Starting Over...

On May 11th, around the same time that I started the blog, blogger.com had some technical difficulties and our travel blog was deleted. If you are interested in the details, you can read more about it on Blogger Buzz. I had been waiting to see if our blog would be restored but it's been over a week so that seems unlikely. Luckily, I had only written one post. Here's my best recreation of that first post:

We're Here!

We arrived in Garching, Germany on Thursday, May 5th. We flew from Denver to London then London to Munich. The boys slept through most of both flights. On the Denver to London flight, William slept in a little bassinet provided by the airline.

Garching is a small town just north of Munich. Frank is working at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics. His commute is a 15 minute walk (at a very brisk pace, he says). Downtown Garching is very cute and just a short walk from our flat.

We spent our first week settling into life in Germany and taking care of some of the necessities for an extended stay. James had a tough time adjusting to the new time zone. The days are longer here than in Colorado so it doesn't get dark until after 9:00. It's hard to get him to go to sleep before then and he still gets up around 6am. As you can imagine, our toddler is a little sleep deprived (and cranky). Before we arrived in Germany, William had been sleeping through the night from 11:00p to 7:00a but has started waking between 2am and 4am for an additional feeding. (Note: both boys sleep issues are mostly resolved as of this updated writing, much to the relief of their parents)

We are renting a three room flat - two bedrooms and a living room. The windows are huge, which is good because there's no air conditioning. We have balconies off of both bedrooms. James' room looks out to the back area where there is a nice yard and picnic tables. I haven't been able to figure out exactly how this works but there seem to be a lot of special events that take place in the area under and behind our building (recently there was an orchestra rehearsal, for example). Our room looks out to the street. It can be pretty loud sometimes but the view is nice.

Here are some photos of our flat:

This is our dining area - conveniently located in James' room. We also have a table in the living room.

Here's our tiny kitchen. Frank and I thought the hallway that we called a kitchen in Orlando was small but this is smaller. Due to space limitations, we go to the grocery store almost every day.

This is James' room. The second twin bed is set up as a changing station for William.

Our room. It's a loft above the living room. Gotta love the twin beds :)

Spiral staircase from our room to the living room. This might be a good time to mention that the floors are really hard. We're hoping William doesn't start crawling while we're here. We'll really have to watch him on those stairs.

Aerial view of the living room.