Week 16

The week from 11/1 - 11/7 was really crazy: "vovó" leaving, hours on the train, spending days in unfamiliar surroundings, sleeping (or mostly rather: not sleeping) in strange beds far away from home, more trains, finally home but without "vovó", more swimming... Poor little Daniel, no wonder he was frequently getting cranky with all this madness suddenly in his little world...

The week began at my parents' home, relaxing a litte before the hectic week was about to begin. But in the early afternoon we had to leave for the airport in Frankfurt, for Jefferson's mother to catch her plane back to Brazil. A very sad farewell, but we tried to enjoy the last minutes together at the airport.

Eventually, Jefferson's mother had to enter security and passport checks, and we took a train to Hanover for a conference of all groups involved in my research collaboration. This trip was rather stressful, since our reservation ended us up crammed together with three other people in a small compartment, with all our luggage and a cranky Daniel... Daniel eventually fell asleep, but later at the hotel in Hanover we paid the price for that, since Daniel didn't care much for sleep for the rest of the night. Tired and exhausted, we went on the next morning to the conference hotel in some small town nearby, and while Jefferson took care of Daniel there and tried to catch a bit more sleep (without success), I tried to stay awake somehow through several hours of computer science, math, and geophysics talks. Our hopes for a calm night afterwards didn't come through either - apparently Daniel didn't like the huge childen's bed and kept waking up all the time. More talks followed in the morning, until we could finally depart on the 5 hour journey home: a suburban train ride to downtown Hanover, a short stop at McDonald's (where Daniel recovered from his sleepless nights with a nap on the benches), and then two more trains. This time at least we had managed to get the baby compartment, with a changing table and fewer seats on the same space - but again no privacy, with some strange woman asking about 20 times whether we had reached Hagen yet and otherwise babbling mostly incoherent stuff, so that we were very relieved when we finally did reach Hagen... ;-)

Obviously, we were very glad when we finally arrived home and could recover from the exhausting journey. Unfortunately, without Jefferson's mother here, even our normal routine at home became much more demanding. We spent the rest of the week in a constant state of being tired to death, but at least Daniel seemed happier again in his familiar surroundings, and of course, at his swimming class on Friday...