Back...

... from my involuntary blogging break.
My old notebook could not be rescued. I took it to the computer store in town, which is, by the way, run by a lady in her 60´s, with long, bleached hair, thick pink lipstick and a gigantic decoltée, who is constantly smoking. I found she was pretty cool. Like, my new idol :)
Yet, she wasn´t able to repair my computer, because the motherboard had crashed, due to overheating. So... I had to say good bye.
I know I´m being pathetic.
And she could retrieve my data, since the harddrive wasn´t hurt. I spent some lonely days without a computer - which was especially unnerving because I had been eagerly writing on my story when my computer broke, and I so wanted to continue.
My husband brought me this old little Dell computer I´m now typing from. He got it from the company he works for, for almost free, and the cool lady from the computerstore installed all the drivers and built in a soundcard, and she did all that for 20 Euros. Cool, huh?
And yep, over the weekend, I didn´t even have sound, and not being able to surround myself with constant music annoys me to no end.
Well, I had to play the piano myself. Some extra practice is not so bad, I guess.
And I´m happy we don´t have to spend any money on a new computer - I want to save it all for summer.
Just in case you´ve been wondering what I´ve been doing (apart from missing my old computer...)

Sure I´ve continued painting the walls, in this case, Mehmet´s room, who needed a makeover more than any other room. It now looks something like this:

Still not perfect. The picture yet needs to be hung up, and basically, he needs more practical furniture, and less clutter. The hard thing about kids´ rooms is that there´s so much clutter you´re not allowed to get rid of... because what´s clutter and what´s precious depends on the owner´s definition.
Like this:

All the assorted plastic smurfs/dwarfs/ monster, who all have a name and a role and a function in the neverending game my sons are playing.
The case they are in?
It´s a seedling tray I found in the garden store. For free. And we attached it to the wall with sticky tape. It might look a little like rubbish, but I still think it´s genious.
Speaking of seedlings:

 I started a "Where the wild things are" work group in kindergarten. Just in case you missed that book so far, it´s an amazing book by Maurice Sendak. In this first week, we planted cress, as to see if it´s actually possible for a forest to grow in a room overnight, and what said forest would need.

We also talked about which animals, or animal parts we can find in the wild things, and colored coloring pages - there´s a galore of them on the internet.
The big kids, from my school library group, I took to the big library in town...

...where we were allowed to witness how the returned books run through the magic sorting machine. Woo-hooo!
I´m off to them - my weekly group is about to start in an hour and I still need to assemble my material for today. And after that, I´m meeting with a friend, for chatting and letting all eight of our kids play together. And tonight, when all the kids are asleep, I´m going to play with the big girls. "Play" as in boardgames.
Looking forward to that.
Music:

These girls are very unique. I´d love to see them live one day.