Summer Manifesto #4 Visit the Animals with the Family

Last week, while my Mum was here, we visited Osnabrück Zoo. Isabella loves animals and the trip was a great success. Even when she got tired, she was so excited to see Baloo bear in real life. Now we just have to teach her animal noises as she barked at everything.

I love rediscovering the world through her eyes. Looking forward to our next zoo trip soon.

Babies and Animals

Lately, Isabella has had a lots of encounters with animals and she loves them! Watching her is such fun.

Of course, she has always been around Pete and he is very good with her. She loves patting him and cuddling. She also shares her food with him if we're not carefully.

At Nico's Grandad's birthday, she raced off into the cowshed and instead of holding back like her older cousin, she was straight up to the calves and holding out her hands for a lick.

At the same party, she had her first enounter with a dog and as he was well trained, she could cuddle him just like Pete.

It's important to us that she isn't afraid of animals but also that she treats them with respect.

She's such a sweet girl, my heart just sings watching her with the animals. I can't wait to take her to the farm and zoo this summer.

Back to the Zoo

Yesterday, we took Lucas to the zoo and either tired him out or bored him to sleep but we enjoyed it.  We even found a part that we missed last time with a giant snake and more birds!

The monkeys

Admiring the animals

More monkeys

Looking around - making sure mummy is following

Giant stone Horace

Buddha

The parrots

Having a break

Ostriches!

Red parrots

Lucas did not like the noise of the red parrots

Cutie Pie!

The fish

The snake!

The big monkeys

More Wildlife!

After ducks, wasps, dragonflies... here is our latest vistor in the neighbourhood - a stork!

Weather

Being English, it's only natural for me to tell you all about the weather here.  One thing I loved about my past experience in Germany is that the country has proper seasons.  Winter is cold, and Summer is hot, certainly the latter part of that seems to have disappeared in England.  However, even here in Germany the weather is starting to get temperamental.  

As I have already mentioned, the weather has been glorious since we arrived in the new flat.  It's been in the high twenties most days and even with our balcony doors and all the windows open, we don't get much relief.  Then on Wednesday night, the weather broke after all the humidity and we had one hell of a thunderstorm.  So much so that Bremen looked like this yesterday:

bild.de

Many Bremen students, our house guest Frankie among them, struggled to get into uni yesterday or basically anywhere north of the city centre, where roads, sewers and cellars were all filled with water.  What really surprised me on the news reports were the number of car drivers who really thought they were better than all of the other (sometimes bigger) cars turning around and actually tried to drive through it!

One sad little part of the whole thing was right on our doorstep.  Although we didn't have flooded streets, we do have a water channel running up the side of our house where we had been observing a mother duck protecting her eggs in the nest since we moved in on Saturday.  Unfortunately there is no sign of mother or eggs.