Celebrating the New Year in Germany

My sister and nieces and nephew arrive today in Frankfurt (YAY!) and we are leaving in moments to pick them up, but I wanted first to let you know what we found out about how the Germans celebrate the New Year.

They call it Silvester, which never fails to make me think of the cat, and they shoot off as many fireworks as they can - get this - from their front yards! Our German neighbor will take Jerry today to the nearest place (almost all the stores have some sort of fireworks on sale starting today - grocery stores, department stores, hardware stores, probably even Toys R Us - they all have 'em!) to procure our bottle rockets. They also have a tradition of melting Blei (lead) on a spoon and dipping it in water to see what shape it takes. If you have a baby pig then you will have good luck. Horseshoes and chimney sweeps are also good luck, but I think the baby pig is the coveted prize. We're looking forward to spending this new year with Jackie and the kids and can't wait to show them around the place!

We'll get some pictures not only of our New Year celebrations, but also of my sister's visit and post them as soon as I can.

By the way, thanks for all the Christmas cards! We had a blast reading all your letters and looking at your pictures yesterday!

We Just Made Elves of Ourselves

All our friends are family are doing it so we did to! Check out our Elf Yourself video here:

http://www.elfyourself.com/?id=1381909363

Paris November 2007

I'm practicing with the photo upload feature on this site. So far, I've only been able to do a few pictures at a time, so I guess we'll start slow! Some of these pictures are the same as in the slideshow (see my skill level here?) These shots are of us waiting for the train at the station in Kaiserslautern. The trains here run on perfect time - unlike our experience with Amtrak in California!

First Timers

Welcome to the blog version of Where in the World is the Beaver Family. I've been updating our website much more like a blog than an actual website, so I thought I'd make the jump to a real blogging site because there are some fancy options I'd like to take advantage of. If you've saved http://www.jerryandbobbi.com/ as one of your favorites, that's okay because I'll put the link to this there as well.

Until I get more posted, take the survey and let us know what you think!