Help me, Obi-Mom Kenobi! You’re my only hope.

We got together with Qui-Gon Jinn, Yoda and the boys after gymnastics this week. For Christmas, I made each of the boys a hat that looks like a Christmas ornament. You can kind of see the metallic top and loop on Lando’s hat, but I obviously should have stood a bit higher up to get a better shot. It was hard enough to keep them all in one spot, though, let alone pose them. Yoda was a little baking busy bee last weekend and brought us all goodies to take home. Qui-Gon Jinn crocheted us the most delicate snowflake ornaments and found us each a ceramic bird to hang in our Christmas trees. 

Our Dutch teacher was off to Florida to see her mom, aunts and uncles this week for a rare family reunion so we didn’t have a dutch lesson yesterday. This felt odd. I was happy to oblige, however, as this was the first time that her mom (The Netherlands), uncle (Florida), and two aunts (Australia) had seen each other in several years. This family has a unique and interesting history. All the kids were born and spent the majority of their childhoods in the Dutch colony of Indonesia (known at the time as the Netherlands East Indies), having a father in the Dutch military. During WWII, Indonesia was invaded by the Japanese so the mother and kids were forced to live in a Japanese concentration camp for the duration of WWII. The father was immediately pressed into duty as a POW and worked on the Death Railway of Burma among other things. The brother, in his early teens, was later pressed into service as younger and younger men were pulled from the camps to replace dead and dying POWs. Very fortunately, all members of this family survived the ordeal of forced labor and imprisonment and at the war’s end were transported to The Netherlands on merchant ships and troop carriers. My dutch teacher’s mom (12 at the time, I believe) snuck her Indonesian pet cat on-board, completely against regulations, and several months after arriving in their new home kittens with the stumped tail typical in Indonesia could be seen living in and around their neighborhood.