Well, we're at the end of Easter holidays... and I am serioudly late in describing some of the Easter traditions in Luxembourg!

As we live in a Catholic country, Easter is of great significance - perhaps the most significant being that Stu has been off school for two weeks!! Tomorrow is back to school - yeah!! He is (and we are!!) quite excited.

Easter kicks off on the Thursday - or Grengen Donneschdeg (which apparently means Holy Thursday, but sounds like Green Thursday to me - my Luxembourgish books have been in the car for almost 2 weeks...) On Holy Thursday the church bells all stop ringing because they are "flown" to Rome to be blessed (blessed... not CLEANED as I was convinced). Because of this local children go around for 3 days with lovely (please add sarcasm) wooden rattles called Klibberen to take the place of the church bells (they make way more noise and go on a lot longer). Luckily for us we live in town (yes, in town, even though we have a farmer's field behind our house) so they aren't quite so gung-ho.

Good Friday is apparently a very high holiday - however it is a working day for most of us.

Easter Sunday saw the arrival of the Easter Bunny at our house.... yum yum... given that the children have a chocaholic mother (who they take after!!) they thought that was just amazing... someone hiding chocolate for them to find!! The children with the Klibberen go around from house to house to collect money for all the "klibbering" they have done. Apparently they actually get some...?

Easter Monday is an official holiday here... called E'maischen. It is celebrated with two markets, one in town and one in a pretty little village called Nospelt. The highlight of the markets are small ceramic birds called Peckervillercher (loosely translated by my Lux teacher as "Little birds who peck"). They are hollow birds that you blow into and they whistle... and everyone has to have one, braving crazy crowds and numerous elbows to hand over a few euros. This was the 50th anniversary of the Peckervillerchers being sold - and yes, we have one for every year we have been here :-)

Marc and I both took the week off and have had a relaxing week hanging out with the kids and doing some things around the house - we have flowers in our flower boxes thanks to Monsieur le Jardinier (a.k.a. Marc). We even managed to get to Nancy, France for a day - just the two of us!! It was very nice, had lunch in a tiny creperie we used to frequent in our pre-kid days and did a little (lot!) shopping...

So here we are, Sunday morning... back to real life tomorrow. Blah... end of vacation blues setting in. But who can be sad watching Dora the Explorer?? Have to run - it's Boots's birthday episode and I am being called for to learn how to make a banana cake.. never a dull moment!!