Christmas and New Years!

Andy, Carsten, and I have had a whirlwind Christmas/New Years vacation which is still on going. We got to spend a week and a half in Michigan, which was filled with seeing family and friends. The Huisman family household has changed dramatically with the sudden influx of grandchildren; having 2 5 months olds and 1 3 month old makes things a bit crazy! We are wondering what next Christmas will be like when these three are all mobile! Our whole family made it to Frederik Meijer Gardens, where we got to see many Christmas trees. They had a Switzerland tree, so we got our picture taken by it :). I've posted a picture of the Huisman grandchildren: Linnea, Eliana, Zachary, Vivienne, and Carsten.

We left Michigan on Thursday and had a great drive through Chicago. I can't tell you how excited we are not to be driving through Chicago on a regular basis on anymore :). We stopped very briefly in Madison so Carsten could get his 4 month vaccinations, and then we continued on to Iowa in order to beat the weather that was rolling in on Friday morning. I will have to say that we do not enjoy our long drives over the holidays, which is mostly due to weather. We seem to have horrible weather somewhere along the way. This time we had 'blizzard fog' in Minnesota and watched the temperature drop 20+ degrees over a couple of hours, which always makes for an interesting drive. The one fortunate thing is that Carsten is a relatively good traveler and he typically does an excellent job of sleeping during the trip. We're feeling a little bad for him the last two days because he caught a cold on Wednesday, got shots on Thursday, and I think he's starting to get a top tooth coming in. The poor guy was very cranky today, which is unusual and it makes us thankful that he's pretty happy most of the time. Needless to say, I'm glad that I managed to keep a couple of teethers and the baby tylenol out of our Switzerland boxes.

It's been a busy year, with both of us getting our doctorates, Carsten arriving, and preparing for Switzerland. We've loved 2010, and are looking forward to 2011 when we do things like: move to Switzerland, travel Europe, feed Carsten his first solid food, and seeing Carsten walk!

Happy New Year everyone!

The Huismans leave Madison

Greetings from Michigan! We have moved out of Madison and are starting the nomadic life for a few weeks. Here's a quick recap of our last week in Madison:

Andy and I spent pretty much every moment packing up our condo, which was complicated by the fact that we were packing things for three different locations: Michigan for Christmas (which includes all the items we didn't want to freeze in the moving truck), Iowa for long-term storage at my parents house, and Switzerland boxes which are going to Iowa because it doesn't fit in our car. Needless to say, this has been a very complicated moving experience and we've done our best to purge and rehouse our possessions & furniture. Any moments we weren't spending packing, we were trying to make sure that our condo was ready for our new tenants. We feel very blessed that we have found a lovely family to care for our house while we are in Zurich. We are very blessed with our friends in Madison who helped us pack & clean our house. We cannot express enough thank yous to those of you who helped (Kayt, Kurt, Nicky, Tom, and Donald). We were able to get out of Madison on Monday, which is when we were hoping to leave for Michigan. To those of you we left behind in Madison: we will miss you!

Carsten has been an amazing baby during this last week. He's been sleeping very well at night, which is a huge blessing for us since we've been exhausted between moving and figuring out kinds of logistics with moving. He's been ok with being in his swing and playmat for long periods of time and has even transitioned into napping other places, like his playmat (whoops!) and his pack n play. We are looking forward to the chance to hang out and relax with him over the holidays. We are also looking forward to seeing lots of family and friends over the Holidays. We will be spending Christmas with the Huismans in Michigan and New Years in Iowa with the Hoogeveens.

Merry Christmas everyone!