A Work in Progress

We have been working our tooshies off and it feels so great to finally have the house set up like a home. Daddy worked especially hard this past weekend. He put the swing set together and hung several pictures--that is no easy task with concrete walls. There are a LOT of extra holes in the walls, but it isn't as if we can just run down to the local Home Depot (or Lowe's, sorry Dad) and get some advice. Brico is the equivalent, but the advice they would give would be in French and therefore useless to us at the moment.

Daddy has put off hanging the rest of the pictures for now. We will be charged plenty of money on move out for the repairs needed on the walls so he is going to try and find out a better way to hang things. For the most part, the boxes are out of the house and in the garage. Almost everything is sorted and organized. We are also going through the piles of paperwork we have collected and filing it away. Translating what needs to be translated has been the hardest part. Our bills are either in French or Dutch so it makes paying bills and understanding what we are supposed to do take a lot longer than usual. Banking here is actually very efficient. We pay our bills by transferring our money into the accounts of whomever we owe it to. There are no checks and we pay for most things with the equivalent of a debit card so not too much different than paying for things in the States and using online banking. For the most part, that goes well. There have been some instances where only cash is accepted. That is what we came across when I took Nathan to the doctor on Friday, but we managed to work it out between the cash on the card and the cash I had with me. Dealing with the finances between here and the States is almost a full time job. After MANY, MANY mistakes, we are figuring that whole thing out as well.

The kids are doing great. Nathan has had a cold that just keeps hanging on, thus the reason for our trip to the doctor. The real reason I took him was because he was not able to hear ANYTHING last week. The TV was blaring and he was not acknowledging anything I was saying. I waited an adequate amount of time to be sure he wasn't just turning the age where he stops listening and starts blaring the TV, but determined that he was too young for that and really could not hear. He does have fluid on his ears, but there wasn't really anything the doctor could give us to fix it, though he tried. We spent 30 Euros on medication--just in case and the doctor visit was 40 Euros. Thank goodness for insurance!

Hannah was over her stomach stuff quickly and back to her self in no time. Sarah continues to be a dream baby. As someone said last week, "She not only read all of the baby books, she wrote them".

The past 2 days the kids have requested pancakes and bacon for breakfast and have eaten them as if they have not eaten in days. I rarely made pancakes in the States, but we did have frozen waffles A LOT. (Disclaimer: I did switch to the store brand from the popular name brand after Oprah made me feel guilty about feeding my children trans fats daily). Of course there are waffles here. HELLO, we are in Belgium. They are fabulous, but they are different. They are already sweet and when heated and drenched in syrup, as we treated our frozen waffles in the States, they just aren't quite right. The kids eat the waffles without syrup, but they must be missing the familiar, so now that our Bisquick has arrived, we are eating pancakes. There is something very satisfying about watching my kids gobble down something I made and telling me how "yummy" they are. Can you tell I don't get that feeling often? As I finished making breakfast this morning, Sarah was tired and hungry and done sitting in her bouncy seat, so I scooped her up in put her in her sling to nurse while I finished. When I sat down to eat my own pancakes, she was still in the sling nursing. Suddenly, she stopped nursing, and just stared at me while I took bites. She started moving her mouth as if she were chewing the pancakes too. Clearly, she is starting to show an interest in eating. I can not believe that by the end of this month she'll be joining us at the table for some tastes of food! She is not quite sitting up yet, but working on it. She's also perfecting the rolling thing.

So we are definitely feeling much more settled and just in time, as our friends are arriving on Saturday. We have even had time to sit down and enjoy some DVDs in the evenings after the kids are asleep. Though we fully intended to purchase the expensive satellite television that all of the English speaking expats have here, we have decided after investigating the cost, that it would be better if we fed ourselves and our children...just kidding. We just decided that it was not something we were willing to spend so much on for now. We haven't gotten the regular cable television at this time. We had it in the apartment and almost never turned it on. When we first moved in I found that most of the channels were American shows with French dubbed in. I got a headache trying to watch an episode of Friends. Honestly, I have seen those shows so many times thanks to TBS and I still couldn't understand what they were saying. I also realized that I could live without the French version of MTV. Pimp My Ride is not even something I can watch in English. I did watch a movie that reeked of Lifetime with the girl from Little House on the Prairie, but it had a very uncomplicated plot and wasn't too difficult to follow. The Dutch channels are in English with Dutch subtitles, but not much of interest there. The BBC had some decent programs, but it was nothing we can't live without.

At this very moment the kids are watching Wiggles Christmas. For some reason they always want to watch Christmas programs in July. Now I get to go around humming Wiggles Christmas songs all day.

It doesn't exactly feel like July anyway. We've had highs in the 60's and 70's with rain almost every day. As our snow blower did in Michigan that first winter, our air conditioner sits idly by, just in case. We're not exactly complaining. Who wants hot weather when you don't have central a/c?

So here are some pictures of life around here including the house--which is of course, the work in progress. Isn't it always?