Being two Eliza is obsessed with all things "baby" (or baba as she says). She likes to use baby forks and spoons. She loves pointing out the small cars ("Auto baba!") and this weekend we did the ultimate in European touring and went to a "baba country": Luxembourg! The best laid plans. We had ambitions to rent cars and do Luxembourg one day and the Netherlands another day so that our visitors could "pin" two more countries. However after wrestling everyone out of bed at 6am and packing up for our first day trip Jonathan and his father had the fun task of discovering that Hertz had overbooked car rentals across Belgium. We were able to salvage our day with a trip to Brugges, but it made the double country pin virtually impossible. After our long ... read more

Two weeks ago we moved into our newest home. It is amazing. It is only around the corner from where we used to be but it is HUGE and full of all sorts of character, which our last apartment was lacking. We now have a big living room, with a fire place for some chairs. We have a big dining room, also with a fire place, and a small, galley style kitchen. We have a lot more counter and cabinet space and AN OVEN. We have a half bath on the first floor (thank goodness because life was rough with just one bathroom and five people) and a terrific old wooden staircase leading upstairs. My favorite feature of the house is the MUDROOM! I have been longing for one of these in Belchertown. On the second ... read more

One of the things we have been enjoying on our visit here was the selection of French music Jose has. One artist in particular, Georges Brassens, was terrific. Unfortunately even the great music in the morning didn’t make up for our miserable night. Eliza was up in the middle of the night and between her and this nasty mosquito bothering us all night long we got very little sleep. The girls got up at 8:30 and Jonathan went into the bedroom to grab a few more minutes of rest. I started packing up while the girls ate. We tried to start a load of laundry but couldn’t quite figure out Jose’s machine, but he should be back tomorrow. We cleaned the apartment and headed out the door around 11am. As it was our last day in ... read more

We were all up a little after 8 this morning. We had breakfast (yogurt, bread, bananas) and I packed a lunch for us. We were out the door at 9:30 and two hours later we arrived at Versailles. There was a slight problem because the C line, which is a fast way of getting around the left bank of Paris was under repair so we had to take the slow trains across town, which luckily didn’t bother the girls much as they love to hang on the bars. Unfortunately it being Sunday and almost noon when we arrived it meant 3 hour lines to get into Versailles. I felt really bad because if I had known we wouldn’t get to go in here I would have brought them into Sanssouci in Berlin just so they could ... read more

Another beautiful day!!! I hope we don’t get too used to it! We decided to spend the day in Maastricht, which was billed in our guidebook as the ‘gem of the south’ (of the Netherlands). Eric (Jonathan's cousin who arrived yesterday to stay with us for a week) was excited, I think, to explore a small Dutch town and the girls were excited to have someone with us on one of our travels. We had to change trains in Liege, but each leg of the trip was only about ½ hour long. We got to Maastricht at about noon. We took a pretty walk from the train station across the river and lunched in front of a huge cathedral. It is a really pretty little town. We decided to wander to St. Peter’s Fort which was ... read more