Tag Archives: #Nathancuty

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law, Our cute son

Three Months Survived

September 6, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 42 Comments

Somehow we managed it yet again, MIL is back in China and thus the three months of terror are over. Over the past years I had a couple of these posts regarding her leaving again and what we/ she learned. This will be pretty much such a blog post again as I am just lazy right now and don’t want to think too much.

Indeed she is leaving but the question is now, has she learned or improved since last year? No, not at all. She is still the same chaotic, messy and crazy person as all the years before. Sure she does promise to change this and that each time but that will never happen. Remember when I wrote all those years back that she was shocked how well people treated their dogs by taking several walks each day with them etc.? Back then she said already “I will do this with my dogs as well!”, as you might guess they are still every single day in their cage to this day. Okay, sometimes she does take a walk with them but I believe it is more to annoy other people as those dogs just poop in front of every entrance they feel like.

milgone2 — I am not a dog but feel insecure with that lady

Now to the things which actually do happen here in our home. I noticed over the years that she in fact loves to use oil when cooking. That is nothing new in Chinese kitchen but she kind of increased the dosage each year. When she was with us in 2014 for three months she needed about every 3-4 weeks a litre of oil for cooking. Last year it increased already to every 2 weeks. Back then my wife already complained that this is just too much oil but she defended herself “your useless father is using much more oil, he needs a litre every weeks when cooking. See I am not as bad as him!” or something along these lines. Yep this year she managed to actually use up every single week one litre of oil! As you can guess the kitchen looks accordingly. We have oil splatter even on the opposite side of the stove and on the roof! It is just insane as every few weeks I had to basically drain the kitchen hood of oil.

Okay okay she was once again a huge help with Nathan and providing us with food (abide it might not have been always eatable). We were especially concerned that Nathancuty might have trouble readjusting to a life without his Chinese grandmother but we worried for nothing. He did not even care when she left him at the airport and did not even say “Nai nai 奶奶” at all since Wednesday. Seems like he is perfectly fine without her. Only trouble now is to get him back on earth after being spoiled non-stop for the past three months.

milgone1 — Yay all packed up and ready to be shipped to China!

I left out one thing now and that is cleaning. The first weeks I really tried hard to keep the apartment and car clean but it was just so futile. It is like trying to stop and oncoming storm by blowing against it. She must have some magical dirt creation tricks as otherwise I can’t explain it. I mob the floor room by room and once I am done to get some rest I realize that the first few rooms are already full of “dark footsteps” like she would be putting ink on her feet or something. Few days before she left we went to a beach and when we went back to the new car my wife told her to carefully clean the shoes. Once we were back home and I wanted to get Nathan from his seat it looked like she had dragged half the beach with her. There was barely any black from the car carpet left, just sand, no kidding. Upon asking she told us that she tried real hard but the sand wouldn’t come off, yeah right she just had those slippers while as my profile boots did not give me any issue. Just thinking about cleaning after her could be an own blog post again so I just stop right now before I remember too much and bring nightmares to myself.

You have anyone you need to clean “after”?

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Crazy Chinese People, Mom in Law, Our cute son, Travels

Holidays in Finland Part II

August 21, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 31 Comments

Here we go now with the second part of our holidays in Finland. Today the blog post will be a bit different, similar to the article Nathan’s World from 2014. We had a great time at grandparents cottage for the first 1 1/2 weeks but it was time to leave and travel to Helsinki for another four days before returning back home.The trip started too early for me, my mom woke me up so early that it was still dark outside! I can’t remember really what all happened but suddenly granny kissed me and said goodbye. Before I could do anything I was in grandpa’s car and we were driving somewhere. As always I fell asleep in the car and woke up in some weird town where we took a bus. Dad mentioned something about “This is so cheap, cheaper for all of us than a single train ticket!”. I don’t know how cheap that is but I was certainly not comfy in that bus. It was soo full of tall people and the bus driver was making weird Finnish jokes over the microphone all the time. At least I was able to sleep a bit more and when I woke up, guess what, yeah another city again. What a strange thing, seems like each time I sleep these days I wake up somewhere else. My parents talked about this strange place called Helsinki, can’t remember that I was ever here before though.

hki9 — There are really many people in this Helsinki

From this strange Helsinki place we went by bus to another strange Espoo place. There some Chinese man waited for us at the bus station and helped my parents to carry some stuff. We all went to an apartment and it was full of people and even a little princess! All the people were talking non-stop so I went to play a bit hide and seek with the little princess, what fun that was. It got even better when daddy finally had the airbed ready for some non-stop jumping action with the princes. This “bum bum 跳跳 (Tiao Tiao)” is soo much fun, can’t understand why my parents looked so annoyed. Anyways at some point I was forced to go to sleep again but at least when I woke up I was still at that great place with the airbed.

After getting some breakfast from Chinese crazy granny we took once agin a bus back to this Helsinki place. My parents surely surprised me when we went to this wonderful theme park called Linnanmäki. Wow it was so much fun there and it seemed my parents didn’t even use any of this strange money thing. Still don’t understand this money, they need it for everything but always complain that they don’t have enough. Crazy Chinese granny was doing stupid stuff again and I nearly had to throw up after being in a ride with her as she was spinning this wheel all the time. Mommy was kind of angry with granny later but it seems that granny didn’t do anything wrong and that it was actually mommy’s fault, I don’t really understand granny sometimes. The food at the theme park was wonderful, so many french fries and ketchup! We should eat there more often. Later daddy went away to meet with uncle Tatu and some other friends and he only returned shortly before I was going to sleep, they must have a lot to talk about.

Next day I woke still up at this place, are we staying here forever? We all went again to strange Helsinki and went to a place full of Moomin stuff! Wow, so many Moomins everywhere but suddenly we left and I didn’t get anything, bad people. A bit later we were at some place eating Chinese food, it just tasted like China, we should come back here more often. Afer this we were in some kind of park and there were so many children. Even the police was there and I think my parents tried to get my arrested as they always wanted to put me on some police motorcycle, good that I fought against it, I am too young for the prison. Daddy called this Lasten Festarit at Töölönlahti, no idea what that is but it was fun. Mommy showed me some kids who were doing kicks and said that I would do this Tae Kwon Do as well soon, looks certainly interesting I just hope they have french fries as well there. There was so much to do together with the little princess, jumping, running, singing, eating lollipops but somehow the old people looked so tired, what a lazy bunch. We left the park and crazy granny pointed out some sea gulls but daddy said that it was actually a swam, don’t know what is true.

We left those nice people and went together with mommy, daddy and crazy granny to some restaurant were other people were waiting for us. Guess what there were two other little princesses and we had so much fun running around, unplugging some lights and having crazy granny running after us all the time. I don’t know when we got back to the airbed place but I woke there up again later. Something was wrong as it was too early again and we took a big car called taxi where we put all our stuff and drove to Helsinki again. There we took this great train and shortly after that we were again at the airport where I had been few times before. Crazy granny was doing crazy things at the security control again, she is just so funny but the security staff didn’t seem to like her funny stuff. Anyways it seemed that the great fun in Finland was over because later we arrived in Hamburg again and took once again a bus, I am getting sick of these buses…

What should I do here? Oh, should I kiss the princess? Hehe, I kissed a princess ^.^

Don’t understand this but daddy was laughing

How do you like bus trips?

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Crazy Euopean People, Crazy Family, Mom in Law, Our cute son, Travels

Holidays in Finland Part I

August 14, 2016 CrazyChineseFamily 39 Comments

First of all I am sorry for not posting any articles for the past three weeks but there were many things happening. During my “absence” we were two weeks in Finland and then the past week we were just too busy with work. At first I wanted to have only one blog post about our holidays in Finland but I quickly realized that I took first of all too many pictures and second that there is just such a clean-cut between our time at the cottage and those days spent in Helsinki. This first blog post about the holidays in Finland will be all about the days spent together with my parents at the cottage and next week will be about the four-day stay in Helsinki.

We had planned our holidays in Finland for some time as we wanted to meet up with some friends and because I also had to help with some things at the cottage. It was no trouble at all to find some good plane tickets but we somehow missed to check at first what time those flights would be. So we ended up arriving in Finland on a nice monday evening at 10pm! Sure it doesn’t sound that bad but the thing is that we had to get still to my parents cottage roughly 4 hours away by car. My dad picked us up with enough coffee in the thermos to keep me awake for the journey to the cottage. It wasn’t the most pleasant car ride I had as by the end of July the days were getting shorter again which meant it was nearly pitch black around midnight, half the trip we had heavy fog hindering us and worst of all we had to check non-stop for moose crossing the road. Yes moose as they are very common in Finland and they do love to come out of the forest at night to pester the roads leading to many dangerous situations which even end up deadly few times a year for both the animal and the person behind the steering wheel. Luckily we did not see any moose this time on the road but it still took a lot of energy to look around the whole car ride.

nummi14 — #Nathancuty making sure that his little cousin is not breaking the poor dolphin

Nathancuty, mother-in-law and my wife fell asleep pretty much as soon as we left the airport and only my dad stayed awake to keep me company while driving. The amazing thing is that as soon as we arrived at the cottage around 2:30 am Nathan decided to wake up and check out the whole place. It took over one hour to catch him running around and he was rather upset that we took him upstairs to sleep as he wanted to still spend time with his Mummo and Opa (Mummo is Finnish for grandmother and Opa is German for Grandfather). The following days meant work for me, a lot of work as I helped out with mowing the lawn, chopping wood, trying to get the outboard motor working again (I failed), cutting away reed in the lake with a scythe and last but not least making myself extra work by starting to build up a wall made out of large rocks. This might give you an idea that the days at the cottage was less holiday for me and more like a working camp. Besides all the work I also joined my father on the early morning bicycle rides around the lake, yes I had a full-time job there!

MIL, Nathancuty and my wife had a bit less to do. In fact they had a lot of free time there when they did not have to watch out for Nathan. That little fellow was rather keen in running around the cottage all the time, especially to the lake. Not that we don’ trust this big boy with his judgement when it comes to his non-existent swimming skills but it is better to make sure that he is fine. In their free time MIL, my wife and my dad went over to the neighbour’s property to harvest the area for raspberries. I believe they collected around 10 litres within a few days and my mother was fairly busy in making every day several jars of raspberry jam. We might be probably soon sick of raspberry jam as my parents come back to Germany next month with their car loaded with the sweet death in jars…

One of the exciting days was when my cousin came over with her three children. You might remember her little daughter from this post when Nathan was fairly jealous of all her hairs. Let’s just say he is probably even more jealous now as she is sporting a lot of hairs while as Nathan might be better off with a monk hairstyle. During all the time at the cottage my dear Chinese mother-in-law had also some stuff to discover. For one thing that ducks actually survive out there in the nature without her feeding them, that seagulls are not ducks and that a rabbit is not a deer. Yes you read it right, she actually thought one evening that she saw a deer on our property and even described it “It was this big (waving her arms in huge motions) and it had very very long legs”. The thing is that there are not deers in that part of Finland but she was very sure that it was no rabbit because “I know how rabbits look like, especially because you have those two bunnies!”. When we all went to investigate and she pointed to the place where she saw the deer a small rabbit came running out of the bushes and she was all like “Look there is the deer”. Got to love her own believe sometimes.

nummi6 — #Nathancuty driving a small tractor

During one of the last days we were invited for lunch by our cottage neighbours who own a farm about 30 driving minutes away. The farm is just huge and they had on a wall a document stating that the farm has been in their family since the 1670s! That is certainly a long line of farming business there but sadly it might soon end as it is just not profitable anymore these days. After a delicious lunch we went for a little walk around and also stoped by their Galloway cattle herd. Last time we had visited them back in 2014 when Nathan had is first encounter with them. The whole area was just breathtaking (not because of the smell from the farm!) and I do hope we can go there next year again. All in all I can say that it was something special for me to visit Finland again and spend time at the cottage. The house at the lake has been now in my family for 24 years and I spent every summer there in my youth so for me it is like a little safe haven, a place I will never forget.