Back from Schoenstatt

I spent last week at the Schoenstatt International Retreat Center in Vallendar, Germany. I am part of the Regional Board for the Military Council of Catholic Women-Europe and serve as the Secretary and Grapevine Editor. Each year, we put on two conferences; a Leadership Training Conference in the Spring and a Spiritual Retreat Conference in the Fall for all Catholic Women affiliated with military chapels in Europe. This was the first year to have a Conference at Schoenstatt with Sister Angela Macari. Schoenstatt is a movement within the Catholic Church to help Catholics become better educated in their own faith and through Mary become closer to Jesus. I have attended 7 conferences over the past 5 years and this conference and location was the most spiritual and moving! I feel as if I have left a new and better person!

Schoenstatt was founded in 1914 by Father Joseph Kentenich. He was a young priest put in charge of a bunch of rebellious seminarian students. In 1914, he and the students put themselves under the protection of Mary. After WWI, the Schoenstatt movement continued to grow and an order of secular sisters was added in 1926. Fr. Kentenich was imprisoned during WWII and survived to help his movement grow across the world! There are Schoenstatt retreat houses all over the world now. You can see a picture of the original Shrine above. This Shrine is copied at every Schoenstatt Retreat Center.

The best description I can come up with for Schoenstatt is gentle, quiet peace.

Sister Angela is holding a Mother-Daughter retreat this next weekend so MK and are back in the minicooper so she can experience the quiet, peace, too. I really want to spend the time to help her re-center her faith. She's entering those wonderful pre-adolescence years and we need all the help we can get! MK is very excited to have our very own Nun taking care of us!

To see more images from Schoenstatt, go to http://www.mccw-worldwide.org/ and follow the link on the left side of the page for europe grapevine. This is the most recent Grapevine I have published and there is a beautiful photo essay put together by our Publicity Chair.

80's Rocker Girl

I forgot to post the other day about the SNOW!!!! Wednesday was a beautiful, sunshiny day. We were wearing sweaters and no jackets. Just a perfect spring day. Woke up Thursday morning, looked out the window and was almost blinded by the snow! We received over 6 inches of snow overnight and it caught everybody by surprise. By 8:30, half of it had melted and today most of it is gone!!!! I just want it to be spring!

I made a homemade CD to rock out in the minicooper. Mostly chick music and a couple of Van Halen tunes. MK really likes "Jump" by Van Halen and asks me to play it over and over again. The other night, when Matt was putting her to bed, she asked: "Daddy, can you make me a Van Halen CD?" He just about fell on the floor. He didn't realize we had an 80's rocker girl on our hands! It's kinda fun to be able to influence her musical tastes right now. Anything to not have to listen to Miley Cyrus over and over and over and over.......................

Yeah! MK likes to Read!

After four years of struggling to get our daughter to read, she is finally reading for enjoyment! I couldn't be more excited. Of course, American Girl has a lot to do with it. But, hey, whatever it takes! Yesterday, after school, she started reading "Meet Felicity" and wouldn't put the book down until she was finished. She read the whole book in one sitting! I was such a bookworm as a kid and I am glad to see MK really getting into these stories!
So rejoice with us! MK is reading just for the fun of it!!!!!!!

The Long Awaited Holland recap!

We've been trying to make sure MK had a fun Spring Break and Birthday Week. Yes, we are still celebrating "the Birthday week". So, I havn't gotten around to posting about our trip to Holland last weekend. This time, my cousin Ralph was not in the country so we made our own arrangements.

Friday:

We left Friday morning and drove all day. Of couse, we spent a couple of hours trying to get around the "staus" (or traffic jams) outside of Koeln (Cologne) and Dusseldorf. Our girlfriend, (the GPS) finally gave up on us. She kept trying to reroute us to avoid the staus but would just take us right into another stau. It didn't help that we reached this major city on Friday at German quittin' time which is about 3:30-4:00 for the Deutsch! MK was camped out in the back seat of the mini with her books, her nintendo ds lite, her three American Girl dolls with clothes and accessories and a DVD player with Seasons 1-5 and 7 of Little House on the Prairie. Yep, she's missing season 6 to her great consternation. We finally arrived at our hotel in Lisse, the Netherlands about 8pm. Since we had already eaten at a rasthof (rest stop), we checked in and Matt took MK to the pool.

Our hotel was 1 km away from the Keukenhof Gardens and right in the middle of the tulip fields. Holland received snow about two weeks ago which kind of stopped the tulip growth briefly. Mostly, yellow tulips and daffodils were out but the red tulips had not bloomed, yet. We took a walk in the fields on Saturday evening and it was very muddy but still beautiful!

Saturday:

On Saturday morning, we got up early to enjoy the hotel's all you can eat breakfast buffet for just 14,90 euros which is about $23.00 for you Americans. It was really good but not worth going back to on Sunday and Monday morning. We left our hotel to meet up with our friends Karl and Lissa in Kinderdijk, a little over an hour away. Kinderdijk (kinder-dike) is a historic Watermill area. There were about 20 mills up and down the canals. And when we started walking out on the trail, it started pouring down rain! Of course, all of our friends were on Mediterrean Cruises this week but we could only take 4 days to go to Holland since Matt's team did not get the week off like everyone else! So as I was berating the fact that we were stuck in beautiful but rainy and cold Holland, we managed to run into the one mill that was open to the public. MK had a blast climbing up and down each level of the Mill and asking a million questions about what it was like "back in the old days".

The rain finally stopped but it was still windy and cold. We left Kinderdijk and decided to drive to Delft. Lissa wanted to do some more pottery shopping. As if she and I don't have enough pottery as it is! After Matt and Karl spent the next 30 minutes in the parking lot trying to coordinate their GPS's to go to the same destination, we were finally on our way! Our first stop was the Royal Delft Porcelain Factory. We decided to not do the factory tour and insteady went straight to the shopping in the Factory store. Okay, I don't recommend shopping in the factory store because it is more a show room than a factory store! We found the same stuff in the city center for significantly lower prices than what was offered at the Factory. Delft is a charming city and I highly recommend stopping her for an afternoon if you ever make it to Holland. We headed back to our hotel and dinner at a Steakhouse in a nearby town. The Dutch eat red meat! Yeah! We all had the spare ribs and MK had a cheeseburger.

Sunday:

Up early again to go eat at the McDonald's instead of the hotel buffet. Guess what? Holland's McDonald's don't do breakfast! So we headed to the Keukenhof Gardens to see if they had a restaraunt that offered breakfast. We ended up eating muffins and drinking tea and coffee. Keukenhof Gardens is only open from March 15th to May 15th each year for the tulips blooming. The park is beautiful and I think we must have taken 200 pictures! Keukenhof Gardens was the whole reason we chose to go to Holland for our mini-Spring Break trip. Ever since I was a little girl and studied about Holland and tulips, I have wanted to visit this country. So after six years living in Europe, we finally made it to the tulips!

After the Gardens, we finally had our lunch at McDonalds. And then drove into Amsterdam. Our mission was to visit the Anne Frank House. After parking and walking over, we found the line to get in was wrapped completely around the building. The menfolk, Matt and Karl, were a little daunted. But Lissa and I were determined to wait. It only took about 30 minutes to get in and the experience was worth driving all the way to Amsterdam. Many of Anne Frank's and her families personal artifacts are housed in the Anne Frank House. When I read the diary as a girl, I had imagined they lived in an attic. They actually hid in the top two stories of a house that was attached/behind Anne Frank's father's place of business. They were able to keep it secret for so long because the house was not visible from the street. It was very sad and moving.

We decided to walk and see a little bit of Amsterdam city. We saw some beautiful architecture and a lot of hippies, folks with dreadlocks and smelled some interesting smells. Karl had a walking GPS and it was time to head to the Hard Rock Cafe' for dinner. He offered a route through the busy street we just passed through or a lovely walk along a canal in a quiet neighborhood. The quiet neighborhood turned out to be "the Red Light District". Yow, they really have red lights outside their doors. And scantily-dressed women sat in show windows in the front of the house. Fortunately, MK missed most of the "girls" but she did see one sitting in a window. Lots of questions, "Daddy, what was the woman doing sitting there? Why was she wearing her underwear?" You should tell a 10 year old girl how important it is to always keep your curtains closed if you are going to run around the house in your underwear!

Thank goodness, Hard Rock Cafe' took her mind off those things, whew! We had a birthday meal for MK with a candlelit icecream Sundae.

Monday:

Up early to leave the hotel and go to see "Panorama Tulip Land". I thought it was a place to pull your car over and take panoramic photos of the the tulip fields. Nope, it was a store. That you had to pay admission to get into. We didn't pay admission.

We decided to stop in Gouda on the way because I love cheese and we probably won't come back to Holland again. We found cheese, we found beautiful buildings and a gorgeous church and stained glass windows.

And then home we went. The trip home was much faster than the trip to Holland.

In a nutshell, we love Holland. Don't care for Amsterdam.

MK is 10!!!

MK turned 10 on Monday, April 7th. We let her open presents on the Thursday night before since we left for our trip on Friday. Some of her comments are posted below:

Aunt Lesa gave here a cute outfit with a shirt and short skirt with shorts underneath:

"It's a matching outfit! I can wear it for tennis!"

She starts tennis lessons next week.

While unwrapping presents: "Ooh, this is really pretty paper!"

Nana and Papa gave a variety of things.

pink house slippers: "I've always wanted house shoes like these!"

underwear: "Underwear!"

She equates receiving underwear with that line from "The North Pole" "all I got was some stupid underwear!" But she liked them.

She did get her American girl:

"I knew I was getting an American girl doll!"

This was after weeks of begging us to tell here what we were getting her.

When I told her that we were going to give her a Wii, she said: "Good, I didn't want a Wii!"

She's 10 now. We are still celebrating her Birthday week. Did you know that girls celebrate their birthdays for the whole week? We were in Amsterdam on Sunday night and ate at the Hard Rock Cafe. They gave her a Hard Rock Cafe birthday pin. On Tuesday, she had two friends for a sleepover and I made her favorite dinner: barbecued chicken legs, shelly cheese, salad and garlic bread and a Birthday Brownie. No cake for this 10 year old, she wants brownies now! The actual birthday party is Sunday at the bowling alley. This time, she is only allowed to invite 7 girls. It was easy since we are still in the middle of Spring Break and just about every one is gone!

There was a fingerprint on the camera lense so all of the pictures we took of MK opening her presents are blurry. Thanks, everyone for helping to make MK's birthday week extra special!

April Fools!

It's been a few days since we've posted so I thought I would catch you up with what is going on with the Fitter's in Europe.
It finally stopped snowing and has been beautiful and sunny for several days now. We are hoping for a beautiful weekend since we are traveling to Holland again. This time to see the tulips in bloom! We are going to the Keukenhof gardens in Lisse, Netherlands with some friends. I am hoping to post a lot of fabulous pictures.
MK's birthday is Monday and our Spring Break starts on Friday. Since her b-day always falls during the DoDDES Europe Spring Break, we have been in a different country almost every year. For her 6th birthday, we were in Tunisia; her 7th was the Isle of Capri, Italy; 8th was Austria; 9th was home because it was Holy Week and I had to work at the Chapel. Her 10th will be in Holland!
We leave on Friday, so she will be opening presents on Thursday night! The birthday party will probably be on Tuesday during Spring Break and we are going to Playmobil Fun Park on the following Friday.
Our time in Europe is almost up, only one year left! We still have to get to England, Ireland and Scotland. I would like to go to Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia and the dream trip is ICELAND!
Who knows what the next year will bring!