Fur den Papst!

Alles Gute zum Geburtstag! Happy Birthday!

I think we should all have fun celebrating the birthday of this amazing man today. We are going to have Eggs Benedict sans hollandaise sauce since my kids aren't fond of sauce which makes them more like Egg McMuffins and less like Eggs Benedict, but hey, we'll just say the sauce is on the side. Way to the side! Like maybe the laundry room.

I might also pull down my pictures from Germany to show the kids what it looked like when I was there and see how rusty my high school German has really become. I was pleasantly surprised when it came back to me enough to navigate through the streets of Germany but that was only 4 years removed from high school and it has been do-you-really-need-to-know-how-many more years than that!

We will skip the pictures of the "research brewery" that I visited that March and the story about how mommy wouldn't have made it home if not for the kind German couple sitting next to her who drove her back to the train station and made sure she actually got on one. In my defense, nobody told me German beer was more potent that regular beer, but that is another story for another day. Don't believe me?

A few other ideas are:

• The German Theme Page full of German activities and printables (not sure which ones are for subscribers only) at Enchanted Learning.
  
• Scherenschnitte is the German word for paper cutting and this website has a fun lesson for kids. We will definitely find some time to scissor snip today!
  
• Check out the top 2o best German recipes at Allrecipes.com.
  
• We will be playing it safe with chicken and dumpling soup and an easy apple strudel for dessert. Easy on the tummies and easy on the mommy. Please don't tell my mother I'm not using grandma's strudel recipe!
• It might be kind of fun to see what life is like for a boy in Germany today (I have not checked out this site just to let you know) and compare that to what it was like when Pope Benedict was a boy. This interview with Pope Benedict's cousin really provides some insight into the Holy Father as a young boy/man.
  
• And if you need to brush up your Deutsch like I do, you can find some free lessons here.

Have a great day! Auf Wiedersehen!