Christmas 2018

All the kids are in the house and we are ready to celebrate.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Yarn Along {December}

I'm linking up with Ginny for Yarn Along today.

I am currently working on a shawl. 

It's quite a challenging project because I'm 

not a very experienced knitter and I keep

 making mistakes. 

I have ripped out so many rows already

 because I won't wear the shawl

 when I know I dropped a stitch in row 25 ;).

I didn't read a lot this month because of 

my knitting, but I am planning on starting "The eight mountains" by Paolo Cognetti" this weekend!

Sergei Polunin, "Take Me to Church"

The kids and I have watched this video

 at least a hundred times. 

He is so, so good.

Christmas knitting

I knitted these hot water bottle covers 

without a pattern, because they are really fun

 and easy to make. 

After uploading the photos I realized that I used

 red skeins from a different dye-bath, 

but I can live with that!

Dancing

Last summer in July my daughter performed with her dance school in the "Theatre de la ville de Luxembourg" and we received the photos this week. 

Some of them are really cool.  

^ She loves hiphop and these two photos are her favorites.

She also dances jazz and ballet, but she likes hiphop more.

Dancing means the world to her and her mama is so thankful for this passion in her life.

Yarn Along {November}

Today I'm linking up with Ginny from Small Things. 

Now that autumn is finally here (love it!),

 I picked up my needles again. 

I'm making a couple of hot water bottle

 covers for Christmas. 

I used an easy 4 row repeat knitting pattern,

 which is perfect because

 1) it looks really nice and

 2) I can easily see my mistakes. 

I am currently reading The Baltimore boys

 (I read in German most of the time)

 by the Swiss author Joël Dicker. 

Although I loved 

The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair

a little bit more, this is still a very good

 book and I am really enjoying it. 

Stacking up firewood for winter

We have had such an exceptional sunny

 and warm summer this year and until two weeks

 ago we still had temperatures above 20°C. 

But it's getter colder and so we are stacking

 firewood for winter. 

Final brocante of the season

The final brocante in Arlon of the season. 

Unfortunately we only went twice this summer. 

It rained a couple of times and we were on

 vacation on two "brocante Sundays". 

But we found some really nice things this time.

^ A round cake pan with lid. I think they were

 used to bake a cake on the stove in boiling water.

^ Old butter molds.

^ A cake stand for our collection. 

Unfortunately, one of the cats jumped

 on it the day after I took this photo

 and it was completely destroyed :(

^ And three small enamel pots. 

😊😊😊😊

Our trip to China

The last week of July until mid August we flew

 to China to visit our second son, who went there

 in April for an internship in Beijing. We stayed in

 Beijing for 6 days, where he guided us around,

 then took the train to Xi'an to see the terracotta

 warriors, then travelled to Shanghai, before

 coming back to Beijing and take our flight home.

 It was an adventure, to say the least!

It was very, very hot and very, very crowded ;).

And since they spoke only Chinese

 (almost no English), we used signs and

 gestures to make ourselves understood.

Dinner was a challenge because we ate

 in small, cheap cafés (like 10€ for the six of us),

 and most of the time there were no pictures

 on the menu list and only Chinese signs. 

But we ate well most of the time and nobody

 had stomach problems. 

Shanghai is much more modern than Beijing,

 but we liked Beijing better. 

^ The Chinese wall. I would love to say that I 

climbed up that hill, but I didn't...

 It was just too hot and climbing stairs isn't

 my favorite thing. The others did though.

^ The terracotta army, one of the most amazing

 things I have ever seen. Thousands of soldiers. 

^ Shanghai skyline.

^ The watertown Zhouzhuang was a highlight

 and very quiet on Monday morning.

 ^ We tried to avoid these (not always successfully).

One thing we didn't like was the attention 

we had as a "patchwork family". 

It was really bad, especially for our son

 who was photographed all.the.time. 

Sometimes they asked if they could take a picture

 (and I said "no, but thank you for asking"),

 but most of the time they did it secretly. 

We were so surprised because Beijing

 and Shanghai are huge cities, they must

 have seen dark-skinned people somewhere,

 if not in real life, then at least on the internet??!!

Like I said, it was an adventure, and we loved it. 

(Another three weeks before school starts 😊).