First trip

Today was the first time we took little Anouk out to explore the wide world. She enjoyed the ride to the Marina district in her cool little car seat. We put the car seat in the stroller and walked around to get some necessary nursing accessories. We had a latte in one of the coffee shops, and she slept through all of it. Then we drove to Crissy Field and showed her the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline on a typical breezy San Francisco day. She acknowledged the beauty, but sleeping seemed a lot more interesting....




The loading and unloading was a lot easier than we thought, so we are now all set for all kinds of trips in the City etc. :-)

Of course, I have been taken a LOOOOOOT of pictures, here are some of the highlights:




Her crib seems a little big for now, but we really like it :-) Thanks, Reba.

Swaddling really makes her sleep better, even though she looks like a little burrito. Sabine has been breastfeeding her, which seems a little painful but is working. It helps with diaper changing, since it doesn't smell nearly as bad as formula. We are also using cloth diapers with plastic shells, and we wash them ourselves. I just finished the first load, and they came out clean. Whatever we can do to help the environment, so our daughter can also enjoy it:

My mom tells me that her living room looked the same when I was a kid, it is funny how some "old-fashioned" things are not as bad as we once thought. It takes about 100 years for a Pamper to be broken down in landfill.

More pictures soon :-)

Welcome Anouk

YAY!!!! Anouk was born 2 days ago, on April 6, at 12:34 in the afternoon, and mom and baby are doing great :-) It is the most awesome experience to see the actual delivery, even though it involves a lot of hard work and pain. But once she came out, hormones make you forget everything and you become the happiest person on the planet.


Anouk is obviously the cutest and most amazing baby on this planet, and everybody who said this earlier about their kid was clearly wrong..... :-) She measures 20 inches (50 cm) and weighs 7 lbs 3 oz (3270 grams), and she was born on her due date (we like punctuality).


After the successful delivery, we stayed in the hospital for another 2 days to make sure that everybody is healthy, and teach us basic baby-survival skills like swaddling, diaper-changing, breast-feeding etc. The staff was very thoughtful and supportive, and the food was good. I slept on a cot in the same room so I could spend the night with my two women :-) On the second night, they served a celebratory dinner with fillet mignon and tiramisu, which was really great. Unfortunately, none of the nurses wanted to come home with us, so now we are managing it on our own.....


We took her home in the car seat (mandatory), and now she is getting her portion of protein as I am writing this. We are obviously very excited, and we'll post a lot more pictures in the next few weeks.


Oh yeah, and some people make you think that kids only smile (you never see other pictures); this is not completely true:

Baby Shower

Our third and last baby shower (after my work's at our place and Sabine's at her office) was hosted by Shannon at our house. I was obviously a little nervous, since she asked me to be the photographer and it was ladies only, so I thought that there would be some silly baby-poop-guessing-games that I was going to be subjected to. In typical Shannon style, everything was taken care of, it felt like a catering service came in and took care of everything. And everything was in our preferred style, not over the top or extreme pink, thanks, Shannon :-) To make it a party, loft of sugar was brought in, including baby shower cup cakes and cookies the size of cakes.

Slowly but surely everybody gathered and after cookies and mimosas, the first game was played: guessing Sabine's belly's diameter with yarn. Most people were pretty close, except for Jen, who purposely over-guessed it to 'win' babysitting duty:


AD ended up winning the competition:


The next game was guessing famous people based on their baby pictures, which turned out to be fairly hard; Obama, Jimi Hendrix, Princess Di and Einstein were among the listings:


After all this excitement, everybody started concentrating on the paint-your-own-onesie, which was an excellent idea. We ended up with about 15 personalized little jumpsuits. But not even Eminem could distract people from their focus:

Erica in full focus.

Marie with her award-winning outfit, but she was disqualified for using stencils :-)

Jen giving the smile for the photo-opp.


Sabine started unpacking the insane amount of gifts:


We got a lot of blankets, clothes, baby necessities and books. Thanks to everyone for being so thoughtful; it's very much appreciated and we are very happy to have such great friends. At the end, we were treated to some more American culture with "Green eggs and ham" by Dr. Suess, read by Principal Steiner:


Now, the wait is on to welcome baby van der Sluis into this world.

White Christmas

Since we don't have family living close by, we decided to spend Christmas in Yosemite with some friends. We stayed in the beautiful victorian Wawona hotel in the park, and went snowshoeing. The weather was in our favor, as it had been snowing for days and it was still snowing when we got there. This made for few visitors and a sense of solitude in the otherwise overcrowded Yosemite Valley. We set off in chilly and windy conditions, looking for the powder. This is Ross, Roxanne, Sabine and Ed waiting to head out.


We snowshoed along the bike path and on the road that was no longer used in winter, and got to the Merced River. The scenery was magnificent, if ever there was a reason to call something a Winter Wonderland, this was it.





The snow was ideal for playing around, with snowball fights, random falls, etc.



It started clearing, so we could see the surrounding mountains, which made it even more impressive. The meadow was perfectly white, the powder up to knee-deep, which made for strenuous snowshoeing, but the beauty of the valley made up for the effort. Sabine deserved the grand price for keeping up with everybody despite being almost 6 months pregnant.





We had a late lunch and drove to our hotel, where we had an awesome Christmas dinner. I walked around the meadow around the hotel the next morning in the brisk cold, but the sky was clear and the sun came out, and I couldn't stop taking pictures of the creek and the trees.



Because of the sunny weather we decided to drive back to the valley. We stopped at the famous Tunnel View parking lot, and I have never seen it this beautiful:

We started our snowshoe trip on the meadow between Yosemite and Curry Village, where we found an untouched patch of powder. The forest was amazing, with every branch covered in snow. Yesterday we thought it wouldn't get better, but we were wrong:






Awesome views of North Dome and Half Dome made for a perfect scene; we passed by the Ahwahnee Hotel and finally made it back to our car after more than 2 hours. Again, Sabine kept up with all of us, and deserved the hot chocolate in the Ahwahnee.





I am not sure if we will ever see Yosemite again with this much snow, it was too beautiful for words. We drove back home with a big grin our face. Merry Christmas :-)