When we get back home, and the routine of a new school year starts, the kids will look back on our trip and one of the first things they'll remember is this:
Trampolining in the rain. They all got soaking wet (kletsnat, we would say in Dutch) and loved every minute of it.
They may not remember the churches and cathedrals, the castles and towers, the old city walls. But they will remember that the neighbor let us borrow the trampoline because his teenage boys don't use it much. They'll remember helping to set it up in the yard. They'll remember racing to jump on it every night after being excused from the dinner table. And they'll remember that one time when a warm rain fell, and they didn't think we'd let them, but Papa joined them, and they jumped and jumped while the water sprayed up all around them and fell down on top of them and they got wetter and wetter and they wanted to go on jumping all through the night.
Back home in Oregon, they will sometimes watch the rain fall and remember that joy of lightness, that bliss of flushed cheeks and shining eyes, and they'll wish they had a trampoline so they could recapture that time when they were truly happy.
Other things they will remember from the trip, those everyday things that might not make it into a scrapbook:
- getting to eat hagelslag (chocolate sprinkles) and nutella and other yummy sweet stuff on bread every morning for breakfast
- getting to eat vla (a sort of pudding, only better) every night for dessert and Oma taking them in turns to pick out new flavors--dubbel, strawberry, blanca, stroopwafel, speculaas
- watching cartoons every morning when they wake up
- riding on the back of a bike with feet in the saddlebags, or dangling free in Alexander's case
- trying to squeeze into the baby bathtub because Oma and Opa have only a shower. Really, even Alexander tries to do this.
