We Now Live in an IKEA Display

Seriously. If you came in here, you would look around for staff in the blue and yellow aprons! Here are some pictures so you know what I mean:

Living Room:


The couch has a trundle bed underneath that pulls out, and combined with the seat, makes a double bed. That's where the kids sleep. There's a nice flat screen TV in the corner, but we only get two English language channels: BBC News and BBC One. The kids really like watching German language cartoons, though, especially SpongeBob SquareKopf.

Desk/Dining Area:

You can see that next to the couch there is a small desk with two chars tucked under it. It also has a small table that fits right underneath it. We pull it out into the room to eat. We use the two chairs provided with the desk and two more folding chairs kept in one of the many closets. That's one thing to be said for this apartment -- there is a lot of storage space. Kind of like IKEA...hmmmm. Also, that curvy chair behind the wall is soooo uncomfortable and such a temptation for children to climb. We'd love to have it taken out of here, but I don't think they would have anywhere to put it.

Kitchen:



Here are two views of the kitchenette. It is cunningly made for such a small space. The top photo shows the stove top, which has a storage cabinet overhead and a drawer and cabinet underneath. To the right of the stove is a refrigerator (the big gray cabinet) and an oven that works both as a microwave and a convection oven. There is also another stroage cabinet over the oven.

The lower picture shows the sink area. The garbage and compost waste is stored under the sink and there's a tiny little dishwasher next to the sink (you can't really see it here). It's the cutest little thing you've ever seen, and designed to easily fit the cooking utensils and dishes dirtied by a family of four. The cloth you see hanging on the door is hanging on one of two hooks that are there just to hang your cloths.

Bedroom:

There's not much to say about the bedroom. It's two separate beds pushed next to each other, which sounds uncomfortable but is actually kind of nice. They don't seem to move around or gap in the middle, so it's possible they are attached to each other. Since I don't have to make the beds (yay for maid service), I have no idea. The good part is that we each have our own sheets and blankets. Aside from the bed, there's not much more than two bedside tables and a closet in there.

Tub and shower area:

The separate toilet/tub and shower areas were heavily advertised as a feature of this apartment. This is the tub and shower area. The tub is really deep and the kids love bathing in there. The curvy sink is pretty but kind of impractical. The shower, which you can't really see, is tucked in the left corner. This room is quite large and a comfortable place to get changed after you bath.

Toilet area:


This room is very, very small. In fact, I don't really like being in there with the door shut all the way because it's a bit claustrophobic. The toilet has two options: small flush for when you pee and big flush for when you do something else. It also has it's own little wash basin, which is nice. You can sort of see Jack's potty on the floor in the foreground there. He's been doing great with peeing, but he had a little poop accident in his underwear this evening. Fortunately, it was Jim's turn to clean up the mess.

View across the street:

This is the view from our living room window. See all the shutters? They appear to be metal. Almost all of them have been pulled down since we arrived, but there are clearly people living on some of the floors who open theirs. I'm not sure what they're for -- they look kind of like hurricane shutters.

View down the street:


This is the view down Hammerstrasse. There's not much to say about it.

Anyway, if you want a 3-D tour of our apartment, you can check it out here. Click on the oval that says "virtueller besuch" underneath the photo on the page, and then click on "die wohnungen" to get a drop down menu. Make sure to choose the second option for 2 zimmer-wohnung -- the first one is a different style of apartment from ours. The second option gives you a 360 degree virtual tour of an apartment like ours -- you will really get an idea of how small it is!

Death March

After a nightmare 18 hour trip, we arrived in Basel yesterday afternoon. The good thing about our trip: the kids were very well behaved, considering they had very little sleep during that time. The bad things about our trip:

diarrhea
6 hour surprise layover in Heathrow, the Airport of Sweaty Doom
sleeping on a stone floor
pulling what was basically an all-nighter at the age of 42

And this isn't even a comprehensive list.

The apartment is nice but compact. VERY compact. I could take a picture of the entire kitchen, bedroom and living room while sitting on the couch. Also, they don't exactly have air conditioning in Switzerland. They call it "air freshening." So far, the difference seems to be that the room eventually gets cool, but remains very humid. So, there's a lot of sweating if anyone moves around too much. Fortunately, the dainty size of the accommodations makes it nearly impossible to move around too much.

We have no food, so I have to try and find a supermarket today. We think there's one right down the street, but I have to go inside to tell for sure. We had italian for dinner last night. The owner spoke mostly Italian, a smattering of German and very little English. We only made it a part of the way through the meal when we realized the kids had to go home and get in bed, so I took the kids and left Jim to deal with the check.

Anyway, we have internet now, I have about 30 francs in my pocket and I've got to figure out how I'm going to feed the kids today, so I'm off. I'll try to post some pictures of the apartment and our street later. If we can get rid of this jet lag thing going on....

Procrastination

I don't really feel like packing!

The kids are really excited about the upcoming trip. Jack believes that Switzerland will really like his light saber and his hair. Lily told her friend today that Switzerland is a place with really good chocolate stores. I hope they don't end up disappointed.

Jack made up a new word this week -- "slurb." He initially created it to describe a strawberry coolatta from Dunkin' Donuts. He took a sip and said "This is a really tasty slurb." He expanded the definition two nights ago while scraping up the cheese sauce from his macaroni and cheese, saying "I'm getting up all this macaroni slurb." I'm really into the word myself. It just sounds cool.

I really can't put off the rest of my work any longer. Catch you on the flip side, folks.

Half Way to 5K

So...Week 5, Day 3

I ran for 20 minutes today with no walking. I feel like superwoman. If you had told me 5 weeks ago that I would run for 20 minutes and enjoy it, I would have laughed in your face. That first day of running, 30 seconds seemed like a lot! But today, I just went out and did it! And it didn't kill me, either.

I am still trying to get over the Cold of Eternity, and had to take a 4 day break between Week 5, Day 2 and the big run on Day 3. It was well worth it.

We are busy planning for our big adventure, so I can't much for now.

20 minutes! Wooo-hoooooooo!

Week 4, Day 2

Great run this morning with no problems. I stupidly peeked ahead to next week and found out that on Week 5, Day 3, I have to do a 20 minute run. With no walking. I'm already dreading it, even though I suspect by the time I get to it, it will go just fine. Running 5 minutes at a stretch seemed very easy today.

In other news, Jack pooped on the potty...FINALLY. He got a "light saver" (light saber) as his reward, but was upset later in the day because he wished he had bought an "MP3-O" (C3PO) figure instead.

He also had his evaluation for speech at the preschool yesterday. We decided to have him checked out because of the squeaky voice thing and the weird way he talks. Some of it has been resolved by the acid reflux meds he's been on, but we thought it was worth having checked. He did just fine and nearly talked the ear off of the evaluator. Sadly, she was not a voice pathologist, which is what we needed for a proper evaluation. We'll have to get a referral from his ENT after we get back.

He told the evaluator we were going to Switzerland and she checked with me to see if he was telling a story! He also told her that when you're sick, you need to eat jello because it makes all the germs go away down into your stomach.

Things I learned from running today: It isn't that bad to go running when it's raining lightly. It's actually kind of nice.

Fat Girl Running

Hey everyone! I am back for now because I finally have something to say. First, I'm going to blog about my whole fitness thing because it keeps me accountable if I think people are paying attention. Second, we are going to Basel, Switzerland, and I want to keep you all in the loop with our doings while we're there! So, back to blogging for me.

For those of you not in the know, my cardiologist pronounced my peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) officially healed in April. I am not off the hook yet -- he would like to see one more normal echo before taking me off certain restrictions, but he did approve me to do more than light exercise. I will be seeing him again next year after an echo. He promised that if the echo was normal, I will not need to see him again unless I have some problem or future echos are wonky. I will have to get an annual echo for a while, though.

After discussing a few fitness plans with my cardiologist (he nixed the fitness bootcamp and anything requiring push ups or weightlifting), I settled on doing the Couch to 5K plan from the Cool Running web site. After 3 years of inactivity, doing something promising to gently take me from couch potato to 5K runner sounded pretty good. Also, it's inexpensive -- it only requires shoes and some flat running ground. So I started it up 3 weeks ago.

The first week alternated 60 seconds of jogging with 90 seconds of walking for a total of 20 minutes. That gave me about 8 minutes of actual jogging out of the 20 minutes. (I also do a 5 minute warm up walk and a 5 minute cool down walk, which brings my total exercise time up to 30 minutes). It went okay, but it was kind of hard to get into a natural run.

The second week alternated 90 seconds of jogging and 2 minutes of walking. That bumped me up to about 9 minutes of running. That week was hard because I started to get shin splints and this incredible knee pain like I never had before. After a couple of days limping around in pain, Jim convinced me that it would be worthwhile to stop in at Marathon Sports and have them fit me for the right running shoes. I was skeptical, but the pain drove me to go there. It turns out that my wonderful bargain Asics from the outlets were completely wrong for my pronation problem. You see, I had read that Asics were considered the best shoe for my problem, but didn't understand that I needed to buy a specific STYLE. I just assumed they were all the same. Anyway...they fit me with some "extreme support" Asics and the difference was immediately noticeable.

The third week switched up the routine to 90 seconds jogging, 90 walking, 3 minutes jogging, 3 minutes walking (repeated twice), for a total of 9 minutes jogging. I was ridiculously scared of running for 3 minutes, but it turned out to be okay.

That bring us to today -- Week 4, Day 1: 3 minutes seconds jogging, 90 seconds walking, 5 minutes jogging, 2.5 minutes walking (2 reps) for a total of 16 minutes of jogging. Yikes!! I dreaded this run, but it was also fine. My legs didn't hurt at all during or after the run, although they did feel pretty tired during the last 5 minute jog.

So, yeah, I'm running and sticking to the program. Next week, I'll be half way through. I'm actually curious to see if I can make it through the 9 week program without having to repeat a week, which is what you have to do if you find one of the workouts too tough. I thought this week would be too hard, but it wasn't, so maybe this will actually work!

P.S. I'm still knitting -- one pair of socks a month plus whatever else amuses me. I'll have to do a photo montage the next time I post.

I'm BAAAAACK!

I'm not going to give some long apology for my absence from the blog. I've been busy and nothing interesting has happened to me. End of story.

I did have an incident on Friday that was a great source of amusement for my family. My mom wished she could have a picture, so I have drawn a series of diagrams to illustrate the incident.

THE STORY: Lily and Jack were dancing in the living room. Lily asked if we could play ballet school, so I said "Sure!" We stood together and I showed her all of the ballet positions and how to plie. She showed me how she twirls. Everyone was smiling and having fun, including Jack. Let me tell you, nothing is more amusing than watching Jack plie. But I digress....

It was about at that point that I said "Do you want me to show you how a real ballerina twirls?" Of course, Lily and Jack were thrilled and moved out of the way. I set myself up to do a turn on one leg as shown in Fig. A. below, and started to twirl.



Unfortunately, I haven't twirled in some time and after turning about 180 degrees, I started to tilt on my axis, much like a planet. See Fig. B. below. As shown in the diagram, once I started to tilt, I knew I was heading for disaster.



In what seemed to me like slow motion, I started to fall sideways to the floor. At the same time, I continued to turn another 180 degrees and my left arm flew out to the side and caught on a chair seat. See Fig. C. My other hand reached to the ground to try and break the fall.



As I hit the floor, my arm remained hung up on the seat of the chair. It is really hard to diagram, but I ended up on my stomach with my right arm out in front of my and my left arm caught raised up behind me on the seat of the chair. See Fig. D.



The pain was immediate and unbearable. As I lay writhing on the floor and moaning, Jack came running over and jumped on top of me, saying "Make a slide, Mommy!" Lily was laughing. I could only croak out the words "Don't touch me! Mommy's hurt!" Right about then, the phone rang. It was my mother. I told her what happened, and Jack piped up in the background "You should be more careful."

I seriously thought I would need to go to the ER, but after icing my arm for about an hour and taking Ibuprofen, everything was okay. It's pretty stiff and sore, but it only really hurts if I try to put it in the position it was in when it got caught on the chair. Since I hardly ever walk around with my arm up in the air behind my back, it barely bothers me.

Once I got out the ice pack, the kids both tried to hurt themselves and demanded ice packs for their "injuries." Lily actually purposely hit her head on the floor. Shne said "I want to be like you, Mommy!"

Needless to say, I won't be doing any fancy ballet moves in the near future...or ever again.