Forty-eight hours in our home for the next 4 months, we have finally settled in. As Dan said, we walked through the apartment and it looked fine, but when we got in and started looking at everything, it has only been superficially cleaned. It was apparently a disaster before so I’m glad we didn’t see it that way! The next morning, we headed first to register the kids at school (more later) and then dug in cleaning. Stripped the beds, bleached every…
So, we have been here for a little less than a week. We still haven’t gotten to our final location, but we will be by tomorrow night! I have however noticed a few things in the interim. My children are completely unconcerned about everyone else speaking a different language than us. Maybe this is normal for children, but most adults I know get freaked out and are constantly asking what others are saying. There seems to be a ingrained part…
Normal family travels (even or maybe especially to Target) include a lot of short calls saying, “Where are you?” We got to Amsterdam and quickly realized that none of our phone solutions worked unless BOTH of us were connected to wifi and the connections kept dropping. We had a couple of misadventures and even got directed to the “meeting point” once. Dan’s fix is to have a meeting point wherever we go. My plan is to not split up until…
We have begun our adventure! Will has a great window seat with a view of the engine turbine. He is actually impressed. We have wrapped up Maggie’s broken arm…mostly so people notice it and steer clear. She wiggles out of it all the time so I don’t know that it is doing a lot of stabilization. Mom and dad came to see us off (and drive home our car). They had the presence of mind to take a picture. Dan…
Initially, after reading all the suggestion blogs and in talking to friends, we had intended on packing 1-2 weeks before we left. However, in reality, we don’t own enough clothes to do that. So we set aside the things that we intended on packing and have them stacked on top of the suitcases and in the corners. Did I mention that it is really hard to pack for winter in August? We did accomplish: Buying new suitcases – Our old…
After attending orientation, I had a couple of hours to kill while I waited until time to go to the airport. Hmmm…I’m in DC a couple of blocks from the White House. What should I do for the afternoon? Taking a picture of the White House is serious business! The security must have been heightened due to Delta’s snafu with the computers. On either side of the photo there were Secret Service members in bulletproof vests yelling at anyone that stepped…
In less than 4 weeks, my family and I will be in the Palestinian Territories. We will fly into Tel Aviv and then go to Jerusalem for meetings with the consulate before we head to Ramallah. We have found schools for the kids, have some leads on apartments and have made connections for my research. Everything is falling into place. It still seems unreal. This week I headed to DC (sans children) to orient myself to the Fulbright experience. Met…
Monday marked the first day back for teachers. Students will return on Thursday. In the meantime, I am frantically trying to merge multiple to-do lists so that nothing gets left behind. First we have the normal back to school things: checking schedules to make sure students are in the right classes, sorting students by teacher so that I can pass out accommodations in a timely manner, and keeping track of new enrollees so that they can be screened for English…
Has anyone ever seen the show Tiny Houses? There are actually a lot of shows in this vein on HGTV. I admit that I have seen these shows and not been tempted to live in a tiny house. Not even by myself, much less with Dan and 2 kids. Well, in retrospect, tiny camper living was not so bad. It was aided by the fact that we didn’t bring that much stuff and we didn’t really *need* anything while on vacation….
If you are going to have a family reunion, do it right! This year we decided to take our family reunion to the west coast! This is actually what initiated the cross-country road trip. So this week, we and the rest of the Fuller clan have hung out in a house we rented in South Lake Tahoe. Great house. It has a ping-pong table, pool table, shuffleboard and a hot tub. So everyone met up here from 4 different states…