Last Sunday, Lyons Cub showed his friend John from Virginia the Cologne cathedral, and this Sunday, we took him to the city of Oberhausen to climb the Gasometer and see the exhibit, “The Fragile Paradise.” What’s the Gasometer? First of all, it looks like a huge, rusty oil barrel. It was first used in 1929…
Lyons Cub really wanted to go on a ship. So the day came where he would experience making a panorama trip on the Rhine river at Cologne. But that wasn’t all. He also visited the Chocolate museum and got free samples and to try from the chocolate fountain, and he went into St. Martin’s church,…
Lyons Cub loves to watch and touch animals. We’ve been at the Reuschenberg Wildpark in Leverkusen several times already, but today, we tried out a different place, the Bird- and Animal Park in the city of Solingen. It has more birds than the park in Leverkusen, even big storks and colorful pheasants. The most interesting…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Have you ever painted Easter eggs with terrible, electronic Christmas music in the background? No? Then, you absolutely need to try the…
It’s Easter Sunday and our second day of adventures… We have a double ticket for Legoland and SeaLife, and now, we’re doing the second part of it. Lyons Cub had been to the AquaZoo in Düsseldorf before when he was merely 1.5 years old, on our summer trip to Europe. I figured that at 4,…
Lyons Cub’s Easter present was a visit to Legoland and SeaLife in the city of Oberhausen in the Ruhr river area in Germany (a former coal mining district). My son is a big fan of LEGO. Like other little kids, he started out with Duplos (his dinosaur duplos, for example) and evolved to dinosaur skeletons…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. This year, like in the past two, there won’t be much of carnival going on, at least not in our city, because…
Oh no! We’ve read in the press that from May on, the Tonieboxes and Tonies will get more expensive! I can totally understand that added material and production and transport costs will cause a little price hike, but 20 bucks more for a Toniebox is quite a bit, and it’s not cheap as it is…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Lyons Cub grew up with two cats, Frankie (our rescue from a reptile show) and Felix (our stray that came with our…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Today, Germany is awaiting a major storm, so the government of our state, North Rhine-Westphalia, has ordered all schools closed tomorrow. Since…
Strictly speaking, it wasn’t JUST an art gallery, it was also a store for trading card collectors, and we took Leander’s Daddy’s baseball card albums from the 1960s and 70s there to have them appraised. But what we really wanted to do was to pick up his 4th birthday present, an awesome painting of Pikachu…
Especially during the pandemic, you might have considered online educational programs and asked yourself: “Is ABCmouse worthwhile?” While there are other alternatives on the market, we have been happy with our ABCmouse subscription for two years now. We don’t use it regularly; my son goes to bed with two books every night (one in English,…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Oh sh**, it happened, Leander brought the stomach flu home from kindergarten, which means for the both of us tea, apple juice,…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Are you an artsy, crafty mommy? I love to do art projects with my son, but as a full-time working mom, I…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. As a child of the 80s, I loved to play Tetris (invented 1984 by a Russian software engineer) on my gameboy (invented…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Do you have a bilingual child? Even if your child speaks only English or German, check out this awesome, relatively new toy…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Leander’s pre-Christmas gift arrived on December 21st in the form of a visit to the LWL Museum für Naturkunde mit Planetarium in…
My mother’s brother and one of her sisters with their children grew up, lived, and worked in East Germany. Her oldest sister and she herself got out as teenagers, before the Wall was built. While I was lucky to be born on the other side of the Wall in prosperous, free West Germany, I was…
by: Emily Sewell When people outside of the United States think of American homeschooling, I can only imagine what comes to mind. Religious zealots, living off the grid, and/or families of at least fifteen children most likely. I think there is a solid stereotype in there somewhere. Well, I am here to dispel some of…
In the past, I have shown you how the kaleidoscope app works, how to make hyperbolic tilings of images, and how to create “belfies” (breastfeeding selfies) with the tree of life. Today, I’m going to show you how to use artificial intelligence to create pictures and paintings of different styles (such as cubism, impressionism, child’s…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. There are so many cute porcupine children’s books out there, and guess what they’re teaching about? You’re right: befriending a special person…
Big day for Lyons Cub!!! We visited the zoo in the city of Wuppertal on October 31st. Alas, due to the danger of Covid-19 transferring from people to the big cats, we couldn’t visit the lions and tigers. However, the brown bears, the elephants, the pelicans, the penguins, the seals, the deer-pig (yes, that’s a…
Ahhh, finally!!! The otters were out. Maybe because it was a sunny day for a change (although it was quite cold for October, brrr… Lyons Cub wore a scarf and woolen hat for the first time outside). We made a trip to the Wildpark in Leverkusen again, in the hopes of seeing some animals that…
Lyons Cub loves parks, like the one with the climbing animals and exercisers, but most of all, he likes to pet animals. (Well, he grew up with two dogs, Honey and Sally, and two cats, Felix and Frankie, and several crested and gargoyle geckos.) So today, he was in for a treat. He had been…
Germany is voting today!!! Angela Merkel has been in power for 16 years (and, in my opinion, has done a great deal for our country). I admire her for how she got us through the pandemic this far (and for having a doctorate in quantum chemistry, of course!). She faced some backlash for her refugee…
Okay, admittedly, those wonderful teepees were already there, built by bigger kids, maybe from a Montessori school or scouts, but Lyons Cub carried several sticks and branches to “improve” them. In his former kindergarten, Amare Montessori in Clarksville, TN, they had big branches like that to build tents with, too. Then, he showed mommy around…
Last time, I’ve shown you how to make hyperbolic tilings of photos, which was great fun already. Well, let’s step it up a notch–my mathematician brother-in-law has sent me the link for a kaleidoscope app, which creates even crazier and more beautiful images! They appear immediately and don’t take as long to build up as…
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that, at zero cost to you, I will earn an affiliate commission if you click through the link and finalize a purchase. Lyons Cub has three more weeks in his current daycare, “Land of Clouds,” where he has been since August 2020. At three…
Do you love classical music? Maybe you have had piano or guitar lessons when you were a child or teen? Or maybe, you would like for your child to make an experience that was withheld from you when you were little? People have speculated for quite some time whether listening to classical music makes you…
Are you a math buff? My late husband’s brother is a mathematics professor, and he sent me a cool link with which to upload photos to distort and reflect them. Are you still looking for an interesting graphic for your site? Check out this website; it will furnish you with fun artworks for your blogs…