Bech-Svalgaard Family Home Page

Updated 3-20-04 by Mikael

Dear Everybody

Now the winter is over and spring is upon us. It is still quite brown around here but the temperature can often get up to 70F; I am right now in my shirts with the door to the garden open. Not much to impress Texans, Californians or Thais - but really a killer if you are a Dane. The locals are warning us that we shouldn't rejoice too early; last year it snowed two feet in the end of March. Signe just came back from a week in Schwitzerland. The kids and I have had fun in the meantime; wandering in the downtown creek; eating hamburgers at Tom's Tavern and going to the pool at the Rec Center several times. Yesterday I went to a parent meeting at Ingrids school with her main teacher and her ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher. They say she's doing fantastically well. Miss Shiela said that she had never before encountered a student that learnt english as fast as our Ingrid. Talk about making a father proud!! Peter is doing really well too; Signe said that she could easily spot the development from just one week of abscence. I still can't grasp that they suddenly can understand everything you say to them in English. I am especially proud of their good, clean American accent. We need more taylored future Americans.

Here are some pictures:

Roughly fourty minutes drive into the mountains is a little skiing area with prepared cross-country tracks and equipment rental. It costs us 100 USD each time to go there, but it's still alot cheaper than going to Norway (even from Denmark). We hope very much that the rest of our skiing gang from DK will be up to the task next year and not be bogged down by baby-daipers..!

The Rockies feature great vistas and fine slopes, but also alot of trees. You don't get to go into the high country, most likely because the public interest isn't large enough to justify the expense.

Ingrid got a sewing-set for x-mas and has since been very occupied with mastering the art. She wants to become a good helper for her grandmother when she gets back. So far she has produced a needle pillow and a small bag.

When we had real winter you could often take Peter on the sled in the morning when going to the pre-school. On my way home I'd have Ingrid along for the ride - a fine way of burning off calories; especially when they want me to run all the way. MUSH-MUSH!

And now for a REVELATION! The invisible friend of Peter, Otto with the bomber-plane, has finally been depicted. As you can see, he has alot of medals. He is also a VERY big guy, the small yellow things in the lower right corner are (from left to right): Boulder, Copenhagen, our place in the countryside and planet Earth. I like his prioritization!

Peter and Ingrids grandpa, Lasse, has sent us several quite fantastic, homemade books. They are being read many times and the kids are continuing his stories in their games and their letters home.

This last week Peter built himself a complete 'Strong Volmer' outfit ('Strong Volmer' is one of the vikings in Lasses stories. You don't want to meet him on a dark street!). It took him most of a week, during which he hardly spoke of anything else. That's typical Peter; to throw himself into such extended projects. He has also been working on drawing a racetrack, thirty feet long and with eighteen cars. He says it is for Anders, but I don't know how many stamps to put on so I'll have to take the package to our post-office. Maybe we'll end up bringing it with us to DK.

I am still going with Ingrid on field-trips,latest we went to a butterfly-museum. There, they also had other nice creatures, such a tarantula named 'Rosie' that you could get to hold.

Here you see I+M in the butterfly garden. We were wearing red because we'd heard that the butterflies liked that color and that they might consequently land on you. It was nice to get to see some green and feel moist air. We don't generally have alot of those two things around here.

My elegant wife! The dress belongs to Ingrid and was bought in Romainia for the fantastic wedding of Signes brother.

After special request from our friends Rebecca and Thor (offspring of Ole and Mette) I hereby present some images of our extensive lego exhibits. Let's start in the space-port area, where you can see a utility tower (constructed from popsickle sticks), a miniature version of the Mars Exploration Rover, a Delta rocket, an Apollo lunar module, a Saturn V rocket, an Apollo command module and finally the International Space Station. A police car and a blockwagon have also pressed themselves into the foreground.

We will continue with the Harry-Potter section, notice here the Hogwarts train as well as the car belonging to Rons parents. Since this picture was taken Peter bought on ebay with his own money the Harry Potter spider set. BTW, Signe has gone beserk with ebay. At first she was hooked on Danish real estate pages, but now the big thing is clothes, toys and linnen on ebay. Just the week she was gone I had three packages from unknown senders with unknown contents delivered at our front door...

The last stop on the Lego tour is the Belville section with innumerable utensils. Signe as assurring me that we won't have any problems getting all of this with us back to Denmark. Hmmmm.....

Here we are on one of my numerous 'death marches'. The kids usually cry out like mad when I yell 'TIME FOR A DEATH MARCH!', but usually we end up having a good time. This time it was terribly cold and windy, which made the trip that much more authentic. In situations like these my headgear comes into good use, got it from my mother-in-law.

Time for Peters birthday, celebration with his best friends from the pre-school.

From Gibson Peter got a strange aquarium with some powder that allegdly should produce little (live) water creatures. We have kept a good eye on this thing for weeks, the kids yell out excitedly, but the parents haven't yet noticed anything unusual. Clever business-concept.

Robot-Peter. When he's with the girls, their favorite game is to be chased around the gardens by him.

(In my opinion) the climax of Peters career as a Lego builder. An exact 1:10 replica of the Mars Exploration Rovers, complete with steerable stereo cameras, haz-cams, retractable solar panels, steerable wheels, high gain antenna, rock abrasion tool, etc., etc. Peter built it, I found the lego pieces. Peter thought it was fun, too!

Our lives here are of course not party-time all the time. Most is fortunately everyday routine and work. As documentation I am including a picture of the apparatus I have built for NIST. Don't the UV beams look nice?

Today is the first day of spring-break, so we have eleven days of vacation ahead of us. In the first half Oma and grandpa from Houston will drop by, after that we are off on a super-duper death camping march to Utah. The week after that Christina (absolute favorite of the kids) and John are coming to visit from California. Ahhh, what a hard and rushed life. We miss you all very much, so send us a mail in resonse to this web-update.

Love - Signe, Mikael, Ingrid and Peter

Mikael (svlgrd@com.dtu.dk)

Signe (sba@dmi.dk)