Laurel Elisabeth Stevens

If you can laugh, it will be okay.  If you can chuckle at the huge water stain on your ceiling and the fact that the AC quit just when you had 12 people in the house, and at least one guest spending the night, then it will be okay. So far I’m still chuckling. . .but then again, the downstairs AC is working. Niobe, our chocolate lab has been with us three months now.  She’s grown comfortable enough to bark at every guest and ringer of the doorbell, be they 5 or 40.  But she’s still a bit confused about where to go when she needs to do her business.  A few weeks ago she was using the upstairs carpet as her spot of grass, oh, about every other day.  That didn’t do well for my view of her.  I was getting really annoyed, if not angry.  She only did it when the kids were upstairs, and I would hear, “Niobe! No!  oh no . . .Niobeee!” That’s my cue to grab three rags and the carpet spray.  Blot, blot, spray, spray, blot.  Grumble, g...

Grandmère and Elisabeth at the Kaiserpfalz We wanted to show my mom a bit of Germany, a bit more than our regular routine, so we headed south to Goslar, a town in the Harz mountains.  It was our second visit to the Harz Mountains and Goslar, and our second visit in the clouds.  I have written down some notes about its history and the interesting (and not so interesting) museums we visited, but the part I’ll remember for the longest happened at the end of the day.  We had seen two museums each, separated by a long and very German lunch (a whole post in itself), there wasn’t anything else on our to-do list and the kids found a playground.  I was sure we’d be too cold to play, but the kids were game, so I thought, why not?  I wanted to go back into the town and find some shops to look at but I thought first we could let them play.   I chatted with Mom, John pushed the kids on the swings, then I convinced Mom and Elisabeth to come with me to the top of the ...