Weekend Update

Yikes! I am just now realizing how close we are to Christmas, and how much I need to do, AND how little time I have to do it in. So here's your weekend update as to what we have been up to the last week or so at Villa Taylor. And please excuse my blogging absences while I am running around like Clark Griswold on Christmas Eve.

 Snow.

 Lots and lots of snow.

 Saint Nicholas visited Austin at Kita.
For the Grandmothers, Austin's are the blue boots second from the left.

from Wikipedia:

In Germany, Nikolaus is usually celebrated on a small scale. Many children put a boot called Nikolaus-Stiefel (Nikolaus boot) outside the front door on the night of 5 December. St. Nicholas fills the boot with gifts and sweets overnight, and at the same time checks up on the children to see if they were good, polite and helpful the last year. If they were not, they will have a tree branch (Rute) in their boots instead. Sometimes a disguised Nikolaus also visits the children at school or in their homes and asks them if they have been good (sometimes ostensibly checking his golden book for their record), handing out presents on a per-behavior basis. This has become more lenient in recent decades. But for some children, Nikolaus also elicited fear, as he was often accompanied by Knecht Ruprecht (Servant Ruprecht), who would threaten to beat the children for misbehavior as using this myth to 'bring up cheek children' for a better, good behavior. Any kind of punishment isn't really following and just an antic legend. Knecht Ruprecht furthermore was equipped with eight deer legs. In Switzerland, where he is called Schmutzli, he would threaten to put bad children in a sack and take them back to the dark forest. In other accounts he would throw the sack into the river, drowning the naughty children. These traditions were implemented more rigidly in Catholic countries and regions such as Austria or Bavaria.

 Austin got a haircut. And by that I mean Chris held him down screaming while I shaved him like an Army recruit.

 I got my Christmas Star. And I love it.

We bought Austin a sled. For fun? No way. It is so we can get to school. A kid in 8 layers of warm clothing takes 3.5 hours to walk to the tram stop. The same child on a sled being pulled over 5 inches of ice and snow can make it in 11 minutes.

Now Mommy knows how a sled dog feels.

A borrowed photo from one of the other Kita Mommies. 

The sled parking at school.

 Austin made fingerprint snowflakes at school!

And he is learning to cut with scissors!

 Mommy takes pictures of the notes from the teachers so she can translate them at home. 

You do what you gotta do.