The day we became Lutheran

This morning Gianna Mai was baptized at the local English speaking Lutheran church. We have been attending this church since Lent and decided a few weeks ago to contact the pastor about having Gianna baptized sometime this summer. He was happy to receive us into the church, but he is moving to Nairobi next weekend. So there have been a series of shotgun baptisms every week leading up to his departure. This morning it was Gianna and a tiny infant named Theresa in the limelight. The godparents are our good friends from New York, Donnell and Nicole. Gianna was her usual squirmy self during the service, but when up front at the baptismal, she was well behaved and didn't fuss or cry at all. Afterwards, we celebrated with lunch at the Long Island Summer Lounge, a roof-top restaurant with a pool, palm trees, and waitstaff dressed up as sailors. They even had a playground where she could get her christening dress all dirty.

We come from a long line of Mennonites where infant baptism is not performed, so they will probably give us a good shunning for this one. I could write a novel about the personal choice to have Gianna baptized at a Lutheran church in Germany and raise her with Christian values and traditions...you can email me if you want the unabridged version! She was one child among a quarter million orphans in Vietnam and now she is our daughter. I hesitate to call her an angel since she is in full-tilt terrible two stage, but I sincerely want God and His angels to continue watching over our precious child as they did when she was living in Vietnam. She really is a wonderful gift from God and I am so happy to see her blessed and baptized today.

The money shot of the actual blessing.

Gianna with her new Godparents, Nicole and Donnell.

Time to play after a long morning of church stuff.

Mẹ's Vietnamese Kitchen: Bun Cha and Che Chuoi

Disclaimer: I am not Vietnamese, but impersonate one in the kitchen to suite my Vietnamese daughter's discerning palate.

Like any two year old, Gianna can be a picky eater. For breakfast this morning, she wanted fried egg with Nutella. She will turn down cookies and cupcakes in favor of green beans if it suits her whim. Soon she will be starting summer camp where she has to bring a lunch that requires neither refrigeration or heating up. Help! She won't touch sandwiches, so I've been investigating some new Vietnamese dishes that can be eaten at room temp. We went down to the red light district today to stock up on Vietnamese ingredients for my experiments. Usually we eat dinner too fast to photograph, but the camera happened to be laying on the dinner table when I set out the plates. Here's Bun Cha over rice noodles and Che Chuoi, semi homemade (I really must try to make this one from scratch).

Too bad I couldn't find all the fresh herbs that are supposed to accompany this dish. There are only so many hours in the day to track down specialty foods in Frankfurt.

This might look gross, but it tasted delicious. The can of Che Chuoi contained pearl tapioca and banana in a coconut sauce. The red thing that Gianna mistook for hotdog is the banana that came in the can. I just added fresh yellow banana. Also, she insisted I photograph her plate of Bun Cha before she hoofed it down. Here it is:

Everything tastes better from a SpongeBob Squarepants plate.

Swiss Alps

To celebrate Dan's first official Father's Day, we rented a car for the weekend and drove down to the Swiss Alps. The weather in the Alps always seems to be hit or miss with on and off clouds and showers. It was raining when we drove into Lauterbrunnen, but the weather throughout the weekend was always on our side. The family-run Hotel Oberland is a lodge located next to Staubbach falls, a waterfall that they light up at night. This was an awesome welcome as we drove up in the dark. The hotel has a nice wrap-around porch restaurant and wood-paneling throughout. Our bedroom was huge with a comfortable European king sized bed and bunk beds for Gianna. But the bathroom had not been remodeled since the 1970's--eek! We were truly roughing it.



For our only full-day in Switzerland, we climbed Schilthorn...via cable car and cog railway. Schilthorn's summit is 3000m, rocky with snow cover (for comparison, Bright Angel Point at the Grand Canyon is around 2515m). Gianna had a good time making snowballs with Bố. Man and I glad I packed her snow boots and mittens. The daunting views from below the cable car did not phase her one bit. On the way down, we caught a glimpse of some mountain goats. Once we safely landed on the valley floor, we hiked 2 hours back to Lauterbrunnen. Who wants to take the bus? The trail followed a milky white roaring river with rocky cliffs, waterfalls, and alpine wildflowers on either side. Along the way, we stopped at Trümmelbach, a glacial waterfall located inside a cave. Pretty cool, but difficult to photograph. After Trümmelbach, we got a first hand view of a Swiss farmer rounding up his herd for milking time. Gianna points to a cow's udder and says "milk in there". She's got farm street smarts!


Back at the hotel, it started to rain. So we took the VW Golf out for a spin around the two glacial lakes that make up the Jungfrau/Interlaken region. Gianna took a nap, and we stopped to watch some swans. We ate dinner back at the Oberland, cheese fondue, of course. On Sunday, we enjoyed the complimentary breakfast, filled up our water bottles from the mountain spring, and hit the road back to Germany. Overall, I give the Swiss Alps two thumbs way up. People told us it was REALLY expensive, but we found it to be more reasonably priced than France, when considering the exchange rate of the Swiss Franc to the Euro. If you ever want to visit, I will pass on the advice that was given to me: stay in Lauterbrunnen! This small town is centrally located for several different mountain excursions and is much less touristy than the cities on the lake. Take a look at the whole album by clicking here.

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

US BBQ--school's out for the summer!

Gianna is done with school for the summer! To say good bye to friends and teachers, her American school graciously threw a BBQ for all the parents and students. While I was hoping for baked beans (really miss those Bush's Baked Beans, or I'd even settle for Campbell's about now), the food was awesome. Wonder brand hot dog and hamburger rolls, Heinz ketchup, French's mustard, Doritos chips, Oscar Mayer Wieners, Betty Crocker cupcakes...wow, I was in American junk food heaven. Someone even brought those mini cheese cakes with the cherry pie filling on top.











Pig out like an American!! Gianna and her favorite teacher












Oh the food [drool]!!!! Gianna and her peeps

This weekend we were in the Swiss Alps for Father's Day. It was AWESOME!! With Gianna at home all the time now, it will be a challenge to post the photos, but I will get them edited and uploaded sometime soon, I promise.

Old Mẹ

We have started planning a trip to the US and it has me thinking about our old life. I went into a gourmet kitchen store yesterday and almost broke down in tears. Everything was so beautiful; wow do I miss all my nice kitchen stuff. This time of the year I also miss going to the shore every weekend. But I'm not the only one missing my old life. Gianna has started talking about "old Mẹ". At first I wasn't sure what she was saying, as she often wants to put on my make-up and I tell her it's only for old hags like Mẹ. But today it became clear, she is talking about her old house mothers from the orphanage in Vietnam. She drew a picture and I asked her what it was. She replied "old Mẹ". Then she said "Gianna like old Mẹ". I asked her if she also liked new Mẹ and thankfully she replied yes! Then she said she misses old Mẹ and misses Vietnam. I just got some Vietnam photos delivered from Snapfish, so we pulled out any picture that had a house mother. Then I asked her which one was her old Mẹ? She pointed to every one of the caretakers in the photos, but never pointed to me. Then I asked her which photos she wanted to put in her photo album. She only picked out photos of one particular house mother that she had a special bond with. This is hard for me, as one of my deepest fears is that we will never really bond and she will grow up saying "you're not my real mom!" But I want her to cherish the memories of the women who were mother to her for her first two years. So we filled the rest of her photo album with photos of all the Vietnamese Mẹ pictures we could find. Now it is full of her friends from Vietnam, caretakers from Vietnam, and a few pictures of her new Mẹ and Bố (who, as she informs me, is neither new or old since she never had a Bố before this Bố).

Gruneburg Park pics

Just some photos I took yesterday at Gruneburg Park.











Gianna and Bố on the see-saw (sometimes it's hard to get Dan off when it's time to leave).











This contraption is a merry-go-round.

"He loves me...he loves me not"

Everything is perfectly normal...but then zombies attack! Bruno comes to help.

Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi, the body of Christ, a city in Texas, and a public holiday in Germany. It was last Thursday. Dan had off from work, Gianna had off from school, stores were closed, and so we went to the zoo. I didn't take so many pics because we had been there before and how many zoo pics do you really need? And yeah, it's mid-June and we are wearing jackets. But today I'm blogging in shorts and a tank-top, go figure.











More random pics of G Mai in everyday Frankfurt life.













This third photo merits some explaination. She likes me to take photos of her eating, and I am happy to oblige. This particular ice cream is called "Afrikan Safari". Why? Because it features dark chocolate ice cream with dark chocolate fudge and dark chocolate candies. Although a large part of cocoa production is in Africa, that name wouldn't fly in the US. But just like the Germans at Dan's work that wanted to give a computer application the acronym "TRAMP" (because they thought it meant "hobo"), the Germans at the ice cream company that came up with this name probably thought they were being quite clever. Germans are many things, but clever isn't one of them.



And now as we leave for another day at Gruneburg park, I leave you with this conversation from yesterday as we gawked at mostly naked Germans laying out on the lawn like it was Belmar beach.

Barb: Germans are really white people.
Dan: They're trying to do something about that.

Cousins from around the world

...red, brown, yellow, black, and white, they are precious in His sight.

If only everyone in the world lived by the words of this children's song. Here are some recent pics of Gianna's beautiful cousins from Idaho, courtesy of Cary Burnett Photography. John and Bethel were adopted from Ethiopia and Elianna was adopted from China.



I can't wait for Gianna's hair to be as long as Elianna's! Right now, if I want to get a barrette to stay in, I have to coat it with pomade first.

Pastry of the day...

...Rhubarberplunder.
It was delicious. I ate most of it on the train ride home so this was all that was left to photograph. I used to hate rhubarb. What happened? Did it somehow get more delicious over the years?





Gianna has finally stopped pining over BàÔngCori and has moved on to Ông more beard instead. We've been spending lots of time at construction sites lately. She thinks Ông drives the tractors and keeps looking for him. Kids her age have no concept of time and space, but unfortunately they are still bound by it (as far as I know...). She thinks the grandparents must live in Frankfurt somewhere along with everyone else she knows. Well tomorrow she will get to talk to Ông more beard on Skype along with Bà, Nathan, Jim, Christina, and their new baby Hunter. She is excited to see Hunter, but sometimes it seems like what she really wants is to catch another glimpse of Ông's captivating beard...

OK, one last photo of food. Did bakeries in Frankfurt just start carrying muffins? I used to never see them, but now I see them fairly often. Gianna picked out this chocolate one and today I saw a batch that looked like corn muffins. Probably if I bought one, I would have been disappointed and regretted not buying the rhubarberplunder instead.

Dan's brat and beer diet

People have been asking "Has Dan lost weight?" You betcha! See above May 2008 (left) verses May 2009 (right). I like the chiseled 2009 version much better but do miss the love handles for squeezing. His secret? Chasing around a toddler, walking instead of driving everywhere, the unavailability of certain junk foods, 1 beer per night with dinner, a hearty German cafeteria lunch...hmmm no mention of expensive dietary supplements, fad dieting, or other ill-advised practices. Just good clean living! Way to go Dan!!

Everybody into the pool!

The last time Gianna was at a pool was at the Somerset Grand in Vietnam. The water was cold, and she probably thought these two white people were plotting to drown her. So we weren't sure how she would react to a pool this time around. There are a lot of city pools and thermal springs in and around Frankfurt. We chose Titus Therman, because the website specifically said they had a warm kiddie pool and it was on our local train line. Gianna has been depressed since Bà, Ông, and Cori are gone, but an hour in the pool really cheered her up! When we were in the locker room changing, she kept asking if we were going to get a bath. She was timid at first, wondering if she should get in the water, but soon was splashing around having a good time. So now that we know she likes the water, next time we will have to try out one of the more expensive thermal spas.

Hunter Cole

While we were traveling back to Frankfurt from Paris, my nephew Hunter Cole was born to my brother Jim and his wife Christina. She has set up a blog with some pics of the little peanut. Hunter has quite fair skin and hair like his mother and like both of my brothers when they were kids. In contrast, I came out with a frock of black hair and have ever since been a brunette. In about a month, my brother Jeff and his wife Nancy will deliver little Ryan. My parents went from no grandkids to 4 grandkids in just over a year's time (Nathan, Gianna, Hunter, and Ryan). It's a grandchild explosion! Let the spoiling begin. Still, Gianna is the only granddaughter on either side of the family, a beautiful pink rose in a sea of bluebells.