Merry Christmas- and Happy New Year!

Note: See pictures separately to follow.

Merry Christmas to all-and Happy New year too - We are still here and determined to blog more and better! Casey and Katie are here for Christmas and Casey has been taking care of all our computer needs, we have a new computer and lap-top and soon wireless access all through the house!

We have Stephanie and Curt, Casey and Katie and Elsa here with us and it's been wonderful and crazy. We are trying to get Curt to eat every favorite European food we can think of, he is doing well in keeping up with it all. We decided we need to fatten him and Stephie up a bit while they are here. Curt's bags took a few days to catch up to him, that was fun for him to borrow clothes from people 4-5 inches shorter- luckily the waist sizes here fit him somewhat. Curt and Stephanie went in work to watch Rich do a C-section and Curt decided that delivering babies is cool after all! Rich took all the guys running and they all survived- though he keeps suggesting longer and longer runs.

Curt has been teaching Erik new ways to take care of the gophers in our backyard. We have some things to put down the holes that buzz and make annoying noises to scare them away that have worked in the past so I gave then the assignment to place the annoying noise makers. Curt decided they could do much better than that and soon they were digging down into the holes and dropping gas soaked rags, next came the fire, and before you know it we had 7-8 fires burning in various holes and some pretty happy boys! Erik thinks having brothers around is pretty fun. I just hope the gophers stay away!

Elsa is crawling all over and has- after a week- gotton over her jet lag and is sleeping mostly thru the night. She is enjoying all the attention and is the most happy wonderful baby. She is having fun trying to catch Jack. We will even get to celebrate her first birthday this week.

We have done our traditional Christmas activities like going to the Christmas eve program at the church around the corner, it's amazing to think that they have been having a Christmas eve service there for over 200 years,-- now that is tradition! It's a tiny church and they sing hymns, have the kids act out the Christmas story, sing again and then go home. We really enjoy starting our Christmas eve festivities that way. We had our family program complete with Scott's yearly rendition of "The Night before Christmas" Every year he manages to get all the family events into the peom and delights us all. The gopher burning was featured this year, much to the delight of the boys doing the burning. We finished up with our live tree with candles on it. Christmas day was nice with leisurely gift opening, it's sure different having older kids who would rather sleep in on Christmas day! Anne wasn't too happy about that idea but went along OK.

On the 26th we had our annual gingerbread house competition, with Elizabeth and Scott even joining in with their own "remote entry" We called grandma and grandpa to judge and had a great time. We celebrated Anne's 12th birthday a day early and the girls pampered her big time. They taught her all about doing her hair and make-up and gave her hands on training in shaving her legs! Every thing a young woman needs to know. Anneliese is very excited about leaving primary behind and moving up to Young Women and can even attend a New Year's youth activity this week.

On the 27th, we celebrated Anneliese's birthday by going to Il Pirata. She had her normal margarita pizza and the rest of the kids had the likes of gnocci, etc. Wonderful times. We managed to NOT get the plum wine at the end of the meal, so that was cool!

On the 28th of December we celebrated officially the turning of the last child to the ripe age of 12. She is now not in Primary, which she has been secretly sluffing for the last several weeks/ month already anyway! We split into two groups on the 28th-- the children being led by Casey went to Oberammergau to stay at the NATO School while Mom and I worked the 28th. On the 29th, the kids went to Neuschwanstein, Hohenschwangau and Wieskirche. We met up with them and had pizza that night from the Italian place around the corner (Scott and Elizabeth will remember). Next day the kids went to Zugspitze skiing and had a wonderful time. It was wonderful COLD weather. Dad stayed with Elsa Jean and Anne. Dad has crossed over into the non-skier relm given his previous shoulder mishaps. The 31st we travelled home again.

On the 31st we had a wonderful New Years celebration out front shooting off 60 Euros worth of fireworks with the neighbors, we had the whole town lite up. It was very cool. Curt was duely impressed with European New Years traditions.

Next day, we moved attic storage stuff from one to the other in preparation of the hopeful moving in of Casey and Katie into our attic. 2nd we went to the Flea market at Homburg and FROZE, but got some very cool additions to our own personal collection of flea items in our Gimsbacher olde house.

3rd, we went to Hambachtal swimming and to Thairama in Kaiserslautern and finally the 4th, we had to deliver the children all to the airport where they flew away much to our sadness. All in all, we had a wonderful visit and loved every second of it. It would only have been better had we had the whole crew home.

Halloween Party

Jack has discovered he can watch the neighbor dog from here. Note his cute pumpkin outfit!

Halloween- We had a progressive Halloween dinner for the youth and our house was the final stop for dessert and a haunted house. We have a really scarie basement that was just waiting for
haunting. Erik and one of his buddies did the set up with alot of fake cobwebs added to the real ones. They also made a graveyard in the backyard, so we started in the yard telling a story about the dancehall and a dancehall murderer in years past that murdered women and buried them in the yard. Our Bishop was the grim reaper running thru the crowd screaming as I was telling them stories, he has our old scythe in hand and was pretty scarie. His son was a ghost wandering around.

Here's Erik with the chain saw , this was the final stop on the way out of the basement- I think this is where the girls started crying (only 3 of them, but it made the boys call the whole thing a sucess) We also had a crazed Dr with a person on his surgical table and he was taking out body parts and eating them and offering the kids a bite, they went thru a good amount of wurst! The night was a huge sucess. Rich was on call and happy to miss the whole thing. Jack was very concerned about the ghosts out in the yard and had to go bark at them everytime he went out. Here are pictures of the haunted house and yard. The clean up is almost done, just a graveyard to dismantle. Everyone thinks we have the perfect house for Halloween, the basement is still scarie even after the clean up!
Rich and Erik are doing another marathon this weekend. Erik is really getting a strong start wiht 3 marathons in 6 weeks. Anne and I are going to do a walk while they run thru the woods, maybe we'll get a medal this time too!

Fall Update

No pictures cuz I'm at work- the big news is the Berlin marathon just completed by Rich and ERIK together, check it out on Rich's running blog Gimsbacher runner. Anne and I were great supporters meeting them at 10, 20, 30 and 40 km to cheer them on, take a few pictures and then get on another train to another part of the city.
Erik is running alot, Anne is figuring out middle school and trying to talk us into letting her quit violin lessons,(kinda sounds like a repeat of Katie trying to get out of piano lessons!) The eternal question--to force them to keep going or to move on to another endeaver that they promise to LOVE and will not whine about?? even on number 5 I don't have the answer!
It's become fall and colder weather- meaning our thick walls that keep us cool in the summer make us COLD now, we are building fires in fireplaces now in the living room and scheune and hoping for a mild winter so our oil will last a long time.
I did get in another trip to Utah to see Daniel in person and got to celebrate Nathan's 3rd birthday with him, that was fun. That hard part was leaving those cute babies! I've been very lucky and made 5 trips to Utah during the past 12 months, I'm not sure I can keep that up but is's been fun. That is why I have a part time job to pay for plane tickets and shopping when I get there.

Brussels floral carpet

We went to Brussels to see the huge floral carpet that they do in the main square every 2 years. It's all done with real flowers, alot of begonias and other stuff too. We went up into the town hall to get a ariel view, it was pretty amazing. We also went to see the famous "Mannekin Pis" It's a fountain of a small boy peeing, don't know why it's so famous but it is, very European, since you see this everywhere (mainly older boys on the side of the road) This was our first trip to Brussels- it's only 3 hours to drive there, you would think we would have gone there sooner, but there is still more of Europe to discover after 15 years! We just spent the afternoon, had a nice dinner and came home. Jack(the dog) and Quack ( our young co-worker) joined us so it was an enjoyable day. Somehow the pictures from Brussels are down further on the blod- so scroll on down for more!

Friends

Saying good-bye to old friends. The Webb family left Germany after 16-17? years here, we were very sad to see them go and will miss them greatly. Terry taught the girls in Young Women and has been a great influence on their lives. We also did many "dish-runs" and floh markts and other adventures over the years. It was nice to have someone we could count on to be here with us as everyone else around us left after 2-3 years. Here's hoping they find much happiness in Colorado and that we see them again somewhere down the road.




There are also some other wonderful people that were here that left us- the Cusick and Hall families both left and went on to Texas. Here are pictures of our last gatherings with them.

Pictures around home-




Family cook out
We finally found a great use for the old pitchfork.

Erik and Joshua made stairs to the stream



Erik has started another building project- a tree house.
We had a lazy week at home instead of going to the beach this year. It was nice to just enjoy the yard and the kids and time together. But we're definately back to the beach in France next year!

Col Jackson

Col Jackson and some of his co-workers. We don't have too many pictures of him in uniform despite being in the military for almost 20 years. These were taken on the occasion of LTC Pack's retirement. She was the right-hand women for Rich in the OB clinic.


Dr's from every service.

Brussels floral carpet
We went to Brussels to see the huge floral carpet that they do in the main square every 2 years. It's all done with real flowers, alot of begonias and other stuff too. We went up into the town hall to get a ariel view, it was pretty amazing. We also went to see the famous "Mannekin Pis" It's a fountain of a small boy peeing, don't know why it's so famous but it is, very European, since you see this everywhere (mainly older boys on the side of the road) This was our first trip to Brussels- it's only 3 hours to drive there, you would think we would have gone there sooner, but there is still more of Europe to discover after 15 years! We just spent the afternoon, had a nice dinner and came home. Jack(the dog) and Quack ( our young co-worker) joined us so it was an enjoyable day.
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July 2008 Home
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Summer update

It's been too long since we updated! We've been very busy with a wedding, a baby and lots of traveling for all. Stephanie and Curt got married on June 21st in Salt Lake. It was perfect in every way. You can see a quick preview of wedding pictures at Bethanyjackman.com on her blog- we're still waiting to see all the pictures- we'll send on the link when they are all up on the website.I think they will be amazing, it was a beautiful day and occasion. Stephanie and Curt are now settled in at Wymount in Provo waiting for school to start. Stephanie got into the nursing program at BYU and will start in August. Rich had to make a quick trip for the wedding so after just a few short days in Utah he was off to Italy to work for a month. Erik had a quick week in Delta riding four wheelers and various other motorcycles etc and enjoying the farm life and then came back home for a few hours before leaving for Copenhagen, Denmark for EYI youth conference for a week. He came back home for another 24 hours and re-packed and was off the Switzerland for a week at scout camp.Luckily he did all the travel, packing, re-packing without any adult supervision and did a great job. Anne and I stayed longer and had plenty of time for a sister's week in St George,and another week in Delta celebrating the 4th with Katie, Elizabeth and their babies. What a trip! Anne and I came home after 3 weeks and then 2 days later Elizabeth and Scott had their baby- Daniel, on July 11. Check out their blog for cute baby pictures. I'm already planning another trip to see the baby in Sept. Those grandbabies are soo cute and fun!
Rich, Anne and I just got back from Italy. Anne and I flew down last week and stayed with our friend, Donna who has her her own pool. Anne of course wanted to swim non-stop. We had alot of great food, and sun and made a day trip to Venice. Rich came home with us so now we are getting back to normal life- whatever that is!
Hopefully we'll get some pictures to add soon. Keep watching!

new patio

Our new patio- here are before and after pictures of our patio behind our barn room that we just finished. There were remenants of stone foundations and old cobblestones, so we took those up and filled in to the stone foundations and now have a nice patio area out the door instead of a muddy mess. Here's before-



Here's after- Plus some really cute pictures of Erik and Stephie and Erik before prom in his new suit.

Nathan's visit

Nathan in his baking hat,

We have Nathan with us for the week while Liza and Scott and Scott's parents are touring Italy. Having a 2 yr old in the house keeps us all busy keeping up with him. He was helping Stephie bake- and quietly emptied several cups of flour onto the counter while she wasn't looking. SHe put him down ot clean that up and he found a box of garbage bags and emptied that out all over the kitchen.