How To: Holland Park

Not to toot my own horn, but I crushed the boys' Christmas gift. In leu of presents we give the kids experiences. I was humming and hawing about making a push to go to Holland Park on the boys' parent teacher conference day in November. But, after Robin told the kids they have a "fun mom" I felt like I needed to keep up the act.

Holland Park is a Dutch themed amusement park. In keeping with my summer vibe - we got to 'travel' without really leaving Berlin. In fact, we even biked there.

Biking in the outskirts of Berlin is dicey in that it's hard to know if you'll be riding on the road with cars. Nevertheless, I wagered that there had to be dedicated bike paths - I mean the park is Dutch themed after all. And oh, did the bike paths deliver - so flat, so uncrowded.

The key to this adventure, and to other crowded Berlin places like Tropical Islands, is you have to go when your particular school is closed but other Berlin schools are in session. Otherwise this place might be my nightmare. But as Holland Park was mostly empty, we had the climbing structures to ourselves. Thus, I could take 400 pictures of the cutest butt you've seen in a harness.

After we climbed until we couldn't grip, we head outside to this crazy slide tower: 

The boys did laps while I enjoyed a delicious cappuccino and a trip through the gift shop to get Stroopwafels and salted carmel chews. It was then that Hugo asked, "why are you being so nice to us." Christmas magic right there.

Not pictured is a very large, very randomly numbered, mini golf course. We were literally the only ones out there. We couldn't stay as long as we wanted however, because my phone was dying. Four hours wasn't enough to do this place justice. But, I didn't bring a charger and wanted a little bit of daylight for navigating the ride home by memory.

While I avoid crowds like the plague, I'd happily go back with any visitors who make the trek to visit us. Real Berlin (and themed Holland) await. 

An Open Book

I, like many US citizens, see the 'Patriot Act' of 2001 as an invasion of privacy. Although, looking through someone's library records does tell a lot about a person. 

Wow, Paige finished this book in a few days:

And these ones in just two days:

Hum, but she's not moving very quickly on this one:

Spoiler: it's because I'm taking so many notes.

A lot of these tween parenting books give tips about how to get your child to open up to you. We all know "How's it going?" doesn't usually get you a real answer even with adults. But, I learned a new trick about how to get the scoop from my friend Ana at the Kita Christmas party. If you see your friend looking sad or happy just declare it. Hearing, "you look horrible," gave me permission to get out some of my pent-up tears. Which, is a good segue to why I was crying again this morning in the Kita.

I just found out that one of our beloved Kita teachers, Judy, died of cancer a month ago. In the last couple years she'd moved to the Kita around the corner so I'd had fewer daily interactions with her. The parents at the Kita around the corner knew that she was sick and died, but the news wasn't public at our Kita as most of the current kids never had the pleasure of having Judy as a teacher.

Like most of the teachers at Kita, I didn't know her well. I knew she was about my age and moved to Berlin for a boy. She was kind and bubbly. She was forgiving when Hugo started a revolt on an Ubahn while on a Kita field-trip. Just last week we were looking at Crosby's Kita picture album and Carmen pointed to her and said "That's Judy." Carmen knew her, even though she'd only met her a handful of times at joint Kita field-trips.

There are some jobs where you can fake enthusiasm or be motivated enough by renumeration to do the work. However, anyone who chooses to be a preschool teacher does it out of love. I am grateful for the love Judy poured out to my kids over their collective seven years at Kita. I wish I'd had the chance to tell her one last time how thankful I am. Instead we'll be sending a video to her grieving mom in Colombia of the kids singing a song. We were blessed to have Judy in our lives. We will miss her beautiful smile and warmth.