Laowai

I’m so thankful for the beautiful Fall we are having. We got to go for another lovely walk in the mountains over the weekend. We went to a man made lake called Wägitalersee.

Claire and I got our Christmas village out this week. And I added a couple new houses so we now have 37! I’m all for the more is more look when it comes to our village, but I might have to edit it a little. Claire did all the set up. She likes to put all the birds together and all the mushrooms together and so on. When I took a look it seems there is a village overcrowding problem. Maybe we can’t call it a village anymore – it’s a full blown city. Maybe we need a suburb. Sigh. Such serious problems I have!

New slippers – they feel so nice!

Our first ice skating of the season.

I’ve had a half finished egg carton wreath sitting around for several months. Just a pile of flowers and leaves hanging around in my messy sewing room. Well I was tired of looking at an unfinished project so I got busy and made those bits into a wreath this morning. I guess this wreath craft is a favorite of mine. This time I used some chalk pastels to add a little red and green and then I glittered the heck out of that wreath. It ended up with a sort of fuzzy pastel old fashioned look. Let the holiday crafting begin!

Here are a few of the other wreaths I’ve made out of egg cartons:

October flew by! Here are a few photos – good memories that I must preserve.

Brian ran the Lausanne marathon again. He doesn’t look like he just ran 26 miles does he?

And some Halloween night photos. We finally got to do some real trick or treating in Switzerland. The houses were scattered around Claire’s friend’s town. The people really went all out decorating their doorsteps. It was very blustery and windy – just as it should be on Halloween.

Oh hello lamas – we’re just doing some trick or treating – don’t mind us.

I never did get any good photos of Claire in her bat costume – oh well.

I’ve already taken our Halloween decorations down. Only the pumpkins remain – staring at me. On to November!

OK – My last bunch photos of our trip to Copenhagen.

The first day we arrived we went for a walk and found trampolines. The girls decided they might like Copenhagan.

Here’s the Copenhagen logo on a garbage can.

We went to the Danish Design Museum and I loved it.

We rented a little boat and took our own tour of the canals and it was super fun. The boat company encourages kids to catch garbage with little nets to help the canals stay healthy. Bea and Claire really got into it. It was a challenge because I’d say the canals are already pretty pristine. Well with some skillful boat driving by Brian the girls did snag a couple pieces of garbage. As a prize they got licorice skipper’s pipes (they were out of ice creams). Ha.

As Denmark is known for it’s beautiful modern design – I dragged everyone to some really lovely shops. I didn’t end up buying anything – mostly because I couldn’t fit furniture in my suitcase. Here are the daughters (sort of) being patient outside one of those designey boutiques.

Just down from our hotel we had waffles with a mountain of whip cream on top . And they served ice cream topped with marshmallow fluff that was mixed with strawberry jam.

The next super fun thing was Tivoli. Tivoli is a 175 year old amusement park. Walt Disney made several visits before he created Disneyland and he tried to emulate it’s atmosphere. It exudes vintage charm with an overload of color and pattern and special graphic details and decorations everywhere you look. It was all decorated for Halloween and we went late in the day so we could enjoy the lights. It was magical!

I dragged everyone to another museum – The Hirschprung Collection.There were lots of portraits of everyday life (my favorite type of artwork). I especially loved the work of painter Michael Ancher. 

Brian was excited to try some Danish beer including some from Mikkeller.

We went to the zoo.

We finished our trip with a couple parks and a very interesting art exhibit in an old underground sistern.

Sorry if I overloaded you with Copenhagen love. Thanks, Brian, for taking us on a great Fall vacation.

So, as I mentioned, I took way too many photos in Copenhagen. I was just having so much fun clicking away everywhere we went (see below).

Copenhagen was friendly and walkable and beautiful and photogenic. So Here are a bunch of photos of the beautiful buildings that we saw. 

I’m getting way behind on posting my pictures of our trip to Copenhagen but today is Halloween so I must post some scary photos.

Tonight we’re going to the town of a friend – they claim there is a good amount of trick or treating to be done. I hope so. I’m surprisingly sad every time my kids have to miss out on American Halloween. I mean it’s an important holiday for a kid and you don’t get all that many Halloweens before you are too big and then you have to be the one handing out candy. 

Bea made these little chocolate covered marshmallow treats to take to school. I love ’em.

And here’s the scary part of this post. It’s a house that I pass on my way home from school. Doesn’t it look haunted.

A big part of the reason we went to Denmark was to visit The Lego House. The girls watched a documentary about it on Netflix and we had to go. It ended up being a winner – so fun for the girls and really interesting too. 

One of my favorite parts was the big model world that included little city and mountain and castle and lots more scenes. There was so much to look at. Little stories came out as you examined what the lego people were doing.

A big part of the whole experience was to just build. There were different zones with prompts to build a frog or bins of one color legos. It was cool to look around and see all the people (kids and adults) completely engaged in building. And a really clever part were these little stations – see below. Since you are a little sad that you can’t take the thing you just built with you – they had these stands where you could scan your wrist ticket thingy and then the machine would photograph your creation and save it just for you. It worked really well and once the girls got the idea they were excited to find one of the stations to record their creations in each area.

Bright colors everywhere – delightful.

Ooooh a lego swan – my favorite!

The museum was all decked out for Halloween and this area had huge bins of orange, green, black and white legos. We were surprised at how much Denmark embraced Halloween.

The girls have requested that we come back every year. We’ll see…