Fall

The time changed here last weekend, the leaves are in full color, the nights are much darker, and the cold air is quickly coming. I can't believe how fast this year is flying by! The Football Team lost in double over time in the Playoff Game, so football season is officially over for Bailey.  Mia doesn't have school this week, so we spent some time at our apartment in Bamberg. Here are a few photos from the last few weekends.

Mia has the best restaurant and was open for dinner one night (with very good prices, I might add :-))

Her Restaurant is called MXR - and she specializes in international cuisine :-)

Delicious!!!

Mia and I spend way too much time together :-)

We were so excited to find out that Camden was chosen to go to a STEM symposium in Wiesbaden for a week in December. A really cool opportunity!

Learning French via German is not so easy. Mia scored a 1 (which is an A and not so easy to get) on her first pop quiz of the year. Even the accent marks have to be written perfectly or it is marked wrong.  You also have to know when it should be capitalized or not. In our experience, the teachers don't usually  - ok NEVER - give smiley faces, so a "Tres bien" and 2 smiley faces was huge!!! Mia was so excited! Her dialect is so cute too! *I wouldn't usually post this, but it is really interesting to me how different it all is. They haven't had any grades all year and this was the first one (and over 150 vocab words already memorized) - which was a surprise quiz.  No word box, no multiple choice or true false - they just have to come up with the answers all on their own! There are lots of red marks, but it is only to tell you how many points you get for each question. All of the teachers grade the same way, so it is VERY consistent. It is amazing that this is the 3rd language for all of these kids (German of course, English, and now French). In 8th grade they can choose Spanish and then later Chinese if they wish!

We went for a hike looking for fungi (aka mushrooms). We found tons of different ones, but this certainly took the cake as the most unusual. Not sure how quick I would be to test this one out???

The forest is so pretty!!!

The sun peaked through the branches and lit up the colorful trees

My camera doesn't do it justice, but truly beautiful!

As we were walking, a couple of horse back riders came through...

and a biker too...

Fall is definitely here!

Bryan went to see FC Bayern play in Augsburg. I told him to take lots of pictures...

...and of course, this is what he gave me :-). He had fun though and FC Bayern won!  He said it was neat to see them play in such a small stadium (Augsburg is a much smaller team, but is playing in the same league this year as FC Bayern)

And Frank celebrated "Gotcha Day" One year with us, but 3 years in age! We adore you Frank!!!

Mia had a costume for Halloween, but did not go trick or treating. It is getting to be a little bit more common to trick or treat in Germany though, but many people are unprepared (with no candy). Our German friend went, and came back with 7 euro (because the people had to scramble to find something to hand out). So funny!

And I spent the Holiday on Tuesday (The Catholic version of All Saints Day) painting the trim from a natural wood color to silver gray. This almost 100 year old apartment has to try to keep its youth :-)