Trip to Nova Scotia

We flew to Nova Scotia for a week-long visit over the Labor Day holiday. We had a wonderful time spending a few days with our favorite missionaries (Grandma & Grandpa Peterson), seeing the sites, and eating lots of fresh, yummy seafood (lobsters, halibut, scallops, tuna, haddock). We did a fair amount of driving and James was a pretty good sport, mostly because we let him throw a lot of rocks in the bay and eat a lot of ice cream. We visited most of Nova Scotia’s highlights: seafood markets, Halifax Public Gardens and maritime museum, Peggy’s Cove, Mahone Bay, Lunneburg, and Halls Harbor.



One of the coolest things we did while in Nova Scotia was to go whale watching. We drove out to the tip of a peninsula (Digby Neck) that juts out into the Bay of Fundy and stayed at a bed and breakfast on Brier Island. Mom and Dad were kind enough to watch James while Jay and Em went for a “3-hour tour” on the bay in search of whales. According to the whale-watching crew, we were a very fortunate group. We saw several humpback whales and they gave us a good show.

Our photos really don’t do it justice. It was amazing to be close to such awesome creatures. We saw plenty of flukes (tails) and waves (flapping fins). We also saw 2 or 3 breaches (when the whales jump out of the water) but we weren't fast enough to catch them on camera. As we were heading back in, we came across a group of 4 whales, one of which was very curious about us. This whale proceeded to swim back and forth alongside and beneath our boat. This is called a “close approach” and it was really neat. We could really get an idea of the whale’s huge size and we could smell the whale’s breath coming from his blow hole...stinky, but still cool!

Pilgrimage to England

It’s a short month so we’ll keep our entry short too. We went to a couple of cool places in February.

The first place is an Abbey ruin in Villers-la-Ville, Belgium. It reminded us of a bit of Glastonbury in England for those of you who may have visited it. It looked like the Abbot had a nice place to hang his miter. The ruins were much more intact than Glastonbury as they’ve only been abandoned since the 1800s.


We also did a pilgrimage to the land of our forbearers, jolly old England. We were invited to go with another couple from our ward, the Millers. Who knew it would be so easy to get there from the continent. We drove to Calais, stayed overnight, and took the Chunnel in the morning. You just drive your car onto a train in France and drive it off in England, on the left hand side of course. We just visited London. We went to a show, Wicked, based on the life of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, not bad. We ate Indian food, we visited Saint Paul’s Cathedral, went to the National Gallery, and shopped on Portobello Road (remember the song from Bed Knobs and Broomsticks?). Best of all we did the Beetles walking tour and ended up on Abby Road. The Beetles tour is much cooler than it sounds, we didn’t see any Beetles, but it’s a fascinating historical look at London in the 1960s.

Buster is taking signing classes and has increased his vocabulary quite a bit. He loves to sign “all done” and “get down” especially when he’s in a car seat on a long trip. Lately, he gets real excited when he sees shoes and exclaims, “dooos!” This word also works for juice and everything that goes on feet…including socks. We’re hoping he’ll learn the some real words from his cousin Anders during our upcoming visit to the States… “gock-gocks”, “crap-it”.

We’re excited to see the folks in MI and UT in April.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everybody!

Not much is new across the pond. We’re very excited to have a new administration and really hope that the generalized excitement and positivity inspired by the election will continue. Those in the foreign service community are especially hopeful that upcoming changes will be beneficial to the U.S. and it’s reputation/influence abroad.

It has been interesting to watch an election from overseas. Since the U.S. is such a powerful and influential nation, the entire international community was very concerned about the outcome. (With the frequency of Belgian and British news and radio reports on the U.S. election, you would have thought it was happening right next door.) The day-to-day of Jay’s job is usually not impacted by a change in the administration. However, the general morale of the State Department is definitely affected…which does impact him. Jay was hoping that he would have Colin Powell as his boss again, but sadly, that is not the case. He’s trying to be positive about the new Madame Secretary.

Our highlight this month was driving to Dusseldorf, Germany to hang out with Mike. He had a job interview there, so we took advantage of the rare opportunity to visit with family.

For some reason, we thought Dusseldorf would be different. It was smaller and more commercial than we expected. It featured lots of Art Deco and ritzy, high-end shopping. Since we don’t have a lot of Euros to throw around, we mostly just ate yummy food and wandered around while Mike and Jay pointed out a lot of “fahrt” signs. Mike figures that his boys would find Germany hilarious because of the prevalence of “fahrts”. Emily figures that many men are really 10-year-olds in full-grown bodies. (“Fahrt” means “ride, journey, way, or mode of transportation” in German.)

James continues to surprise and amuse us. Our favorite thing about James these days is his little stick-out belly. Some of his shirts are now too small only because they don’t make it past his tummy. He continues to babble almost continually, and his attempts at real words are comical. Buster makes noises that sound like words but they are mostly tonal grunts – like uh-oh turns out to be grunt-grunt (vary the pitch to sound like uh-oh).

We totally rearranged the furniture on the ground floor of our house so that James could have his own space to play in (destroy). So, our dining room has become a family eating area/playroom. We’ll see how well it goes. Emily is just happy to keep the toy mess in one room that glad that James can play in the next room while she prepares dinner.

Buster is getting much better at signing and we are excited to begin a baby signing class this month. A few weeks ago, Emily was helping James eat lunch and he kept making the sign for airplane. She kept looking out the glass doors and around the room trying to figure out why he was signing “airplane.” After a couple of minutes, Emily realized that James wanted her to “zoom” the food into his mouth like an airplane… something she does during many meals, but had failed to do during that one. Once she began “zooming”, James was content to eat his lunch. What a silly kid!

Christmas Slackers

We slacked off in November and are late with this month’s update. Although we do have a legitimate excuse for this month – WE ALL GOT SICK! In November we were extremely busy traveling and studying.

We traveled to Detroit for Thankgiving to take Bimmy’s dreaded board exam and we were also able to hang out with Mike, Sarah, Roo, Alisa, and company so it was a two-fer. Bim was in full freak-out mode. Jay’s favorite memory (great fodder for future teasing) was the night before the exam when Bim tried the last batch of practice tests and performed dismally. She kept asking Jay (only half-kidding) if he’d still love her if she didn’t pass the exam. Those who know Bim well should find this story pretty funny. Considering the 3 months of study, lousy mom-cooked dinners, and pathetic social calendar, not to mention the price of plane tickets, the exorbitant cost of the exam, Bim still maintains that the question was a fair one.

She doomed and gloomed all the way to the testing center and of course passed. For those that didn’t hear, the printer at the center broke down the morning of her exam. So, only the edges of the printout were readable. The sheet said, “Congratulations, you have…” Mike kept teasing Bim that the sentence concluded with “…completed the test.” However, Bim was confident that she passed because of the “Congratulations” and because the exam ended up being much easier than the practice tests from the night before.

We received the official scores in the mail a couple weeks later, and Bim performed just fine… although I’m sure some of you can guess what she said when she saw that she earned less than a perfect score. It’s probably okay that Bim pushes herself to do better, but Jay thinks (rightfully so) that she is ridiculous sometimes. So, hooray! Bim is now officially a Board Certified Pediatric Nurse Practitioner and a heck of a wife and mom.

During December we decompressed from studying and prepared for the holidays. We got our Christmas tree up a full 2 weeks before Christmas, and (if all goes well) we should have it down by the end of January. (This is a big improvement compared to last year.) Shortly after returning from Detroit, we learned that our church congregation (the international, English-speaking ward) would be dissolved at the end of 2008. Now we’ll attend services in the Brussels First Ward – with folks who speak French. We look forward to the challenges that a new group of people will bring. Struggling with communication will definitely be humbling and will hopefully bring us closer together. We will miss the other half of our old congregation that will go to the Brussels Second Ward in downtown Brussels.

We went on a festive trip to Bruges and went to an Ice Festival (As a sidenote, the lady on the internet site is scary! But she wasn’t there – whew!). It turned out to be very cool (in more ways than one) - a whole ice maze filled with various ice sculptures with a Harry-Potteresque/ wizarding theme. A giant ice slide ended the maze so Jay and James went down it – James liked it since his bum didn’t have to touch the ice.

Christmas Day was fun. We opened lots of toys (James was spoiled), played Wii Super Mario Cart, and ate Christmas dinner with our neighbors and friends (the Harrisons).

We celebrated New Years in Vienna, Austria. We were there for 4 days, but struggled with illness and frigid weather the whole time. Fortunately, the company was great. We stayed with some friends, the Petersens, who went with us to Italy last summer.

Since temperatures turned out to be -4 Celsius, we didn’t do much besides walk around downtown Vienna. All of Europe is experiencing very cold weather right now and we are not used to it…especially not James. We also visited a Hapsburg Palace, Schoenbrunn that turned out to be very lovely and interesting. The cool thing about Vienna (besides that fact that everything is called “Wiener”) is that they have no restrictions on fireworks – it’s like the one thing Austrian’s go nuts over. So everyone buys big fireworks (not like 4th of July Home fireworks – BETTER) that shoot up in the air. The embassy hosted a party in a building downtown, so we went and welcomed the New Year with tons of fireworks 360 degrees around. It was cool.

Just a few words about James… He has been weaned since mid-December…yay! He weighs almost 22 pounds now, has a cute protuberant toddler belly, and is busy and talkative. We don’t understand much of Buster’s babble. The only understandable words so far are “hi”, “mama”, “more”, “uh-oh”, “arf-arf” (which means doggy), and an occasional “aaa duh” (all done) and “dink” (drink). James has also learned some sign language words which he uses sporadically (milk, drink, all done, airplane). He is a speedy walker and gets into trouble very quickly when his mom has her back turned. Fortunate for him, James has a cute impish grin and gives really great hugs, so we can’t help but forgive him. He has more teeth (eight) and sports what Jay calls a white-blonde baby mullet. Buster liked Christmas, especially undecorating the tree and tearing open wrapping paper.

Buster has been a trouper. We have schlepped him all over during the past 3 months and we are so grateful that he is a pleasant travel companion. During our most recent visit to Vienna, we were all congested and miserable on the flight back to Belgium. James was starting to develop a fever. Even so, his parents probably fussed more than he did.

We hope you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Come visit us in 2009!