I recently had my first bout with Dutch summer weather. Last year, I caught the tail end of it… hot then rainy and cool. I say bout because it doesn’t it didn’t last so long but mannnn did it shake me up. I don’t love heat, the colder the better for me. I grew up in South Carolina where the warm/hot temperatures can last from March to October. While South Carolina can hot and humid most of the year, the lovely invention of air conditioning (my sister and I call it Air Con) makes the heat bearable. You go from your work/school to the car to your home all with the blast of air-con. As a young adult, I moved to NYC. They don’t call it the concrete jungle for nothing. It's like the sun radiates off the concrete building and ground and burns everything in sight. In the summer the heat is unbearable sometimes and don’t get me started on the heat in the subway however it doesn’t last so long so with the help of cool drinks and Air Con you just deal.
One of the most exciting elements of moving to the Netherlands (or so I thought) would be the cold weather. When we moved here, I was reeling off of yet another steaming hot NYC summer and was plain damn over it. So you might ask, how has the weather been since you moved? Well… let me tell you its no cakewalk; we traded sticky hot summers for random heatwaves followed by crazy rain and cool temperature. You might say, that’s not so bad… well, I am here to tell you it has its pitfalls. For 5 days the temps progressively rose from 21°C (70°F) to 30°C (88°F). Each day, I said I possibly can’t do this heat, especially because we don’t have Air Con in our home (most people don’t in Europe). Even my company’s office didn’t have Air Con before we moved to a new location.
This no Air Con thing is something a Southern Belle like myself has to get used to. After all this heat we were met with relief the weather report read that there would be consistent days of the temperature of 21°C (70°F) and below for the next two weeks. “Okay Okay I can deal with that” I thought…. “Well not so fast Ms. Kami” Mother Nature said….these cooler temperatures brought with them some the craziest consistent rain spells I ever remember. As I type this it is 16°C (61° F) in July. Since the heatwave ended it has rained every other day. So it seems warm temperature here can’t sustain and to break that heat the rain acts as a coolant.
It rains so much and can be so windy we had to get a
shield for in Chris' bike when Johan rides with him.
This keeps him relatively dry.
Through some research and re-educating myself on science, it seems as though this has to do with the dew point. The dew point is the atmospheric temperature below which condensation takes place and water vapor is turned into water droplets. Rain is liquid water in the form of droplets that have condensed from atmospheric water vapor and then become heavy enough to fall under gravity.
Additionally, I found that In the Netherlands, a heatwave is defined as a period of at least 5 consecutive days in which the maximum temperature in De Bilt (a city in the Netherlands) exceeds 25 °C (77 °F), provided that on at least 3 days in this period the maximum temperature in De Bilt exceeds 30 °C (86 °F). Wow… so much more to this wet rainy country than I though.
And…. If that weren’t enough we have been Potty Training Mr. JoJo (aka Johan). They say boys are harder to potty train and if we are looking at just Johan, that would definitely be true. It's like he is an infant all over again. This is totally TMI but he has woken up in the middle of the night EVERY SINGLE NIGHT for the last 3 weeks with a poopy diaper. WE ARE “TY-RED”. The only saving grace is that Johan is at school most days where they have been leading the potty training efforts. Y’all pray for us!
This Dove video explains exactly how we feel about parenthood some days…
One of the other interesting things about the rain here in the Netherlands is the fact that no one seems to be moved by it. Folks can be seen biking (even with the babies on the bike), walking, running, grocery shopping, you name it, the Dutch just keep moving. It’s an attitude I am striving to further adapt. I have been no stranger to picking myself up by the bootstraps but in some ways, I’ve become a hermit. COVID-19 has forced us all indoors. My goal over the next few months is to not allow anything to deter me from anything I want to do. As the amazing Luke Cage says… “Always Forward, Never Backwards”.
Smile,
Kami
Love the blog Kami! Love your insight.