visiting oma & opa

daniel and i have been driving down to stay with his parents about once a month since we got married, and now that their first grandchild is here visiting is high on the priority list. on friday we made the three hour trip to their village near ulm and came home sunday evening. daniel has been playing the organ since he was fourteen and still plays in the village churches whenever we're down there. my in laws' house is a quiet place in the country and while he rehearses the songs for sunday i like to drink coffee with his mom or read a book. in the past i was on my phone constantly (and still am a lot of the time!) but i've been trying to be more mindful about the chance to relax for the weekend and unplug. i always come home rested if i've spent the afternoons doing more knitting or reading than facebook scrolling.

on saturday afternoon daniel's mom wanted to do some shopping in town, so i left gabe with his papa to go visit uroma (great grandma) while we were gone. oma bought him a new onesie (here it's called a "body") and a sleep sack. it was a beautiful day and we had ice cream afterwards and talked about the family and her vacation apartments. daniel's dad built their house in 1980 from the ground up and it's massive, so after the four kids moved out they converted the basement and upstairs into small apartments. mostly they have construction workers staying because of the huge train project going on in stuttgart, but there's usually at least one weekend in the month free for us to stay.

for this trip we decided to try going on our first ever date without gabe and thankfully it went really well. i pumped a bottle earlier in the day and laid out pajamas, and other than a few tears at bedtime he did ok. we wanted to go see a movie but there weren't any original versions playing in ulm. (original version, or ov, is the film in the original language without german dubbing) instead we went to a toy store to use a gift card that's been sitting in my wallet for months and then had dinner in ulm next to the danube. gabe made out like a bandit and got a wooden teething ring, a ball, and his first schleich animal. schleich makes the best, cutest, sturdiest little plastic animals and daniel's mom still has some from the 80's that look brand new. they're on the expensive side but the quality is well worth it. the restaurants next to the river were packed but we finally found a spot and enjoyed a few hours alone as husband and wife for the first time since our little one was born. having family to babysit is a blessing and i know that if my family were closer we would probably already be having regular date nights! xoxo