March update on NY resolutions

A quick and dirty one
1. Sleeping by 12 : Not happening. Addicted to The Good Wife series. Watching Series 1 on DVD. When not watching TV surfing net. Not able to sleep before 1.

2. Cooking new dish a week : Ok. Made palak dal, vegetable puffs this month.

3. One hour with the kids daily: Ok. We had a lot of park outings in March as the weather was glorious. Daily 2-3 hours in Zurichhorn park with S cycling around with her friends, and then S and A playing in the playground with everyone. Did not get much activities done (meaning letters and numbers with S) but there's time for there when they grow up.

4. Exercise 4 times a week: This is down to 3 and manageable only at 3.

5. A book a month: Reading Sea of Poppies now. Have recommended it to my Book club as the May book but now on reading it am wondering if the high number of Hindi words are going to be a problem. Great book nonetheless.

Berne

In March we had some good weather (sadly we were deceived that spring was here and its now been raining and cloudy continuously for three weeks!) and we decided to restart our weekend drives out.
First on our list was Bern. Can't live somewhere and not go to the capital city right?
Its only a 11/2 hours drive so we just decided in the morning and set out. We decided to avoid the historical sites and city centre and just do some fun kiddie things. Search on tripadvisor on the drive there and we were set. Seriously what did people do before internet? Same way how did people drive without GPS. Alas we are becoming a highly machine dependent society (Terminator series i hear you) but now i'm just rambling.
We started at the Bear Park in Berne. The city and canton gets its name from the Bears (Berne means bear in Swiss German) and the symbol on the Berne flag is a red bear. They used to keep bears in the city centre in a pit but sometime ago it was moved to a bear park. So we first went to the bear park. I was expecting many bears but there were only there but it was in a beautiful setting by a river bend and you could get quite close to the bears and see what they were doing of course they were behind a fence). There were steps leading to the river and we could see people jogging along the river.

After the bear park we went to Gurter Park which is a hilltop park providing a panoramic view of Berne. The journey was highly thrilling as our GPS took as all the way to the top of the park, but when we reached there we realised there were no other cars there and when we asked a person in the restaurant about the car park he looked shocked and said driving there was forbidden! and we should immediately drive back down unless we want to get caught by the police and pay a huge fine. We slowly drove down back and about 4 km down saw a sign we had missed which meant no entry for cars! damn the GPS. We were speculating that if we put Mt. Titlis on the GPS it'll probably show us a path to drive to the top!

Anyway we cautiously drove to the parking of the Gurter Bahn which is a funicular taking you to the top of Gurter park, alternative is to trek up, but with two whiny kids we took the easy option out. We saw many mountain bikers using the Bahn, they were taking their cycles up and cycling down the hill. The people here are highly sporty. Its all skiing and snowboarding in the winter, and as soon as the snow melts on the hills its mountain biking, running, cycling and trekking. I'm inspired.

The park on top is lovely. There was a train for the kids- their first solo trip. I did not want to sit again on a toy train. S was fine but A kept crying whenever she saw us. There was a wooden tower for S and the hubby to climb, and a playground with very different equipment (one section had levers and pulleys for kids to play with and figure out how things move in different ways) to keep S busy. We were too late for the restauarant so we had to settle for the usual spaghetti/fries/chicken nuggets in the self service restauarant. I tell you, every place here has a kids section and there are always fries available.

We took the bahn back down and were home by 7 pm. Unfortunately we haven't been able to do any other weekend trips out as the weather has been awful but keeping fingers crossed. Next post on our Barcelona trip. We drove there- well the hubby did- the total road trip was 3000 km and we had sunny beaches and snow in the mountains in the same trip!

S first unsupervised playdate!

My little baby is growing up! S had her first unsupervised playdate today. By unsupervised I mean I wasn't there- the other mother was watching both the kids. We had all gone to the park together after school and the kids were cycling around/playing in the playground and I told S that we had to leave (I've got red eye and was feeling really tired and A was quite cranky) after a couple of hours. S said she wanted to continue.

So her friend's mom kindly volunteered to take S home with her so that she could continue playing with her friend there while I took A home and had an afternoon nap. I jumped at the chance. All the best to her managing two of them!

But it wasn't so bad. Firstly S is really comfortable with her friend and her friend's mom as we hang around every other day. Secondly her house is only about a 5 mins drive from my house so she knew that if she got tired/fussy they could call me and I would be there. And the weather was awesome and they have a lovely garden which extends into a meadow kind of place and the girls were happy running around there. So much so that S refused to come home when i had to pick her up!

Another first was me writing a letter to the police (yes you read that right) explaining that i had a parking permit valid for parking in a particular place and could they please consider reversing the fine they had levied on me. Really felt odd writing a letter to the police!