Monday Coffee, We Fell Back, and a Little More Practice

Welcome back to Monday! I'm linking up with Molly at The Move to America to reflect on last week and look forward to the next with her Monday Coffee Morning blogging social. Give her excellent blog and other participating blogs a look!

Well folks, it's happened again - the Central European Timezone has fallen back an hour onto Standard Time. Like most people, I prefer the time change off of Daylight Savings Time (falling back) over the spring change (spring forward). We're fortunate that Little Man will sleep til 8:00 am some weekend mornings, so we did get to enjoy a bit of the "extra" hour this morning; and tomorrow morning I won't drop Little Man off in the dark like I did on Friday. But despite that, I'm not actually a fan of Daylight Savings - I'm one of those people that think it's outdated and not actually that beneficial - and wouldn't mind if it was just done away with altogether. But it's here, so unless I plan on going totally off the grid (and let's face it, I'm not one to survive "rugged surroundings") I'll continue to deal with it.

Little Man tucks in two more practice days at kleuterschool this week. Last week's first practice days went better than I could have hoped for, and he's already looking forward to more lunch with his friends and buitenspelen (outside play/recess). We're looking forward to his continued enthusiasm.

Little Man's full days of practice at school mean that I will have less reason to ignore a couple of bigger chores I've been putting off around the house. Some cleaning out and organization is in order, and the best time to do it is when I don't have "help."  Now I just have to pull up the motivation to get it done, which I should really do since I have no intention of going out in the awful wind we're having today.

I am well into starting my posts for my Dutch food series to come, and I'm really excited to eat my way through these creations. So far the only cooking incident was a minor burn - an occupational hazard when your oven is above your eye level - so I feel like this is off to a good start! This week, I'll continue to plug away at the posts and recipes some more and hopefully be able to get everything up mid-to late November. Here's a sneak peak at one of the tasties that I'll be featuring:

For later this week, we're preparing for Halloween. It's not really something celebrated in the Netherlands, but it is gaining popularity. Our expat club is putting on a Halloween party for the kids, and we're attending. Now to just figure out how we're going to make the dinosaur costume Little Man is envisioning...

And the end of October reminds me how quickly Little Man's birthday is approaching. This week I need to talk to the teachers at the peuterspeelzaal about the expectations for in-school birthday celebrations. Children's birthdays are a big deal in Dutch culture, and they celebrate at school (parents also go in for the school celebration for younger children) and give their classmates some sort of cadeautje (little gift). Little Man wasn't yet in school at his birthday last year, so I only have a vague idea of what I'm supposed to do and will figure it out while I have a bit of time left to plan.

Before I leave you to start staring at organizing the piles of papers, I need to put in shameless plug to promote myself. If you enjoyed my posts about tips for taking kids to museums and our scavenger hunt at the Rijksmuseum, please check out my guest post at Deanna's wonderful blog, From Casinos to Castles. Deanna's Monday posts focus on mothers supporting each other rather than being in competition. She has very kindly included my post today that provides tips for doing cultural activities with young kids on vacations. Please check out her blog and leave any thoughts or feedback!

It's no secret that we love museums!

We're off to start our Monday - here's to your week!