Fasnacht 2014!

The festivities have started; specifically they started at 4am on Monday morning! Fasnacht is the Basel Carnival, held every year starting the Monday after Ash Wednesday. Most Swiss cities and towns have some sort of Carnival celebration, but Basel's is probably the most well known in the country. I've been really excited to see what all the hype was about, so here's a bit about what we've experienced so far.

Street before the lights go out at 4am

Fasnacht lasts exactly 72 hours- from 4am Monday morning until 4am Thursday morning. This year's theme is "Keep Clean," with a badge to wear that points to rubbish on the streets, but also to unclean activities, sharp practices and even abuse of power. Most lanterns, floats and costumes this year are some sort of play on local, national or world politics, with many of them poking fun at the US and EU as well.

Costumed participants

Morganstreich means "morning prank" and is when all of the participating groups go to their specified spots throughout the old town and start playing and marching at 4am on the dot. The city electric company turns off all the lights in the city at 4am as well, so all you can see are the lanterns and lit up floats being presented. Here's what it sounds like when everything starts:

Monday was a holiday in Basel, so BK had the day off. In the afternoon the first processionals started. The same groups from the morning follow a large ring around the old city, crossing a couple of the bridges. It seems like complete chaos, but the participants seem to know what they are doing and where they are supposed to go. You can't picture a parade in the US, because it's really nothing like that.

Poking fun at the Catholic Church and Swiss Guard

Dressed up as the NSA

The fun continued today, and you can pretty much constantly hear the tweet of piccolos and beat of drums throughout the city. We went to the lantern display tonight and tomorrow will probably go see another processional. The party doesn't stop until 4am Thursday morning!

Does this thing float?

Today was our last day with the trainer, and boy was it an exciting one! No, I didn't go into labor or anything, but we had some serious excitement out on the river.

First thing when the trainer got here, we headed out to the river to work with the stroller and do some recall work as well. To change things up we walked toward the city and stopped just after the nearest bridge. I "parked" the stroller so it was just out of the way so that we could work with the dogs without the stroller for a few minutes.

Next thing I know, the stroller is rolling down the embankment and into the river!

This wasn't today, but you get the idea

Luckily right now the river is really low, so the stroller caught on some rocks and stopped just after going into the water, and landed wheels down, so it didn't even get that wet. It also seems that it is very durable, since it survived and works just like it did before- virtually no harm done. I'm not sure what I would have done if I had to call BK and inform him that our stroller floated down river and now we needed to get a new one. Yikes!

The dogs were a little excited, and I felt really bad that the trainer had to get her foot wet to pull it out, but in the end all was okay. There aren't many people out on this cloudy day, but one guy did come up to us extremely concerned that there was in fact a baby in the stroller. The trainer reassured him that we were, thankfully, just practicing with the dogs.

I figure, let's look on the positive side. At least this happened before Baby K came along; no harm done to the stroller; and many lessons learned on dealing with the dogs and stroller…the main one being, don't forget to make sure the brake is on really good!

The pups are wiped out after all the excitement and continuing our training inside for the remainder of the hour. Let's hope for a day with a little less excitement tomorrow!

Pinterest success!

Ah, Pintrest…why must you show me so many good recipes, all of which I want to try?

Tonight I really went out of the box and fixed two new things for BK, which is a serious risk. He tends to like me to stick to the recipes he knows that he likes. We even talked on Sunday, also after cooking something new, and made a list of the "go-tos." I think BK may be a little more open to what I want to eat or try right now…for obvious reasons. Sometimes this is met with success, and others, not so much.

Tonight turned out really well and good good reviews as well. I made Balsamic Glazed Steak Rolls, Parmesan roasted potatoes and sautéed spinach. Sounds good, right? It was, and wasn't too much trouble to make, as I was essentially able to use the same pan for everything.

Unfortunately, I got all wrapped up in cooking and trying to time the completion around BK's arrival home from work, and totally forgot to take pictures of my creations. The photo above is from the website where I got the recipe, but mine looked pretty much just like this. The veggies are really good as well, and I made enough so that I have some for the rest of the week. My only downfall on these was that I don't have any toothpicks, so keeping the rolls together was a little difficult.

The potatoes were new as well, but not hard to do. I can't seem to find the exact link that I used for the recipe, which is annoying. All of the recipes I keep finding for them require more work than I did. You just boil potatoes for about five minutes, drain them, then sauté in olive oil with garlic, adding parmesan at the end. Sauté them until they are crispy on the outside. I stuck mine in the oven as well, but mostly just to keep them warm while I finished cooking everything else.

Sautéed spinach was the other part of our meal, but it makes a regular appearance in our house, so nothing exciting there. If you haven't tried to make it before, you should. It's really easy…olive oil and garlic in the skillet, then just add a bunch of spinach and sauté down until you have the consistency you like; add salt and pepper to taste.

So, all in all, a relatively easy and healthy meal tonight. I may put this one on the list to make again, as it went over quite well. I think it may be a good one to make while the parents are here, as they could do it and we can easily get all the ingredients here as well.

I need to fill you in on our Planning for Parenthood classes and other random stuff we've been up to, but more on that later. Until then!