Today was an absolutely gorgeous day, and the two boys both had new bikes, so we decided to go on a bike trip through rural Holland.
The official introductions:
The youngest guy in these pictures, wearing a red sweater, is Thom. He's five years old, loves The Incredibles and all things Spiderman, and also loves the camera like nobody I've ever seen. He plays football, takes swimming lessons and judo lessons.
The next oldest, sporting a brown jacket, is Job (the J is pronounced as a Y). He's seven years old, is freakishly smart, and knows it. It is as equally hard to tear him away from reading a book as it is from watching cartoons on Nickelodeon--which can get quite annoying, actually. He plays football, takes judo lessons, take circus lessons, and plays piano. He's been bumped up by two grades in school.
The girl in these pictures is Merel. She's 10, a bit less bookish than the boys, but quite intelligent and mature for her age. She plays field hockey and piano and takes extra math classes. She has a healthy competitive spirit, which culminates in many bike races down the neighbourhood streets. (I usually win, which I savour fully because 10 year old girls are about the only people I can beat at anything requiring physical effort.)
The mother is Lieselot, and she's a doctor at a nearby university hospital, specializing (I think) in circulatory and heart sort of stuff. She works a lot with students, and last week was working on an article to be published in a medical journal.
Hans is the father, and he's also a doctor at a nearby hospital (a different one). He's the head surgeon and the manager of his section, which deals mostly in removing tumours from the kidney-prostate region.
Honestly, I don't think it would have been possible for me to find a better family to be working for. I got lucky.
Anyway, I'll put these pictures up without much commentary--which is nice, because most of my other posts take about an hour and a half to prepare, from sorting through the photos to getting all the formatting correct.
You may also notice a blonde-haired kid in the photos; he's a friend of Job's whose name I never bothered to learn. The kids often have friends over and most of them don't speak English. They usually give me a gape-mouthed stare and then ignore me the rest of the time.
This is my favourite picture I've taken so far; I call it "Man of the Land".
Yes, that's me. My hair is a bit too short, as I had it cut two days ago by a Turkish barber who didn't understand what "That's short enough" means in English.
(damn blonde kid, getting in the way)
Afterwards, I sat down in the living room to watch the Canucks-Flames game from last night. The kids came in for the last ten minutes of the game and got their introduction to ice hockey. ("See, in North America we actually allow our athletes to contact each other, not like in Europe where if a soccer player gets nicked he starts flopping around on the ground like a fish out of water").
It actually worked out pretty well, because I got Job to keep waving my Canucks flag all through overtime, which gave the Canucks enough retrograde momentum to allow Daniel Sedin to score the winning goal...
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