Traveling With a Toddler — Day 6: Dogs, Pigs, and Lots of Running

(If you want to see the previous days, just search for “traveling with a toddler”)

Day six of our Germany trip went something like this:

Thore and Thilo came into our room in the morning to wake us up to get the day going. The day starts a lot earlier in the country! Karen was outside to feed the pigs, so we got up and I watched the boys play with the dogs, Arnie and Chilly Pepper, for a little while…

…before we went outside to find Karen. She showed us piglets that were only hours old! I just love Karen’s outfit, it’s so little Miss Polish.

After a hearty breakfast, Karen had the great idea to visit the farm on which we met as teenagers and spend a lot of fun summers together. We both hadn’t seen Annelie and Cord in years, and they said come on over! After a 45-minutes drive we arrived. Cord and Annelie live on this beautiful, old farm that was a dairy farm when we were there; now they raise pigs and have a lot of land for crops. They also used to have ponies and horses Cord’s late father, Onkel Hans, took care of — I learned to horseback ride on a little Shetland pony called Katja from Annelie when I was twelve. It was like stepping back in time to see that lovely old house again. I hadn’t visited in about eight years!

Annelie has the most beautiful garden:

Looks like they were ganging up on L, but they really weren’t.

The boys had the best time running in circles in the garden.

And then they made friends with the dog…

…and ate some Johannisbeeren. Well, L did, T and T didn’t like them. Curious–

After we sat together and reminisced over coffee and cake about the good old times, and the fact that two of Annelie’s and Cord’s three children are now married and expecting babies (gosh, we are old!), we checked out all the farm vehicles. Landon sat on four, here is just one picture of them with a tractor:

We had a hard time to say good-bye — we could have stayed there for days. Back at Karen’s farm, the boys got a good scrub in the tub, and after a yummy dinner of open-faced sandwiches, Landon was ready to hit the hay. I had spontaneously deciding to stay another night — we were just having too much fun.

Can you say TIRED?

Tagged as: boys, dog, farm, Germany, Johannisbeeren, photography, pig, toddler, tractor, travel