The Rest of the Trip!

Hi, everyone!

On Monday, James and Thomas went back to school.  Grandma and I went to the bus stop with their mommy in the afternoon to walk home with them.  When Thomas arrived on his school bus, he was wearing a Power Rangers costume!  That’s not what he was wearing when he went to school!  James arrived on the big school bus right after Thomas.  Their mommy took chocolate waffles to the bus stop as an after school snack and gave them a ride back up the street in the stroller.

Then it was present opening time!  Thomas and James had presents from their Sunday School class celebration that happened while they were away.  Thomas got a Bible story sticker book!  Grandpa and I helped James build the new Lego set he got at Legoland.  There were birthday presents for Uncle Steven, too!  The presents James and Thomas picked for their daddy arrived in the mail while everybody was away.  James got his daddy a Lego model of the Eiffel tower.  Everybody started building it, but James finished it!

This time of year, sunset in the Netherlands is way past my bedtime!  Grandma took this picture so I wouldn’t miss seeing it!

On Tuesday, Grandma and I went to James’ and Thomas’ school to pick up Thomas from Sunbeams class.  The AFNorth International School is very big!  I made friends with the lions by the front entrance, then we waited in the lobby for Thomas.

We weren’t done celebrating birthdays, because Tuesday was Grandpa’s birthday!  Aunt Kara made a chocolate birthday cake for Grandpa!  It was very pretty and it tasted yummy!  James’ friend Anna was staying overnight and came home on the school bus with James.  Grandma made overnight sticky buns with James and Anna helping.  Anna helped me put the pecans in the pans!

On Wednesday morning, Uncle Steven baked the sticky buns and we ate them for breakfast.  Everybody said we did a very good job making them!  Right after James and Anna and Thomas went to school, the mover showed up!  Uncle Steven’s family is moving back to the United States this summer.  All their stuff has to move, too!  Most of their furniture won’t make it to their new house until the end of the summer, but things they will need right away get a faster trip.  Uncle Steven and Aunt Kara spent Tuesday evening piling up their “unaccompanied baggage” on the table in the living room.  The mover came and wrapped it all up so it wouldn’t break.  Then it all went into a big wooden crate in the moving truck!

Before everybody came home from school on Wednesday, Grandma and Grandpa and I took a trip to see the American War Memorial Cemetery at Margraten.  During World War II, many American soldiers died fighting to liberate Belgium and the Netherlands from the German Nazi army.  The cemetery where they are buried is a memorial to their efforts.  There is a map of the battles and a pretty chapel at the end of a reflecting pool.  Every grave is marked with the name, unit and date of death of the soldier.  Grandma told me that each grave is adopted by a Dutch family.  Those families decorate the graves for holidays and the soldier’s birthday.  World War II ended in Europe just before Grandma was born, so now it’s the children and grandchildren of the Dutch families who tend the graves their parents adopted.  When we went into the chapel, Grandma was surprised to see the prayer on the wall!  She said it was her mother’s favorite prayer!

We got home from Margraten in time for me to go to the bus stop to meet Thomas and James again.  This time, Thomas came home in the clothes he wore to school!  Anna came home with James again.  Everybody walked home and had to wait for their snack until they got there!

Thursday morning, Thomas and Grandma and I took the recycling down the street to the containers with Aunt Kara.  I helped Thomas put the paper in the paper recycling bin.  Grandma took care of the bottles!  The recycling center is right next to a public field.  A flock of sheep were grazing there.  That’s how Dutch towns maintain their land, instead of mowing it.  Grandma calls these sheep “field maintenance crews”.

After we did the recycling, Anna and her mother came over and we all went to another amusement park!  Pretpark de Valkenier has lots of rides that are just right for children James and Anna’s size.  As soon as we got there, I made a dinosaur friend!

The first ride James and Thomas and Anna and their mommies took was a kind of carousel that rose up in the air.  At the end of their ride, it didn’t come back down right away.  Everybody had to wait in the air until somebody came to fix the ride!  Right across from that ride were a set of mirrors that made everybody’s reflections look funny!

The first ride I got to take was pedal cars that looked like helicopters on a high rail .  Grandma did all the pedaling and I got to look at the dinosaurs in the lawn below!

There were lots of my cousins around!  I saw some of them in the circus puppet theater and more of them on the safari ride.  Thomas was the jeep driver and James was the back seat driver!

James and Thomas and Anna loved the Green Snake roller coaster and rode it again and again!  Then they all did the Haunted House ride.  Thomas thought it was funny, but Anna was a little scared!

There were horses to ride, just like at Legoland.  Here, the ride is cowboys, not knights jousting!  I waited while James and Anna and Thomas went on the moon rocket.  They told me it was jiggly and sparkly inside!  We had lunch at the Pirates Cove.  I made sure the cannon next to our table wasn’t loaded!

After lunch we went to the other side of the park.  There was a self-service ride!  When two buttons are pushed, the flying treasure chest gets pulled up to the top of one end of a U-shaped rail.  Then it rolls back and forth until it stops at the bottom.  James and Anna and Thomas really liked this ride, too!

James and Anna went up and down on another pirate ride, then they rode on the pirate ship with Aunt Kara.  I wanted to go with them, but I was too short!

It was almost time to leave, but James and Anna and Thomas and Uncle Steven went on a barefoot path.  Thomas got done faster than anybody else!  The last ride everybody took was the water slide.  James and Thomas and Anna each got to go twice before it started to rain!  I helped put the rafts back on belt to go back to the top of the slide.

Today, Grandma and Grandpa and I drove to Brussels and flew back to the United States.   The Belgian passport control line was so long that it took us a whole hour to get through!  We almost missed our flight to Newark, but the plane waited for us!

We had a snack at the United Club in Newark before our flight back to Rochester.  Now we’re home.  Next week, we’ll go back to the airport for Aunt Kara and James and Thomas when they come to stay with us!

Love,

Lion-san