Halloween

Oh yes, that heathen custom of dressing up in horror costumes and scaring your neighbors into giving you candy is a big thing now around here. Henri and Karl were joined by their buddy Florian.

First there was some warmup scaring...

... expert make-up work ....

... even for Florian's little sis Marie (with mom Christine).

Henri toyed with the idea of doing the handsome Jedi. Finally the scare team was out the door.

Upon return the candy loot was evenly distributed (that ice cream cone is actually an for real, since the ice cream parlor next door is giving free scoops to all kids coming in dressed up).

I think neither Karl nor Henri had that much candy in one sitting. So it was food coma or simmering sugar high, before a glorious night faded into an exhausted dinner.

Autumn Break

Fall break. Time for a trip put to Omi's and Opa's where you can hike the vineyards with the new canine family member Lara...

...show off your reading skills (Karl had a blast, taking over some paragraphs and especially correcting the pronounciation of Star Wars names)...

...and go an excursion to the "sea of rocks" that was supposedly thrown into the landscape by ancient giants. In short: fun!

Rolling Stones

Sometimes you get to go on unexpected adventures with Henri and Karl developing their own tastes in all things culture. There was the big minerals expo in town. Who knew that's a big thing amongst first graders? Henri was quite taken as well, looking at all the shiny and sparkling gems and crystals.

They had some really cool things there though. There were big sandboxes where you could get a California gold rush style strainer and look for little treasures in the sand. The had little sharks teeth and gems hidden in there. Karl and Henri got quite the loot.

You could also try out to your luck as a junior paleontologist and hammer your way through some slabs of geological matter to look for fossils. We got some snails and mussels and quite a bit of corprolit. Which is a fancy word for fossilized dinosaur age fecal matter.

The big draw of the expo was "the first fully assembled T-Rex skeleton shown in Europe" though. Seen here in a very well executed reenactment of "Jurassic Park". Much to the enjoyment of the crowd we did five takes to get it right. Sure looks scary, doesn't it?