7 quick takes

1. Hello and happy Monday! I hope you had a nice weekend. We did, although it wasn’t very eventful. We read books, watched a movie, played games and built a LEGO street. A perfect way to spend the weekend if you ask me.
2. A calm weekend was great, especially since we don’t have many weekends left here. Hartmut is working very hard towards a deadline mid-March after which we want to travel one more time to the north, where our time in Malawi started. After that, it’s over! We have roughly one more month here in Monkey bay. When I think about that, I get extremely excited and so sad at the same time. It’s just a bit unreal that our time in Malawi is almost over. (You’ll have to bear with me, I’ll write that on every blog in the next few weeks.)
3. The good thing about our forced move in December is that I have downsized on a lot of things already. The goal is to end up with as much as we came with; four suitcases. But that’s not so easy. Especially not since the girls are avid treasure hunters.  Or rather, I should say treasure hoarders, who are great at finding value in anything they see, but very bad at letting go. Every shell, stick and feather they find, finds their way into our home and when I tell them they can only keep the most beautiful ones, they declare everything ‘the most beautiful’. I wonder how I am going to convince them that I’m not going to fill all my precious suitcase kilo’s with shells, rocks and sticks.
4. When you want to find Sophie, the first place you need to look is on her bed. Not because she wants to sleep, but because it’s her favourite place to read a book. Her favourite books involve animals and adventures, and when she’s found a book she likes, she’ll read until she has finished it. It’s really cool to see that it doesn’t really matter if the books are Dutch, German or English. When the girls were little, I was worried that their language development would be slower because they are being raised with three languages, and I was wrong. Now I see yet again that I did not need to worry, because kids clearly have the capacity to learn multiple languages at the same time. Sophie is trying to stretch that ability even more. Her plan is to live in Paris when she is a grown-up and in preparation for that, she has started to learn French. She’s about a month in, and I’m really impressed by what she has learned so far.
5. While Sophie is reading, Doris is playing with LEGO. She’s building a medieval city, based on pictures that she has found in various books.  It’s so cool to see her determination, and she’s learning so much through all the research she is doing. This kind of self-motivated hands-on history lessons are my favourite.
6. I write, but while I do so, I follow the Olympics, my guilty pleasure. I am not the world’s biggest sport fan, but there is something really special about the Olympics. And as a proud orange-supporter, the Winter Olympics are great because there are lots of people to cheer for. Unfortunately, the girls don’t share my enthusiasm. For some weird reason, they are rooting for team Germany. I have no idea why they would do something like that.
7. Time to leave the laptop and go outside.  Perhaps I can even motivate the girls for a walk, although I don’t think they are ready to leave their LEGO and book behind. Have a great week!