Wrapping up the 1st month

It’s hard to believe that it’s almost been a month since we arrived in Switzerland. In some ways it feels like we’ve been here MUCH longer and in some ways we still feel like we just got here… if that makes any sense. Our main objective this month has been trying to find an apartment. We never imagined it would be this difficult but apartment finding in Switzerland is a dog-eat-dog business. Apparently there are so many people looking for places that once you list your apartment for rent it is gone in a matter of hours! Not only that, but June 31^st is a standard lease ending date so all the apartments that were available July 1^st (when we need one) already found new tenants months ago. Thus, we are left with the ones nobody wants. We put an application in on one in a city that we really like. The apartment is not what we wanted but we figure we’ll stay there 1 year and then 9 months from now we’ll start searching for a new place. We are still waiting to hear if our application went through, and if it does (fingers crossed) I’ll have a whole post dedicated to our new “apartment with character” (our nice way of describing it).

Other than that here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve been up to:

Luke has been teaching Jack how to play badminton:

He's already better than me :-)
We love hanging out under my favorite tree
And climbing the branches

Jack graduated to the big kid swings
Although sometimes he still gets a little freaked out about falling backwards

Riding the $1 carousal at the mall. At the mall in Colorado Springs any of the rides over 25 cents were off-limits to Jack. Here, $1 for a 30 second ride is standard.
Playing in the rain.
I took Jack to the pools this week. He had a blast!
This is the baby/toddler area
Here is another pool that is a little deeper. You can see that the pools are right on the lakefront so you have an awesome view of Lake Neuchatel while you are swimming
A big water slide
Jack loves the water!
Can you tell...

Jack thinks he is batman. It's pretty funny. If you ask him where Batman is he'll point to himself and say "right here!" He loves to climb up really high and stick his arms out and say "I'm Batman" This is what he's doing in this picture below
Practicing swimming
Once it got chilly outside we moved into the indoor kiddie pool

The pools are a little ways from our hotel so I rented a free bike. They give the bike and bike trailer to you for free as long as you have it back within 4 hours. It's pretty awesome. The bike trailer was so much better than the bike seats since it is easier for Jack to sleep in. But the harness was broken so we had to improvise:
Jack loves his ice cream
This is the beach right by our hotel
None of the kids wear swim diapers here and Jack is getting used to sitting on the rocks without the extra padding of a diaper. The first few times he sits down too hard he squeals and says "beach hurts your butt"
A little nervous about going into the lake
That water is freezing! I wouldn't even go past my ankles.
Enjoying the view
Good times! I sure do love these two!