Today I Wore Jeans

I am having the most unusual day.  It's a little after noon.  I've just pulled a casserole out of the oven.  The laundry is folded and the floors have been swept.  The dishwasher is running.  The baby is napping, the big boy is at preschool, I have a warm cup of tea in front of me and a pumpkin candle is burning on the counter.  Things feel... alright.  It's the closest to calm and content I've felt in a long, long time.  There is so so so much more to do.  But for right now, at this moment, I have the rare sense that I have accomplished enough.  And to top it all off, the weather seems to finally be giving us a little break from the heat.  I wore jeans today, and didn't regret it!      

The kids don't stop.  This, I'm pretty sure, is fairly normal.  We have a 2.5 year old and an (almost) 8 month old.  The little one has already taken a few steps, and is fast working on her walking skills.  She's everywhere all the time and there is nothing I can do to contain her.  The 2.5 yr old thinks he's 14 and runs the house.  He's independent, head-strong, stubborn, defiant, energetic, and clever.  He does his best to outsmart us every day, and most days does a respectable job of it.  I also can't remember the last time our family went more than a week without someone being sick.  We keep getting dragged down by viruses, colds, tummy bugs, ear infections, fevers, coughs, etc.  While we are thankful that it's never anything serious (despite a couple of good scares), it's very tiring, and often difficult not to let it bring us down mentally as well as physically.  As if little kids aren't hard enough, we seem to have had a long lasting bout of bad luck in the health department.  It's been exhausting and frustrating.  I know little kids get sick a lot, but it really does feel excessive, plus the adults in the house keep getting it too - literally every time!

We also bought a house in July.  So this makes 3 moves in 5 years for us.  I do believe we'll stay put for a while now!  I've had enough packing and unpacking and organizing and reorganizing.  We are thrilled to have found a home in a wonderful neighborhood in the little city of Fulshear, Texas.  I sure never thought I'd end up here!  After nearly 3 years in inner-city Montpellier, France, Texan surburbia has been a shock to our systems.  But we are slowly figuring it out and getting the hang of it.  I miss France nearly every day.  And not just because of the wine and cheese!  Although I do miss the wine and cheese... But I also miss the weather.  Texas is so very hot.  I think it's hotter than it was before we moved away.  I miss walking the streets.  I miss long, four-course dinners on terraces.  I even miss struggling through the French language on a daily basis, even though I often hated it when we were there.  I miss traveling and seeing the world.  I miss the view from our window overlooking a large, old, beautiful building.  I miss JR's nursery and the sweet ladies that cared for him every day.  But of course, I missed Texas when we were gone, and this is a much better fit for us right now.

We are ready for some normal, average, somewhat boring sounding but really actually fun life.  Weekends with friends watching football and more holiday parties than we can fit into our calendar.  Spending time catching up with old friends as well as making new ones.  We need more mornings in sweat pants without feeling guilty about it.  And maybe we'll even fit in a little time for personal hobbies between diaper changes, constant laundry, and late night work meetings.  The Huguet House is slowing down for a little while, and it's a refreshing change.  I often long for our days of jet-setting and living out of suitcases, but that will come again later.  Right now, you can find us eagerly awaiting sweater weather and cooking up giant pots of gumbo in our new home at

5703 Trinity Bluff Ct.

Fulshear, TX 77441

         


          

Life Lately: Settling In To Katy, Texas

Four months back.  That's it?  It feels like much, much longer.  In fact, it almost feels like we never left.  Not that life is the same, it's not at all!  We are in a different house, a different neighborhood, different jobs, our family looks different, and yet, the fact that we just spent three years living in France, seems very surreal.  It's hard to believe we did that, and it's hard to believe it's over.  And now, it's back to American life and culture more or less as we left it.

We are slowly settling into our new house and new lives, much slower than I'd like in fact.  But then I have to remind myself, it's only been 4 months!  We arrived in Texas at the end of June, spent two weeks in a hotel, and then 2 more weeks waiting on our shipment of furniture and goods to arrive.  So really, the first month hardly counts.  And since then we've been in and out of town a lot, visiting family while we can still travel, using our free weekends furniture and baby shopping in order to slowly fill this big new house, and of course, watching football!

"Helping" unpack

Splash pad with cousins

I spent weeks searching for a suitable preschool for JR, only to come up empty handed (every single one around here has a wait list, and he's on them), so we fill our days running errands, exploring playgrounds, and searching for exciting things to keep our social butterfly occupied.  He has started swim lessons, and absolutely adores them.  He's not very good at most of the training exercises, but he is almost always the happiest baby in the pool.  In general, he's too busy smiling and giggling to learn how to blow bubbles or close his mouth under water, but he'll get it eventually.  For now, I'm learning lots of tricks for handling babies in pools, and it's a great Monday morning activity for us.  As it turns out, anything involving water is a big hit with this boy.  If we find ourselves with an empty afternoon,  we almost always end up playing in the sprinkler in the backyard:

And seeing as Houston only recently got the memo about fall, this setup easily lasted us through mid-October.

Settling in has been a frustratingly slow process.  Moving internationally means changing nearly everything, and all those little details add up.  For the first couple of months, we felt buried in paperwork: expense reports, ID cards, utility bills, medical insurance (sore subject for us after experiencing the French system), 401K, vaccination schedules, and many other little things that all seems to take an hour or two each to sort out.  Then there's the fact that we went from a small two bedroom apartment, to a big four bedroom house.  Not that I'm complaining!  Living conditions in France were one of the biggest frustrations we had in our time there.  Our apartment was small, and not all that nice.  Organizing was impossible, especially once JR joined us and the whole place exploded with baby gear, and it was incredibly frustrating to feel like I couldn't get a grip on things.  But it's the price you pay for inner-city living, and we sure did love being able to walk into town every day.  Now though, space is easy to come by.  Which means I have no excuse for poor housekeeping!  So a lot of time has gone into furniture shopping, sorting through boxes of things and getting rid of stuff (this is usually a pre-move activity, but we did it after), and figuring out what to do with all of this space.  We've made a lot of progress, but still have a long way to go.  In reality though, this house isn't it for us.  We are renting right now, while we get to know the area and different neighborhoods, and plan to buy next summer.  I already feel like we have one foot out the door, and decorating hardly seems worth it.  

It's good to be back.  We know that Katy is the right place for us right now, and there is a comforting reassurance that comes with knowing your lives are moving in the right direction.  France was good for us for a while, but as our family continues to grow, we need to be back in a place where we feel we can provide the type of life and upbringing that we have in mind for our children.  The future still feels very blurry.  We aren't sure how long we want to stay here, where we might want to go next, or what might be in store career-wise, but for right now, and most likely the next few years, Katy, Texas will make a great home base for The Huguet House.

Come visit anytime!

The Huguets

5039 Big Meadow Ln.

Katy, TX 77494

Moving Woes

Moving is tough.  Down the street, to a new city, or to a new country, it's a lot of hard work.  I planned and I planned, I researched and I prepared, I made lists and I checked them off, I set up a master calendar with all our appointments and deadlines, and I felt good pretty good about it all.  France is officially behind us, and in retrospect, I did well!  I didn't miss many details, I set out a good timeline, and I kept all of our communications and contacts well organized.

But sometimes it just doesn't matter, and this move felt like one of those times.  I was prepared, it should have all gone smoothly, but it didn't.  Everyone excepts a few hiccups, if you don't leave some wiggle room in your schedule for unexpected delays and last minute tasks, you are setting yourself up for failure.  That wasn't the case for us though.  We started early and worked daily to make sure we stayed ahead of schedule.   And still, everyday seemed to bring a new crisis.  By this point, it's starting to feel like someone is watching travel reservations for our names to come up so they can start throwing ninja blades in our path every few hours and see if we manage to dodge them all.  

Sometimes it's big things, and sometimes little things.  So here's a little taste of what we've been working with over the past 15 days.  I think things really started getting rough while we were attempting to enjoy one last holiday in Italy.  Everything was settled before we left.  All the reservations and appointments were made, both for the vacation and the move, and there were exactly enough days to do everything we needed when we got back without stressing or having to over work ourselves.  Then about halfway through our trip, we get a notification from EasyJet (the most un-easy airline I've ever flown) saying our flight back to France had been cancelled.  Twice I've flown with EasyJet, and twice, they have left me stranded in cities overnight.  There wasn't another reasonable way back to France; we resigned ourselves to an extra night in Rome.  I know it doesn't sound so horrible, but we really needed to get back and get going on moving tasks, and more than that, we were ready to get home.  We had only three days between vacation and the arrival of movers, and EasyJet took one of them.  

We finally made it back to France, a good 24 hours behind schedule, but ready to get moving.  We had a two hour drive from the Marseille airport back to Montpellier.  About half way through the drive, we get another unfortunate surprise.  The little car that has served us reliably for over two years, that we had checked out and inspected and prepped to sell the DAY BEFORE we left for Italy, had an engine light come on.  Actually it was two engine lights.  So now not only have we lost an entire day, we have an extra problem to deal with, and kind of a big one.  A car isn't like a coffee pot, you can't just dump it in the trash if there isn't time to sell it properly.  We also needed the car.  We had a week in temporary housing, and the only way back and forth between the apartment where we had work to finish up and the place we were sleeping at night was the car.  There was no way I could give it up for even one day, I had to have it!  We had movers coming in 48 hours, and that had to be the priority; we ignored the car problems.  The next day, one of the lights went off as mysteriously and suddenly as it came on.  We informed the buyer of the situation, and told him we probably wouldn't have time to get it looked at before we left, but he wanted the car anyway.  We kept driving it, and kept ignoring the engine light, and the next day, the second light went off too.  Two days of stresses and worry, and the problem worked itself out (at least as far as I know, hopefully the new owner didn't break down on the side of the road the next day). 

So we got back from vacation a bit more stressed and irritated than we had hoped, but ready to get to work.  We spent the next two days sorting clothes and packing suitcases and trying to decide what is crucial to our lives for the next six or so weeks, when we are hoping to receive our sea shipment.  The movers showed up bright and early the morning of the 18th.  So early in fact, we had to rush to change out of our pajamas!  Have you ever heard of anything starting in France at the hour of 8:30 A.M.??  We weren't really prepared for them, we still had shelves on the walls that needed to be taken down and dirty laundry I rushed to finish, but we managed it in the end.  We were all really impressed that the moving company sent a team of four hardworking, efficient men to get the job done in only a day and a half.  The packing and loading went smoothly, and then it was straight to work on tearing out the entire kitchen, down to the very last screw in the wall, and repainting JR's room from blue back to white.  We had reserved the majority of Saturday and Sunday to spend at the apartment taking care of these jobs as well as any other minor repairs.  

That's when Saturday morning threw us another curve ball.  JR woke up with a 102.5 fever.  Five days away from an international move, and the baby gets sick.  By this point, we were all stressing a little bit about the amount of work that needed to be done, and a sick baby was a worry we did not need.  We gave him Tylenol for the fever and tried to keep him cool in non-air conditioned summer heat, and by Monday morning he seemed more or less back to normal. But then Tuesday morning the vomit came.  Luckily (this word feels like a stretch) it didn't last long and he was all better by Wednesday.  Just in time really, because we left on Thursday!

So Thursday came.  We scheduled our flights over two days to make the journey easier on us all.  To do it in one big stretch, you have to wake up at 4:00 AM to catch the 6:00 flight out of Montpellier, then hang out in Paris for a few hours before the 9 1/2 hour flight to Houston.  Because we are traveling with both a baby and a dog, we split it up and overnighted in Paris.  So Thursday should have been easy, all we had to do was to get to Paris!  We reserved a big taxi van to take us and our 8 suitcases from our temporary apartment to the airport, about a 10 minute drive.  Without warning, all of the taxi drivers in Montpellier decided to go on strike.  Not only were they refusing to work, they were parking their taxis in the road, blocking the way to the airport.  Why?  In protest of uber, which I'm pretty sure doesn't even exist in Montpellier yet.  There was literally no way to get a car in.  The only option was the public bus from the city, meaning we would have to get a ride 30 minutes into the city, then take a bus with all of our luggage 30 minutes back down to the airport.  And we found this out about 3 hours before our flight.  Panic ensued.  We went from on top of things to scrambling to figure out another plan, fast.  Fortunately, we have some great friends and colleagues in Montpellier that were willing to drop what they were doing and help us.  We wouldn't have made it otherwise.  It also turned out that every few hours, the taxi drivers cleared the road for about 15 minutes and let some cars through.  And, again if you can call it lucky, we got the timing exactly right.  The taxis pulled around the curve right behind us, another 15 seconds and we wouldn't have made it in, but we did.  We were spared the trip into the city and the bus ride back down the airport, which would have greatly jeopardized our chances of being at the airport in time for our flight.  We still had to work around our taxi driver not showing up, and it sent our stress and frustration levels through the roof, but in the end, it could have been a lot worse.  Thursday turned up after that though.  We got JR his own seat for the flights and brought his car seat with us, and it was an entirely different experience.  My horrible, squirmy, screaming flyer turned into an angel, and both he and the dog snoozed the entire hour and ten minute flight.  It's been a long time since Kerry and I were on a plane together and had the luxury of sitting back, relaxing, and talking!  

Friday: new day, new crisis.  Up early, full of anticipation and excitement, and eager to get going, we arrived at the airport two hours before the flight, with no bags to check and boarding passes in hand.  A great start!  The boarding passes said terminal 2E, so off we went, ready to get through security and do a little last minute Paris airport souvenir shopping.  We reached the entrance for terminal 2E, and found a large crowd standing around looking confused.  Eventually word got back to us that someone had left an unattended bag in the terminal, and everyone had to clear out while it was being "destroyed".  It was a mess!  One airport employee informed us that there was another way around, we could walk about 30 minutes to terminal 2F and then make our way back to the gates in 2E, but it was such a long way around, she recommended we stay put.  So we waited in the crowd.  For an entire hour.  International flights start boarding nearly an hour before take off, so as we watched the minutes tick past, we were getting more and more anxious to get going.  Finally, the crowd slowly starts moving.  We follow in line, get up to the terminal entrance and check the board to make sure there were no changes for our flight.  Except, our flight wasn't up there.  Not at all.  Our jaws dropped in disbelief and disappointment.  Not feeling so good about things anymore.  We now have only one hour to get through security, passport control and find our gate.    We wasted no time in asking an employee for help.  She scanned our boarding passes and replied with, "oh, the terminal has changed, you'll need to head (guess where) to 2F!!! And also, there seems to be a problem with one of the passes, so you'll need to stop at the ticketing counter to sort it out."  We didn't have time for any of this!  We might as well have showed up 50 minutes before our flight, because we wasted over an hour waiting on nothing.  We took off.  The quickest way to 2F was through the parking garage, and we ran.  With a baby dangling from our arms and a tiny dog in a cage bouncing by my side, we moved as quickly as possible, and arrived sweaty and thirsty at terminal 2F.  They let us go through the employee security line when we explained what had happened, which was a big help, but still only left us about 40 minutes to get through passport control and find the gate.  We hoofed it, all the way through terminal F, following the signs to gate L46, which took a good 15 minutes because it turns out, the L gates are right next to terminal 2E, so we pretty much ended up back where we started.  Finally, L46 was in sight.  Boarding had already started, but there was still a decent crowd lined up, so we could relax a little.  Now we just had to hope that whatever the "issue" was with one of the boarding passes wouldn't be a big deal.  We queued up and handed over our tickets.  The problem?  Upgraded to business class!! It was a great surprise after a stressful morning of running around, and a nice way top off our European adventure.  

It's been pretty smooth sailing since then.  The flight went well.  The dog didn't make a peep, and JR was decently behaved as well.  

We had other minor issues pop up during the move process, these were just some of the biggest ones. We did manage to enjoy a few afternoons on the beach as well before we left, so it definitely wasn't all bad.  But it sure did feel like we had more than our fair share of difficulties.  We are safely here though, and hoping the worst of it is behind us.  There is still a lot of work to do on this side, but we are looking forward to settling in and staying put for a while!

A few snapshots from the journey:

Packing!  What should we label this box?

Checking in two carts full of luggage, sending it to Houston!

Minnie's set up for the flights.  I felt bad leaving her in that little cage for so long, but she didn't seem to mind at all!

The boys checking out the business class amenities.  JR particularly loved playing with all of the buttons for the lights, seat recliners, and entertainment system.  

No More Daily Baguettes? - The Huguet House Is Coming Home!

I don't make much time for writing these days. Maybe it's toddlerhood in full effect, or maybe it's me finally prioritizing french studies, or maybe we've just been too distracted running around Europe while we are still over here. 

For months now, we've been working on a route home. It's not so simple though; it's been a lot of discussions and meetings and planning, but finally, it's happening! Early this year, we were offered a chance to move to Palo Alto, California. It wasn't what we were hoping for, but it would get us back the U.S., and sometimes a little faith can take you a long way in life, so if this is where life was leading us, we were up for it. We signed the papers, met with movers, researched neighborhoods, started looking at housing and daycares, and were ready to book flights, when - Hold On!! Somebody somewhere changed their mind. California was still ours if we wanted it, but there is a new opportunity if we'd prefer, in Katy, Texas! Of course we happily accepted the change, and quickly got to work on the new moving arrangements. We had to start back at square one, but it was a small price to pay to be going home. 

Tonight is our last night in Europe. Tomorrow we fly to Houston, and this chapter of our lives comes to an end.  The last few weeks have been jam packed and filled with the usual moving stresses and aggravations, mixed in with a few French quirks to make it extra special (taxi strike anyone?). It's hard to believe almost three years have gone by since we left Texas, and that this crazy adventure is wrapping up. Tonight we are in Paris, resting up for ten hours on a plane with a 16 month old ball of energy and a tiny, old dog. If feels good to have made it this far, but there is still a lot of work to do. We'll be house hunting immediately, closely followed by car shopping (you mean we can't share a car anymore?), and then eagerly awaiting shipments from both our storage unit in Houston as well as our sea shipment from France. And that's just the big stuff. 

While Montpellier holds many things near and dear to us, and we do feel as if we are leaving a part of our lives behind, we couldn't be happier to be coming home. It's what's right for our little family right now, and we can't wait to get settled back into American life and culture. 

I've had a lot of requests to write about the moving experience, and I can tell you, we haven't even left Europe yet and we've got plenty of stories! So perhaps if JR behaves on the plane tomorrow, I'll get a chance to detail some of our recent experiences. But for tonight, we are praying for a good nights sleep and smooth and safe flight tomorrow!

We'll see ya in Texas!!!

Munich

Upon our arrival in Munich, it quickly became apparent that my generous little JR had shared his nasty flu virus with me.  What a sweetie.  So while we had big plans of Christmas market strolling and castle touring, we had to cut a few things out in exchange for a bit of extra rest and relaxation at the hotel.  We'll have to catch you next time, Neuschwanstein!

Travel and Leisure included Munich in it's list of "Best Places to Spend Christmas."  But after spending three days there in the thick of holiday season, I have to disagree.  Perhaps I was clouded in flu fog, or maybe it's that we were there on the Saturday before Christmas when crowds were at their heaviest, but the city just didn't feel very... festive.  Don't get me wrong, it had it's moments!  And there were some impressive efforts made, most notably the enormous Christmas tree rivaling that of Rockefeller Center, and the daily concerts performed from the balcony of the town hall.  But the market itself offered little variety in the shopping.  Half of the booths seemed to be selling Christmas ornaments made from straw or thin wood.  We did snag a few good finds, but the only reason it took us more than an hour to see all the booths is that the crowds were so thick that it was nearly impossible to navigate the aisles, especially with a stroller.  

Town Hall at night

Giant Christmas tree at the Christmas market

JR thought these things were really neat...

Christmas market during the day

Munich actually had several Christmas markets, many of them small and focused on a certain theme.  Aside from the main market, we also made it to Nativity market, where you can buy yourself Baby Jesus's by the euro, and the children's Christmas market.  The children's market had Christmas scenes on display for the little ones' entertainment, a few more booths selling straw ornaments, and lots of food and drink options.  One stall in particular gave off the irresistible smell of baking cinnamon and sugar, and after walking the small circle of the market a few times, we gave in and bought ourselves a chimney cake.  Dough is wrapped around a wooden stick and baked, then quickly removed and packaged in a plastic bag to be sold warm.  I thought they were dubbed chimney cakes because of the vertical baking apparatus used to cook the dough, but it is actually for a different reason.  We found a table and ripped ours open to discover... a steaming chimney!

Get it?  It's a chimney!

Children's Christmas market

That evening we got a sitter for JR and attended The Nutcracker Ballet put on by the St. Petersburg Festival Ballet.  By this time the flu was really kicking in, and I was grateful that our evening out required little activity and allowed me to rest my head on my handsome date's shoulder for the entire evening.  We have seen the Nutcracker many times now, but this variation was a new one for us.  Even I had to consult the program to see what exactly was happening.  Did you know that in the Russian version, Marie (or as I know her, Clara) gets married to the Prince and they have a wedding ceremony?  We also didn't see a Sugar Plum Fairy.  It is always interesting to see different culture's takes on familiar traditions.

Another necessary stop on the Munich agenda is the Hofbrauhaus, a traditional, historic, somewhat cheesy but undoubtedly entertaining German beer house, and it did not disappoint!  We went for an early lunch, figuring it would be less crowded and that bringing a baby to beer house in the evening probably wasn't a great idea.  We ordered sausages and schnitzel and two of the biggest beers we've ever seen... what is the point of mugs this huge??  Mine was warm by the time I got half way through it.  And no, I didn't finish it - the jumbo beer defeated me.  It was an enjoyable lunch, with live German music playing in the middle hall and countless waiters in costume zipping around effortlessly carrying about a dozen beers in each hand.  And they never seemed to spill even a single drop!  I would imagine that the Hofbrauhaus really comes alive at night, with all the tables filled to standing room only and volume levels through the roof.  A tourist attraction yes, but it seemed there were plenty of locals around as well, and I expect it is one of the more entertaining places to be in Munich on a Saturday night.

Making our selections...

Very excited about the huge beers!

Bar at the Hofbrauhaus 

 Munich is a big city, and that's exactly what it felt like.  It's also a German city, but that felt more like a detail than a defining factor.  The city center was full of major chain shopping and large, uninteresting buildings housing businesses and large department stores.  Munich didn't charm us, but I believe that it could.  We stuck to the city center, and while that works perfectly fine for a number of large cities (Paris, New York, Barcelona, London), I suspect it takes a little more work to find what makes Munich special.  If I ever do find myself in Munich again, I won't rely on wandering the city and enjoying it's unique atmosphere.  Instead I might look for an informative tour, venture out to some of its parks, and explore some of the smaller neighborhoods for shopping and dining.  I know Munich has more to offer than what we saw in only three days, next time I'll make sure to find it!          

Nurnberger Christkindlesmarkt

I've had my sights set on Germany for a while.  Two years ago, I knew we'd be visiting the German Christmas markets before our time here was up.  This was the year for it!  What I didn't see coming was Vienna, Austria - a fantastic surprise, and we topped it all off with Amsterdam.  Flexibility is a great thing to have when traveling, and for this trip, we went where the winds took us...

I couldn't decide between Nuremberg and Munich.  After many days debate and research, I quit debating between the two and settled on both!  Nuremberg's Christmas market is well known as one of the best in Europe, and Munich had a showing of The Nutcracker Ballet that I simply couldn't pass up.  The other two cities were chosen in close collaboration with our traveling companion - not only did I get to spend Christmas in some incredible cities, I got to do it with my best friend!  Robin joined us for Christmas in Vienna and then we all hopped over to Amsterdam, and I got her all to myself for 8 entire days!

So here is what we got up to during our two week venture through northern Europe:

We had a bit of a rough start.  Three days before we left, JR woke up with a 104 degree fever.  We panicked.  About three months ago I had a conversation with someone who's daughter had a fever so high as a baby (110) that she had permanent brain damage and now lives in a home where she can have 24 hour assistance.  I have been haunted by this story ever since, and when JR's fever registered at 104, it was all I could think about.  We immediately shot some Tylenol down his throat and rushed him to the emergency clinic.  The very kind pediatrician on duty checked him over, assured us it was not that uncommon for babies to have fevers that high, and held back giggles at the extremely anxious first time parents standing in front of her.  She was confident that it was just a virus, likely the flu, and sent us home for lots of cuddles, rest, and juice, and said to keep the Tylenol flowing.  We weren't entirely sure he would be in shape for vacation in only three days time, and were very nervous we would have to change our plans.  But when it came time to go, the fever was low enough that we packed ourselves up anyway, assuming he was on the mend and just needed another day or so to get himself back to normal.  In the end, that assumption was more or less correct. But before I could get my sweet little boy back, we had to endure hours of screaming on the train (locked in the bathroom - it was that bad), and two nights of coughing and crying fits that lasted hours, along with a handful of unusually early mornings (6 AM?!) while he sorted out his schedule again.  We made it through, but it wasn't a very relaxing start to the vacation.  Good thing Nuremberg isn't full of tourist attractions, and all we really had to do was spend two days strolling the aisles of the Christmas market and wandering the city.

Sick, grumpy baby aside, Nuremberg felt like being in a movie.  The main Christmas market was compact, but plentiful.  It took us an entire day to see all of the stalls; each one was so full of treasures I could have browsed for days.  The spicy scent of gluhwein tempts you from two streets away, beautifully decorated cookies hang so thickly from the awnings that you can barely see the people working the booths behind them, and around every corner there is someone cooking up something deliciously greasy and sausage-y,  And then there is the backdrop: a magnificent church dating from the 1300's towers over the market, complete with a working glockenspiel and flanked by Christmas trees.  In front of the church are choir stands, where every few hours you can hear festive tunes put on by local choirs and bands.  On the other side of the square is the impressive Schonner Brunnun, or Beautiful Fountain.  The masterpiece is in fact so tall and unusually designed, that if you didn't know better, you may not suspect it to be a fountain at all.  Also, we didn't see any water running through it so that was kind of a major element missing.  I assume it was turned off because of the cold weather?  The church bells chime hourly, and while the bells are singing their song, and the sun is quickly fading at the early hour of 5:00 P.M. and the decorated booths begin to glow and twinkle, the scenario seems impossibly perfect.  Of course that's when the sick baby wakes up from his snooze in the stroller and reminds us that it is in fact, real life!

Some of the Christmas market highlights:

Christmas market stalls in front of the church

Cookies!!!

Vats full of steaming hot gluhwien

Close up of the glockenspiel

Beautiful Fountain at night

These "prune men" have been a Nuremberg tradition for decades.  Likely invented by a father looking for something to delight his children, these little characters are now widely popular throughout the city and of course, with tourists!  

The majority of the market is lined up in neat rows in one of the town squares, but it also seemed to go on and on throughout the streets of the city.  At nearly every turn we spotted more red and white striped tents, mostly selling sausage sandwiches, cookies, and gluhwein, but every now and then surprising us with something yet unseen.  And just when we thought we had seen it all, we stumbled upon the children's Christmas market.  Less booths for shopping, but a market in it own.  Here is where we found Santa and an angel ready to hear the little one's Christmas wishes, numerous small kiddie rides, baked cheesy pretzels, and a playroom full of toy trains and legos.  But the highlight was easily the giant carousel in the center.  It looked straight from the pages of a fairy tale.  Intricately detailed, whimsical, and glowing in golden light, I could have started at it for hours.  But it was quite cold out, so we settled for a quick spin with JR and called it a night.  It was his first carousel ride, and he loved it!            

We did pull ourselves away from the Christmas market for a few hours to see what else Nuremberg has to offer.  We explored the outside of the old castle, but skipped the tour because really, we've done so many of them.  The inner city was very typically and beautifully German.  Skinny cobblestone streets that shone with fresh rain showers lined with tall, attractive buildings.

Walking the streets of Nuremberg

JR selfie

Kaiserburg Castle

The Nuremberg Christkindlesmarkt certainly lived up to it's legendary reputation.  For Christmas market fanatics (such as myself!) it is a must-see!                      

    

October / November / December

This pretty much sums it up:

Not pictured: 2 empty bottles of infant Doliprane (Tylenol), 1 box of infant nausea medication

JR: 2 colds, the flu, 1 stomach virus, bronchitis
Delaney: 2 colds, the flu, 1 stomach virus
Kerry: 2 sick family members

2 emergency room visits
3 visits to the pediatrician
At least a dozen runs to the pharmacy

Here's to a healthy new year!