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.