Busy Days

Felix with his flying dolphin

Been super busy entertaining Felix. This morning we watched a couple of short documentary films, one on dinosaurs and the other on Egyptian mummies. He has probably seen each of them a hundred times. At one stage Felix turned up the sound so much it hurt my ears and I told him not to do that. He gave me a reproachful look and explained. "You don't understand. I love dinosaurs so much, the sound has to be loud." When the second documentary came to an end he said that when he grew up he wanted to be a "dinosaur researcher" and a "mummy researcher".

The other day we went to the lakeside for lunch, Ariela, Felix, Lilly, me, Ose whom we had visited in Munich and her friend Irina who is a music teacher and who had given a piano recital at Ose's place the day we arrived in Munich. After lunch, Lilly lights up a cigarette and Ariela looks and sounds most unhappy about it. Feli says to his mother in a most matter of fact tone, "Mama, don't look at Lilly just now, then you wont see her smoking."

Apart from Felix there has been a spate of visitors. Andrea came over a couple of days back and is here again today. Right now she is with the kids in the workshop downstairs where they are busy painting pictures. She's come with her 9 year old daughter Ines who is quite a handful. She and Feli make quite a pair, dashing across the house and screeching at the top of their voices. Julia, my friend Sabine's daughter, had visited yesterday with her ten month old baby Aidan, and Aidan's baby sitter, a really nice young woman from Colombia in South America. She reminded me quite a bit of a South American girl I used to know in Paris in the days when I was an au pair myself - Graciela, who was from Venezuela. She had the same quick mind, the same sense of humour, the same warmth. Jenny's year in Germany is over and she returns home tomorrow, so now Julia will have to look for a new au pair. Meanwhile I have an invitation to stay with Jenny and her family in Bogota - anyone want to join me?

I've been taking photos but it's a bit of a pain transferring them onto the computer. I do hope to get down to it at some point though.