Winter turned into spring, and our little lump of infant turned into a squirming, laughing, wriggling, *almost* crawling baby. He even added solid food to his liquid diet — “solid” in this case meaning “pureed and pulverized”. So far he likes carrots, parsnips and rice cereal – although we had to put the cereal aside for Passover. He didn’t seem to mind though.

You can see in the photos that he looks just like Patrick — although in the right light, if you squint, during a full moon, when you’re not wearing your glasses and after a few beers, he may, at times, have a tendency to almost look like me. Or, as our friend Jessi B-C said: “Who photoshopped Patrick’s face onto that baby?”

Our last entry claimed that we were going to be in the U.S. for a couple of months earlier this year. Psyche! Patrick’s project ended earlier than he thought, so instead of Micah and I spending 6 weeks in frozen Minneapolis in February (darn!), he came back to Munich instead. The best part – aside from having him back with us – is that we were able to go on our already-scheduled vacation to the Canary Islands.

Real Europeans may know this already, but it was news for Euros-in-Training like me, that the Canary Islands are like the Bahamas of Europe. More specifically, they are the sunny coastal fishing village Germany never had, but always wanted, as long as you can still eat various wursts and heavily fried schnitzels. On an island. In the sun. Belonging to Spain. There was nary a tapa to be found. On the bright side, since the vast majority of our resort were extremely retired Germans, I didn’t feel bad about wearing my bikini at the pool. (Note to self: keep the competition to 85-year-old women in full length sarongs).