Head, shoulders knees and toes…

 

Abbie is active as ever lately.  I can’t get over what a little sponge she is.  It absolutely amazes me how quickly she catches on to things.

She is absolutely in to EVERYTHING now.  She’s figuring out how to get into more things daily, but she’s fairly good at listening when I tell her no.  For some reason she loves to sit in her toy shelf.

 

We’ve been working on body parts for a while now, and she has quite a few of them down.  She’s even starting to say a few of them.  For 13 months old, I think she’s doing pretty well!

Here’s her touching her ear, which she can also say.

And her hair (which she also says) and her belly…

And her nose (which she says) and her tongue…

And her foot, which she also says and if you tell her to point to her other foot, she’ll point to her other foot.

Right now we’re working on learning her knees and eyes.

She LOVES wearing her sunglasses now and every time she sees them she brings them to me to put on her.

She’s still a little unsure about her pony, but she’s warming up to it, slowly but surely.

Abbie knows how to make a few animal sounds.  She knows how to roar like a lion, woof woof like a puppy and “ooh ooh aah ahh” like a monkey.  Here’s Mark getting a little carried away with the “ooh ooh aah aah”ing.  *BIG GRINS*  Abbie obviously loves it.

Abbie has turned in to my little buddy.  She’s always been my side kick, but now she knows she’s my side kick.  When we were in Zurich, we were eating at this fish place.  I was eating shrimp, and I didn’t want to give her shell fish quite yet, since shell fish allergies are on Mark’s side of the family.  Mark was eating some other kind of fish, and was trying to get Abbie to eat some of his.  Every time he’d hand her some, she’d throw it on the floor, look at me, and sign “more”.  So I took some of Mark’s fish when she wasn’t looking and pretended I was eating it, and then gave her some of it,and what do you know, she gobbled it right up.  Little turd…  Every time I sit on the floor now, she hauls all her toys and books over and perches herself right in my lap and sits there.  She’s never done that before.  I also wear little barrettes in my hair to try to keep it under control in this crazy humidity.  EVERY SINGLE TIME she sees a barrette in my hair she attempts to rip it out and put it in her hair (which is GREAT fun when I wear her in the Ergo).

Oh, and Abbie will give you kisses now, which melts my heart every time.

Lucerne, Switzerland

(I had to split these into two separate blogs because it would take FOREVER to upload this many pictures in one blog post.)

On our way home, we decided to drive through Lucerne, Switzerland.  I’d read that it’s the 5th most popular tourist destination in the WORLD in 2010!  It was beautiful and what I was hoping Zurich would be like.

The ride from Zurich to Lucerne (about 45 mins) was beautiful.

 

Lucerne is right on Lake Lucerne (go figure…).  Zurich was located on a huge lake too, and we passed quite a few large lakes on our drives through Switzerland.  Seems as though Switzerland is all mountains and lakes!  Lake Lucerne is the 4th largest in Switzerland.

Abbie got a kick out of all the swans, and so did Mark and I when they did this.  =)

This bridge is the most famous landmark in Lucerne.  It was built in 1333, and part of it was burned down in 1993, allegedly due to a cigarette starting the fire.  All the triangles on the bridge depict the history of Lucerne.

This is what I pictured Switzerland to be like, and it probably would have been like this is Zurich also if there hadn’t been that huge fair going on at the time.

Abbie was a pretty good girl throughout our trip, except for her sleep issues…  She sure does like milkshakes though!

We passed under the gondola on our ride home.  There are a few gondola rides you can take up to mountain peaks in Switzerland but they’re like 70CHF ($70) per person, so we passed this time around.

 

Again, this picture doesn’t do any justice to the beautiful scenery that surrounded us.

Lessons learned in Zurich…

Our trip to Zurich was… interesting.  I definitely learned quite a few valuable lessons, which I will share with you.

1.  Make SURE to double check the costs of the hotel before you book it.  I looked all over online for decent prices for a hotel.  I found the Crowne Plaza on one of the sites for around $270 for both nights.  I decided to look on the hotels actual website instead of going through booking.com.  (Side note: Switzerland uses the Swiss franc for it’s currency, which is abbreviated CHF.)  Apparently I got the conversions of the currency all confused or something..  I’m not sure what exactly happened besides my stupidity coming to the forefront.  The hotel ended up costs 265CHF per night and conveniently the conversion rate between CHF and USD right now is 1 to 1…  So our hotel bill for both nights was $540.  Oops.  BIG oops.

2.  Switzerland is very expensive.  Even excluding the outrageous cost of the hotel, Switzerland is really expensive.  Beautiful, but expensive.  We didn’t buy any souvenirs or even postcards because the postcards were $1.20 each.  A coke was $3.50 at the cheapest and usually $5.  We ate at a take out Chinese place and our bill was over $45…

3. Make sure you know what’s going on in a town before you visit it.  We really wanted to see the “allstadt” (Old Town) part of Zurich, and we did, kinda.  It was just with 50,000 other people…  There was some HUGE festival going on in downtown Zurich.  There were thousands of people everywhere, so you couldn’t really take in the beauty of the city with all the people and rides and vendors everywhere.  It really took away from the quaintness of Switzerland, and fighting the crowds is not my idea of fun.

4.  Sharing a hotel room with a 13 month old that doesn’t sleep well is not my idea of fun.  Abbie does fairly well traveling, but we made the mistake of keeping her out late on Saturday night.  We were out until 10:30pm, at which point she was completely overly-tired and on her 2nd wind.  She SCREAMED when we tried to put her to bed, and if she does that at home, you can leave her alone for 5 mins max and she’s out.  However, when she knows you’re in the room, she’ll scream for a LONG time.  I think we finally got her to sleep around 12:15am, and she was up at 6:45am.  Nice.

5.  I’m married to a saint.  Despite my stupid mistakes of booking an expensive hotel and picking a place to come that had a festival going on, Mark never once said anything to me about it, besides it’s a good thing this month his pay is tax-free, and he laughed when he said it.  Seriously, that man is amazing.  He didn’t get mad about any of it, and just chalked it up as lessons learned.  I don’t know what I ever did to deserve him.

Anyway, we stopped by Lake Como in Italy before we went into Switzerland to grab lunch and get gas.  We were only here for an hour, but it was BEAUTIFUL.  Here are a few pictures.

The drive through the mountains in Switzerland was beautiful and these pictures don’t do it any justice, but I’ll share them anyway.

Here’s what their money looks like!

 

The train station in Zurich.

One of the churches in Zurich, but I don’t remember which one.

 

So Abbie didn’t want to take a nap on Sunday either, after her HORRIBLE night of sleep on Saturday night.  We went back to the hotel with hopes of getting her to take a nap, and after an hour of trying we finally gave up and stuck her in the Ergo and headed out again.  Not more than 5 mins into the walk and she was out cold, and stayed asleep for over an hour.

Despite the lessons we learned on our trip to Zurich, we still had a good time, and I’m happy as long as I’m with Mark.

Slacking

My last blog post was June 26...  That's quite the lapse between blogs for me, but I guess I just haven't been in the mood to write lately, and haven't had time really, and our internet service sucks, so even if I did write a blog (especially ones with pictures), most of the time it wouldn't upload because the internet is too slow. 

So to all my faithful readers, I'm sorry I haven't written a blog lately.  I have quite a few of them to write and I'll try to get around to doing it this week.  Hopefully Abbie will play in our playroom/ computer room long enough for me to get a blog or two written, but lately she hasn't wanted to do ANYTHING except play with me 24/7.  Which is all fine and dandy, until I want to get something else done while she's awake and she throws a huge fit.  The joys of being your baby's best friend.  I wouldn't trade it for the world.  =)

I promise I'll try to get a few blogs written tomorrow.  Hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July.  Let me tell you, as wonderful as it is living in a foreign country, you truly don't realize how great America is until you don't have all the American conveniences at hand.