Beautiful Belgium

As promised, here is the rest of the story. ;)

Me and Fan Fan :)

Emily and I caught our plane Thursday evening.  My sweet daughter fell asleep before take-off and woke up just an hour before landing.  She has proven once again to be the ideal travel partener. I would never have dreamed of doing a trip like this solo if she weren't so willing to go with the flow and entertain herself much of the time.  And now that she's beginning to talk, she has become quite the charmer, so it's fun to be able to say, "I'm with her!"

We arrived in Brussels, picked up a rented carseat (which we only ended up using twice!) and were greeted at our host's home by Ga (my mom) Poppa (my dad), Tita Nannie (that's Maggie in Emily-speak) and a delicious spaghetti dinner.  Emily turned on full charm and was the evening's entertainment.  Bernarnd, our host (first exchange student's father), has a grandson just Emily's age and so the house was fully equipped with plenty of toys and gismos for Emily to discover and play with.  He also has a beautiful and very large back yard that Emily called the "parque", which we were all able to explore and enjoy since the weather cleared up nicely as our visit progressed.

Bernard's daughter, Fanny was our first exchange student, as I mentioned.  She holds a special place in all our hearts and really is like a sister for me.  I visited her when I did my exchange in Granada and she attended my wedding seven years ago.  In 2014 we reconnected  when we discovered that both of us were pregnant and due around the same time.  Her little Eliot was born just two weeks after our Emily.  Friday morning we had brunch over at her beautifully rennovated house.  Visiting her and her adorable family was a wonderful treat.

Emily and Eliot: the next generation of friendship!

Emily and Eliot got along as well as two 21-month-olds can be expected to--which is to say they mostly ignored one another.  At this age there isn't much playing "together" so much as playing "next to each other".  Still, we got some cute pictures.  I think they could pass for twins, though Eliot is much heftier than my delicate little girl.  And it was a pleasure for me to finally meet Ivan, Fanny's doting partner and super-dad.  He is great and I am happy that my Fan Fan has found such a wonderful person with whom to share her life and her parenthood.

Chatting in the garden...

After a nice long nap back at our home away from home (Bernard left us the keys since he was out of town for the weekend), we joined up with our second Belgian sister/daughter, Charlotte for a sushi dinner.  We had another wonderful few hours catching up over snacks and dinner.  Charlotte was married a year ago and still has that newly-wed glow about her.  She showed us pictures from the wedding, but unfortunately her husband was out of town and we weren't able to meet him.  The evening was too late for Emily, who started getting sleepy (read crabby) toward the end, but for the rest of us our visit was too short.

Friday was a great day.  Visiting both with Fanny and with Charlotte was wonderfully comfortable and relaxing.  It was such a reaffirmation of the strength of our friendship that after so many years--in Charlotte's case we hadn't seen her since 2005!--we were able to chat as if no time had passed.    I really felt at home with both of them, a great feeling when you're in a foreign country.

Emmy exploring the "parque" with Ga.

Charlotte was quite enamored of Emily, and she was pretty smitten with Sha Sha, too. ;)