So, what did you do today?

Today I scrubbed a goddamn boat with various toxic substances mostly derived from bleach. My sister will be most pleased to learn that I did not mix the toxic substances and therefore did not burn my lungs even once.* Many buckets of rinse water later, the outside of the boat is clean once more. We have not started on the inside yet; the outside took the better part of today. Well, I suppose technically the outside isn't done either as we did not clean the part at the water line. Okay, the deck and the cabin and so on are clean. 'kay? It's amazing where algae can find a place to grow, really it is. It was sort of like cleaning mildew in Atlanta only it was green.

Who needs a fitness club? Come on over here and I'll let you haul buckets of water all afternoon. Biceps, baby have I got biceps now. But my hands will never recover; when am I going to learn to use gloves when I should? Probably never. If the varnish poisoning incident didn't teach me I suppose nothing will. Really, I should give up all hobbies involving toxic chemicals. Or maybe I should just put Poison Control on my speed dial.

Thursday we went to Utrecht as the kids have been off all week. We went to Utrecht because every day this winter we have seen bus 400 to Utrecht leave the station, nine minutes before our bus leaves. And so Douwe became consumed with a desire to know where it was going. So we took bus 400 to Utrecht. It takes about an hour.

Here are the kids at the bus station:



D'you know, they have a Dockers store in Utrecht? I have imported God knows how many pairs of Dockers for my husband, as he loves them and they cannot be gotten here. Or I thought they couldn't be gotten; we got off the bus and there it was, a real live Dockers store. They haven't got one in Atlanta that I have been able to find but there is one in Utrecht.

Once we got there we had to do what all Americans do when they go to a foreign city:









And then after that we had to walk all over the world to find the tourist information place. My own elaborate plan in going to Utrecht was to, you know, walk around. I mean, Douwe is 7 and Daan is 5; they are not demanding in terms of entertainment. However, some of us want to actually Do Something when we travel so we hunted up the tourist information place. Thus ensued a really funny conversation as Oma tried to find out how to get to the Botanical Gardens from the nice lady while my kids hollered "We want to go to a museum! Where is the museum!" and Daan went to get a map so she could show us the museum.

I think that nice lady thinks my kids are very odd. She does not know that my kids think museum = dinosaur exhibit.


Anyway, we settled on the canal boat tour as Nel wanted to do something out of doors and the kids wanted....well, you know what they wanted.
Nel ended up getting her very own personal tour of the canals of Utrecht as we were the only people on the boat and I was occupied in keeping my kids from actually jumping out of the boat and answering many rapid fire questions like "are we there yet?".

We found out in Utrecht that Daan has grown 4 centimeters in just under a month which is a lot for him. He walked under one of those "measure your child" signs in a store and I realized he was in the wrong size range -- I had measured him just before Carnaval.

He was walking funny one day this week and I realized that his shoes were too small -- or actually, one shoe was too small. So I had to go get him new ones and there were many discussions about whether he will permanently have one foot bigger than the other. Happily, by the end of the week his other shoe was also too small, which was the only thing that got him to quit putting those shoes on -- he quite liked them.

*Long story. My sister will never let me live my experiments in Better Cleaning through Chemistry down. Who knew the all purpose cleaner had ammonia in it? It didn't smell like it.