We said goodbye yesterday to my cousin Jenny. She spent a month with us here in Switzerland! It was so fun having her around and getting to visit parts of Switzerland with her.  She survived having two adopted siblings (mostly thanks to our baby gate that at least allowed her to occasionally escape) and I think even had a little fun with them.  The boys loved following her around so much that they are still looking for her even after she is gone. Jenny, we hope you made lots of fun memories and enjoyed the break from Indiana!! Come visit anytime.

Here are some picture highlights from her time here with us!

“Bye Jenny, we’ll miss you!”

Jenny and I went to a ladies cooking night a couple of weeks ago.  We had a lot of fun. The lady from the church that taught the class owns a business where she teaches and hosts parties for businesses and individuals. So she had everything set out specifically in sections for each recipe and had recipes there. We broke off into pairs to make different parts of the meal and then enjoyed the feast at the end. Jenny was assigned to the cucumber carrot salad with yogurt sauce and I was assigned the naan bread. the other parts of the meal were a vegetable curry, Tikka Masala and a mung bean dish. Everything was really good.

you can tell the tikka masala was good!

we finished the meal off with a mango yogurt dessert!

This evening Jenny and I are making our own batch of the chicken and cucumber salad. We are going to eat it with Roti bread (like we used to have in Penang) that I found at the Asian market here.  Yum!

Last Saturday we took a short day trip to take Jenny to Ballenberg. It is a giant farm museum with farm buildings representing the regions of Switzerland. We barely got through a 4th of it because it was so big. They have bread-making, farm animals, old homes, displays of traditional Swiss farm fashion…they most certainly did not call it farm fashion but you get the idea, carpentry, pottery and on and on. If you are interested in learning more about it here is the site.

Here are some pictures from our day….

The highlight of the day for Owen was playing with the cowbells

(this picture is for my sister-in-law Claire….if I am remembering right she loves poppy’s)

A couple of weeks ago I hosted a baby shower for a friend from the Embassy with a few other ladies. With everyone bringing food it meant I could focus on decorating and doing fun projects like icing a zillion cookies! The shower went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time! The mom-to-be didn’t want to be the center of attention so we made it a family affair! Here are some pictures!

Katie and Haley made AH-mazing cake balls. Red velvet with chocolate icing were the best! I am going to have to make those at home at Christmas time!

the kids decorated onesies that we hung on this cute line

Sweet mom-to-be!

Katie and Jeremy found the best dad gift ever for when he has to come up with dinner!  Being away from the US we hadn’t seen this but they found the pizza cookie combo box at the commissary! So funny.