Oh Christmas tree

Well Christmas is well and truly in full swing. Many many renditions of ‘Deck the Halls’ by Ilona and/or Bluet (but mainly Ilona) have been performed. The kids celebrated Christmas German style at their Herman School last Saturday, and last Sunday we headed out and bought ourselves a native Christmas Tree, then decorated it. Here it is:

Football!

First visitors

we just had our first visitors to our Connecticut house - Nana and Wayne flew in for the weekend. In this time we managed to visit Putnam Park, a site from the civil war, the Mark Twain library (whiuch Ilona was excited to join now she is 5 years old) and (briefly, it was cold) Mark Twain's Stormfield estate, build our first indoor fire, eat some delicious food, and the kids even still went to their German class.

Kids on Swings

Sadly it is now a little cold to be outside without the incentive of snow

Ilona’s 5th Birthday

So this week it was Ilona’s fifth birthday, for which she was very excited (of course). On her actually birthday she had to go to school, where they wished her happy birthday over the tannoy and gave her this crown to wear. She also took cookies. When she got home she found her birthday bike in the basement after a short treasure hunt, and on Thursday she went to bounce with Emily, Bluet and her friends and trampolines til late, followed by more pizza (she also had pizza for her birthday dinner at home. Lucky she likes pizza)

And below is the last picture of a 4 year old ilona:

Wilder Walking

Finally, in the last 2 weeks, Wilder is walking, and walking fast. Here is an early video from his walking progress, more to come.

News no pictures

Hello, and welcome. First an update - I've been using Flickr for all the photos in the blog but they are about to limit free users to 1000 photos, and delete any extras - as I have over 4000 there right now, I need to find an alternative for the blog. Hopefully coming soon. I will also convert all the previous entries to a PDF book for download, so nothing is lost. I've already done the first 2 months of 2011!

In the meantime, Ilona has for some reason started to speak with a Southern US accent, despite never, as far as I know, having encountered someone who talks like that. It is real Southern Belle 'I have always depended on the kindness of strangers' stuff. You may recall she returned from York at the beginning of the year speaking like a northerner, ('Carry me like a baby'), so she seems to have a knack for accents. But as for the Southern one, as I have no idea where she hears it (the only TV they watch is Octonauts, which is British), I can only conclude morphic resonance must be true.