Blake's First Hospital Visit

On Friday night, July 26, around 10 pm Blake came running in the living room with his hand on his head and blood everywhere:(. I had no idea what happened but I, of course, freaked out. There was so much blood and Billy was downstairs and he couldn't hear me screaming for like 5 minutes. When he came up we got Blake and all the mess cleaned up and saw he had a little hole in his head. He was playing with the cat and ran into the door knob.

The puncture was on the border off hospital or not but it was deep enough to make us nervous so we went. Now, we have no idea what to expect because we have not dealt with anything medical in Germany yet.

Luckily, children's hospital is located on our street just a few blocks down so we knew where to go.
We arrived and they spoke English and are familiar with American military workers so they had special paper work for us. The policy as an American is out patient a deposit of 250€($337) and inpatient deposit of 1000€($1,327). Whatever it doesn't cost they send back to you and you get a detailed receipt to send to your insurance which covers your cost. Great system all in all, no inflated pricing here at all.
The doctor came in and introduced himself, on a first name basis, and shook all of our hands . He checked out Blake and said he was able to glue his head back together:) yes, i know how that sounds. We would not have to get the stitch, he was wonderful with Blake.
When it was time to go he wrote us a detailed report about Blake's injury then explained the process of how medical works being an American and what we should expect.

Comparing this to our U.S. emergency visits there was NO comparison. They were, like the Germans are, speedy and very efficient. I have had that the care you receive here is top notch and I was happy to experience it first hand. This whole hospital experience took about an hour.
I know my fellow Americans will probably hate me saying this BUT this was socialism at its best. If you could have the hospital experience here you would agree Americans just don't have it right.
I will leave with saying, because of insurance in America this visit there after waiting 2-3 hours would have cost about $3000. Here it is less than $300. Go figure!!!!

Last week of July in Germany

This week we went bowling at a German bowling alley , great time. We were amongst a very large group of Germans, we love being around the locals in their community. There was even a restaurant, a nice one, in e bowling alley with indoor and outdoor sitting with good food, well pommes fritters were all we tried but good as always. They had a mini golf setup and a DJ box where it appears they have music on weekends. Looks like a really fun place to have an adult birthday party........:)

On Wednesday, July 24, another big festival kicked off by our house. This was was called Schlemmen AM See,meaning feasting on the lake. There were white tents as far as you could see all around the lake. There were basically food tents from all the area restaurants and bar tents with DJs. The restaurant tents were set up with dining areas with chandeliers and you could be waited on or stand inline for your own food. There was not your average German food either, there was Thai, sushi, lots of Italian food, shrimp, we even had an ox sandwich. Yummy!!!!
The bars were done up like VIP lounges with little tables and they even had the fog blowing:)
Also, 3 stages setup with different types of bands on each.
On Wednesday evening Billy and I walked down with Blair. We had a drink and listened to a band, they are usually cover bands and sing all AMERICAN music so it's really fun.
On Thursday evening Billy and I had date night. We had food from a few different restaurants and lots of different specialty drinks.
On Saturday we went with our whole family and some friends and their kids. One of the guys with us brought his 2 daughters the same ages as Trey and Blake and they all had a great time together. They became fast friends and climbed trees and ran around. Trey made the comment " mom this is so much fun. They are not like normal girls, they climb trees and stuff and don't whine" so cute!! These girls have spent 80% of their life in Germany, dad is American and mom is German. The boys cannot wait to go visit them at their home in the Black Forest.

This week we will be heading to the Italian Riviera, the beaches in Northern Italy..... Stay tuned

Hotter than HOT

Short blog today, just had to vent on our latest weather....
While no rain in a country known for rain has been nice, the heat has NOT been. I'm not really complaining because I would take this weather over NOLA's anyday but enough is enough.
The past few days have been mid 80's and today we approached 87 and everyday through Wednesday of next week shows little relief. Saturdays high is projected at 98:(
Now it's a very dry heat, thank goodness but with no AC, it SUCKS!!!
We are tempted to buy a portable AC, they sell for about $200 but we are holding out because we are being cheap. ThE house amazingly isn't tooooo bad but we have ceiling and floor fans in the rooms and there are metal and wooden automatic shutters on all windows so we keep them down to keep the sun out.
Wednesday we should finally see some rain after weeks of none but the high is still 84.
I know all the Louisiana people are cursing me right now but like I said no AC is rough.
Even the hospitals here do not have AC:( I would hate to be in one of those delivering a baby right now.
The other problem with this heat is that in Germany your trash only gets picked up every other week!!! So gross, especially for my friend that has 2 kids in diapers. I sneak some of ours into bins on the base.......
How is the heat for everyone else?????
Have a great week!!!!!!!!!

First Month in Europe Overview

I figured I would briefly fill in some of our first month in one condensed blog. Forgive me because I am going to touch on everything briefly and probably wind up all over the place:( it won't help that i haven't yet figured how to place my pictures with their descriptions,but here goes nothing.....
We arrived the morning of May 27 to rain, cold and just dreariness, which Billy said it had been this way all the 7 weeks he had been here,Great!!!! It remained this way for about 10 straight days, welcome to the real Stuttgart weather I guess. Luckily after that there have been very few rainy days and warmer temps with plenty of sunshine. We are definitely spoiled by this mild summer weather.

On the first day Billy drove us by our house and took us to eat German schnitzel and out for the best ice cream ever. I am not an ice cream girl but I have pretty much had ice cream everyday that we have lived here, it is much lighter than in the states and my favorite flavor is mandel, which is an almond flavor. The ice team place that is our fav is in walking distance to our house, I guess at least we walk.

The first week we stayed in a hotel in the heart of Stuttgart and enjoyed great restaurants and city site seeing. It was fun and the kids loved that they had their own hotel room on another floor even. In Europe most hotel rooms are quite compact with one bed so it was a different experience for allof us. The language barrier wasn't and still hasn't been all that difficult because within the cities 90% of the people speak English. Still has me a little intimidated in certain situations but most of the time we get by with the little bit of German we know and the whole lot of English they know.

On June 1st we moved in with loaner furniture. Our entire shipment was supposed to be delivered May 31 and on May 30 we received an email stating that wasn't going to happen,it has been moved back a week:( now what, loaner furniture!! Not awful but let's remember we have beds and a table, sure,but no sheets, comforters, dishes of any sort!!!so what's that mean? Time to spend very unnecessary money. Something we do NOT like to do!
Anyway, we survived with more eating out and during that first week Tanya and all the kiddos arrived from Atlanta for the next month:) that was the bright spot and she had a rental car so now we can go around and do big sight seeing:) because let's not forget we shipped our car and it took 6 weeks, we actually just finished our first full week with it. It's nice to travel to more distant places but we have decided at least for now, one car is enough. We live in a city where you can walk to literally anything and everything and take a train to wherever you wish. Billy actually rides his bike to work daily. Up hills and all, it is quite a workout but allows us to eat ice cream, bread, and drink large beers:)

While Tanya was here we did more than I will ever be able to write about but I will cover some highlights.....
We toured the Bayern Munich stadium in Munchen, the European word for Munich??? They had literally just won the soccer cup, like winning the Superbowl for us!!this was awesome and a great intro for my boys into the soccer experience. We toured the stadium, locker rooms, the press rooms and everything .it was super cool! We all went to Munchen for a day and discovered this city is NOT for kids. There is NOTHING for them and no easily accessible bathrooms,pain in the ass!!
We survived someone and we allowed the kids to live another day:). We did goto the famous Hofbrau House and will try to take everyone there, it was super neat and yummy!
We spent a weekend in the Alps, which is documented in another blog.
We biked in the Black Forest,visited the Ludwig Palace in Ludwigsburg. This palace was a 3 hour tour and the kids loved every minute of it. We visited Rothenburg, the super cool German style city that is still surrounded by a wall. Is city is everything you think Germany would look like.pics are below. We took a cruise down the Rhine River, disappointing once we got off the boat and toured a town because they were under water a week before from the terrible floods:(( we didn't realize.
We made our first trip to the freibad, the community pool, which we love.
One night Billy took all 6 kids to his baseball game and Tanya and I were Able to have a night out. We visited a biergarten and had wine, haha then an Italian restaurant for more wine and dinner then we decided we were going to hit up the nightlife scene in my town. The first bar we walked in we sat and ordered a beer and after about 5 minutes we realized we were in a Gaybar. Oh we'll, we stayed and drank our drinks then we went to a so called "American" bar, eh,nothing to write about there. The best part,around 1 am we were able to just walk home from our "wild"night out. Well, maybe not wild but definitely oh so much fun.
I feel so lucky to have had Tanya here to hang out with me e first month, lets not forget, she speaks GERMAN!! I am sad at she is gone. And in her honor, I will do a whole nother blog on the GermanTrash Situation!!if I haven't complained to you about it yet you are definitely in for a treat.
Thanks for bearing through this blog post, now the random pics for you to piece together . I will try to put them in the order of the post but I have no control.

Europa Park

Actual Date of this event: Friday, July 12

We decided we have done a lot of trips throughout Germany, some Alps and a little Austria, all of which were not necessarily kid oriented. We have seen several castles, which Trey liked so Much we bought the German castle pass, good for something like 65 castles as many times as you like through the year. We have gone hiking through the alps and been to several different restaurants and cities, which the kids have enjoyed but not really centered around them.
So.........we decided we would take them to Europa Park, Europe's second largest amusement park, next to EuroDisney. We actually question now if we need EuroDisney, way better things to see in Paris, especially when you have Europa Park.
We took a 3 hour train ride directly to the park which was AWESOME!!! Love love not having to drive everywhere. One of our trains was even a double decker, which the kids thought was so cool.
They were so excited that we actually made the 630am train with our fresh croissants from the bakery full of Nutella, very yummy.
Europa Park is located on the German/France border and is basically a town all it's own and the park was huge. We were immediately bummed that we didn't plan to spend the weekend, now we must return soon, thinking Halloween time:)
This park was incredible, like being at Disney, everything was pristine and there was an ABBA show and I love ABBA!
We rode rides EXACTLY like Space Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Haunted Mansion. Anyone that knows us well knows that we are Disney freaks and go at least once a year so this gave us our fix, especially with the rides. We actually started wondering if Disney owned a portion of this park, but we really do not think so.
If you visit us in the Summer and love amusement parks this is a definite for your list.
After a long fun day we made it back home around midnight.
Only cons about this park were the food! But..... you could bring yourown and everyone did. We brought our favorite salami and gruyere cheese on brotchens with us for lunch but later needed something and everything was meh! AND e worst part , NO fudge, seriously an amusement park with no fudge????? And not any chocolate bars in sight!!! Darn Germans, what is that about???
Totally random but thought it was neat that you don't stand in a bag check line, crime is so ridiculously minuscule that they do NOT check your bags! Bring drink, food, whatever! And oddly enough that is pretty much the norm in Germany. Everyone is eating their sandwiches everywhere you go because the breads are to die for, especially the pretzel roll.

Other events of the week:
Our car arrived!! Hooray!!! Now to take the driving test:(
I put it off twice because Billy said it was so hard I was paranoid but this Monday I decided I don't care in going to try. This required a 3 1/2 hour class then the test with 110 questions, you can only miss 15 and ALL the laws are totally different! I was shaking in this test but woohoo!!!! I passed, I missed 14!!! Funny thing is the US government registers our car in the overseas country you are located in and without this license you can drive rentals your first 6 months here but can never drive your own car without this license so it's kind of important.
What else????? I finally made it to the gym today and went to a boot camp class with Blair and my friend Liz. Pretty rough, especially considering I hurt my left shoulder when I slid down a flight of stairs in our home on July 3:( I am ok but 3 different types of push-ups throughout the hour was rough.
On a good note though, Billy is on a baseball team and we were all at his game tonight to witness his grand slam ! His team won 15-0
Tomorrow we are headed to the pool with friends and then a biergarten on Friday with Billy's coworkers, so everyday is pretty much FUNday:)
And on Sunday there was a high wire act at the base. It's a group that travels the world and they were nothing short of amazing. One guy stood up on a 65 meter bending pole and played star spangled banner on a trumpet while swaying. Look close at pics below!!

Sorry this is so long just trying to catch everyone up on what we are doing here in the land of beer and pretzels:)