After our whirlwind tour of the Pacific Northwest, we returned to Hamburg happy and thoroughly jet-lagged. You can hardly imagine how wonderful it is to be woken nightly - from 1am-3am - for about a week straight to play toys and read books with a 15-month-old bundle of late night energy. We swore we’d never do that to ourselves again, but how quickly we forget…..!

So in the vacation aftermath, we did a little bit of local this and that to round out our summer:

1. Splashed in (and drove through) our very own Lake Hamburg

The long driveway which services our house and the 2 new houses adjacent to us was not yet paved or set up for drainage when a maverick set of rainstorms hit, providing us with about 5000 gallons too much water and a nice low spot on the dirt driveway for it all to gather. There is probably a Toyota immersed in these shallows. Soenke bought a pump and literally pumped all the water into a nearby field. It was probably totally illegal, but it worked and our mailman resumed our mail delivery the very next day.

2. Discovered Hamburg’s Indoor Playgrounds

During all this untimely rain, we took advantage of one of Hamburg’s many indoor playgrounds. Sophie went ga-ga over the ball pit (it took a lot of coaxing to extract her, about 2 hours later…)

3. Went To The Zoo

We did enjoy a sunny Saturday and headed straight for the Wildpark Schwarze Berge, home of the world-famous “Haengebauchschweine”, which translates loosely into “really really fat ugly pigs with short legs and giant bellies that drag on the ground”. The cool thing is, you can feed them (obviously a lot of people do that), and Sophie definitely wanted to ride one (um, can you tell?).

4. Sat Around Taking Photos of Sophie

In this riveting series, we wanted to capture Sophie doing something brilliant (whatever that was), but she spotted the camera and instead provided us an entertaining picto-logue of her attempts to retrieve the camera, and sadness at being denied:

Sophie plays contentedly…

…then spots the CONTRABAND… a camera!

Urgent bee-line for the target device..

Wails of frustration “mommy, gimmee gimmee gimmee!!!”

More wails… bad mommy! Evil mommy! I want CAMERAAAAAAAA!

5. WE GOT A LAWN!

And finally, after an entire summer of impatient waiting, our lawn was installed (THANK YOU DEAR HUSBAND!).

Soenke and our garden-guy Toby do the hard labor, greatly appreciating my helpful supervision:

Sophie scorned the soft, beautiful grass in favor of hard, dirty stones:

Soenke celebrates his manly new lawn (we don’t know what the broom is for):

6. Sophie Does Cute Baby Stuff

Our ahead-of-her-time daughter takes up yoga:

And shows us how fun mashed potatoes can be:

7. Mommy & Daddy Go To The Opera

Our hilarious friend and brilliant tenor Joseph Calleja came to Hamburg for one of his signature roles, the Duke in Rigoletto. My favorite part of the evening was going out for drinks afterwards and being regaled with fabulously-juicy, opera-world gossip that I will sadly have to take with me to my grave…

(I get an F-minus in photo taking that evening… Joseph is on the right.. he really loved the duck-suit, I can assure you…)

8. We Book Our Vacation To The MALDIVES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (note sounds of cheering and fireworks!)

Please don’t hate me, but this is where we are going in November…

And thus concludes Summer 2008 !