3 years old

Nik turned 3 last Saturday the 29th, the next day he came down with the flu and has been battling with it all week. On Sunday he was awake for only 4 hours total all day, it was the quietest day I have had in a very long time. He is feeling better but still has a hacking cough and if he gets started with the coughing then he ends up throwing up, a vicious cycle that doesn't help his throat any.

Last year he was Mr. Independent but now he is suffering from separation anxiety, I can't wait for the old days to come back. He is even shy with his grandma when he first comes down to KokaRoka and will hold on to my pants and hide behind me.

Other fun things happening with him:

• He has an active imagination, he loves to take everything pile it into the living room and pretend it is snow and jump around in it. He also "goes fishing" and "drives a car" (the cushions and pillows surrounding him).
• He likes to feed everyone, if he's eating then you should be too! with words like "want", "try" and "like?", this includes his baby sister.
• following that - he loves to cook and wants to help in the kitchen. This can be really fun until he picks up the big knife or something similar and scares the crap out of me.
• He plays very well with his sister and shares all of his toys.
• He liked getting all of the presents for Christmas and now gives "presents" handing his pacifier to his sister and saying present and giving me one of his toys or an object.
• He doesn't use sentences very often but he is bilingual and will say something in Greek and then in English or the other way around.
• He plays pretty rough with his toys and the only toy that seems up to taking the abuse is Lego's. Anything else plastic is put into two categories, the cheap toy (sometimes not so cheap)- lasting only one day, and the moderately good toy- lasting for a couple of days.
  

Well this is all I can think of right now, overall we have a pretty busy time and I can't wait to send him off to pre-school next year. As summer approaches I am going to try to do a little more sitting with him and doing "school" activities, so he can get used to it.

Little Teddy Bear

Eric and Leslie sent this hat for Nik and now it has been handed down to Katerina, I love hand-me-downs, especially when they are sooo cute!

A picture with ΓιαΓια (yaya)

and ΜπαΜπα (baba).

Christmas

Our Christmas Dinner, Turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes and dressing. Arthur made bread the night before and I made a carrot cake and apple pie for dessert.

Here we are on Christmas Day, if you are wondering my hair is wet, both baby Kat and I just came out of the shower. Katerina has a black lip from Nik throwing a metal car at her.I did a wreath for the door (okay I bought it) maybe next year I will be brave enough to ask the neighbor for some of her holly.

Nik opening his present from Santa, it worked out that he got a present every other day, it was much better this way and the excitement on his face was worth the wait for me (more of that to come later).

A spider man race track!

My cute girl with her first hair barrette, wearing a lady bug dress from Aunt Jeanie.

The snow

So these are the pictures as promised of our snow 2 weeks ago, it is all gone now and we had a very sunny Christmas. The rest of Europe is pretty snowed in and in Greece we are having wonderful weather, hah! it's great living here.

This is what I woke up too in the morning it had snowed so much that there was even snow on the veranda, it must have been blowing pretty hard for it to come in.Nik trying to get out to the snow, and the baby would with joy like to escape with him.
My bougainvillea finally had to be moved indoors, but it had flowers all the way from June to December, amazing.
The car was snowed in.
Nik and I threw a couple of snowballs and did a snow angel, he finally got so cold that he cried about his fingers being cold (the gloves didn't stay on long).

,I walked all the way down to our grocery store, for some supplies, this was the view.

Foot and Mouth

No not the disease, she loves to have her foot in her mouth when I am changing her diaper. I guess the freedom of no diaper, pants or socks allows her to reach her toes for a little chew time. It snowed on Monday but melted the same day and then it snowed on Wednesday night and on Thursday there was so much snow that it came up to the middle of my calf. The snow was different than what I am used too, it wasn't icy snow and if you made a snow ball and threw it it would break up in the air and come down as fluffy snow. It's very hard to describe, but was very interesting. I had to go to the supermarket for milk and it was a great workout since I was making a lot of new tracks, kind of like running of sand. The snow is still here but in smaller amounts, the roads for the most part are clear, they had a bobcat scoop it up. I made pictures and will post them soon, no pictures of Riene in her snow suit (picture "A Christmas Story") but I am sure there will be more chances of fresh snow.

6 months old and cuter than a doll

Our little girl is 6 months old today and what a great day it is. She has her two little teeth on the bottom peeking out and is enjoying eating all kinds of things. She scoots around in her walker and when on the floor she will arch her back and kick her arms and legs like doing the backstroke and this gets her around. She loves laughing at her brother and I think to myself what are you laughing at, but just looking at him makes her happy. I love love love having a little girl to dress up, so much fun.

Third day of four day trip

On our third day of our trip we left our hotel and went to the hospital that Nik spent a large part of his first year (two months total) to say Hello to the main doctor that did a lot of the operations. We then headed out of Thessaloniki towards Pella (read about it on Wikipedia) another ancient site and the birthplace of Phillip II and his son Alexander the Great, Aristotle also taught there. The picture above is of us at the museum and below the exterior of the new museum.
The head of Alexander.
This was how the whole tour of the museum went with me or Arthur dragging Nik along and the baby just hanging out, although she did drink milk next to a table found in the palace that was over 2,500 years old.
The decoration on the table described above, phenomenal workmanship.
This is a photograph of one of the floor mosaics found in the palace. Thank goodness it was just a photograph because Nik jumped on top of it (it was on the floor with just a small barrier around it). From then on one of the musuem attendants followed us around, the Greek state would save a lot of money if they got rid of half of the museum's staff, way to many people standing around.
This little jar was found under an earthen floor in the agora, filled with silver coins, boy wouldn't it have been luck to find that.

Two pictures of the ruins of the Pella Agora (marketplace).
15 minutes from Pella is Γιαννιτσα, we stopped there and had a gyro and chips then we headed south about 15 minutes to Avramis Rose Co., to buy some roses for me. I have been dreaming of getting roses from them for 2 years now, ever since I got their first catalog, I got 2 roses named parole and 2 named dream love (fragrance is like lemons).
Here's Nik smelling the roses and chasing Arthur driving the car, it's the end of November and we still have roses, gotta love Greece.
Our little adventure for the day left us in Noussa, where if we had a second home in inland Greece it would be here. Arthur has is old army buddy here and is also godfather to the little girl Anastasia pictured below with her big brother, we have talked about them before and generally visit them around Easter.
We enjoyed a dinner with them that tasted a lot like Texas Bar-B-Q, minus the sauce, next time I will bring some homemade bar-b-q sauce with us, it was tasty and made me a little homesick, I was hankering for pumpkin or pecan pie afterwards.
The ugly face is being made to Nik and not to the crying baby :)
My pretty girl with her daddy.

Second day of four day trip

We woke up on our second day in Thessoloniki and drove immediately to Domaine Gerovassiliou Winery just 15 minutes away from the hotel. They have this awesome museum with all of the tools used throughout history to make wine and then they have one of the biggest corkscrew collections in the world. We had a guided tour through the museum and then we got to taste two of the wines that they make there. I would suggest to anyone visiting Thessaloniki to go there, they can even take a bus from the IKEA and it will drop you off at the closest village and the people at the winery will come and pick you up.

We then drove back through part of Thessoliniki to get to our second part of our day trip, we wanted to visit the birthplace of Aristotle (Arthur's favorite historical person). They have a wonderful park dedicated to him in New Stagira, but as we drove through it was too foggy to even stop and take pictures. The wonderful thing about our hour and half drive across Chalkidiki was the how many times the land changed. We first drove through a farmers paradise with green fields in every direction, then it became barren and rocky with scrub bushes like Arizona (minus the cactus), then again another change to a wonderful forested land (this was the foggy part) that you could just imagine little fairies flying about, and last but not least the coast line with beaches everywhere.
This was at the end of the forest part and at the top of a hill with a rest stop looking down on Stratoni village. We had our pic-nic of leftover chicken from KFC.
The picture above is of Ancient Stagira the birthplace of Aristotle it has a stone wall around it and still looks in magnificent shape, we were the only one's visiting it.





Classical Stoa in Stagira.


The below picture is of Olymbiada, a small coastal town that was pretty much closed down for the winter months but you could tell that they are pretty busy during the summer.
And here's Arthur getting a ticket on our way back from our day trip. In Greece the cops stand in the middle of the road and randomly pull over cars. So as luck would have it the cop motioned for us and the car in front of us to pull over. Arthur got booked for the hook (for towing) that he has on the back of his car.