Learnings

We learned a few things since our last blog entry.  Most of them were about food.  A couple were from 79-year old photos, and one was from grunting pigs.

We ventured to Oma and Opa's house in Leimen to celebrate Easter.  We were completely spoiled as usual with delicious food and drink and love and company.  It's hard to choose what was the favorite dish... rouladen or filet?  We learned about traditions of German Easter:  pickled fish for Good Friday dinner (accompanied by a tasty cold cream sauce with dill and apples along with potatoes), and a special way to eat the traditional hard-boiled eggs.  First you cut them in half and pull out the yolk, then put some mustard, olive oil, white vinegar, and salt in the yolk hole and eat up.  Not sure if either of these traditions will make their way into our yearly festivities, but it was fun to learn about them regardless.

Lily and Paul enjoyed an Easter egg hunt in Oma and Opa's living room, while Elise suspiciously watched the candy hunters in action.  They all enjoyed banging on the piano and Lily couldn't wait to hit the zip line at the park in the woods.  The only downside was that there are a lot of stairs in the house and Paul and Elise are a) not to be trusted on stairs and b) addicted to stairs.  So they had to be watched constantly and we were definitely playing zone defense, handing off the one going up to whoever was helping the one going down.  

Another thing we stumbled upon while in Leimen was a handful of pictures from 1934 and 1935 of the twins born to Nicole's grandparents.  You might recall that before we learned there were two babies growing inside Nicole we had no idea that twins ran in the family.  The boy twin passed away at a few months of age for fuzzy medical reasons, but we had never seen pictures of them before.  It was exciting but sad to see these pictures which no living person could tell us about with any certainty. 

On the way home from Leimen we made a two night stopover in the tiny town of Gundelfingen (don't search for it on Google maps, the wrong one shows up) at a sort-of farm B&B.  It would have been great if it was about 40 degrees warmer.  As it was, it was hovering right at freezing the whole time we were there which meant we couldn't spend a lot of time outside checking out the several ruined castles within sight.  You might think there's not much to do in a tiny little town with about a dozen houses, but there's a lot less to do in a small apartment without your usual supply of toys and books.  All was not lost, we did visit the assortment of animals on the B&B grounds which included four donkeys who gave us loud hee-haws, a couple of young lambs, and some pigs making horrible grunts and squeals.  And we had a couple of nice meals at the two restaurants within walking distance with friendly staff.  We decided we were going to get out and see more of Germany this year even if it's a pain to get everyone out of the house, so at least we were successful on that front.  

So what did those grunting pigs teach us?  They were in a little barn or something and were squealing and grunting as if the butcher were chasing them around and they were trying to escape to the great outdoors.  So even if you freezing your butt off, sometimes it's just better to get outside.