Julia's Diary

If you are a regular of this blog, you should know by now that I love horses and ponies. Otherwise I recommend you start again (not necessarily in June 2006, it´s enough if you go back to posts from my third year, more or less). That´s why our Austrian holidays were so fun too. I could ride two days, and I also learnt lots of interesting and useful stuff about horses, like how you clean their “shoes”, comb their hair, walk carefully behind them (in case they confuse you with a fly), and keep the stable clean (I´m telling you, they produce lots of poo!) . Here I am, stolz wie ein Spanier (or rather eine Spanierin, right?).

Two moments of our long gone holiday in Austria, where I could improve on my hiking  and photographing skills. In the first picture you see some of our hiking companion and in the second Papi und Mami mit Minibauch  in Innsbruck, our only incursion in the civilization during our very bucolic summer holiday. The temperature up in the village, where we stayed, reached the very summerly temperature of 9 or even 10 degrees centigrades…

My sibling (who hasn´t sent us an email yet to tell us whether it´s a boy or a girl, despite  our insistence) will be much smaller than this baby (that we can really guarantee…) . This one is one that I adopted from my aunt Sandra, whose boys were after all not that interested. Her name is Catarina, although I´m not sure I´m getting the spelling right. This was also my first choice name for my sibling (pretty much independently of whether it´s a boy or a girl), but my parents, particularly my mother, weren´t convinced. I´ve recently got another baby with dummy from my abuela. I´m slowly but surely getting to the point where I could open a Baby Gruppe in our flat!

This is the picture of the year for my mother. She doesn´t often get me to put on elegant little dresses (or if she does, they don´t stay white for long) and pose for a family picture without showing my tongue or shutting my eyes. Hey, I must be getting older! The ballerina shoes were my pride and joy this spring/summer season. Unfortunately, it´s now got to cold to wear them and my feet have grown to big for them anyway. We were in the garden of the church where our friends Andrea and Thomas had just got married. It was my first wedding ceremony and I got a bit concerned towards the end, because I sort of missed out the moment when the priest asked them whether they wanted to marry and they said yes, but my mother assured me that they really had been asked and had agreed. Knowing that they had not got married against their will made me feel much better and I could relax for the family portrait.

This is the documentary evidence that I had a birthday this year too, my fifth birthday!  (and also that my heart still belongs to Daddy…). We threw a birthday party this time too, with friends, candles, games, but as usual I seemed to enjoy our very own and private celebration even more. I think next time my mother will give the bigger party a second thought

Spring 2011 came and as usual I enjoyed our balcony, where I really know how to make myself comfortable by now, and the neighbour forest, where once we even nicked some of the wood, that Samichlaus had with so much effort piled up over the winter, to lit our fire. But shhhhh, he shouldn´t find out, and really not now that he´s soon coming again. At the end of the day, it was papi´s idea!

From competition to competition! It would seem like my parents are training me for the Olympic Games or at least for some sort of Glarner local games! But really, that´s not the purpose and my parents don´t expect to get rich thanks to me (or at least not thanks to my sports skills, many and multifarious as they obviously are). This was my first run alone, without Papi, in Baden, and I was one of the youngest runners. When I arrived, I told mami that I was feeling really sort of exhausted, but that I had then seen the finish line and I had  run even faster. A real champion, huh?

And I won! And that´s why they placed me almost as high as Snowly. First it was not clear to me why they were taking so long to say my name. They had promised me a medal, independently of my performance, so I was rather preparing one of my complaining grimaces when they finally said it and I sort of understood that I had been the fastest. May be because I was one of the few who didn´t slow down on the slope to wave at their parents   In the other picture I´m savouring my triumph while training in one of the essential parts of the skiing experience, the Après Ski.

My mother, as the 0% Swiss component of our family, was absolutely baffled as to how the instructors got us to learn to put on or skies, take them of, get on and off the lifts, slide, slide down and, the biggest challenge, break!! Everything in five days!! The final race was a blast. I cannot hang the videos because they are too big. But I hope you get a feeling from the pics. It´s actually more steep than it looks like!

The winter holidays were real fun this year. I had at last reached that size at which I could wear real skies and real boots, and not that Mickey Mouse “Rutscherli” on which I had to try last year. As you see, it didn´t take me long to learn to go on the children’s lifts. Neither did it take my parents too long to find their own ways of accompanying me, some -granted- more artistic than others.