Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Rothenburg is a walled city which dates back to medieval times. The streets are narrow, cobbled, and because of the unusual amounts of snow we've received, slushy. We only spent one night and all of us wished we could stay longer because the city has so much to discover. Going down to breakfast in the morning had us wondering if we'd wandered into a Japanese tourist convention, and our hostess informed us that January and February are the most popular months for Japanese tours. Why?

Berliners

For Fasching (carnival, Mardi Gras) it is traditional to eat berliners. Sadly, they weren't anything special. But, since duty required us to eat them we dutifully partook!

Creating aliens

Our dishwasher busted, but not before creating interesting abstract art out of our plastic pitcher. Our new dishwasher makes normal, boring dishwasher sounds. Does this mean it's going to last?

Toofus

Red Fraggle looses her first tooth!

snow days

We've had one 2 hour delay of school, two early release days and one day of school canceled because there was supposed to be freezing rain. No freeze, but lots of rain that day. This is what the back door looks like in our house, only usually there are more gloves, hats and snow suits thrown on the boots.

What Ben has been doing

Broken, or is Gumper just messing with us?

The functional lives of appliances in our home is not always very long. If you consider the fact that six kids put a lot of wear and tear on 'stuff' this is not surprising at all. Add in a husband who doesn't always remember to switch the voltages and you have even more destruction.

Recently the portable DVD player quit working. I drained and re-charged the battery, tried different discs, turned it on and off and finally gave up on it when only sound, no video, emerged. It was our only currently functioning DVD player (the big box doesn't seem to like running on a converter) so I made the decision that it had to be replaced. Want to know what happened the day I received the email from Amazon telling me that our new portable DVD player had been shipped?
I guess we're just doing our part to help the economy?