My Last Couple Weekends in Pictures

All right, it's about time to get back to normal in these parts, so let's start off by catching up on my last two weekends. Cuz weekends are fun and summer weekends are always worthy of a blog post, filled with sunshine and fun as they tend to be!

Last weekend started off with some very necessary replacing of some of my unsuccessful balcony seedlings with some more colorful, and living, flowers.

And we began to realize that our balcony is, in fact, a crazy wild garden surrounded by proper German orderly balconies filled entirely with perfectly tended flowers. (We think ours is way cooler, though.)

We paid a visit to the exhibit on empty and "ghost" subway stations in the DDR at Nordbahnhof and then wandered across the street for a beer in the sand and some beach volleyball viewing at Beach Mitte (which totally made me want to learn to play volleyball - those chicks had asses of steel!).

I scored on some gorgeous pink end-of-season (so it seems?) peonies.

And we met little baby Hanna! A preciously cute little monkey that Kerstin and Hendryk are lucky enough to call their own (more on her and all her adorableness to come in a separate post next week - there's too much cuteness to fit all in here!).

I swear I'm not crushing her head here, just showing how ridiculously tiny she is!

Finally, we enjoyed a long overdue visit to Dr. Pong after watching the EM - Euro Cup - game (was it Germany? Could have been, they all blend into one for me...) at Prater (as usual).

This past weekend we started off right with a grill evening on the balcony...

...before the crazy, intense thunderstorm forced us inside (but not before we had to rescue the tomatoes from the perch and place them all safely on the floor of the balcony before the torrential downpour and hurricane-like winds threatened to blow them away!).

And somehow, I got a picture of the sky lit up with lightning!

We spent Saturday in the 'burbs at our friends Anja and Matthias' new house where they threw a housewarming pool party (the best kind!).

I never show up empty-handed to a party, so this time I whipped up a couple batches of my all-time favorite (though seriously labor-intensive) blueberry-mint cupcakes, this time with some raspberries thrown in cuz that's what the grocery store was offering.

How cute are the wee munchkins? In a rare moment that Mia agreed to share her boat with Aron.

Micha played soccer for the first time ever with a naked girl (Mia is nothing if not properly German - meaning happily naked)

Mmm, grill goodness. Notice little Aron in his swanky robe in the background. This picture exemplifies why he earned the nickname "Hef" this weekend.

Boys will be boys if you give them a pool and lots of toys

Sunday we headed to one of my favorite events of the year - the Staatsoper für Alle (opera for everyone) concert in front of the beautiful (and sadly, still under construction for an insanely long time) Staatsoper on Unter den Linden.

Well, little girl, it wasn't too loud for me!

Where's Waldo? I mean...Micha. :)

It's so freaking awesome how they just hang that giant TV screen from a crane for the weekend!

And finally, we cheered on our friendly neighborhood bumblebee (did you know those giant bees - called Hummeln in German - are called bumblebees?! I literally just had to Google translate that and am a little blown away to find out that a bumblebee is just a kid's word but a whole different creature than a regular bee...) while he paid our tomatoes a visit. We also recently found out that tomato plants need bees and their pollinating techniques to, as Micha says "get [their tomatoes] born", so this guy is our new best friend.

And now that the weekend's over, you know what that means, right? BIRTHDAY WEEK!!!

The Bar Cart

Well, you know, sometimes an unexpected break from things does one well. It's been a bit quiet around here because my life-work-play balance hasn't been particularly in the favor of play lately, much to my own dismay. Natalie has also somehow been surviving the past two weeks without internet, which she says will be back soon. We shall see...wish us both luck!

So let's start up again on the right foot and take a look at my super cute bar cart today, because I'm quite happy with how it's come together over the past few months.

Zara Home glasses | Manly whisky corner with some girly doilies

Hendrick's (I'm completely smitten) really is the champagne of gins, in taste and looks 

My goodness, we have a lot of whisky... (We, in this case, means, of course, Micha)

Yup, this bad boy is getting plenty of use during the EM (Euro Cup) this month, let me tell ya.

My Weekend in Pictures

Favorite breakfast made just right

Five years of awesome deserves champagne

Baby tomato blossoms arrived at last!

Another tiny blossom

Other happy plants after a day of rain followed by a day of heat

Our overloaded balcony... (no worries, though, we finally gave away, to Micha's momma, those extra five tomato plants that were taking up all the sitting room)

Guacamole prep

Fish fresh from the grill

Dinner for three

Mojitos for the EM

Window washing

Courtyard kitty watching

Blue sky admiring from a bridge with a view

The weekend was full of extended post-anniversary celebrations, beer drinking and EM watching with Kai (yay! Germany made it to the quarterfinals!), and a little bit of apartment prettifying in the form of window washing on our non-rainy Sunday. We also cooked a bit, I made my very first batch of mojitos (they were so much easier than I thought they were!), and then I had to get up at the ripe old hour of 4:30am this morning to catch a flight to Birmingham for work. It was a lovely weekend and I'll be glad to be back home again with Micha tomorrow. The 30°(C) heat that awaits me in Berlin doesn't hurt either...

And how was your weekend?

Five Years of Awesome

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

That's how I'm summing up our time together so far. Thanks for an amazing last five years, dude! Here's to many many more years of awesome. And beyond!

xoxo
Nic

Inspired By...

...camping done right - with plenty of mosquito protection yet still a lovely view and space to walk around in. Ok, we may be going camping soon with friends, and I'm a little not-yet-so-thrilled...a girl can dream it would look like this, right?

Wolwedans Dune Lodge

...rugged, manly flasks, to store the booze that will keep me warm and happy (read: non-whiney, for Micha's sake) on said camping trip.

Available at Liquid Courage

...an evening beach picnic that would make me forget I was in the wild outdoors.

Photo by Swoon by Katie | Styling by Sweet Emilia Jane and Sitting in a Tree

...the coolest, cuddliest, and most ridiculous blanket to warm up under next to a bonfire.

Available, (though currently sold out) at Ikou Tschüss

Image credits: Glamping by Wolwedans Dune Lodge via the Travelettes | Mustache and mountain flasks by Liquid Courage | Picnic by Swoon by Katie, styling by Sweet Emilia Jane and Sitting in a Tree | Donkey blanket by Ikou Tschüss, pinned by Ez

First Harvest

Our mint plant nearly took over the balcony so this morning, I decided he needed a trim. This was very likely spurred on by a coworker announcing we would be making mojitos tomorrow at work (I don't ask why, I take moments like this as they come.) but she didn't know if she could find enough mint. So, quite obviously, I volunteered my little plant.

FYI, that's one of those normal-sized Anthropologie latte bowls, not one of the cute mini ones. (Yeah, also, I recently broke three of my five mini ones...sad face. psst, Liz, I need a new stash!)

The overgrown parsley

And the chives that won't die, no matter how many winters they have to endure

Aren't they looking great? I'm a bit neurotic about googling the right way to trim them, so I'm hoping they'll keep growing like mad all summer as a result. Hooray for balcony gardening!