Ready to celebrate by Thursday

Getting back into the swing of things this past week has challenging. Even though I completed my second semester of German class, I still found myself not having enough time to get things accomplished. It did not help that in addition to doing the normal laundry, Adeline contracted more lice from school on Monday when she returned from our vacation so I had to conquer them and our household again, and then I had to throughly scrub our fruits and vegetables due to the E.Coli outbreak.

Emmie's dance class performed some of the routines they have been learning on Monday afternoon. Uschi joined us for the entertainment of a firetruck dance and few other songs. We celebrated afterwards at the cafe. 

Uschi also collected numerous little WWF animal packets from the local grocery store for the girls. They are like trading cards, but are stickers. The teachers at school are into filling up the matching sticker books with them as they trade them with the students during the breaks. Adeline was so excited to receive these from her as she has been just watching the kids these past few days trade them. Emmie likes categorizing the animals. 

Tuesday morning, Adeline's class went strawberry picking. The children were taught field etiquette when picking strawberries and each child picked their own basket. The teacher drove there, so she could drive the strawberries back to school as I do not think the strawberries would have survived the walk back with the children carrying them. Adeline did a great job picking sweet ripe strawberries as we ate them all up in the afternoon. 

On Wednesday, I finally caught up on the normal household duties when it was time to make treats for my birthday party on Thursday. I made a cake with melted chocolate raspberry ice cream in it, since the Germans prefer to eat ice cream and cake at separate times. I figured with this recipe, I covered both culture's birthday traditions.

Our friends came over Thursday afternoon and we had a combined birthday party for Briggi, our neighbor who had a birthday earlier in the week, and myself. Even though the weather felt like it was fall out, it did not dampen our spirits, or maybe it was Strawberry bowl drink Briggi made. Anyways, I enjoyed the day celebrating another year filled with love, laughter, and happiness and am looking forward to what the new year will bring.