A Slower Pace

We three girls are trying to approach our last couple of weeks in Brussels on a slightly slower pace. We ran ourselves a bit ragged in Paris, although as Lucy said today, "It's not every day you can climb the Eiffel Tower or go to the Louvre." Since we have a little more time here in lovely Brussels, we can spread out the fun and add in some time to just be. Not to mention that Lucy already had a bad cold last week and then I woke up yesterday feeling horrible with a cold of my own. Tylenol helped and we'd already planned to take it easy. Julia in fact requested a computer free day so I obliged; thus no blog posts yesterday.

So after breakfast and Brian's departure for work Wednesday morning, I suggested a completely geeky management type activity and the girls embraced it. I love them. We each got four post-it notes and on our own wrote down four things we wanted to do over Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Then we put them on the wall and compared and discussed, combining like items and organizing into columns by day. The overlaps really warmed my heart to see that writing and creating art were important to all three of us. Here are the results (initials L=Lucy; J=Julia; M=Mommy to avoid the L/L conflict; brackets show we combined those ideas):

WEDNESDAY

{M - paint (inside or outside or both)

{J - go to the park and paint

{L - visit the park, have a picnic and draw the arc

{J - catch up on writing

{L - do some work in journal and read

{M - sketch in our journals

Wednesday summary = all accomplished. We did journaling and reading all morning, still in our jammies. After lunch we strolled over to Parc du Cinquantenaire and painted and sketched. We did not even go to any markets yesterday, because in the late afternoon we had plans to go visit Brian's office at the EC. Such an international team he has the good fortune to work with while here and so welcoming and kind. It was nice to see where he works and meet some of his colleagues, including one who will come work on exchange in the US in Brian's office in the winter. The four of us went out for dinner afterward.

THURSDAY

J - Europeen Parlament [sic]

M - play games (especially new game and Rat-a-Tat-Cat)

Thursday summary = accomplished, although we never got around to Rat-a-Tat-Cat because we were so into our new game, Mapominoes Europe, given to us by our dear friends the Storers as a travel gift. We learned a lot about Europe from the game, and had fun too. Then we walked over to the European Parliament building, just on the other side of Schuman subway and Parc Leopold, for our tour. So it was an all-around geography, government, history, and politics learning kind of day.  As an extra bonus, we scouted our next painting site/viewpoint in Parc du Cinquantenaire.  And we found an awesome smoothy place, Guapa Juice, a perfect discovery just a short walk from our apartment.

FRIDAY

L - practice tennis

L - gelato

M - go to one art museum

(note: J - go to the water park - this one we elected to postpone for fairer weather since it is barely 70 deg. F here still, mostly cloudy and rainy)

I'll report on Friday after it happens.