My Last Couple Weekends in Pictures

All right, it's about time to get back to normal in these parts, so let's start off by catching up on my last two weekends. Cuz weekends are fun and summer weekends are always worthy of a blog post, filled with sunshine and fun as they tend to be!

Last weekend started off with some very necessary replacing of some of my unsuccessful balcony seedlings with some more colorful, and living, flowers.

And we began to realize that our balcony is, in fact, a crazy wild garden surrounded by proper German orderly balconies filled entirely with perfectly tended flowers. (We think ours is way cooler, though.)

We paid a visit to the exhibit on empty and "ghost" subway stations in the DDR at Nordbahnhof and then wandered across the street for a beer in the sand and some beach volleyball viewing at Beach Mitte (which totally made me want to learn to play volleyball - those chicks had asses of steel!).

I scored on some gorgeous pink end-of-season (so it seems?) peonies.

And we met little baby Hanna! A preciously cute little monkey that Kerstin and Hendryk are lucky enough to call their own (more on her and all her adorableness to come in a separate post next week - there's too much cuteness to fit all in here!).

I swear I'm not crushing her head here, just showing how ridiculously tiny she is!

Finally, we enjoyed a long overdue visit to Dr. Pong after watching the EM - Euro Cup - game (was it Germany? Could have been, they all blend into one for me...) at Prater (as usual).

This past weekend we started off right with a grill evening on the balcony...

...before the crazy, intense thunderstorm forced us inside (but not before we had to rescue the tomatoes from the perch and place them all safely on the floor of the balcony before the torrential downpour and hurricane-like winds threatened to blow them away!).

And somehow, I got a picture of the sky lit up with lightning!

We spent Saturday in the 'burbs at our friends Anja and Matthias' new house where they threw a housewarming pool party (the best kind!).

I never show up empty-handed to a party, so this time I whipped up a couple batches of my all-time favorite (though seriously labor-intensive) blueberry-mint cupcakes, this time with some raspberries thrown in cuz that's what the grocery store was offering.

How cute are the wee munchkins? In a rare moment that Mia agreed to share her boat with Aron.

Micha played soccer for the first time ever with a naked girl (Mia is nothing if not properly German - meaning happily naked)

Mmm, grill goodness. Notice little Aron in his swanky robe in the background. This picture exemplifies why he earned the nickname "Hef" this weekend.

Boys will be boys if you give them a pool and lots of toys

Sunday we headed to one of my favorite events of the year - the Staatsoper für Alle (opera for everyone) concert in front of the beautiful (and sadly, still under construction for an insanely long time) Staatsoper on Unter den Linden.

Well, little girl, it wasn't too loud for me!

Where's Waldo? I mean...Micha. :)

It's so freaking awesome how they just hang that giant TV screen from a crane for the weekend!

And finally, we cheered on our friendly neighborhood bumblebee (did you know those giant bees - called Hummeln in German - are called bumblebees?! I literally just had to Google translate that and am a little blown away to find out that a bumblebee is just a kid's word but a whole different creature than a regular bee...) while he paid our tomatoes a visit. We also recently found out that tomato plants need bees and their pollinating techniques to, as Micha says "get [their tomatoes] born", so this guy is our new best friend.

And now that the weekend's over, you know what that means, right? BIRTHDAY WEEK!!!