Find The Agent

Today we met up with my old KMS team mates and all of their new and old family members for afternoon coffee and even managed to take a group shot. We had a good time! Unfortunately it's so hard to make this happen more often... Karl is the black thing right next to me. He's in that phase where he doesn't want his photo taken AT ALL, so he was pretending to be a secret agent.



Managed to sneak the camera in while he's super focused reading his Playmobil magazine.

Weekend Update

Here's the view of an average morning with the Kreye brothers. As you can see the good mood bar is set high 'round here. Although it can be followed up with any mood that's available to the emotional cosmos of an average toddler/small boy. Like -rather macho...



...or ambitiously nerdy.



It was supposed to be a weekend update of course. So there's still homebound Henri due to the closing of his daycare. He loves it. Fred's rather tired of the juggling. Henri tries to make up for it with extra angelic charm offensives. Next week his new daycare starts though. Finally.

Otherwise renovation at the house started full throttle. All walls that had to go are gone. Here's Karl inspecting the stairwell to his future room.



And here's Henri pointing to the future panoramic window of Fred's future office.



At the end of the day there's of course always something on TV. Yup, they're dazed. But not confused. Shaun the Sheep, Vicky the Viking and the Gruffalo are quite friendly fare on the stream-fed tube.

Wednesday at the Zoo

Henri and me are definite crisis profiteers in this transitional phase between daycare centers. I took off a few days and we're just hanging out having a good time, while everybody else is working or attending their classes in educational institutions. Today for example we just decided to go to the zoo, where we had us some lunch and some prime entertainment. like the huge polar bear jumping the glass pane pretending to kiss Henri (see Henri's reaction above).

I'm curious what tomorrow will bring. A whole big load of fun, that's for sure...

Fighting Mode

Just so nobody mistakes Karl for something he really isn't - he is a pilot on an expedition to research dinosaurs in winter. Photo just posted to set the tone for the action-packed, heroic update on our daycare drama....

...after the authorities shut down our daycare on Mondayx Fred got into true "Furious Fred" fighting mode. In a matter of 24 hours she got Henri not only a daycare slot, which is unheard of in the rather family-unfriendly town of Munich. She even got him into one of the most sought after places, a really wonderful daycare center not too far from us with a very nice garden, great programs and a lovely staff. This is the stuff superheros are made off. On the side she got half of Munich and the local press all riled up, so the authorities back-pedaled and agreed to let our original daycare stay open until summer. Now it's acutally that staff who backs out, because they lost their nerve. Anyway, the only question left right now is who should play the heroic Fred in the movie saga "Saving Toddler Henri"?

Deceiving Calm

This is a very non-winter-wonderland season, so Sunday it was off to the museum of technology to escape the dreadful icy drizzle. Henri was in full excited curiosity mode, testing his expanding vocabulary (boat! ship! diver! helicopter! airplane!... all with a few letters missing, which makes it all the more fun to decipher his fluid narrative).



After checking out the history of naval technology and some of the marvels of aerial warfare the brothers teamed up to do some major construction work in the kiddie land part of the museum. Defending their temporary Lego homestead against hordes of snotnosed huns they set up a mighty castle designated to the Knights of the Lion (another Playmobil storyline) with Henri as living proof that no toddler of insufficient height dare to scale the walls of this unconquerable fortress.

The early evening hours the brothers split their activities according to their age appopriate interests. Henri played with a train set. Karl pursued his research of the fact that TV rules! Well, itunes via Apple TV streaming rules so far.



All the weekend calm was a bit deceiving though, since Monday brought on a full force hurricane of Munich social reality. Some bureacrats from the department of sports, education and culture stopped by Henri's (private) daycare and shut it down. For good. From one day to the other. After ten years of spotless operation and very loving care. On the day our paper ran a story how the city wants to increase support to private daycare (because as of next year there is a law guaranteeing daycare and the city of Munich can't even provide five percent of the necessary slots). One of the main reasons for the shutdown was that there are some structural changes that should be made to have the place up to code, but can't be made, because it's a landmarked building. To add insult to injury - for referrals to other (in Munich non-existing) daycare slots they sent the parents to another department, which is actually responsible to refer sexually and other abused children to foster homes and such and help asylum seeker families from war-torn countries to find a place to stay. So with Karl and Henri in private daycare and Karl now in a Catholic kindergarten, the only contribution this mighty state of ours has made to the upbringing of our children has been to shut down a major support of our and especially Fred's work life. We are considering joining an occupy and/or tax resister movement. More on this case and why Fred once more is the designated superhero of this family soon.

Superbrothers

Sometimes you just feel you better don't mess with the brothers...

...but then again, they might mess with you.

IKEA

For males of all ages a trip to IKEA can be an experience ranging from annoying to traumatizing. Not so for little Mister Henri, whose excitement was only matched by his trip to the fairy tale theme park back in summer. Well, what's not to like. Exciting cuisine to tickle your palate, around every corner basically a new appartment to explore, including kitchens where nobody cares, if you touch aplliances emitting heat in real life or experiment with breakables (actually we encouraged him to go wild, since we were kitchen shopping and wanted him to act as a real life stress test). Plus the added benefit of one of those strange Bavarian holiday weeks with Kindergarten open and both daycare and editorial offices closed, which meant - mon and dad all for himself!



He even good naturedly put on a silly hat, while older boys broke into tears, when they actually had to wear one, because their initial glee about wearing a stuffed animal on their head acutally resulted in a purchase.

Hurricane of Holidays

Happy new year! (where are those mid-90s HTML effects again that make letters blink in colors and dance around?)

Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year's - as Louis CK describes life with kids, it's a hurricane. But one with really good surf. So we went to Bensheim and Heidelberg and Seeshaupt and piled up kids in various apartments around the country.

In Heidelberg Karl got to form an international version of his gang of rascals (have we mentioned that he declared himself the boss of the gang of rascals in kindergarten and kids have to apply for it to become a member? Every morning? And they do and sometimes the girls aren't allowed to be members for the rest of the day? Oh the cruel world of kids).

So he met his match - Tomas (left) now residing in Great Britain and Max (right), residing in Switzerland. We had all assembled in Carolin's and Ivo's old apartment in Heidelberg (just sold) to have a massive dinner of slow cooked duck ragout over pasta prepared by chef F.



The gang tore the place apart. The girls namely Ulla (left), Anna Lynn (on lap) and Thora (right) engaged in civilized conversation.



All can of course be smoothed out with a session of reading.



Works all the time - as demonstrated by Maria, who was our houseguest for New Year's with Paul (left) and Eva Lia (on lap)...



...and Tim, who did some reading of his own.



The calming power of reading can of course only be trumped by ice cream. Which followed another festive dinner prepared by chef F.



Then there was the trip out to Opa Paul.



And the great new blackboard Henri got for Christmas.



I guess there's a lot of details missing and photos of people mentioned, but not shown. But somehow those serene days of festive family gatherings left us as slightly worn like a five day stint at Burning Man including all the mind altering produce the Black Rock Desert has to offer. So we leave you with an incomplete record, just mentioning that of course Carolin and Ivo and Jessica and Markus and Opa Michael and Maria and Milena are somewhere in those pictures, out of frame, but not loved less of course. So once more:

Happy New Year!




(opening image - Müllerstrasse on New Year's)