the dailies

While the electrician is installing light fixtures and the painter is painting the parent-bathroom, I will quickly post some pictures from the last few weeks. Picnics, a day at the beach, and visiting Antwerp's large en plein air sculpture garden, with Evelina. For a variety of reasons we have decided to keep Evelina at home with us, full-time. She is not upset about not having to go to day care anymore. In November she will start attending kindergarden. Time has flown by, she is growing up so damn fast that we want to have her with us for a few months before she is off to "school" with schedules etc. So, we do stuff with her around the house and out. She loves helping in the kitchen (never mind that everything takes twice as long). With her papa she has taken up doing puzzles. His mother tells me that as a 3 year old he could sit with his puzzles for hours. Evelina puts a 75-piece floor together in a few minutes and exclaims it was not difficult. So give her a few more months and she might do the same.























We also went to the beach for a day. Evelina had been reading some stories about the beach and wanted to see for herself (again, as she did not seem to remember that we had gone before... strange for a kid who talks about her pre-18 month daycare care-givers still and knows exactly which objects in the house came with us from Austin and which ones did not -- and I don't mean big things like furniture but plastic storage containers and the like...) The Belgian beach is well, a bit blah. It was crowded and we saw way too many pink people in tiny bathingsuits than Robert and I care for, but Evelina had a good time. So, we might do it again, but hit another and nicer spot on the coast next time.















Apart from trying to get work done in the house we have also started adding some green to its exterior. My mother made us planters with lavender for the front of the house, which now Evelina needs to water (whenever it doesn't rain -- she's only had to do it twice!) and Evelina and I planted some plants for the back. We still have to finish this projects as we have more plants than pots, but we hope to finish this by next week. We don't have much outside space behind the house but what we have we cherish and we have big plans for. It is amazing what a little bit of green and some flowering plants can do to one's state of mind. Evelina was very patient and helpful as she had had much practice planting flowers at Moeke's house. We even planted a little Texas-garden with cacti. Seeing the flowers at the front and back of the house is one of those little things in life that thoroughly makes me happy inside.

Hope you enjoyed the pics. More to come!