Easter Report

Anna's new best friend is Mr Easter Rabbit! Not only did he hide some chocolate, Easter eggs and a trainer bike for Anna in our living room...
...he also hid lots of chocolate eggs in the Park. Anna and her friends Arne and Darius were thrilled to search for these treasures - and to eat them all at once!!!
The rest of us meanwhile was relaxing on picnic blankets in the middle of the green nature - a truly successful Easter Sunday afternoon!
(Next time in the Park, Anna disappointingly asked: "No chocolate eggs?"... Nope - not until next year, my dear!)

Soap Bubbles in the Park

At the risk of repeating myself - I LOVE the Babelsberg Park! Every time we walk through the park I find it amazing how the seasons change plants, trees and light in the park. Even after more than two years and countless excursions to the park, it never bores me!
Here, I post some pictures of one of these countless walks in the park, when we took some bubble soap with us and enjoyed watching them fly and Anna try to grasp these shiny voids.
Tree stump climbers:
And yes, Florian was with us all the time slumbering all the fun around him...

A Visit in Austria

And some more picture collages from our visit in Austria:

The Ustaszewski family with Ciocia Jola from Toronto

In Lustenau with aunt Ruth and cousins Judith and Martha (...and a most delicious chocolate cake!!!)

Opa and Oma with Florian

Our traditional hike to the Rauschbrunnen

Christening of Florian

In April, we travelled to Innsbruck, to enjoy our old hometown and our families and to celebrate the Christening of Florian in our "old" parish of Allerheiligen. This parish is blessed to have a charismatic and great priest - Franz Troyer. He admitted Florian to the community of Christians and held a joyful, interactive and wonderful ceremony.
From now on, aunt Ruth and uncle Thomas will accompany Florian through his life as his godmother and godfather.
The Christening was a wonderful opportunity for a big family reunion! We are really thankful that members of our families came from as far as Switzerland, Germany and even Canada!
At the end, when we celebrated this event in a more profane way, uncle Christoph thought to give Florian a second baptism - one of the more profane kind...

Marble Track

We now have our first marble track! Though it was a gift for Florian, Anna, Kamil and me are the ones who are playing and enjoying this wonderful toy at the moment. But I am sure that Florian will happily play with it soon enough! It consists of wooden cubes and blocks with channels, which offer thousands of possibilities to build exciting marble tracks. Usually, I would not advertise for certain products, but in this case, I really want to mention the company producing such a fine, intelligent, sturdy and well-manufactured toy: Cuboro! Yes, it is really, really expensive (what else do you expect from a Swiss company ;-) ) but worth every cent! I am totally convinced, that you will find us playing with this marble track for many, many years! We now have the child-version "Cugolino" but we are waiting impatiently for an occasion or rather an excuse to buy the adult version... When is Father's Day again?

Various from March

This is just a post of miscellaneous pictures from the last two weeks:

A lovely bouquet of flowers my brother send me for my birthday:(Thanks so much, Christoph! The flowers survived two weeks - the chocolate only two hours...)
Florian is watching over daddy's sleep:
Florian and his friend Helge:
Anna savouring a chocolate covered rice cookie:

Couch Sandwich

Finally, after two years of having a living room without any decent sitting place (instead having plenty of space for playing, lying, cuddling, running and bouncing), we got a real couch! I spent the first two afternoons with the kids upstairs in our ameliorated living room and tried not to move too much from this heavenly place!
And here are two picture of couch sandwiches: