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Hannah has something to share:

We are expecting baby Patton #2 in the middle January. Gender reveal and pregnancy updates to be added to the blog soon!

Happy birthday Hannah

It is hard to believe Hannah has turned two, about two weeks ago. It has been really fun watching her grow and change over the last six months. She is really starting to understand the Swiss German (so I am told) since she goes to daycare the two days I work and has been saying many more words in English. It is such a neat thing to see small children learn more than one language, they pick it up so fast! 

She still enjoys eating most things she tries, sometimes getting her to try things can be the problem. But in general she is a good eater, and is a bit on the heavy side at over 90% :) Quite the change from less than 10% her first year! I was quite chunky as a little girl too, like ,other like daughter I guess.

Hannah is also very good at playing independently and demonstrates a good imagination. 

Lately she has been baking me lots of cakes :) lucky me. In general she has always been a happy and content little girl and that seems to be continuing. Of course we have our two year old moments, but thankfully not too often. 

Another thing that hasn't changed is that Hannah is an observer and is quite often too scared to try some of the things the other little kids are trying, swimming (she likes only warm water), run bike, going down the big slides, ect. But thankfully she does like the outdoors so john still has hope for her going mountain biking with him someday.

We couldn't love our joyful, content, Lego and puzzle loving Hannah more! Happy birthday Hannah!

Airplane

August first is the swiss national day, much like the 4th of July in the US. Everyone in Switzerland has the day off work to celebrate! This year Pilatus, the company John works for, had the roll out of their new airplane, the PC 24. This also happens to be the airplane that John is working on.  He is an avionics systems engineer for the Utility Management Systems group... Don't ask me what that means. Before the big roll out we heard they were expecting 20,000 people and we thought they were crazy, turns out 25,000 people showed up! 

It was actually a really cool event, besides being crowded. We had front row seats for the 2 hour program.

They had pilots perform an air show with all the old and current Pilatus airplanes with intermittent tradition swiss yodlers or alphorn players. Then the new airplane was pulled out by 24 military horses, which maybe was a but cheesy but neat nonetheless. John also had coupons for free food, who doesn't love a free bratwurst during an air show, I know I do. Now we will have to wait for the first flight to see how well John is doing at his job :) 

Portovenere, Italy

My sister and her husband, Mike, came to visit for two weeks about two weeks ago. We did lots of fun things in the area, but the highlight of the trip was driving 5.5 hours to Portovenere, Italy (ok the car ride itself wasn't that fun...two adults and a toddler cart seat in the back- enough said). 

Portovenere lies on the southern border of the Cinque Terra National Park, which is a quite popular place to visit and to hike the path connecting the 5 towns on the Mediterranean coast. 

We had hiked there when we visited Switzerland a few years ago and it was a beautiful and great experience. But, I am so happy that we stayed in portovenere. It is a typical coastal Italian town with the colorful buildings, plus there is a big church, castle, and island right there. We enjoyed two nice hikes, including one going over and around the island, which gave us breathtaking views. 

 

The only downside is most restaurants serve meals late, dinner starting at 7 or 7:30... Normally lasting a few hours, that doesn't work to well with a two year old who is used to going to bed at that time. Nonetheless Portovenere was rather child friendly and overall we enjoyed it more than the more touristy cinque terra towns.

Marmie and Papa Patton's visit

Almost 6 weeks ago now John's parents came to visit. Their visit started a very crazy 6 weeks for us, as they were here, then John left the same day as them for America fir work for 2 weeks, then john arrived back in Switzerland the same day my sister and her husband arrived. The time flew by and now our visits are done for awhile. 

Anyways, back to johns parents visit, Marmie and Papa is what all the grandchildren call them. We were excited for them to arrive, because they have done very little traveling and we thought they would be blown away by Switzerland and the beauty of where we live. I think they were! While they were here they enjoyed time in Luzern, a few good hikes, a trip to L'abri community (founded by Francis Schaefer) in the French part of Switzerland where John's Dad gave a speech, and a trip to Lake Como in Italy. The trip went by very quick and fun was had by all.