A Few Months Abroad in a Few Weeks

Big news... we're heading to Munich for most of the rest of the year! It's been brewing for a few weeks, but now it's official, with flights booked and all. To make a long story short, I will be covering for a colleague in the Munich sales office for about two months, doing business development stuff with customers and distributors. Should be an interesting glimpse into a new part of the business for me. And of course it will be a great experience for the three of us, living in a great new city for a couple of months. We still need to get our housing squared away and there are lots of little details to work out, but it's pretty exciting to know that in a few weeks we'll be in a whole new place.

As some of you know, we already had a Christmas trip planned to Germany, and that actually complicated things a bit. You can't be in the country for over 90 days without a visa (a big hassle), and if you're working there are tax consequences if you're there over 90 days. Combine that with the fact that I'm needed there within two weeks and we want to minimize the trans-Atlantic flights with Lily, and we are ending up with complicated travel. I'm heading over two weeks from today, then Nicole and Lily are following about 10 days later. Then I'm coming back for about two weeks after Thanksgiving before turning around and going back for vacation in mid-December while Nicole and Lily are staying in Germany until the end of December, maxing out their non-visa stay at 90 days exactly. Whew. It was not an easy decision to do things this way, with over three weeks apart from each other, but hopefully it will be worth it versus the alternative of more long flights and more crazy jet lag adjustment for Lil'. Plus she'll get to spend even more time getting to know her Oma and Opa on their home turf.

Whew. A lot going on...

On the Lily front, the last couple of weeks have seen a couple of interesting developments. First, she's been babbling a lot more, and the complexity of her babble has increased. Where before she would repeat one or two syllables over and over, now there are a lot of syllables mixed together and it sounds like she's speaking her own little language. It's pretty cute to hear. Second, she's become very attached to her mama. A lot of the time she only wants mama to read to her or change her diaper (ok, that's actually a bonus for me) or comfort her. It becomes a real pain when Mama wants to cook something and Lily wants Mama's attention and gets mad when Mama asks her to go to Daddy or play with something else, then she gets upset and Daddy tries to comfort her but only Mama can comfort her, and Daddy's trying only makes her that much more upset. Sigh... it's a phase that will pass, right? While you contemplate that deep question, here's a nice pic from last weekend out at Kruger Farm on Sauvie Island just North of Portland.