Busy week, this one! Our family celebrated Jacksons birthday on Monday (a day early) thinking we couldn't do it on the actual day ..... as it was events changed last minute and things turned out that we could have but we are learning to move gracefully with the flow! I said all that to say, with all that's been happening it feels like a couple of weeks ago that we celebrated Jacksons birthday!!

Monday saw the first day of a new routine of me getting up at 6am and the kiddos coming out of bed at 7am. I'm in desperate need of time to think and prepare for our new school year starting at the beginning of September. So Monday was spent getting ready for Jackson's special dinner and buying his presents ..... presents were the easy bit as he had seen us shopping for Michael a couple of weeks before and had placed an order for some knight figures. Food was a little bit more trickier as we hunt for wheat-free foods in this land of cheese and yummy 'wheat' breads. Marcel managed to badly twist his ankle at the playground ....... I keep telling him he's too old for that toddler stuff!

Tuesday was a home day with some tabletime and read alouds and our first relaxed dutch lesson. A neighbour has kindly offered to get us started with teaching us the basics of dutch. We went over the vowel sounds and vowel combinations and then onto using verbs. That was pretty cool and aspects of the vowels are really falling into place! That night I rode down to Amstelveen centraal for some time-out and think-time. After a bite to eat and doing a spot of planning I discovered that V&D (pronounced 'Vay and Day') department store was open till 9pm on Tuesday ..... NICE ...... that means on my night off I can get something to eat, a coffee, stationery if I need it, and relax doing a little window shopping too all in the same place!

Wednesday we left the house early to meet up with another mum and her two children in Zaanse Schans ~ a quaint village that still has some working windmills and lots of museums and cool things to check out. We didn't get home until after 6pm that night. We were tuckered out by the end of it but it was lots of fun and so fascinating!

Yes, you guessed it! Outside the Clog Museum and shop!!

More in another entry about that day!

Thursday was a catch up day spent doing some more work and researching trains and public transport! As most of the websites are in dutch it takes a bit of doing to work out the best way of getting to a place. Tomorrow we are off to Rijswijk (near Den Haag) to update our passports.

Friday ~ we did the passport thing and have our stamps now!!! Marcel headed back to Amsterdam for work and the kids and I headed for Den Haag for a look-see (being only 10 minutes by train from Rijswijk)! We had a nice walk through the centraal part of the city, with it's beauty and age, and are ready to go back at some stage in the future for more!

William of Orange ~ in the Den Haag centraal square ~ we are looking forward to learning more about this man whose impact on The Netherland's history was huge.

Then it was home again on the trein! What a great feeling that the public transport system is making so much more sense to me!!