Never make big moves when you're emotional.

Yeah, right.

More later.

HHE = Why do we have all this crap??

Everything but our mattress (which didn't fit through the window) arrived via this cool gadget

Living on the third floor means several things. We get lots of sunshine. We don't have people walking past our door all the time, or hear the building door open and shut a 100x a day. There's no one above us, so no noise there. And at the end of every walk, we get to take on 3 flights of stairs, often with groceries. It's not a bad deal overall.

We unpacked as many boxes as we could while they were coming into the house, which of course meant that by the time the movers were done about 1 p.m. we had stacks upon stacks of boxes still to go through. I know that these items are what makes a house a home, but do we really need to feel this homey?

Three days later and we're making progress.

There's a small cascade of steps that need to happen for this process to finally end, starting with removing the boxes from the living room and getting the growing pile of storage items down to the basement.

Then we can make sure the furniture is how we want it and get the pictures up on the walls. Everyone knows that once the pictures are up, the house is yours.

Happy Birthday to Jonathon!

Our youngest is now...

15!

That time of year, again...

School starts are stretched over the next 3 weeks, with the first one starting today at the Frankfurt International School. This is the first time we have all 4 kids in 4 different schools. Thank goodness my wall calendar has arrived so I can keep track of where each one is around Germany and the world.

First day of 10th grade

Two+ weeks in

Yup, still walking a lot.  But now we're mixing in a little more UBahn. I'm still racking an average of 15K steps a day.

More things are checked off. Internet is in the house, the children are happy. UAB arrived on Monday and we realized we have no hangers (none in the welcome kit either), but are so happy to have our awesome new pillows and familiar fuzzy blankets. The process is moving on our car purchase, we should hopefully get our HHE this coming week, as well as hear whether Nicholas will attend the base school.

Wednesday we successfully got our Consulate badges and submitted everything to get new Dip passports.

Thursday Jonathon and I made our way to his new school for a day long orientation, along with several other newcomers.  It certainly helps for that first time to go with others who are all varied in their knowledge of what we're doing and how transportation works.

Thursday Rebecca also began dogsitting a couple dogs on the compound. Each day she takes them for multiple walks and spends her overnights there as well.

Friday Jonathon made his own way to his school for an additional half day of orientation, and the girls and I returned to the Zeil to do some shopping. Props to C&A for being a pretty nice store, Katherine got a rain jacket for 40 Euro.

Ian wants me to buy one of these:

aka a Dirndl

Today Ian and I and the girls checked out the mall at Nordwestzentrum.  A nice enough place that is indoors yet feels outdoors because of the glass ceilings. And when the ceilings are opened up, people smoke everywhere "inside." Still no luck finding rain boots, but we scored a granny cart and two small fans (for the girls' rooms) from the Rewe there, and a bug zapper racket from the tech store.

This evening Ian and I trekked to a biergarten to meet up with the rest of his team. The Consulate is different, there's little cohesion within the building - just about everyone has their own office, hallways are vast and empty, much of the population is regional - so it's good for his team to get together for social time.

Figuring out the new place

It's no secret that living in Europe means walking and more walking.  It's awesome.  Probably not as awesome once winter hits, but right now in summery August, pretty awesome. We walk to the grocery store.

We walk around the fun downtown area.

We walk around the fests.  This weekend there were 3 or 4 fests going on.  We went to MainFest on Saturday.

And MedievalFest on Sunday.

Blueberry Mead.

We're figuring out the U Bahn (11Euros for a day pass for up to 5 people, great deal) and the buses, but mostly we walk and walk. 

Made it

We don't have internet at the house so we're at the Fieldhouse on the compound using the WiFi that intermittently works. And by intermittently, I mean that sometimes the WiFi comes on. And when it does, it seems that rarely does more than Gmail and Facebook work.  I'd really like to order some stuff from Amazon.

*sigh*