Food-Fun Week

Well, our good intentions of staying home this week to save money went out the window. It all started with a phone call of my friend Winde: feel like going to the wellness center for some pampering and some bubbly? OFCOURSE!! I grabbed my bathingsuit and off we went. 3 hours of pure relaxation. After soaking in the hot tub with a bottle of Cava(the Spanish Champagne)and some good old laughs and conversation we tried to endure the sauna and steam room for as long as we could stand it. After some swimming in the heated pool we each got a thirty minute massage...heavenly. We had a wonderful time and vowed to do this on a more regular basis to get our juices flowing again. I really do think treament like this should be covered by health insurances of all mothers, so write your congressmen ladies :-)

Saturday night our friends Winde and Steph and Will and I were lucky enough to get treated by our friends Jens and Tanja to a wonderful Tapas diner. Three couples having a feast of scrumptious food and beverage off the calorie and weight watchers point charts! It was nice to be out with them because all of us have young kids (ours are the oldest!) so it doesnt happen often that we all can make it to dinner together, so when we do, it's catch up time. We swore not to go out for drinks after since we all had to get up early the next day, but of course, "when the cat's away the mice dance on the table!" In this case the kids are the cats and us moms are the mice....we were in bed at 3:30am.

Sunday morning was my birthday brunch. I know what you are thinking, my birthday was in January, I know. As I said earlier, it is very hard to get all of us girls out on the same day without work, kids, husbands or hobbies getting in the way of our plans, so this was the first Sunday most of us could make it. We went to a very cosy breakfast place in Hasselt called "The Coeckepanne", which means the pancake. I love their deluxe breakfast with fresh squeezed orange juice, fresh fruit with yoghurt, chocolate croissants, egg and bacon omelets, and breads with a plethera of fancy cold cuts and salads and of course to finish it off..a nice latte to go with the crepes. Absolutely NO more room in my stomach, or my pants for that matter. A wonderful birthday brunch with my friends. Thank you to my girls for the great presents and thank you to the dads for watching our babies!

Sunday afternoon we took the kids to our local "kermis" which is like a carnaval. They loved it of course. We thought we would teach them how to deal with money so we told them they each had 25 Euros to spend on rides. Chloe quickly negotiated that snacks did not count because we as parents should feed them anyway, so this left them with the full 25 bucks to go on rides and play games. Chloe's favorite was definitely the trampoline jump. They put her in a harness and pulled her up about 20 feet into the air and then release her onto a trampoline to jump. Totally fun to watch. She liked it so much that she went on it twice! Will and I got in on the fun in the bumpercars. I would never get competitive in a kids ride, that would be majorely immature...Our kids shot their first guns too! They had to hit the balloons with these BB guns to win a prize, and we were soo happy Lainey, after 10 tries hit 1balloon on her very last shot. Super cute! After a few more rides, and a bag of "smoutebollen" which are basically deep fried doughballs with powdered sugar (and an absolute MUST at the Belgian carnivals) it was time to go home. And our very responsible children? They had money left over!! Do not ask me who they got that from.

Well, our week is over and it is time to start work again. I just wanted to end this blog with something the kids said that made us laugh or cry or got some type of emotion out of us someway somehow, because kids do say the darnest things sometimes..I really want to start writing them down so I will forever remember.
Lainey is becoming more Belgian than we thought. I told her that I loved her, and she said she loved me too. I asked her how much she loved me? Lainey answered:"mmm, I love you a 100 meters mama":-)

Until the next time,

Love Lesley