

Now, here’s where I tell you that I’m perfectly aware of the laws in Germany.  You aren’t supposed to let your car run idle.  Good Germans turn their cars off at stop lights.  I think you’re supposed to.  I’m not a good German, but I don’t usually let my car sit running outside of my home.  Did I mention it was 11 degrees?  Rather than let my children get frostbite, I yell at my car while it’s running, I stick a pen in the door, I go inside and get a screwdriver, I look through my owner’s manuals.  Nothing.  Finally, I give up and am looking up the number for ADAC (German AAA) and have given up all hope of getting Jack to school.

Then I hear a tapping at the window.  It’s my grouchy old neighbor.  The last time I saw him he was wagging his finger at me and threatening to call the police and I would get a whopping TEN euro ticket for parking there blah blah blah!  Sometimes when you are playing single parent with sick kids, you take your chances on that 10 euro ticket, mister.  So, he goes off on me for about five minutes in Germglish about how it’s OK to run your car for five minutes when it’s cold, but not thirty and the smoke from my car was entering the windows of all nearby homes, and he wouldn’t be calling the cops on me this time (I also learned he is a retired police officer which would explain his penchant for the law and the calling of the law).  Then he pulls out this spray bottle that says -70 (I couldn’t read the rest) and sprays it in my door latch thingy and shuts my door.

Really.

Number one, my door was FROZEN after being left open for a minute.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!  I’m from the South, this sort of thing blows my mind.

Number two, was this guy being nice in a German sort of way?

I rolled down my window and thanked him and asked what was in that bottle.  I own my own bottle now, thank you.

I would like to add the disclaimer that these self-described “typically German” things seem to only happen to me.  I could very well just be a poor citizen.

Regardless, I rushed off to the Waldorf School and I’m one of the first people there.  It’s a min-man day (they don’t follow the usual schedules on theses days).  Everyone else seemed to know this would happen and there was no forest trip that day.

Crisis averted.

Everyday is an adventure when you can’t read or speak German but LIVE in Germany.

I really loved this post from my friend, Lori.

We’ve had such an exciting December…. Randy came home, we took a trip to Sweden, we went skiing in the French Alps, we have  been blessed beyond what we knew we could ask for.

AND, I will be posting regarding said activities.  All in good time!  Can’t have the world’s longest blog post here.

How is it then, that I have much more interesting things to say when life is mundane?

Ah!  Regardless, when Randy came home from Africa, we headed straight for a Christmas Market in Rudesheim (probably one of my very favorite places in Germany by the way).  Christmas markets are Randy’s favorite thing about Germany so it was terrible he had been missing out.

Jack would like for everyone within earshot to know that he really really really doesn’t care for chestnuts, by the way.  Regardless, the carts are cute.

Having a little hot chocolate and gluhwein (hot mulled wine).  Yum!

Our little town of Otterberg had a Christmas market as well which was pretty exciting.  The main attraction was the horse and carriage ride for the kids.  Well, it was a fun IDEA at least.  It seems as if the Americans and Brits are the only people on the entire face of the planet who know what a LINE is.  I’m just not pushy enough to live in Europe.  After three failed attempts to get Jack on the carriage (and being first in “line” every time), someone just shoved him on for me and then looked at me funny when I was like, “what about me??!”  I have a kid who can walk, why would he need parental supervision??!  So, I just waved goodbye.

This is something I’m still getting used to.  At Jack’s school it’s totally not unusual to see two-year-olds walking by themselves on the street.  There are kids younger than Jack riding their bikes all over town by themselves.  This fact isn’t lost on my son, by the way.  He brings it up all the time.  I mean, God forbid you don’t put socks on your child with their shoes (I’ve been publicly ridiculed for this oh so many times), but let them play in the streets without parental supervision?  Yes, please!

I digress.

I present to you, Otterberg at Christmas:

We were driving the other day and the Christmas “classic” by Band Aid, “Feed the World” came on for the second time that day and I was singing along and I guess Jack started listening to the song. “Mom! (because he is usually yelling) Mom!! Why are they singing about feeding the world?!”

Me: “Well I guess the people singing want us to think about people who don’t have enough to eat all over the world”

Jack: “There’s a lot of people all over the world. Only God can feed all of the people in the world”.

Me: “Yeah, I guess you are right Jack”.

He then went on a little bit more about what a dumb song that was, then about the languages Santa Claus speaks (obviously that would be English, German, Spanish, and Chinese) and how in the world were all of the children of the world going to get presents then? And how would he know their names?

But, I was still pondering his reaction to a song I always liked. Pretty deep stuff.

I’m pretty sure this is the hardest anyone has ever jammed to Silver Scooter.

We have our itunes playing on the TV if you are wondering what she’s looking at!