A New School Year...

Next week Laura starts first grade and this year I am having the opposite response then I had last year. Despite the changes that a full day of school brings for Laura, I am very ready for the school year to start. All day first grade is different from our half day kindergarten experience, and in addition Laura is starting at a new school. Laura will be attending Ramstein Elementary on Ramstein Air Base and although we have attended the new student “tour” we are still not sure what to expect at the new school. We have learned that kindergarten through 12th grade all ride the bus together, therefore a total of 54 German city buses drop off and pick up every day. (OH MY) After the last couple of weeks with Laura in a new house and new country I am over ready for her to go to school and meet some new friends. I love having Laura around, but every evening when Sam returns home from work and Laura is on her 9th straight hour of talking, my nerves feel very frayed. Fortunately for her and her new teacher, Laura already knows everything there is to learn in first grade, I know this because whenever we sit down to work on her summer homework packet Laura corrects me. I constantly hear “That is not a sentence” and my all-time favorite “Did you even go to the high school mom?” So on Monday at 8 am, with brand new lunch box in hand, Laura will start a new school year at a new school.

Romantic Heidelberg...

On Saturday we headed out to the romantic city of Heidelberg. All of our Germany travel books describe Heidelberg, along the Neckar river, as the city of romance. We explored the city for most of the afternoon we walked along the river, ate in a café along the cobbled streets and shopped in the marktplatz. Heidelberg is a busy university town, so we actually saw young people, which was a dramatic change since Sam and I were beginning to think that Germany only had very old folks living here. Although after about four hours spent sightseeing, shopping and eating I am not sure what the guide books consider romantic, the one armed man playing drums for spare change, the convert to Islam booth or the dozen or so dogs aloud in the restaurants. While I was still looking for my romantic part of the city, Laura found hers at Build a Bear! We traveled thousands of miles and we just cannot seem to get away from buying the bears new clothes, therefore one of her numerous bears now sports a fashionable “I Love Heidelberg” shirt. Maybe I should have looked harder in that chocolate shop for romance, I am sure with enough Euros spent I could have found something.


Sam and Laura beside the Neckar River.


As ussual I appear in one picture!

Sam sucked it up and paided the 1.50 Euro for him and Laura to head to the top if the old town Church.

The Kitchen Plan...

There are many differences here in Germany from our life in the U.S., space is a major one. The one closet our house has is a linen closet located on the second floor next to the bathroom. The Air Force helped solve the closet problem in the bedrooms by lending us four closet like wardrobes. Unfortunately these did not help with the kitchen storage issue. I knew that something would have to be done in the kitchen even before our stuff had arrived. So I grabbed the Ikea catalog and braved the German information desk at the store in Mannheim to ask how to find things in the warehouse, turns out this was a valuable lesson I would use again when replacing Laura’s furniture. Somehow we made it home with some shelves and to Sam’s surprise and pleasure not much else.






In the video you might notice the ONE small drawer , the multiple trash cans (trash is an ordeal here), the small frig (we have a big one downstairs),and the lack of counter space. Not to mention my kid who decided not to brush her hair yet this morning.

The Moving Plan Continues...

After what felt like a very long wait we finally received our “household goods”. The German movers who I affectionately refer to as Larry, Curley and Moe, showed up bright and early Tuesday morning, well ok maybe it was just bright Tuesday morning. They opened their truck and proudly announced that all of our 10 crates where accounted for. We expressed some concern that one of the crates had someone else’s information printed on the front; Moe ignored our fretting and opened the crate to prove our belongings were safety inside. Once the crate was opened I knew right away that the movers were wrong, these were not our belongings. My first clue was the box with “grandfather clock” written on the outside, we don’t own a grandfather clock. Once we conveyed this information to the movers they proceeded to open the box and show us the contents, clearly they were hopping that because we had not seen our belongs for an extended amount of time we had somehow forgotten we owned a grandfather clock and upon seeing it our temporary amnesia would clear, no such luck. After some phone calls, mostly conducted in German, it was reported that there was absolutely no way that the missing crate was in their warehouse. Larry, while smoking what must have been his tenth cigarette since arriving at our house, announced “this has happened before and the crate ended up in Alaska, they found it in a year though”. I felt much better. Two days of Sam incessantly calling the company later, they stated that they thought they had found it. I was less then hopeful, how could they think they found it, it was a huge crate. Later they must have decided that they did indeed find the missing crate because they made an appointment to deliver it Saturday morning. As it turns out this crate was not worth the wait. By unpacking boxes for four days we were able to conclude that most of the missing crate was the entire contents of Laura’s room, sadly this crate must have met some rough seas on the way over because almost all of Laura’s furniture was broken. Fortunately Laura was just happy to see most of her toys intact and seemed amused at the idea of Mom and Dad trying to locate matching furniture in a foreign country.



(our extra couch did not fit up or down the stairs so they brought it in through the secound floor balcony)