DutchInLaw

 I'm emptying out my cupboards of school supplies, craft boxes, puzzles, science kits-- and there is now a huge mess on our table, and multiple piles of donation/trash items by our door.  It's summer, time for a fresh start. I want to be out having fun and not shoving miniature dinosaurs and ripped papers in the cupboard to deal with later. I'm looking forward to bike rides in the sunshine. Getting piles of books from the library and reading them at the playground. Picking strawberries from our garden.  We're getting the Museum Card this year, and train passes for July. I'm beyond excited at the upcoming adventures. More time out learning and exploring, less time dealing with vacation boredom. The kids are older and have longer attention spans, and loved Leiden's Boerhaave museum and the Prinsenhof in Delft. I'm hoping to revisit those, plus add in famous new places like Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum, Leiden's Museum of Antiquities, Rot...

Sometimes I feel like writing a blog post about the fun and interesting things that come our way while living in Holland. Sometimes I just feel like dropping a ton of photos into a post so there's at least some sort of recap. (Also sometimes (most of the time) I take so many hundreds of photos that my computer fills up and gets upset at me, which means I really need to get better about clearing them out.) So, here you are. Alsjeblieft .  This is hagelslag (literally, hail-strike), the chocolate sprinkles that Dutch people put on bread. But this particularly kind is so fancy, it's called HAGEL-SWAG. I can't even.  Soft summer evenings with bike paths up the dike. Beautiful but annoying to bike up.  Sometimes we do school outside. Because, why not? Pippin continues creating with pattern blocks. His six-year old explanations of what he has made are not brief, but they are entertaining.  Our blueberry bushes give us about a handful a week.  Friends come over for pl...