April

The month started with Falco’s new class having a fashion show as a finale for their big “Clothes” project. Falco had a magician costume that my mother helped Marjolein make a couple of years back for Matthijs. It is still a hit.

Matthijs had a school trip and almost missed it, because he did not tell Marjolein he needed to be at school half an hour early…. Now that the two smaller ones are at a different school Matthijs goes to school alone: it’s a safe 1 km walk. This time he was back ten minutes later, saying he couldn’t find anyone. The teacher called to say that she and the class had missed their train and Marjolein had eight minutes to get Matthijs to the railway station. She tore down to the station with him, he got the train with his class and had a fine day out at Archeon an open-air historical museum. She was a little miffed that teacher had not thought to call in the half-hour the class spent walking to the station and that school had not thought to warn the parents that the kids needed to be early: some of us have scatter-brained kiddos.

We both started a running course this month: our goal is to build up enough fitness to run the 5km Haarlem Canal Run. We both find that running with a group gives you the incentive to keep going.

Bilingual issues: Falco read PIC asked how he should pronounce it without being rude, the “pick” pronunciation sounds like Dutch for dick (but ruder) and the soft c would be “piss”.

Matthijs has his father’s tendency to become addicted to games: he is now obsessed with “Roller Coaster Tycoon” which of course means that his brothers are too…

Marjolein planned to have a very quiet birthday and invited almost nobody, but a bunch of people turned up spontaneously so I dug out the Cobb barbeque she gave me for my birthday and had not yet used; you do not do much barbequing in November. It worked fine and we fed a whole table full of people out of it.

Falco also had a stay over with his friend T in Amsterdam and was brought back in time for us all to celebrate Queen’s Day together. We went to the local sports field and sold enough rubbish to be able to buy new rubbish, which we will probably sell again next Queen’s Day…

Marjolein wanted to take things easy because she was rather under the weather, so logically we then went on to the fun-fair that had just set up in Haarlem North?!? The children thus had a pretty wonderful day and Marjolein survived (just).