Happy Holidays!

Herzliche Weihnachtsgrüße!

We hope that this holiday season finds you and your family healthy and happy. For us, this has been a wonderful year with lots of happenings. We have been able to watch W. grow and become quite the independent little person and sadly we have seen the remnants of her babyhood slip past.
J. has been to many exciting new countries with his new job and has had the chance to experience a variety of different cultures- not to mention new beers! We really are fortunate that we are able to have this opportunity to live abroad and do so many things as a family.
Speaking of family, we will be adding another little one to our brood in July! Baby Archer is expected to arrive on the 2nd, but I know with Archer and Whitney genes, it’ll probably be later rather then on time… especially if baby’s anything like my mom… (Love you mom!) keep checking the blog for more up dates.
Well lucky for me, and for you, I’ve been keeping up, pretty much with our doings here in Germany for the past year on this blog. Hopefully next year we’ll have many more adventures to add to our story…

Fröhliche Weihnachten,

The Archers

St. Nicholasbahn

Last Friday we took a special holiday steam Christmas train ride- St. Nicholasbahn trough our village with a few friends. The train is from the 40’s and very vintage. About 10 minutes into the ride St. Nicholas came on the train with Black Peter (he reads off all of your bad deeds over the year) and handed out treat bags to the children. The bags were filled with a bread man, chocolate Santa and a licorice flavored cookie, along with some Clementine oranges, which are very popular right now. W. was feeling under the weather, but really enjoyed the ride. It took about 2 hours, with the train traveling about 5mph. We stopped for an intermission ½ way through, got off the train and had sausages and hot chocolate at one of the depots. The children were then able to see St. Nicholas personally if they wanted to. There were no 2 year olds that volunteered. For more info (in German) go here: http://www.selfkantbahn.de/ Here are a few photos from our trip:

She ate the whole bread man!