Back on Saturday, March 13th we sat down at the computer with the notion that we wanted to take a vacation on the 18th…we talked and searched for a few hours and in the end both agreed that Disneyland Resort Paris could be the perfect place. Somewhere that H would enjoy herself (we hoped) and we could enjoy watching her. It was hard winter for her being inside and we needed to get out! We had both been to Paris in other lifetimes so we didn’t feel bad about going right from the airport to the resort and returning back to the airport 4 days later.
I realize this all took place months ago, but I wanted to share our fun trip and excitement that IS Disney!
Here is our story of day 1 of the trip
We went for the cheap flight on Thursday morning which meant getting up at 3AM but it was worth it. The hotel package included 4 days of park-hopper tickets and we got the most out of it. Justin’s favorite part of the trip came within the first 6 hours of leaving the house. We researched our options to get from the airport to the resort and it didn’t take long to settle on the high-speed train! The acceleration was so smooth, the countryside was flying by and instead of taking the 45min to 1 hour listed on all other modes of transportation, we arrived in 8 short minutes, pretty impressive. I guess I should stop explaining and just include the video now….
**Disclaimer: I didn’t have the time to make 2 sets of each of these videos (Home video and web video) so you are seeing our home video version. There might be a few extra seconds of things like “It’s a small world” but you can just slide that bar along as fast as you want! **
We agreed that the Disneyland Park was about 80% the same as the original. We spent our first day there. Everything was offered in both French and English, a large portion of the people around us were speaking British English. Our favorite thing by far was watching H when she would see something new, her biggest brightest faces came when she would see another character. Justin is someone who is fairly unimpressed by autographs but his first order of business was to buy H a princess autograph book and Tinkerbell pen for that very thing.
We took full advantage of the “Baby-swap” program that Disney offers (we found the details on line before we left.) One of us would wait in line for a ride with H while the other waited at the exit with the stroller & Matt. When the ride finished, we just had to tell the attendant at the exit that we were waiting with a baby and we were able to walk right up the exit, cut in line and jump on the ride. So, H rode each ride 2x in a row, we both got to ride the rides and we waited half the time we would have otherwise.
As soon as we arrived to our hotel and saw Goofy, we knew it was the perfect get-a-way for our family after months of being at home both pregnant and with a new born. It was such a blessing to find out that we had these extra days off of work that we had not remembered to be able to go on this trip! Our first trip as a family of 4.
Here are some highlight pictures from day 1…more to come on day two tomorrow!
Matt slept the whole way on his first flight ever
Headed to the security tent, she’s starting the “day” tired already from travel.
Disneyland Paris – 2.5 years old!
Showing me her new autograph book and pen, already adverse to pictures by mom and we just got to DISNEYLAND! Sorry girl, get used to it!
Train ride, resting feet, feeding Matt, headed to fantasyland
riding the carousel with mom, her first real ride.
a love for “writing” just like her mom.
got a bucket of kettle corn (yum-a very un-European thing, it’s been a long time!) and reserved our spot on the curb for the “Once upon a Dream” parade. Of course the crowd filled in ALL around us and H loved the parade! We ate dinner after at Casey’s Corner. Hot dogs with a 2 year old are a sure thing and man was she hungry!
Pretty much what Buddy looked like the whole trip, just different clothes!
6:30 – back to our Hotel, Disney’s Sequoia Lodge. I went out and made reservations for dinner the next two night, explored the hotel and bit, found the pool and then we were all pretty exhausted!
There seems to be so much do to, dishes, laundry, editing home video, teaching M how to eat “real food”, frozen mango in the freezer waiting to become “Tres Leches Cake with Mango”, feeding the fish with H, reading “Breaking dawn and I have graham crackers that are dying to become a crust for something!
One thing that has been taken off my plate for a few months is scrap booking or the likes of it. One last item that I made with what I had left here in Austria was H’s 3rd Birthday invitations. We are going to have a small crowd so I only had to make 5 but it will still fun!
The invite reads:
Haley is turning three
and wants to “start” her
next year with you!
Come on over to a “pit-
stop” party at the
Eggbauers’ home on
August 21, 2010. “Race
time” is 4pm. Come with
an empty “fuel tank” and
We’ll fill ‘er up. An
evening “drive-in”
showing of the movie
Cars will culminate our
party. We’ll see you on
the “race day!”
We are having a “Cars” themed party, by H’s choice. It’s one of her favorite movies these days when she can borrow it from someone! (She’ll be the proud owner after her party!) We wish we were able to send out a bunch of these invites to all our family and friends…so, consider yourself invited! If you can make it, we would LOVE to have you!
We’ve been thinking of starting a mini-series about our Haus, trying to document some of the things we don’t want to forget, people, places etc. (Maybe even some things we’d rather forget but can’t?) It’s a whole different world here, not just living in a different country but living in “community” with others here on campus. Hopefully we can capture just a bit of our life here over the last 2.5 years….
The first thing I wanted to remember was a huge blessing that we’ve had while living here : the kitchen. Of course there is the food. J & I have agreed so many times we would not want the job of cooking for upwards of 100 people, planning the meals and getting it on the table at the right time. Robert & Sunny are our kitchen staff couple. They do a great job! For me and the kids (mainly H) they have provided so much more than food…constant friendship! There have been so many days when we have to get out of the apartment and are able to walk downstairs and visit the kitchen. I get to talk to other adults and H loves to get a cookie from the kitchen and then run around with Robert. Especially in the winter when no one is around, they have saved my sanity more than once! Thank you S&R for your amazing ministry here and your great friendship!
I thought this would be fun scrapbook album to do when I heard about it on this blog back in the fall. It was the idea that you would pre-make an album for the month of December and then all you had to do was take pictures each day, add it in with a few notes. The pre-made book was no problem. I think I fished it sometime in November. Even taking the pictures wasn’t too bad, I did have to get a little creative with “Christmas” things to do since I was so pregnant and we were here in Austria all Dec, but we had fun with it. The main problem came with getting pictures, I wanted to order from the states since I know what I would be getting and the price was right. I made a huge order from Cost-co and my parents brought it at the end of December, right off the bat I was way behind. In the mean time, we had Matt which changed our lives forever. I finally finished up the book on the 4th of July, 2010.
I would do it again and now have a few ideas of how to make it easier next time. We are planning to move to the states in the fall so I’m not sure how it will work out for December 2010 but I’m going to try if I can. I think it’s a fun way to document all our holiday traditions!
Here are a few of my favorite pages from the 2009 book I just finished:
This week turned out to be a great week but not very conducive to blogging! Because….we had VISITORS! We love visitors, family or friends! This time we had friends come with their family…our good friends Ben & Juli (from SD) made a trip over to Austria from their exploration of Prague to visit us! They brought Juli’s mom and sister with them, which just made things even more fun! They arrived on Tuesday planning to stay the night and ended up staying 2 ~ Yeah! Hopefully we gave them a good overview of Austria, spending all day Tuesday in Vienna and then Wednesday spending time in the countryside of Austria. We had a great time and are so thankful that they came, it really warms our hearts and keeps us sane to see people who know and love us! It made my week on Tuesday to be in H&M with Juli, having a friend to look and shop with, it was a small thing but really touched me. Thanks B,J,L & R for coming to visit us, playing with our kids and the great conversation! We’ll play Settlers next time!
Having a bottle outside St. Stephens, downtown. It was almost 99F on Tuesday.
Haley in Vienna, almost 3!
Zanoni & Zanoni..a must visit ice cream stop when it’s this hot in Vienna.
Walk & eat, walk & eat…too much to see in one day.
Nap time.
This is our son, after having been in transit, (car to train to backpack) for 5 hours and only having one bottle and sweating buckets! He is such a happy boy! We finally got a break while our guests toured Schonbrunn. A nice bench in the shade of the gardens.
Ice cold water and a bottle for M, drinks all around!
Juli taking a “sexy” pose of her mom in front of the palace for her dad! nice.
Seriously, this was the only picture taken of the 4 of us…I’m not sure why. Sad.
We finally got to dinner down the street from our house at around 7:45, luckily it had a playground for H!
Hopefully a good time was had by all, I know we really had a great time with our visitors!
We haven’t had a proper family pictures taken in awhile and for sure not since Matthew was born. When we started making serious plans with our friends, The Lindsays, about their trip to Europe and seeing us, I made sure to ask Kristy if she would be willing take some family pictures of us while she was here. She has really gotten to be a great photographer over the last 2-3 years since she got her SLR so I knew we’d get some good ones! And we did! Thanks Kristy for working with us and using your “daughter” experience with Haley to get a few good ones of her too! We love them! (I think the last one is my favorite or the third one…)
H went to school, she usually doesn’t go on Tuesdays but tomorrow is the father’s day breakfast and we learned from the mother’s day breakfast that the day before the kids cook the breakfast (actually cake) for their parent. She said it was chocolate and said school was fun today…good news!
I measured out 1/2 of a Tbsp. of ranch dressing for my salad at lunch…it makes me feel like I’ve turned a corner in my seriousness about loosing this baby fat! I am on day 5 of no sweets for 20 days and it’s not bothering me much at all. Also, while I was searching for some healthy dinner recipes, I found a recipe for homemade caramel corn (the UNhealthy kind) that I am TOTALLY going to make if I reach my goal weight for this month. I do have to cut myself a tiny bit of slack, I saw this today and was reminded what I’m working back from!
The day before M was born
M decided he didn’t need much of a nap. He wasn’t upset, it didn’t seem like his teeth were hurting, he just didn’t want to sleep. We found the “walker” in the closet that we forgot we had. He likes it OK, of course there is no walking go on but it’s a nice tray for his toys, gets them closer to his mouth which is were EVERYTHING is going these days. He’s getting so tall, when he lays on the changing pad and kicks his feet they hit the desk if I don’t have it pulled all the way to the edge. I always feel bad when I hear his heels hitting the desk.
It’s hot. It’s supposed to be hotter tomorrow. I’m thinking on Thursday we’ll go to the zoo since it’s our day off.
He could relax on the changing pad all day!
I am behind on a lot of projects: video clips for the family, photo books on line, December daily book, editing pictures and a sister/brother photo shoot I want to take with the 2 shirts in the top right of the picture. I have to do it soon…M’s not going to fit into that shirt much longer! I probably only have days left….
today seemed like a pretty normal day in our lives.
We LOVE visitors! It warms our hearts to see family and friends coming through our door and spending time on our couch! This last week, we were blessed to have two different couples visit us! J’s Aunt and Uncle spend 2 days with us and it overlapped with the visit by our dear friends, The Lindsays, who stayed for 3 days! It has been such a fun few days and now that they are all gone we are a bit sad, it was such a high having them all here at one time! We showed them around the Haus, took all 4 of them to Melk and Durnstein and then spent time with the L’s in Vienna and playing Settlers. It was fun to take people out who have never been here before and I even got to go on 2 different tours downtown that I had on my wish list! Everyone enjoyed meeting M and getting to know H better since she is almost a year older than the last time they saw her. It was a very memorable time!
Jeff, Kristy and I took M downtown in only the backpack. Jeff stepped up and did some of the carrying…even when he was getting an ear full!
In this case, I am not sad that this “era” is over in my life. To explain how this era started we have to go back to spring 2007. I was very pregnant and wanting a bit of a hairstyle change before our baby girl came. To make a long story short, I went to the “more expensive” salon and it was a disaster…both times that I went in. I was pretty upset, I had wanted great pictures in the hospital and of us with our first child! It wasn’t to be: Memorial day picnic ~ 2007 August 21, 2007
About a month after H arrived, I left her with her dad for the first time and headed to the “cheaper” salon to try and get the whole thing fixed. I talked it over with a very understanding girl and we matched my roots and she dyed all my hair for the first time in my life. September 2007 ~ back with a full head of brown hair, much darker than before I had a baby!
Since that day the “growing out” process has been LONG. Here is some documentation along the way: Mother’s day 2009 Fall 2009
Last week I got my hair cut. The mobile “frisure” came to the Haus and everyone took turns. I explained I wanted 7-8 cm cut off my hair and to make it straight across the bottom. This moment was when the era ended….after 2 years and 8 months, probably only 5 haircuts, all the dye has finally grown out and my hair is its natural color again. NO more two-tone hair! I am sad that my hair has gotten so dark after having kids, but I am SO happy today when I look in the mirror and know I can wear my hair down if I want to. The silly thing is that I am actually contemplating highlighting my hair when we get back to the states…back to square one. May 2010
Memorial day picnic ~ 2007
August 21, 2007
September 2007 ~ back with a full head of brown hair, much darker than before I had a baby!
Mother’s day 2009
Fall 2009
May 2010