Kitchen

So today is day two of our kitchen revamp. Yesterday, after a long afternoon search, we finally found the tiles we wanted to put on the wall. We ended up getting floor tiles! Less shiny and more robust than the usual kitchen tiles. I hope it works! Almost anything is better than the icky color that the tiles are now.


I was telling Herman that I'm glad I didn't realize how much work was going to go into fixing this kitchen up. The dust, oh my stars, the dust!! As you can see right here....

it was not a misty day... it was the dust. Which obviously penetrated the house right up to the eaves. I have now "cleaned" downstairs, but I guess the rest of the week will be spent dusting and dusting and dusting...


This is our outdoor kitchen. Sounds pretty fancy, hey? I did actually cook on here this evening, on an electric burner. Thank goodness for good weather!

The hot water was off downstairs, so Herman had to lug pails of hot water up and down the stairs for me so I could dust a little. And I had to get the water from my soup from the hose outside:-). Later tonight this will all be covered up with plastic and tomorrow will be a day of rest.
I'm just hoping nobody will come by and steal the pans and tupperware that is still stored in the cupboards!

Snow

Home improvement

Even though Herman has been sick, he has been able to do some home improvement. Like the painting of the wall that I mentioned yesterday. And the hanging up of these ethiopian paintings.
I'm grateful for him, for the handy man he is. Grateful that he has enough energy to fiddle around in his own time making our house that much more ours.

Thoughts

Despite the busy times, the stress about my job, the lack of sleep, the house cleaning and whatever else gets put in my way to distract me, I have still managed to have some meaningful thoughts. Meaningful to me, that is.

I told Herman the other day that I was becoming more and more aware of the fact that this family needs me. Not so much a practical need, more an emotional need. Marinda likes to do things with me, Tristan could use more of a helping hand in coping with settling in here, my hubby likes my moral support and an encouraging presence. Why should this be new to me? It really isn't new, it's just something that I have often felt as a claim upon my time, instead of something that I can give freely.

This job of mine, which I'm not blooming in, has made me realize that my job (or how well I succeed at it) does not define me as much as I thought it does. When all is said and done, it's just a job. And it can be done just as well by anybody else. I have found out that I am capable of functioning without the acknowledgement and appreciation that I thrive on. That there is more to me than work, just as there is more to me than weight. I learned the weight thing a while ago (though that will often come back to haunt me I think), this lesson about work is the next thing to learn.

Learning this has made me more aware of that which really does matter. My family. My friends. It is more important to have a family functioning well, than to have a job functioning well. I think the balance has often been off in my life. Now I feel more of a desire to invest in my family, instead of feeling it to be a moral obligation. It changes how I look at things, and will hopefully make it easier for me to spend quality time with those I love.

Now, I think what I just wrote may sound pretty uncaring, unsympathetic, and maybe downright awful. In many ways I am or have been a degenerate mother and wife. (degenerate: a person who has declined, as in morals or character, from a type or standard considered normal). On the other hand, I have done my best with what I had, even if that falls or fell below the standards set for motherhood. Going through depression, being a young mother, struggling in our relationship and experiencing some of the side effects of being a TCK have not made things easier for me. It's not an excuse, but maybe it will make things more understandable to those of you who don't know me well.

It feels like my world is getting smaller, my dreams are growing smaller. Instead of longing for a bigger career which includes travel, I am now hoping to find a job closer to home so that I won't have to stress so much about the travel time. Instead of longing for big changes and challenges I'm looking forward to family dinners, movie nights, or moments like now, when my family is sitting on the couch together, watching tv, while kidding around, laughing and making jokes with each other. Togetherness, in the smallest way. Ultimately making it something big.

I think I will go and join them.

Home Sweet Home

Somehow it feels good to be home. Despite the fact that Herman, Tristan and Marinda are sick. Hermans ulcerative colitis is taking a turn for the worse, Tristan is "school sick", and Marinda seems to be heading toward a nice batch of the flu.
And yet, it's nice to be home.
Maybe it's because it feels good to be needed. Needed for remembering not to put butter on Marinda's bread. Needed to pick up the phone and hear the details of a day. Needed to sympathize with aches and pains. Needed to cook and clean. And needed to be me.... plain simple naggy old me; imperfect, impatient, restless old me.
Somehow, I can't be missed, and I can't help but feel grateful because of it!

London

I'm sitting at home after my "london experience". Marinda is at dance class, Herman is off to the soccer field with Tristan, so the house is quiet. I just finished looking at the pictures we made in London (which are not great, so you won't see many of them here!) and I've been thinking about how I feel about my time in London.

I had hoped I would be stunned and amazed. I wasn't. Was it due to the fact that we were rushed and harried before we good and well got there? Perhaps. Perhaps it was also due to the fact that we hadn't gone into great detail in the planning. Maybe it had to do with the weather, which was not aweful (no rain, thank goodness!) but not great either. I'm not sure. But whatever way I look at it, I was not terribly impressed.


So what did we see? We saw the Houses of Parliament and the Big Ben. We saw Westminister Abbey, inside and out. We saw Buckingham Palace. And we walked for miles and miles, crisscrossed through Soho, and stopped by in a couple of bookshops. Sat by the Thames munching english baked goods, had dinner in an italian restaurant in the middle of the Chinese Quarter. Rode in the metro, admired the cabs, enjoyed the buses and peeked into shop windows. Felt our feet ache from pounding the pavement, were surprised at how polite people were, were given a Krispy Kreme doughnut for free at the airport, and were utterly exhausted by the time we finally got back home.

Westminister Abbey was impressive, actually. But somehow I didn't quite get the feel for all the history that is encompassed in that one building. Because really, talk about history!! It's all in there. Factually I got a lot of information, but it didn't grab me by the guts as historical places will sometimes do to me. Maybe that was because it was utterly jampacked with tourists. I could almost walk over peoples heads (as the dutch say).
Maybe we should have gone for the prepackaged tourist deal and had all kinds of history dished out to us in ready made portions. There's a certain ease to that! You don't have to spend time thinking about which metro to take, or which bus goes where..... maybe next time?


The flight was an experience in itself. My friend hadn't flown in 30 years, so I had to explain some of the rituals of travel to her. I was a bundle of nerves myself, until we got into the air. I can get airsick sometimes, and I have a strong dislike of turbulence. But the trips were good. We sat in different seats, got a good look at the dutch countryside and seaside. Went through clouds, saw the sunset, had some turbulence and saw Holland by night. About as complete a journey as we could wish for!



So, how would I sum up this trip? As a pretty unique experience. And one that has actually made me pretty happy about where I live now. Lots of history to be seen here! Maybe next time I would be happier going to someplace smaller like Stratford-upon-Avon. Someplace that is not quite as huge. Maybe I need to go see London with someone who comes from London, to get a much better feel for the place. Maybe, just maybe, I'm not as adventerous as I like to think I am, and I should just stay at home and enjoy what I have!!

One of those days

It was one of those days when nothing quite goes like you've planned. Couldn't get the kids up, had to really drag them out of bed. Then couldn't get myself up and moving. By the time I had mentally prepared myself for at least an attempt at housework one of my new friends popped by for coffee (which was just a great excuse for sitting down again and having a nice chat and letting all mental preparation flit away!).
Followed by lots of standing around, sitting down, taking a couple of steps, looking at dust, sighing a little, preparing some soapy water only to let it cool, aimless meandering around the house type of activitity. Which then led to an afternoon filled with driving back and forth to pick up broken bicycles, getting a present for my sister in law, birthday visit to aforementioned sil, rushed dinner, packing up for Tristans slumber party, more driving (which included long stretches of traffic jam).
Well... you probably get the picture.
And the poor sick people around me! Dear sister is struck down with a nasty infection, brother dear with a migraine, Herman sneezing his head off and as he himself said "leaking out of every orifice". My heart is with you all!

Today

Today is the first day of possibly a whole weekend of no kids. Hmmm.... wonder what we'll do with our time!
Although we will have to take it easy. Unfortunately, during our vacation, Hermans colitis acted up quite badly making him feel very tired and also giving him a lot of pain. So he's had to call in sick and he's having to take things real slow.
But despite that, some time without kids is not something to be taken lightly! It's great to watch whatever I want on tv, to eat food that the kids don't like, and generally enjoy the peace and quiet. Especially knowing that the kids are doing something that they enjoy doing. Tristan is spending a couple of days with a friend from his old school. He's really been looking forward to that. And Marinda watched a movie with two friends who are over from Russia and is now staying with one of my friends in Utrecht.
Well, that was a lot of words spent on something that is most likely not interesting to anybody but myself!
Anyhow, I will now install myself in front of the tv, snuggle up to Herman and watch Secret Millionaire. Gotta love that program!

Old friends

Yesterday I finally got around to unpacking the 15 or so boxes of books that have been laying around in our attic. It was actually a quite a joyous occassion! See, one of the new things in this house is "my" room. It's our fourth bedroom/guest room/office, but I have the honor of claiming it as mine. I get to decorate it the way I see fit. Now if you think that that is no big deal, let me tell you, that to me it is! As I have written before, Herman and I are very different. Decorating therefore also becomes a compromise between his taste and mine. In "my" room, there is no compromise! YEAHHHH!! Though it's far from being done, just unpacking boxes of my books and arranging them in the room made it feel more mine. As well as finding and placing these: they are like old friends......

I made this lady when I was in RVA. She's travelled with me to every house since then.

I like to mess around with clay every once in a while. It's often very therapeutic. So a lot of my stuff has a story. I won't tell you the stories around these. If you want to hear them, come by and ask! And my stuff is often three dimensional, so I have front and backs of these.

I

And last but not least: this little fellow. I got him on my first birthday, and as you can tell, he has had some hard lovin'.


I'm getting a real kick out of seeing my room come to life!

Just a moment in time

It's 20.35. It's been a luke-warm kind of day. Herman is pounding little bricks into the ground to make a patio kind of place. I can hear the squeak of the trampoline springs as Tristan and the neighbor boy jump up and down. Marinda just came by to give me a hug. She's sporting her new sweatshirt with Carrie Dance Productions written on it. That's her dance school. She just flirted with the neighbor boys brother who came driving by on a scooter. My dishes are steaming on the sink, the water is waiting for more dishes to be cleaned. The sun is still shining with that soft warm light that comes late in the evening.
I guess the right word would be contentment.

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Our first home

After we got married (and for a little while before), Herman and I lived in this lovely villa. The outside was gorgeous, as you can see. The inside was decorated in our wonderfully unique style. We had no money to speak of and no clue as to how long we would be living there so we didn't bother painting the smokestained walls, or replacing the worn out carpets. Instead we threw in every bit of junk we had, picked furniture up off the street, and made do with what we had! This second picture is the end result of that huge effort. Isn't it fantastic in its orginality? The wall decorations were made by me at school while studying art therapy. The couch came from a friend in Belgium and was so uncomfortable we hardly ever sat on it. The chairs were almost as bad. We slept on matrasses on the floor. But we had a good time anyway!
Then, just before we got married, we got a chance to buy pretty much everything we needed in one go from somebody who was changing practically everything in their house. When we came back from our "honeymoon" our house was finally furnished with something approaching good taste. That was just lovely. Marinda was born in this house. Later, after we moved out, our family doctor moved in. Whenever I went for a checkup I would sit in the waiting room on almost exactly the same spot as where Marinda was born. This house is probably the closest we will ever come to living large!

Toilets

Yes, toilets. Why toilets? Because the way dutch toilets are is totally typical and weird when you think about it.
When you step into a dutch house, the first door on your left or right is the toilet door. What on earth made anybody think that that is practical? I for one do not like to be welcomed into someone's house with the smell of their latest toilet production....
Then the size. Dutch toilets are tiny. Any larger american would not fit. Seriously. If you sit and lean forward too far you hit your head on the teeny tiny sink that's stuck in the corner. (that is, if there is a sink, sometimes there is no sink!).
Many houses have only one toilet. We luckily have two, thanks to my handy husband.
And last but not least, the soundproofness. Or lack of it. At work it is quite humiliating to be sitting on the toilet (in this case located in a small narrow hallway) and hear your boss talking on the phone in the room next door. I used her office once, and believe me, she can hear every tinkle!! Or if we sit outside for lunch, I hear my colleague's sighs of relief from the open toilet window.
Charming, isn't it!!

Please do come and visit!

Plants

This morning my half-sick hubby and I went to the garden store (or whatever it should be called) to pick up plants. FINALLY! So now I have a ton of plants and empty pots sitting outside waiting for me to get the job done. I'm seriously hoping there will be no more frost at night, otherwise I'll have to haul all the plants back indoors to save them from freezing!
But just the sight of all the plants is a joy. I'm looking forward to looking out my window and seeing some color instead of plain walls and green grass. I am not, however, looking forward to the proces of getting the plants in the pots. I have only just managed to get my nails growing again and I don't want dirt all under them. Yes, silly me. And perhaps is just laziness as well. I want the pleasure of the nice view, but not the hard work of getting it done! I sincerely wish the sun was shining, that might make it a bit easier.
But anyway, I will gird up my loins and get my hands to work and then sit back and enjoy the end result. If it is at all worth making a picture of, I will do so. Funny how many more pictures I take now that I'm blogging!


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just finished reading The Russian Concubine by Furnivall
before that I was reading Silent Witness by Simon Tolkein (the grandson of). Very strange to be reading a crime novel by an author whose name is so closely linked to fantasy!

Wonderful Hubby

How great is it to come home and find that the computer has found a home on an actual desk? To see boxes that used to contain lamps lying empty on the table? To see the counter empty of dishes and food preparations made? To see hubby carrying around tools and pieces of wood? To crash on the sofa and be offered a hot meal and cold drink? To find that the grocery shopping has been done?
Let me tell you, IT'S REALLY GREAT!!
Now I will go admire the rest of the work that he has done in Tristans room and give him a HUGE HUG.

(this is not our kitchen, but my moms, picture taken in Ethiopia!)
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currently reading Shake Hands for Ever by Ruth Rendell

Curtains!

Yes, we have curtains! And they're hanging up!
Today has been such a fruitful day in the house. We got a floor down (well, Herman did. I just handed him the floor boards and hung around trying to be helpful. Sometimes I succeeded). Herman fixed our bookcases so that the tv would fit in. He hung up the rails for the curtains. I ironed the first curtains and resolutely decided NOT to wash the second pair. No more ironing, thank you! I had to go buy a new iron because it had a layer of burnt gunge on it from ironing too many polyester clothes at the wrong temperature. (I sincerely hope other make this same mistake...)
Anyway, it gives a real sense of fulfilment to get some more things done around here. Sunday we're celebrating Tristans birthday and it will be nice to have people over in a house that we feel happy about!

Got a job!

Well, I've got a job on March 1st! Not the job I applied for actually, but a job replacing a sick person within the same organisation. So at least for now I'll have my foot in the working world and hope that something more permanent will come along soon. It's always easier to apply when having a job then it is when you don't have one. It's less hours than I hoped, less salary, no compensation for travel costs and no mobile phone, but I will make do. It's not like I have a a ton of people knocking on my door wanting me to work for them!
This picture is of the inside of the building I'll work in. It used to be a bakery, so there used to be all kinds of delicious cookies and cakes placed in the wooden shelves. I like the look of the place, it has a sense of history.
Just knowing that I'll be going to work is giving me an energy boost. I want to make sure I use the next two weeks well as far as fixing up the house goes. I can't wait to have my own room fixed up, so that we can finally put the computer and the second tv where they belong and I can finally add all my pretty colors and doodads. Now it's just a room with a huge pile of boxes in it! Next week we will have a number of people helping us out. Thank goodness for friends!

New House

Today we're going to pick out tiles for the renovation of the bathroom and toilet in our new house (all lovingly paid for by our rental agency, how cool is that!).
Boring house, isn't it! It certainly needs some extra attention on the outside and the inside. But as you can see, the garden is pretty nice (for dutch standards) and there's more room in the back as well as a shed, and we have a little bit of space around the houset. Our house now only has a garden in the back and the front, nothing on the side because it's stuck in the middle of a row.
We're totally charmed by the orange front door (not!) and especially admire the way the people before us made the house seem so welcoming and open.....
Today I will probably plant some tulips in the front, back and side of the house. I bought these a number of weeks ago because I wanted something to look forward to in the spring. We'll probably also plant an apple or plum tree somewhere in the garden and enclose it so that we can have some more privacy. As well as that we've been checking out the dutch version of e-bay looking for secondhand floors, couches and kitchens. So our house will be new to us, old to others! Limited budgets make for creative home makeovers. I'm starting to look forward to it more and more though, and I'm happy about that!
Come by and visit sometime!

Home

Some pictures of our home and garden. We live in Houten, which is a small city perhaps, or a big village. I guess that depends on what you compare it too! When we first moved here 5 years ago I always felt I was on vacation when I arrived home or looked out the window when eating breakfast. Even biking to work has its joys when you pass tiny canals with swans, little bridges and some meadows with cows and sheep in them and a farm or two. All squished up together in small proportions as usual in Holland! Our former house was in the middle of the city, with two bedrooms, so this house felt like a little paradise when we first got in. After 5 years you get used to anything, so now we are of course aching for a change. Hopefully sometime in the next two week I will be able to report that we will be moving closer to Hermans family home. That all depends on if he gets his dream job or not. Then we will be in for a lot of changes, including a new house. I wonder where we'll end up !