More Andrew Pictures

Andrew is 5 days old today.  Crazy how much has changed in less than a week.  We came home on Monday and have been enjoying being at home.  Laura is doing pretty well, though you can tell she's struggling a little with all the changes.  She's super sweet (most of the time) with Andrew though and we only need to worry about her smothering or poking him too much.  She loves to watch us change his diaper, swaddle him and feed him.  Then she goes and does the same with her baby.  I'm waiting for her to start nursing :)  She hates it when he cries and sometimes cries with him.  I'm enjoying seeing them interact as well as having my parents here to give me a hand with the two of them!

 She LOVES to kiss Baby Brother.

 What we got when we told her to show her teeth when she smiled.

 Big hand, little hand

 Ba-by An-rew, nose!

 Tom's starting him early on GT and airplanes

Trying for some artistic shots :) 

 Father and Son!

My sweet baby snoozing away!  Did you notice they have the same blankets in Switzerland as you get in the US?

Introducing Andrew Paul Holst

At Katie's first doctor's appointment after finding out she was pregnant, the doctor insisted that Katie's due date was the 1st of December; Katie was indignant, having already determined that the due date was supposed to be the 2nd of December. In our broken French we found it impossible to argue. I, personally, had a difficult time bringing myself to care much about this trivial detail in the life of my first son, and to be honest, over the coming few months came to side with the doctor leaning toward the 1st. But not so with Katie. She made it her mission to prove that lady wrong. And though it took nine long months, she succeeded.

We went to the hospital on the 1st for the official "due date check-up" and you could see the fire in Katie's eyes as they told her she wasn't dilated at all. "I always knew that doctor was wrong," she told me with a gleam of satisfaction. The nurse gave us a "contraction cocktail" all-natural recipe that was supposed to get things moving, so to speak, but Katie was not going to get to try it. 

At 12:50am on December 2nd, the contractions started and at 5:34am, we had baby Andrew Paul laying in Katie's arms, whimpering and looking thoughtfully at his persistent :) Mommy (he looked to me like he was a day or so over-ripe!). 

Anyway, I'll spare you the details for now and let you see what you really care about: the pictures. I'll update a bit later with a more thorough account of Katie's victory.

Katie on the 1st of December--just to prove that she was not, in fact, in labor yet.

Andrew Paul Holst...hand-picked and fresh!

She really does NOT look like she just gave birth. You would think that we staged this picture some days later, but I promise you, I didn't.

Laura meeting Baby Brother!

I think she likes him!

That's what Laura does when you tell her to "smile".

<<---Same baby--->> 

Gramps and grandson

Andrew Paul Holst

Chillin' with Daddy in the sun

That's all for now, folks. Come back later once we've all had a bit more time to catch up on some sleep!

Family Photo

A picture of all four of us!  These are a rare occurrence - it is HARD taking good pictures of/with a toddler.  I'm open to any tips you might have!  This was in front of our rental house in France.  I loved the meandering grapevines (the grapes were good, too) and all the flowers.  Laura enjoyed watching the numerous caterpillars that were chowing down on the rose leaves right outside of our door.

 Laura climbed up in the apple tree with Daddy and actually cooperated for a picture!  This is her face when you ask her to smile (sometimes).

Desaples

Every fall "the cows come home" in a traditional celebration called La Désalpe - literally coming down from the Alps. We made it to two different festivals this year and Laura loved them.  She saw cows, sheep, donkey, goats and horses up close and personal.  At first the loud bells around the necks of the cows scared her, but she got used to it after awhile.  While Laura's favorite part was the animals, I liked shopping in the markets the best.  Such fun, crafty, Swiss stuff to be had... I didn't buy much, but looking is half the fun!

With all the traffic, we were a little late to the first parade of cows in Charmey.  It meant we got a good view, though.  Everyone just pulled over and ran across the street to watch the cows go by.  Either that cow is really big, or our car is really small...

One cow broke ranks and headed straight for us! 

 Laura is really distracted.

 The decorated sheep.

 She's started smiling on command (sometimes).  This is her sporting pig-tails for the first time.  At first I couldn't keep them in and now she asks for them all the time. She needs something done to her hair though, it's finally!! (it only took 2 years) long enough to get in her eyes.

Before winter arrived (it's 32F outside right now), Laura decided to play on the porch in this interesting outfit.

Time for a break! 

 Our second desalpe in Semsales. Laura talked about the donkeys for days.

 An interesting float? in the parade. The man in back was playing music by manually cranking a handle.

 Hard at play...

 I take no responsibility for this outfit.

Happy to be outside at the park behind our house.  This fall has brought the opportunity to search for chestnuts.  We find them and then feed them to the deer who live next to the park. 

Laura wanted to be like mama.  She carried her baby around like this all day - even on our walk to the park.

Apples and More

One thing I love about our house is the apple trees in the back yard.  They produce more apples that we could ever hope to use in a season.  However, we try!  Laura loves going out to "pick" apples.  Though her contribution is usually finding a (worm-free) apple and eating it while Mommy and Daddy do all the work.  She eats a whole apple much better than one all sliced.

My cuties.  Laura really enjoyed wearing her boots.

 Always willing to share.

 Our friend, Matt, flew in from France to visit us for the weekend. It was great to be able to catch up with him, feed him fondue and show him a few of the local sites.  Laura is still talking about "Map" and "train" and "bye, bye" meaning that we took Matt to the train station and said goodbye to him there.  She loved having a visitor.

Know what it is??  Play-doh!  It was super easy to make and is a wonderful toy.  I was so excited to have it turn out successfully.  Now I just have to resign myself to the colors getting mixed together...so hard...

Family Vacation

We've had plenty of travel opportunities since moving to Europe and have enjoyed being able to do some intensive site-seeing.  However, the vacations we've had have not been very restful.  We decided that it was high time for a "do-nothing" vacation.  So we had our first relaxing, low-key vacation as a family a few weeks ago.  We found a house to rent in the teeny-tiny town of Braux, just north-west of Dijon, FR.  It was a perfect location and just what we had hoped.  We took walks in our little village, played on the jungle gym in the back yard, ate peaches off the tree and grapes off the vine, swam in the pool and did a little non-intensive site-seeing.  I want to go back...

 We went to a local market (about 15 minutes away) our first morning there.  We bought honey, some green beans, bread and jam (ooh, the jam was good!).  We strolled through a community garage sale and then had beef bourguignon and lasagna for lunch at a little cafe.  Laura took time to play in the pedestrian zone while mama finished eating.

 She's growing up...doesn't she look like a little girl here?

 Anything can be a toy when you are 22 months old.  This chain entertained her for at least 5 minutes.

 There were three rental houses on the property in addition to the house where the landlord lived.  Our neighbors were Austrian and (of course) spoke excellent English.  There were 8 of them traveling together (2 families) and they invited us to their brick oven pizza night.  It was fun!  We rolled out our dough, choose our ingredients and then had to bake our pizza in the brick oven without shoving it into the ashes.  It is hard!!  Everyone made a pizza and then shared it with the rest of the group.  I was stuffed by the end of the night.  I also experienced having goat cheese (yum!), tuna (not so yum), creme fraiche (didn't really notice it), an egg (not too bad) and various other unusual ingredients on my pizza.  It was a fun evening and an enjoyable new experience.  Meanwhile Laura dozed away next door while we watched her on the monitor - it was a night out!

 My pizza had goat cheese, zucchini, olives, peppers, bacon and creme fraiche.  I thought it was pretty good and it didn't get singed a bit.

 On our way back from a walk in our little village (also a belly shot for those who have been asking).

This is what Laura does when we tell her to smile.  She's also gotten so heavy that she now requires the two arm hold :)

We visited Flavigny - another teeny little town - one rainy morning.  They are known for their anise factory as well as being the film location for the movie Chocolat.  It was a very quaint town with lots of ups and downs.  I loved the pretty stone house and all the beautiful flowers decorating them.  We had a delicious lunch at the co-op cafeteria (quiche for me and potatoes and roast chicken for Tom) and just enjoyed a slow morning. 

 The gate to the city.

For our last outing, we drove across the valley (10 minutes) to an old chateau and church on a hilltop.  They were closed, but we enjoyed walking the grounds around them.  The view were beautiful and we were the only people there.  It was so peaceful and quiet.  Laura discovered that chestnuts are fun to hunt and we found a plethora of them!  Her constant chant was "nother un" meaning she wanted to find more to step on and extract them from their spiny shells.

All in all it was a great vacation.  Just the rest and together time we needed in the midst of Tom's crazy work and preparations for Baby Brother's arrival.

More pictures to come!  We also saw our friends Matt and Stephanie, but I don't have any photographic evidence...yet!