We love our windows!

We love our German windows and wish we could bring them home to the U.S. with us. For all we know, they are sold in the U.S., but we had never seen such a system before moving here. These are our dining room windows. They are heavy-duty, two-paned windows set in a thick metal frame.

Turning the handle up halfway allows you to completely open the window. This makes washing the windows very easy. I wish I could say it has inspired me to the wash the windows more often but...well...anyway, when I finally get around to washing the windows, it's much more easily accomplished than when we lived in the U.S.

Turn the handle all the way up and you can tilt or kippen the windows to allow a refreshing breeze to circulate indoors. We don't have air conditioning (most Germans don't) so our windows are often kept tilted. Our big glass doors going out to the patio work the same way.

Almost all windows have rolladen or outside shades. These are either electronic and work with a switch, or manual as these kitchen windows are. Pull the fabric belt on the left side of the window to raise the shades or loosen the belt to lower them. Stop just shy of lowering them completely and the shades allow in a bit of light.

Lower them all the way and no light whatsoever creeps into the room. These shades eliminate the need to have venetian blinds, with all their dust and broken slats. When all the rolladen are down at night, you feel safe and secure inside your house of armor. And in the morning, you can hear everyone up and down the street raising their rolladen to greet the new day.

But have you noticed what's missing? Especially in light of the fact that Germans don't have air conditioning and need to leave their windows open to cool the house?

Our first few weeks here, we noticed several times a week that Emilie and Rebecca were getting bitten by a bug or bugs of some kind. The critters would leave dozens of dime- to quarter- sized bites all over the girls' tender skin. One bite on Rebecca's eyelid our first month here landed her in the emergency room when her eyelid swelled up and she couldn't open her eye. Once fall came, the bites stopped.

But it's summer again and the bugs are back. We thought the culprits were the little-bodied, long-legged spiders we see around the house, but our pediatrician thought they were more likely mosquitoes. The bites don't itch, but mosquitoes could very well be different here.

Emilie and Becca seem to get bit so much more than anyone else and we think it's because their bedroom window is the only one to look out to the back of the house, past which there are acres of fields, horses and a stream. No doubt the home of many bugs.

They needed a screen for their window. People here just survive without screens. The morning last month that I counted 17 quarter-sized bites on Rebecca and was too embarrassed to have her go to Kindergarten in shorts was the day David decided to put a screen on their window.

This is the only screen available -- a velcro screen. There is no slot in the window framing for a screen. David climbed to the tippy top of our extendable ladder and cut-to-fit a flimsy screen that he velcro-ed to a strip he had already adhered to the wall around the window.

Here is that screen just a few short weeks later. We're praying that autumn comes soon.