When life gives you mole hills...

Make sandcastles!

Yup, this is how we entertain ourselves these days!

4th of July festivities... in England!

I know, it's a bit strange, but it's true, we do have a huge 4th of July celebration here. There are enough Americans around to make it a very, very large event.

We couldn't believe how big it was, or how many people there were! There were even full up carnival rides. We told the boys they could pick one ride, and surprise, surprise, they chose the "choo choo." So we payed our money and let them go... only after they got on did we realize that most of the other parents were riding with their kids. We were too cheap for that (great parenting at work.)

So when little e started to scream in terror, he was on his own (well, he had N to help him out I suppose, but he was wearing his hearing protection, so he probably couldn't hear his little brother screaming!) You can see that he wasn't to thrilled with the ride.

However when it was over he ran up to me and said, "I have good day on choo choo mommy!" Go figure.

Then it was dinner time, we were still pretty close to the loud carnival rides, so N thought he still needed his ear muffs on. You can't be too careful!

Finally we found the bouncy castles where we camped out for the rest of the evening and let the boys bounce the night away. There was this one where kids could get on and try to push each other off pedestals with this padded bar. N wanted to do it, so E went with him. It's hard to tell in the little picture, but N is laughing hysterically. I think he thought pushing his daddy over was pretty much the funniest thing he had ever done!

Get the Rocky theme ready!

There was also free face painting, so we thought we'd let the boys try. They've never had their faces painted before, and e's lasted like eight minutes before he smeared it all over himself. N did manage to keep his for the rest of the night.

The cutest puppy ever...

One darling kitty cat...

Finally, to finish off the night we watched a concert by "Tops in Blue" which is always a family favorite, and then waited for the fireworks. One little boy thought the fireworks were OK, the other one was absolutely terrified. He was literally shaking with fear. Even with his hearing protection on, he wanted no part of that. He clug to daddy, looking the other way, and most of the time even covered his eyes. I felt so bad for him... but I did manage to get this adorable picture of my little scared kitty!

It's tulip time! (Or at least it was three months ago...)

So I'm still behind... but also still feeling the need to post in chronological order. So the next big event was our last minute trip to the Netherlands to see the tulips. Literally I put this trip together about a week before we went, I had heard the tulips were looking good, so we went for it.

The tulips were in fact looking good, the were lovely... my children however, were not. It was just one of those weekends where they were dead set against everything we tried to do, or get them to eat, or, well, you get the point. It's one of those trips that I probably won't look back on with a great deal of fondness because of the whining and complaining. But, as I said, the tulips were beautiful, amazing, and I'm really glad I saw them!

Our first stop was kinderdijk, a world heritage site that has 19 original working windmills built in the 1700s. It was just a huge plain completely filled with windmills to keep it from flooding itself. It was really cool. The boys loved running around here, and was pretty much the only part of the trip they enjoyed!

To get to and from this village we took a road that literally ended in water. We had to take this little ferry across the canal, so Dutch!

The next day we drove past all the tulip fields, unfortunately the two or three days prior to our visit were prime tulip harvesting, so a lot of the fields were bare.

Apparently if we had been just a couple of days earlier they would have been carpets of flowers. Oh well. However, we did see lots and lots of tulips at the Keukenhof Gardens, the most famous tulip garden in the world and the reason thousands of people flock to the Netherlands in the spring.

I can only describe this place as an amusement park with flowers. It was that big. A map was required, there were different "lands" with different styles of gardens, and it was packed to the gills with tourists and tulips. I seriously didn't think there were that many tulips in the whole world. Here are a couple of pictures, but they don't do this place anywhere near justice.

Yes, many of the flowers were taller than the boys!

In the middle of the gardens they had a children's play area with a swing for N and a little tunnel for e to run through.

E and N even got to practice their walking on water skills!

The next day we headed into Amsterdam. We thought we had a fun day planned for the boys including a train ride into the city, lunch at a crepe resturant. (Hello, pancakes with bananas and chocolate for lunch!) A canal boat ride, and maybe one sightseeing stop at the Anne Frank house. Yeah right. It became aparent after the crepe lunch that no one ate that any sightseeing was not going to be an option that day. So we mostly rode the canal boats and walked around the city while trying to prevent total melt down. We were semi-successful.

That night (and not a moment too soon) we got on our overnight ferry and headed back to England. But not before we stopped for dinner at the only place our boys would eat anything at all weekend long... a dutch McDonald's. Ahhh, the joys of parenting.