Happy St. Patrick's Day from Germany

It is always interesting to find what holidays are different in Germany compared to the United States. I worked on Labor Day, Veteran's Day, Thanksgiving, MLK day (although Germany celebrates the original Martin Luther!) and President's day. And Valentine's Day isn't that big of a deal in Germany. Well St Patrick's Day is also not celebrated in Germany. Makes sense though, it is an Irish holiday. We only celebrate it in the USA because so many Americans have Irish heritage. So today we dressed in Green, had waffles with a green white chocolate topping Heather creation, did a green scavenger hunt, went out for green ice cream, and other fun green themed things.

In preparation Heather did some research on who St. Patrick really was. For those of you who don't know, he was a missionary to Ireland. He was not Irish but was British and was captured by the Irish and brought to Ireland as a slave. He found Christ in Ireland, and later escaped back to his home. He then became a priest and felt it was his calling to return to Ireland as a missionary. He did return and successfully converted many Irish people to Christianity. It is said that he used the Shamrock to explain the Holy Trinity to the Irish. St. Patrick died on March 17th around 460 AD. So we had a fun day talking about the trinity, missionaries, enjoying the color green and the beautiful weather!

Here's a little slideshow of our fun day. (Sorry there is no music. iTunes converted all our songs to m4a files which don't work with Picasa. If any of you know how to get around this please let us know!)

In other news...we had a visitor two weeks ago. Our dear friend Elizabeth Reese (Auntie Lizzy to the kids) took her one vacation week to come to Germany to visit us! Wow, what a blessing! Heather and Elizabeth and the kids had a great time together while I had to work. Elizabeth got to experience the sights, sounds, and flavors of Weimar and we even were able to get out to the zoo the last day she was here. She also was able to bring many treats from America including a new laptop from our families. The laptop we got before we came to Germany died so we were in need of a new computer. We didn't want one with a German keyboard and German operating system so my dad picked one out for us in America. It is a huge blessing, and my dad said it was partially selfish to get us this new computer because it has a great webcam for Skype. :-)

Now we are in the general flow of life. We are healthy (my foot is not broken for those who remember out last post), and life marches on. I have spring break in a couple of weeks. Spring break here is the week before and after Easter. That's right, two weeks! Hopefully we can work on studying to get our German driver's license during that time.

It's crazy to think that we have almost been here for 8 months (Holly's birthday will be the 8th month mark). In another 8 months we will be in the decision making process on whether to stay in Germany or return to Oregon in the summer of 2013. We were talking about that decision this afternoon and it is a hard one. We have a lot of very good reasons to stay in Germany and a lot of very good reasons to return to Oregon. Seeing how much our lives have changed from a year ago, who knows what will be happening in another year.

I think that is enough for now. Thank you for reading and please feel free to leave a comment or send us an email. We always appreciate your notes so much.

From Germany,

Scott, Heather, Stanley, and Holly