Well, as you can see I've been way behind on the blog! It's been a crazy couple of months, but we are now settled in Germany. At the beginning of May, we moved out of our house in Augusta and traveled to Ohio. On May 18th, Jeff left for Germany while Brayden and I stayed behind to spend some time with family. While Jeff was busy traveling between Germany and Colorado Springs for a month, Brayden and I hung out in Columbus, Wadsworth, Cincinnati and Nashville. It was a great trip home and it was so nice to see everyone! On June 20th, Brayden and I made the journey to Frankfurt! I must say that I was more stressed out about the plane ride with a toddler than I was about the whole move itself. He was a trooper! It was a 9 hour flight from Atlanta to Frankfurt and Brayden slept about the last 5 hours of the trip. I think that the worst part of the trip was trying to haul his carseat down a narrow airplane aisle while trying to manage our bags and a toddler at the same time! Needless to say, we made it!!
The day after we arrived, which also happened to be my 29th birthday, we moved into our house in a village called Enkenbach-Alsenborn and received our unaccompanied baggage (the necessities that we shipped really early so that we'd have it when we got here) and some temporary government furniture. Our living room looked like an office building for a few days with that furniture! That next week, all of our household goods arrived in one piece (for the most part)! :)
Jeff took command of his unit on June 28th and has been hard at work since. I've been getting the house put together and got involved with the local MOMS Club that just got started up here in the Kaiserslautern area.
Brayden is entertaining as usual! He is now becoming our little parrot that is repeating everything! His favorite words are basically anything to do with vehicles including "wheel", "choo choo", and "car". At his doctor's appointment last week he was 37 inches tall (99th percentile), 29 lbs (67th percentile) and his head circumference was in the 95th percentile. Unfortunately, the weather lately has been cool and rainy but we have been able to take advantage of some of the parks when the sun has popped through the clouds. It's very hard to believe that he will be 2 next month!!
One of the biggest struggles so far has been the language barrier. Our landlords live right next door and they are nice as can be, but they speak as much English as we do German. We've also struggled to get our Internet working because every time Jeff called the customer service line, he would get hung up on. But, hopefully after today we will have Internet in our house and it will make it a lot easier to keep up with the blog!
Guess this says something about Americans not considering it important to know more than one language. Though I must admit that the German I know would not get me far.
ReplyDeleteWhile on the Seine River cruise out of Paris through Normandy and back, our 38 member crew was French, Hungarian, Romanian, and Bulgarian (5). So I got to use the few phrases of Bulgarian I know daily. They always greeted me in Bulgarian once they knew that I knew the very basic formalities. Have to admit it was fun.
Knowing French was fun as well through the entire trip, but especially during French music in the lounge on board the River Baroness.
Yeah, I'm starting a German class at the end of August through the USO. I've picked up on a lot of the basics already, but I want to actually be able to carry on somewhat of a conversation.
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