Hot Summer in the City - Week 1

Hard to believe we're already back from our long awaited summer trip to Chicago, but the good memories we carry with us will keep us content until Christmas. I'm especially grateful we were able to meet up with Ellie in Detroit and Aim on her business trip back to Chi-town. Only Mike got away but it's now on me to make it to SUNY-Buffalo, where my man is going to be teaching and starting the Yu Lab this fall...fantastic!

In my campaign to sell Chicago to Jochen we spent quite a lot of time exploring the city. We baked on Oak Street Beach, rode bikes along the shore up to Lincoln Park, caught the fireworks on Venetian Night, and wished we had our camera with us when they served us a pitcher of Weizenbier - that had Jochen rolling on the floor . One of my most favorite spots is still Millenium Park and it's only with the greatest editing restraint that I include just two pics...

Another highlight of the trip was meeting up with Leanne and Niki, two kindred souls who never let me go, and gathering our families around us for the first time. Despite the kids and husbands, being with each other made me feel nearly 16 again.

Pig was, on the whole, unfazed by the new faces, and I dare say he remembers a lot from his last visit. He took to his A-Kong right away, and in short order had the run of the house at my parents. I'm really happy he got to see Aim this time, as she invested so much of her time for him in his first year I don't want him to lose contact. We miss her all the way in California but had a great afternoon playing in the park near her granny's house.
Next week - Door County getaway

Travel Season Begins

Since the last post we've been waiting for summer to arrive in Germany. Back when it was still dreary and rainy Oma and Opa visited us and here are the Wittkamp men (Hans, Jochen and Mini Me) all hard at work doing taxes or account reconciliations or whatnot.

Pig's travel season started early this year, and kicked off with a stay at the Frankfurt grands in early May after cheering Papi on for the Mainzer Marathon.

Second half of the month found us in Munich, where we happened upon the annual brewer's fest at the Viktualianmarkt. The free beers started flowing at 11am AFTER the men in Lederhosen danced around with wreaths...ah, where would German stereotypes be without Bavaria! Pig loved the bustle, the horses, the bells and whistles!

We met up with our favorite well-over-70s couple again in June to head off to the Bavarian Woods, just on the border to the Czech Republic. We did a lot less hiking than intended, due to the heat, the compulsion to catch as many WC games as possible, and sheer laziness. However, the hotel we stayed at was positively idyllic so we enjoyed lolling on the grounds, teaching Pig how to blow dandelion spores (of course he had to take a big bite first) and giving him a flower power makeover!

Escapades

It was always meant in the nicest way (my favorite backhanded qualifier), but back when Pig was just a baby I used to say a dog was way more entertainment for money - but I've changed my mind since - I am LOVING the toddler phase. Yeah, you have to hold the line on crap food by getting good at sneaking chocolate and chips before his eyes, and storage solutions you thought were perfectly sensible are now fair game for havoc. A couple of random pictures this week, only to show how much fun we're having. Jochen started this silly game of giving Piggy his finger to gnaw - was cute back when Pig had one or two teeth, but anyone could see this was a game which could only end in tears...
This other pic - well, somehow all through winter we could never get him to wear a hat, but he seems content with his babuschka....these crazy babies!

Pig is Back!

We've been away for too long, loyal readers! Despite Hsin taking matters into her own hands a few months back and all of you righteously clamouring for updates, work has been pretty hard going since end of last year so the blog fell behind laundry and shut-eye in the long list of priorities, or rather, to-dos. However, as my hours don't seem like they will improve (and commuting to the UK at least once a week now the standard), it's become more important than ever for me to protect my time with the Pig and to try to preserve the sweetness of watching him grow up. Even in this short time away a lot has changed since our Chicago visit. Pig is still his humble self, but he's now quite a refined user of utensils. In fact, we're amazed he hasn't stabbed himself with the fork yet, despite his usual haste to cram food into mouth. On the whole he also manages to convey sticky rice, yogurt, mashed potatoes and other adhesive carbs safely on the spoon from plate to palate. Having said that, no sporks needed for blueberry cake!
Trotting Pig now not only walks, runs, stamps in place like a loco, and plays soccer, he's also climbing anything he can get his hands on. We'll see how safe our balcony is this summer....

Pig is happiest when he has TWO balls in hand...
Finally, a picture from this year's Karneval celebrations. It was fairly lowkey this year for us but we did manage to take Pig for one of the small local parades (where we totally cleaned up - bags of candies and 5 stuffed animals. We figure there's a few more good years ahead until his cuteness expires). We can thank my cousin Jean for the Piglet costume - Pig preened quite a while in front of the mirror, that's how much he liked it. When Jean first told me she bought him this costume I have to admit I regretted not calling him Piglet from the start...wouldn't you have found it more socially acceptable, more adorable perhaps, if I had associated the nickname with the AA Milne classics? In any case, Pig he is and Pig he shall be...until we break ourselves of this bad habit!!

Guest post: Pig in Chicago

Since I have Piggy pics to share, I've decided to briefly hijack this blog in the name of long deprived Pig-watchers everywhere. Everyone was very happy to see Felix over the holidays (oh, yeah, and Yiwen and Jochen, too- but, you know, check the name of the blog) until we discovered that Piggy had no idea how to go downstairs, having grown up in a stairless environment. He would fearlessly (cluelessly) approach and try to descend down the stairs headfirst, and got pretty disgruntled (hah! grunt, pig, get it?) when we kept turning him around to go feet first. After a few days he was a pro at the stairs, but he was unable to apply this new found knowledge to slides.


Piggy has three teeth (or he did at last sighting, more may have emerged), and he gets along quite well with them, especially when you consider that none of them actually approximate (two lower teeth in the middle, then one rebel tooth up and off to his right), making them more decorative than functional. But it gives him a super cute grin.



I think this is a great picture of Piggy and his A-kong. You have to realize that it's taken with my digital camera which has a lag time of, oh, forever. Good for idyllic scenic shots, crappy for squirmy babies. Basically you have to look into the future, predict that Piggy will be doing something adorable 10 seconds from now, and snap.


Finally, me and the Pig enjoying a mutual teeth adoration moment. Of course I get the last picture. My reward for slaving through posting with my 56K modem. Yeah, that's right, it's old school. Anyhow, we're eagerly awaiting the next Pig sighting in the summer, when he is fully bipedal and really ready to take on the town....

Pig is One!!!

Our Piggy is one!!! Hard to believe the year has gone by so quickly. We didn't make a big deal out of his birthday, but in the course of the week there were more than 5 cakes cut and eaten - and Pig made sure he packed away his share.

Thanks to everyone who sent along lovely presents and well wishes. I have more photos to load, but this is as far as I got and if I don't publish it'll be another month before I manage. The phone came from my great friend Aimee who remembers everything we say about the Pig and his obsessions. Both my family and Jochen's thought the phone was the best present he got. Pig thought so, too!!

Sheep is to Cotswolds as Pig is to....

We made it to Victoria and Iain's wedding with an hour to spare, no thanks to British Airways (aka Bloody Aweful). I will spare you the details because in the final count being with our friends was most important. The happy couple beamed their way through the ceremony, the speeches were witty and moving, I got a pic with the Town Crier, and the music commanded all ages to get-down-and-boogy. We'd left the Pig behind in Frankfurt with the intention to live it up, but forgot all about the 11:30pm last call at the bar....is this land of Kate Moss? The party sans alcool ended soon after that, but V&I I hope we continue some time soon in Cologne!!

The next day we drove off to the Cotswolds. It's a lovely piece of countryside, and the towns with their honey stone houses, small shops and High Streets were booming with fall season tourism a nice bustling way. The landscape is wide and open, and owes much of its idyllic nature to the white fluffy floating dots baaing away on the hills. I can especially recommend a stop in Broadway and Bourton on the Water. Our third and fourth days were spent in Bath, which lived up to all expectations. I didn't drag Jochen to the Jane Austen museum, but so enjoyed strolling down Milsom Street and Laura Place and fancying myself pining after an officer that anything more would have left me swooning. Because of Bloody BA we ended up with a much later flight back and Jochen had to get us back to Cologne Monday morning in time to send me to work. Yuck! You know how if you start the week behind you never seem to catch up? I'm glad that week's behind me now.

Because I travel regularly to the UK for work, it usually doesn't come to mind as a vacation destination. Therefore I was very happy to have had the excuse this time to leave London behind to enjoy old pleasures and new: staying in gorgeous country estates, hogging full fry-ups every morning (ok, everytime I come to England I give myself permission to eat badly), chips and more chips, marmite, and last but not least - Su Doku!! The bug has bit badly and we've brought the disease back to Cologne in the form of 2 fiendish volumes of puzzles. Sadly, I finally read I Capture the Castle and fear I would have enjoyed it much more at 17 than now (!) Such is age!

Pig sat the whole thing out, so sorry for the skimpy photo content this time, but below is a preview of the photos we will get from Sinead and Roland's wedding. Sinead's brother in law is a professional photographer and he has kindly taken many pics of us, including the one below:


...our hearts!!!

First Wedding, then Race

Hurray!! Our friends Sinead and Roland got married this past Friday, after a courtship of over 12 years. Sinead and I started a conversation on the train to work two years ago and continue to astound Jochen with our endurance on the phone. Hot topic this year was of course wedding planning in all dimensions, and I'm pleased to say all our conversations led to a perfectly lovely day. The very simpatico Irish-German couple was graced with a gorgeous sunny September day and ended their blowout wedding party at around 5am the next morning. Jochen and I busied ourselves on the dance floor until past midnight, but sensibly went home to get some rest before Pig's 6am reverie. Saturday we were moving rather slowly and I managed to schedule a last minute hair appintment for a much needed cut, but forgot to go get a guidebook for the Cotswolds: Second wedding is this coming Friday in Shropshire and we're meant to make our way down to Bath...thank goodness my husband is a scout and will get us there, map or no map.


The wedding festivities continued Saturday night, but we declined to join the party because we wanted to get up extra early on Sunday to support our friend Frank at the Brückenlauf. Frank is a sports fanatic who regularly finishes among the top 10 at this race (over 6,000 entries). This year he was 7th overall and delivered a 16km time of just seconds over 1hr. The Brückenlauf is a course which takes you across 3 or 4 bridges that span the Rhein, so part of the challenge is the ascent/descent of the stairs leading to the bridges. I did it one year and hated it because I was in the middle of the pack so when you get to the stairs it was so full you can only walk up and not run...as you can see Frank doesn't really know what I'm talking about. Go Frank!!

Piggy loved this action filled weekend. Above pic was taken on our way to meet Frank at the race. Is he not growing so quickly???

Pooped, and it's not the Pig!

I was wrong when I said no late nights for a while...this past weekend Jochen's friend Andreas was in town for a short visit and we ended up going out for dinner and drinks - came home just past 1am but that was enough to leave me exhausted for the start of the week, even with a fairly relaxing Sunday (ok we were enthralled by the election results). So far the postings, if you've noticed, covers mainly our activities on the weekends, and rightly so. What happens during the week can be summed up in four words: wake/work/eat/sleep. Jochen covers a slightly broader spectrum of activities but all in all the underbelly of modern life is trying fruitlessly to construct a perpetual motion machine out of a dual career nuclear household......

The heart of this precision clockwork (?) is, of course, our darling Piggy. He keeps us going with his antics and drooley grins. No new photos this week, but we have some choice shots from the archive - first with my father and one of kids my mom used to babysit from this summer, then one of Felix from the days when he could only push backwards, then finally one before his publicist told him to embrace the papparazzi. Enjoy!

Mountain Pig in the Making

Jochen and I had a rare late Saturday night out this weekend with friends (new babysitter working out great so far) and remembered the next morning at 6:30am why we do this so seldom these days. The option to loll in bed is now a bygone decadence, and whilst I can't wait until Felix is 14 and first stirring at noon, on the whole this is yet another lifestyle change we've come to terms with. Next late night out this month will be for our friends Sinead and Roland's wedding, where I promise to try to last until at least 1am...

In any case, the early start works well with one of our favorite pastimes - hiking. This weekend we joined our old Summit Club alpine group on one of their more modest tours. We sat out last season due to the pregnancy, but sorely missed this crazy group's outings (generally along the lines of 7+ hrs, 25+ km, 1200+ height meters). This time the tour was only 19km, but man, lugging all 12kg of Pig and backpack was no stroll in the park. Jochen and I traded off, but at some steep ascents and descents it was a real challenge to recalibrate my center of gravity. Pig was stellar: never complained during the 6hr tour, took several catnaps, and enjoyed everyone else making a fuss of him. Here we are at one of our stops, the highest railway bridge in Germany.

We also want to make good on the earlier promise: here you have a pic of the Pig with his two new teeth, having just successfully devoured some tasty ants-on-a-stick. We give free rein to his snacking habits, but we don't think tooth decay is a laughing matter. Here is Pig getting a brushdown before bed....

We also mark today's anniversary in our thoughts.

Hush Little Piggy...

I originally wanted to chat about how we haphazardly go about finding Pig's babysitters, but that topic will have to wait another day. I also wrote a whole post already but lost it accidentally (thus the late update) and don't have the heart to begin afore, so I'll get to the point: how is it that class in America can be a risk factor for children on par with history, political strife, absence of resources, geographic remoteness, cultural biases and other converging determinants in countries like Nigeria, Indonesia or Iraq? We *accept* that children in these parts of the world live in jeopardy because there seems to be no simple solution to their problems. But what happened in Louisiana? Don't get me wrong, race is still the biggest handicap to class, and I also understand it's hard to talk class in a nation where both the rich and poor firmly believe they belong somewhere in the middle. But Katrina blew the covers off from the parallel universes in our country, and we're reeling.

Barbara Bush, bless her I-can-say-anything-I-damn-well-like-now (I'm guessing no one's putting money on Jeb) heart sums it up so well when she said, "...and so many of the people in the arena here (in Houston), you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." What WASP candor. Are the fundamentalists praising God for delivering this group out of their own misery?

Pictures of the children, the old and the sick left to fend for themselves in the aftermath were devastating. It sickens me America does not respect the dignity of the poor and the vulnerable. How do you survive an experience where you realized you were simply not worth the effort to rescue?

Everyday I tell the Piggy I love him, and I hope he remains safe, happy and healthy. This is a modest wish that should be granted to every parent.

Short Break from the City

Jochen's parents invited us to meet them for part of their walking holiday, and luckily this was the perfect weekend to be outdoors. We met them noon Saturday in the boonies (ok, near Marburg if that means anything to you non-Germans) and made tours both days before returning to Cologne earlier this evening. Hans and Helga are great hiking companions because of their vast knowledge of plants and trees and insect life. Given the season I had high hopes of engaging them to gather some chanterelles, perhaps even a porcini or two. We did see plenty of mushrooms along the way, but my mother-in-law had to let me down gently each time. This one above (forgot the name) is poisonous and turns purple when you break it open. Good to know nature is partly, if not all, idiot-proof.

Of course, the fact is not lost on us that the invite was rather for the Pig's than our company, but who's complaining when the grands take him for the night, take him for the afternoon so we can go hang out in the sauna? My parents can't wait to have the Pig when we go skiing this winter...we can't, either!

Pig gets a free ride when we go walking, but the minute he's let out of the sack he's all over the place, making tracks. This afternoon he found cruising along the benches so hilarious he kept yelping in triumph and laughing his head off. Here is our petit cochon finding ol' mom, when he should be sniffing for truffles...

Pig in Holy Land

Cologne's big party of the year is nearly over. We kept our distance, but still felt the amazing energy of the 800,000+ visitors to World Youth Day - organised by the wild and crazy Catholic Church. Two years ago when the countdown clock to this weeklong event was erected (no Greeks, these Germans!) I thought it was so cool the organisers wanted put up 70,000 people in private homes...I mean, would this idea fly in Chicago or NYC or anywhere outside Iowa? Two colleagues at work are each hosting 4 people, and in addition to opening up their homes they also lay out breakfast for them every day...at 5am. What we hear is somehow the pilgrims are kept busy daily until midnight. What do they do all this time ???

Well, I didn't track down a schedule, but behind our building there's a church and every night this week the kids have been singing themselves silly or blasting Robbie Williams (I know, I also didn't realize he was Catholic). On the one trip I made into town this week with Pig I did see them dropping off lots of cash and boosting our local economy. All this between bible study-a-thons, I'm sure. So you ask, how does one spot a WYD pilgrim? Stigmatas aside, they carry these terrifying WYD backpacks, or wear wimples or cassocks, or are waving flags proclaiming their places of origin. I know I said earlier I liked the idea of hosting strangers (because I'm all for free lodging), but for those of you who have travelled with me you know I actually don't even like talking to strangers on vacation. It's annoying overhearing people (those younger than I am now, at least) trying to sound cool to each other, and it, like, makes me gag, you know? Or it'll go like this one time in Switzerland when we were in a gondola with 3 other Americans. Upon realizing I come from the US and seem to be familiar with Europe, one old dude asked if I were a stewardess. It was an insulting yet flattering moment...I should have tossed my hair and said yes. The jetsetting glamour that could have been mine!

So since I'm not personally on vacation, on a whim I will talk to strangers visiting Cologne. My good deeds this week were directing some WYDers to the best gelato place in town (it was unsolicited, so stop snickering. I was minding my own business and heard someone ask where they can buy good ice cream. It would have been uncharitable not to speak up) and chatting with this other WYD group from Washington State on our way to market this morning. I wasn't going to, but eveyone on the street ignored this troupe passing by, and it struck me the Germans are not big on small talk, either. So it was up to me, and I must say the girls were taken aback when I piped up. I ended by wishing them favourable weather tonight and they knew already from the last few days they needed every prayer - finale is all of them camping outside Cologne then waking up tomorrow to celebrate Mass with the Pope. If it rains... Woodstock III!

What does this all have to do with the Pig? Nothing, except I had to bait Hsin to read to the end...We actually didn't take out the camera this week, so here's a gratuitous pic from last month.

All Summer in a Day

It's mid August but the rainy season continues in Cologne. A small reprieve came yesterday so we hightailed it to our usual stomping grounds outside the city for a short walk - made shorter and slower because I picked the wrong shoes and had to shuffle along painfully...what a shame. Pig enjoyed the outing immensely, and the topic of the day turned to listing his current likes and dislikes, which we're happy to pass along:


Piggy Loves:

Cars, buses, motorcycles and anything that makes a revving sound. Lights. Bread. Getting tickled. Splashing in his bath. Standing up, jumping around. Dancing with his mommy. Being sung to. Playing with spoons. Banging on the table. Grabbing our glasses. Grabbing mommy's hair from the back (see disheveled hair above)


Piggy Hates:

Fisher-Price Classical Chorus Singing Stars Gym (which I made Hsin drag here from the US and still makes him cry, nearly 5 months after introduction...minor digression, I had no clue what I was doing when I picked this toy from the lineup. I did make the mistake of BELIEVING in the glowing reviews on Amazon. Can anyone tell me if they're for real or do toy makers hire hacks to write "my daughter Ashleighee played with it for hours on end, and we loved the musical medleys"?!!). Getting dressed. Sudden noises (except engines). Babyfood spinach. Getting tired. Being put down on his back. Watching others eat without being offered anything.

Of course, all this may change based on the mammoth discovery made this morning: Pig has spout his first tusk!! Despite valiant efforts we have failed miserably to secure any visual evidence to pass on - you'll have to take our word for now, but rest assured we're already nostalgic for the passing of the toothless grin!

(ok Hsin, happy?)