No baby yet

Well, today was my due date. I read somewhere that only five percent of babies are born on their due date, and that first babies are on average eight days late. Isn't that lovely... So to keep you all occupied I posted some pictures of my big 40 week pregnant self.

The bounties of the land

Look, Nicolien! I caught a bird. Yay! I'm really proud of myself.

Wanna have it? 'Cause you can, you know. We can share it. Want me to bring it into the house for you? 'Cause I will. I'll even put it on the couch where you can reach it easier, if you want.

See, I dropped it here especially for you. That way it won't get my drool all over it while you decide.

Don't want it? Really?
*I'll never understand those weird humans...*
OK, then I'll just eat it myself.

Roosters Goodbye

The four white chickens you see here are roosters. The two brown ones are hens. All of them were hatched October 29. The roosters eat a lot, poop a lot, fight and aren't very productive. That is why I gave three of them away to our uncle, who promised to return one (deep-frozen). One is allowed to stay and rule over the hen house (as long as he isn't too noisy, like Tandoori was). Some people say this is cruel, but I guess that's the way farm life can be...

When in Rome...

... there was no opportunity to blog. But it was beautiful!
We spent 4 days in Rome, between Christmas and New Year's. We saw all the sights (well, all the major sights, anyway) and had lots of fun with two of our best friends. It was really cool. This was our third city trip with them (Barcelona and Copenhagen were previous) but it just keeps getting more fun, it seems like.

I don't feel like writing much, but I did want to share one of the best pictures with you.
And of course, wish all of you a wonderful 2008!

Creepy

When I see a spider, I usually grab a cat, put it near the spider and then it eats it. This is one of the reasons I am happy to have cats. Unfortunately even the cat didn't like this one: it ran away from it!
Thank goodness my mother-in-law was close and was able to kill this horrible creature. Brrrrr!

Sunday afternoon

Because I finished writing my thesis this week, I gave myself the weekend off, school wise.

Today has been a lovely lazy Sunday. We slept in, had a slow breakfast and then decided we would do nothing today. Well, hardly anything, anyway. So we spent the afternoon sitting outside on our terrace, enjoying the lovely view of a freshly mown field. The cats had fun chasing after mice and birds and we read our books. It was almost weird to just sit and be lazy, it's been so long since I've done that! A while ago that was all I could do, but then I couldn't enjoy it. Now I had the choice so I enjoyed it thoroughly.

Yesterday I worked in the garden, pulling weeds and watering. The beans are little plants, the shallots as you can see have started growing greyish green leaves and last night we had the first two strawberries! I just took a picture of one of the plants and noticed a few other red ones.

Oh, how I love the summer! Three more weeks of school and then I'll be off for about two months. But today was a nice little foreshadow, I can feel my batteries recharging...

Proud

Inspired by Ashleigh at Stitched in Holland, I took this picture. Call me crazy, old-fashioned, weird or silly, but looking at this just fills my housewifey heart with pride and joy.
Can't wait to sleep between the air-dried sheets!

My fireman

When I drove home from work yesterday, I noticed big black clouds of smoke coming from a campsite close to our town. I thought of M: he would probably be paged because it was a fire in our municipality. As I got to our house and parked our car, M came running to me. "Can you take me to the fire? I missed the truck, I was too late." So off I went, with him.

At this campsite (which is also sort of a trailer court, because most people there have a trailer that they use as a weekend house) one of the trailers had caught fire. The person in the trailer had started to cook food, but then fell asleep. Thank goodness he wasn't hurt but as you can see the trailer was totally ruined.

M jumped out of the car and I helped him put on his suit. He ran off but asked me to wait, so I parked the car and waited. Because I had recently bought a new cell phone with a pretty good camera, I decided this was a good moment to give it a try. It was interesting to see him work (isn't he a cool fireman?) and to see what all happened. Because of the long Easter weekend, lots of people were at the campsite and they all came and watched. It was an interesting crowd of people.

If you're interested in all the pictures, click here and click on "view as slideshow".

Cats

Isn't this a too cute picture of my cats?

My week

In the past week:
- the weather was awesome;

- we finalized our mortgage;
- I went from teaching 9 hours a week to teaching 12 hours (almost back at my regular 15);
- we spent the week-end to my grandpa's who lives by the North Sea, because he turned 94;
- I graded lots of papers;
- I took some more walks by the river and took some more pictures of the high water level;
- I worked in the garden for the first time this year (and how lovely it was to be outside again);
- I did lots of laundry (which was all dried outside, oh how I love the smell of air-dried clothes);
- I actually cleaned my house (hadn't been done in too long).

I'm sure you will now understand why I haven't been online much! I've been doing so many things, while trying to keep in mind that I'm still sick and need to rest. So I've also carefully scheduled nap times and reading times, which works well for me.
Spring is in the air and I love it!

Doesn't this picture look like one of those standard desktop wallpaper backgrounds? It's not, M took it with his phone. The Dolomites are beautiful...