When I first got back to California we spent most of our time running errands and going to our favorite places. I wanted to catch up on all of the food that I had missed. Kentucky Fried Chicken definitely was one of them! Not the chicken of course, but the mac n cheese, mashed potatoes, cheese balls etc. is delicious! It was wonderful being surrounded by mountains and beautiful sunsets disappearing behind them again. It was overwhelming to be back so I didn't want to see any other people but Nick on some days. As much as I absolutely love seeing everyone again after being so extremely alone, I need my balance. Nick can hang out with friends almost every single night without any problem. But I need my alone time about every other day. I am emotional person with lots of thoughts so I need time to process that. One other reason for why I wanted to take it slowly in the beginning was because I barely knew anyone of Nick's new friends. They aren't exactly new friends, but when so many moved away during the year he started hanging out with other friends who he hadn't seen for a long time. That meant that I came back into a completely new group of people that I had to get to know. During the past three years, being an au pair and meeting Nick, I have met so many new people that I am honestly a bit tired of introducing myself over and over. After a while your brain gets exhausted by all of the new impressions. I missed Sofie so bad and just wanted to hang out with someone who knew me already. But a month into this experience I feel like I have finally gotten to know most of them and I now consider them to be my good friends :)
On another note, I have wanted to explore Nick's family tree for a long time and ended up doing some research while I was still in Sweden. It's so hard as a geneaology researcher to know if you have found the right people. You can only hope that you are following the right track because it's a lot of work that goes to waste if you don't. But I think I got this done correctly. I have found quite a bit but the part I got furthest with was his mother's father's side. His Netherland heritage.
One thing that is very tricky with the English language is how to explain the difference between your mother's parents and father's parents. In Swedish we have different words for all of them. So now when I am going to explain Nick's family tree and who everyone is, I will use these words to seperate them.
Father's father = Grandpa
Father's mother = Grandma
Mother's father = Grandfather
Mother's mother = Grandmother
Around the year 1600 a man named Pieter Regeer was born in Belgium. He married a woman named Jaquemijntje Malevaars. They had a son named Matthijs Regeer and he married Marija Isaaks Venningh. All four of them decided for some reason to move to the city Leiden in the Netherlands. Matthijs and Marija had seven children together and the family name Regeer was kept in the family all the way until Nick's grandmother's mother got married and took her husband's last name. Leiden must have been quite the place because the family lived in the same city for about 300 years until they moved to San Jose, California. I personally don't know the reason why they moved but a ton of people immigrated to America in the late 1800's and early 1900's because they were poor and got news of the gold rush. Some of my own relatives did just that. So to sum this up, Pieter Regeer was Nick's mother's, grandmother's, grandpa's, grandpa's, grandpa's, grandpa's father :)
