E- Me member dat Dad.

Memories are a funny thing. It's often harder to remember what we did last week than what we did a decade ago. I find it particularly weird that, with rare exception, most adults can't seem to access any memories from the period before the age of 4-5 years old. I say "can't access" because from raising kids of my own, it is obvious that our memories work quite well before this age. However at a certain point in our life we are no longer able to recall this information.

Molly seems to have forgotten most of her time in Europe, but does have certain things that stick in her head. Although I don't believe she has seen this photo, she sometimes talks about coming to the gym with me one day after my season ended in Fuerstenfeld. I set her up with some music (she called it "do-do"), crayons and dolls and she was happy for a couple of hours.

Finny continues to surprise us with some of the things she recalls. Last week we pulled out a hat that had been put away in storage since last summer. Immediately she said "Daddy, me hat. Alli gave me the hat and a bathing suit for me birthday." I of course had no idea, but it turns out she was right. Alli had given it to her for her second birthday 13 months earlier. Given that 50% more of her life had past since then, and this gift wasn't a topic we had discussed, I was pretty surprised that she would remember these kind of details. It's the kind of thing that can make a parent happy to know their child has a sharp brain and at the same time a little scared that every detail of our lives is being indefinitely recorded on an impressionable young mind.

Here are a few more pictures from the end of our stay in Europe that Molly may just still remember. One is of Molly swimming at the city pool in Fuerstenfeld (which is massive- it used to host up to 12,000 people a day before Austrians discovered cheap airfares to the coast). The others are from our trip to Croatia. We drove 12 hours from Dubrovnic to Fuerstenfeld all in one day. The kids were fantastic but looked pretty fried by the end of the trip.