Category: Real Life (Behind the Scenes)

Posted on

What’s So Great About Photos?

Halli Hallo! Here we go again, another round of Everything’s Famtastic to enthral and delight you. Last week’s post about dealing with grief was kinda heavy and not my usual thing. But then again, the passing away of so many friends and family in such a short time is also not “my usual thing”. But nobody is ever alone in their grief. I just hope that my post reached the right person at precisely the time when they needed some reassurance, comfort and strength after losing someone special.

One of my “usual things” however, is photographs. I take a LOT of photos. Just ask my Hubby. Or my kids. Or pretty much anyone who has known me for a while 😉. I take photos with my mobile phone. I take photos with my big fancy-pants SLR camera.

I not only take a lot of photos, oh no. I collect photos from my Hubby’s mobile too. And when we get together for special occasions with friends or family, I like to check out what photos anyone else took too. Which means that I have a fairly large collection of photographs.

Ahem. *clears throat* I don’t think that I have been quite clear enough. I have a REALLY LARGE collection of photos. I haven’t done a hard-core sorting and cleaning out of photos from my laptop in years. Since approximately 2014 to be precise *buries face in hands in shame*.

Ok confession time. I take a LOT of photos. I have more than 40,000 photos stored on my laptop dated from 2014 to present. I am a photography addict.

There is just so much to do with all those photos… *wails*

Continue reading “What’s So Great About Photos?”
Posted on

6 Must-Haves for Road Trips with Kids (and How to Survive Them)

Hellooooo! It’s me! I am back in the land of Everything’s Famtastic after being AWOL these past 2 weeks. I do have a perfectly valid excuse: we were on our family summer holiday!

As alluded to a few weeks back in my list of super summer activities and “Bring on Summer Holidays!” I said that we were planning our summer holidays trip. We had such a famtastic time in Croatia! I can HIGHLY recommend a visit. All of the people we encountered were lovely, friendly, helpful… we had a new language to try out (“hvala!”)… the weather was sunny and hot… views are stunning… gorgeous beaches… icecream every day… What more could you want for a summer holiday?!?

Hubby and I knew that we had to prepare well for the trip. Nobody wants to have 3 kids whining “Are we there yet?” 30 minutes into the drive, right? Am I the only one who has ever fantasised about having one of those glass partitions installed in the family car? You know what I mean? Between the driver and the backseat passengers. Like, in fancy-pants limousines and such. After a few rounds of “Are we there yet?”, just press the magic button and the upwards gliding of a pane of soundproof glass is the last thing you’ll hear for the next hours 😉.

Oh OK, of course we would never actually DO that. But don’t pop my daydream bubble, alright?!?

tips, how-to, roadtrip, parenting, road trip with kids

So, big trips with children call for military-precision planning. And plan is what we did. Today I’m here to help you out by sharing with you the items we packed for the kids (and us grown-ups) to make the journey as bearable, er, entertaining as possible.

Continue reading “6 Must-Haves for Road Trips with Kids (and How to Survive Them)”
Posted on

Bring on Summer Holidays

Another week complete. Another week closer to Christmas. Hey, wait! What?!? Christmas? It’s true, at last one of my children have already asked me how long until Christmas (“About another 5 ½ months, sweetie!”). But they seemed to have missed the big fun right in their face: summer school holidays!!!

School’s Out For…

… well you know the song title. My kids have been requesting to hear it a lot lately!

This week marked the end of the school year for our 2 girls. Both brought home outstanding report cards over which they- and we parents- are extremely proud. Apparently both of our girls are class leaders in the amount of books they devoured, er, read. And both have loved their teachers. Which makes it plain easier for everyone involved, right?

For one of them though, not only was this week the last before summer, but also the end of an era: Miss 10 has just completed primary school *sniff* “I think I have something in my eye” *dabs eye*. 😉 I will confess, there were more than a couple of tears shed. In fact, I think I was weepier than Miss 10, who informed me very matter-of-factly that “just because I am sad doesn’t mean that I must cry”. Oh man. I would like to point out that I was not the only mother with watery eyes on the final day of primary school. However I of course will not be naming names 😉.

Primary school here in Germany is over and done with after 4th grade and high school lasts from 5th to 13th grade! Which as an Australian, is something I am not used to. So off onto the next big adventure for her. (And for me, as I have ZERO experience with the high school system here. Looks like we will be learning together).

But before the next big school adventure comes a summer break FULL of new adventures. Hurrah! Like going away on holidays! We are all so excited and desperately looking forward to going on a big trip somewhere totally new. And this year it’s Croatia!

Big family holidays require big plans. Like: What to pack? What not to pack? What’s the weather likely to be? (Sunny and hot apparently!). Suffice to say that there are scraps of paper all over the place here with list after list of what to buy, what to organise, and what to do with our pet bunnies.

And that’s where I am going to sign off for this week. Because we are exhausted from the final weeks of school and everything that gets celebrated, signed and tidied during that time. If you have school-age kids, you know exactly what I am talking about. And now because we are busy prepping for our holiday.

So, Auf Wiedersehen, vidimo se kasnije and see you later! Have a great week, and if you have school holidays too, enjoy every minute!

How are you spending your summer? Got any grand plans? If you have kids, what are they hoping to do in the coming weeks? f

Posted on

The Half-Year Growth Check-Up

Hey everybody! There is an electricity in the air around here. Can you feel it too? No, we don’t live underneath one of those really tall, high-voltage transmission towers 😉. I’m talking about the summer school holidays countdown! Have the school hols already kicked off where you are? We have 5 school days left and counting…

Did you see the long list full of FAMtastic ideas for the summer holidays I posted last week? Have you tried any of them yet? Or have you made your own “To Do List” for holiday fun?

I need to sit down with our 3 kiddos and make up our own personalised “bucket list” for these school holidays. Because I can tell you now, as much as I am looking forward to having lots of fun times with the kids, we will NOT be ticking off ALL of the 61 suggestions from last week’s list! We have however, already started experimenting with making ice cream 😉 based on a Donna Hay recipe. Oh my, how my children are currently infatuated with our @donna.hay cookbook…

Coconut, raspberry, choc chip ice cream. Delish!

I don’t know whether you remember, but at the start of the year I wrote about setting goals for GROWTH for myself for this year. Not drunken New Year’s resolutions, but real goals that I plan to achieve by year’s end. And given that the year is already half done with, I thought it was about time I gave myself a review. If you set yourself some goals for this year too, I hope that you are straight up rocking them! Me? Hmm…

Continue reading “The Half-Year Growth Check-Up”
Posted on

Get Outdoors and Savour the Summertime

Hey! Just like I promised last week. Here I am, back again! For a multitude of reasons I really needed that week’s break. But it was good for me. Now I can share with you all the good stuff that has been keeping me so busy these past weeks!

The sun has been shining here, with a few gorgeously puffy clouds gently sweeping across the blue skies. And we have been having lovely summery temperatures which I have been hankering for for months now (well, except for the 5 week break in Australia over Christmas 😉). But not counting that…

Now, I don’t know about you, but all this amazing weather makes me want to skip and twirl and grin wildly in the sunshine. Of course there are always the complainers who bemoan that at 25 degrees is it already “too hot”. Me? I’m just getting started!

I thought that it could be fun to share a few of the things that we have been doing around here these past couple of weeks. Perhaps you will find a couple of ideas that you and your family could try out now that the warmer weather and longer daylight hours are here (in the northern hemisphere at least). Or maybe it will inspire you to get outside and discover your own adventures!

So, summer days, here we go…

Continue reading “Get Outdoors and Savour the Summertime”
Posted on

The Sweetest Season of All- Strawberry Season

Hooray! This week’s Everything’s Famtastic post is brought to you from a germ-free household! This is very exciting news, let me tell you. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you ought to go back and read my post from last week talking about how our family was knocked over one after the other like a set of bowling pins with a stomach virus. But healthy we are and here I am!

We are still finding and ridding our garden of strips of glittery streamers and pieces of confetti leftover from the confetti bomb my daughter and her friends gleefully enjoyed at her party last Saturday (see also, last week’s post here).

It’s wonderful that we are all healthy, because that means we can get doing things outdoors. Like soaking up the Vitamin D-filled sunshine… Like having spontaneous waterbomb fights over the hedge with the neighbours… Like taking advantage of the season and picking strawberries!!!

I might still have some adjustment issues with being an Australian expat living in Germany. Sure, a few months back I even posted about some of my personal difficulties of living an expat life here. But I’ll tell you what, I have totally found my groove when it comes to Erbeerzeit in this country.

You seriously have NO IDEA how much I love strawberries.

Continue reading “The Sweetest Season of All- Strawberry Season”
Posted on

Fab Fathers, Giggling Girls & Irksome Illness

Willkommen again to the weekly entertainment and information session that is Everything’s Famtastic.

I thought that this week I would give a shout out to all the German Papas out there. A couple of weeks back, I wrote about Mother’s Day, with a big, warm virtual hug for all you Mamas.

But now it is the men’s turn. Or at least those who live in Germany (Sorry to you Australian, American, Canadian, English… dads). Father’s Day was celebrated in Germany this past week. On a Thursday, no less. And Father’s Day- or Men’s Day as the non-parent males would claim- is an entirely different thing to most other countries’ way of celebrating fathers. So, Alles Gute zum Vatertag to all those fathers out there doing their best for their kids! I hope that your children thank you and appreciate all you do! To Hubby: we love you very much and thank you for all you do for us!! xx

Allow me to fill you in though, about our week of things (including Father’s day) going not quite to plan. Aha! Also the perfect opportunity for us mamas to show just how tolerant, unshakeable and adaptable we can be. Maintain a positive attitude and all that, right?!?

Continue reading “Fab Fathers, Giggling Girls & Irksome Illness”
Posted on

Anniversary of a Transplant

Hello World! Everything’s Famtastic is here! I hope that all is well in your part of the world, wherever that may be.

Looking in the calendar this past week I really just noticed how quickly this year is flying by. I think that’s a grown-up thing, right? As a kid it feels like you wait sooo looong for everything but as an adult *poof* and another year is over.

And then I realised something else. A couple of days away marks the one year anniversary since I had my cornea transplant. And that is even more unbelievable than how quickly the flowers have been blooming this spring!. A whole year since I received the ultimate gift: a cornea from an anonymous donor. ONE YEAR!

I talked about the subject of organ and tissue donation a while back here. I wondered whether any of you out there who might be needing a transplant of some sort just needed to hear that someone else has gone through such surgery and come out stronger on the other side.

Given that my own anniversary of being a recipient is coming up, I thought it might be interesting to share with you a bit more about my personal experience (skipping the more graphic details, I promise 😉).

Continue reading “Anniversary of a Transplant”
Posted on

Mothers are Monumental

Hello Everybody! Last week I celebrated my 40-something birthday and I am not sure where in the world you are reading this from, but for me, today is Mother’s Day! Lucky for me, the sun is shining here, the kids are behaving, and all is good in my world 😊.

I know that Mother’s Day is not celebrated by every country on the same day. I know that my friends in England already had their Mother’s Day for the year. But plenty of other countries are celebrating today too. And making it completely convenient for expat me, is the fact that both Australia and Germany celebrate Mother’s Day today, the second Sunday in May. That means no mix-ups within our family and no excuses like “Ohhhh, I thought we were celebrating on the German Mother’s Day not the Australian one…” 😉.

Not only have my 3 beautiful, energetic and sweet children been extra lovely today and made it a special day. My dear Hubby too, of course (thank you very much for that massage gift voucher. I’ll happily take care of that!!). I also have another reason to smile today. I have some new babies in my life…

Continue reading “Mothers are Monumental”
Posted on

Birthday Like a Grown-Up

Well hello, hello and hello again to you all! So nice to have you here. I can happily report that my antibiotic days are over and my tonsillitis has made a full retreat. Thank goodness! I hope that you are staying healthy as the season is changing over at this time of year.

For me here in the northern hemisphere we are drifting through spring, hopefully progressing towards a very warm, sun-filled summer. Which in our part of Germany is certainly not guaranteed! I know of at least one summer since I arrived here that not one single day was over 30°C (86°F). Which for an Australian girl like me was essentially an oxymoron in the definition of summer.

There are 2 big things that I really enjoy about May in the northern hemisphere. The first is that Spring is in full swing (hey, that rhymes!). And the second is that my birthday is coming up! What’s not to love about Spring flowers and birthdays? Wouldn’t you agree?!?

Continue reading “Birthday Like a Grown-Up”
error: