We have INTERNET!!!

So this week has been a loooooooooooong week.  We moved into the house on Monday and Tuesday with our stuff and have been trying to unpack and get things organized ever since.  David has been crazy busy at work and I have been running all over the place for the kids.  Also without the internet at my house I had to go over in the evenings to my friend's house to work.  Thank goodness for them!!!  But we have internet now at our house!!!  I am sitting at our dinning table and looking at our stuff!!  It is amazing how much better I feel tonight getting things done.  We had a surprise visit from our good friend Mat Penney.  He was traveling back from deployment and stopped overnight in Ramstein and I happened to be on facebook, so the next day we were able to have lunch with him and had a wonderful visit!!  Michael enjoyed his time too because he played at the BX playground and found a new friend.  I tried to talk to his grandma, but she only spoke Italian and that is not in my vocabulary at all.  I am having a hard enough time learning German fast enough  :-)  Maybe next year.  So Michael started his school and he really didn't like it at all and to be honest I didn't either.  I wanted him to get into a program called Strong Beginnings.  Well they were full and I was told by the teacher that he didn't know anybody leaving until at least December.  So I asked for prayers and low and behold the next day, not joking, I got a phone call and he is in Strong Beginnings starting on Monday!!!  God is sooo good and has answered so many prayers for me this past month.  It has been a month of learning, stretching and trusting in Him.  I think Michael is very excited also about the new class!!  It is still a long drive, but I will make it with a happy heart!  Thank you for all the prayers!!!!  I haven't taken pictures of the house yet, but I will and try and get them up in the next couple of days.  David and I are going to a military ball tomorrow night, should be fun!!  Luckily I found my shoes today and my dress so that is all good stuff!!!  Nothing like jumping in with both feet!!!  The weather is still holding and we have a HUGE dirt pile next door and the boys played for hours in the dirt!!!  They were so happy and so was I!!  They came in with dirt in every crevice!!!!  It was great to cook dinner in my kitchen tonight, I am still getting used to the German appliances.  I have to get a converter for the temp, I totally guessed tonight and thankfully dinner was good and not under cooked or burnt!!!  I also was able to go to the Ramstein Welfar Bazaar on Thursday afternoon all by myself!!!  No kids or husband and was able to walk around and look.  It was amazing how many vendors they had from all over Europe, the came from Italy, Poland, Belgium just to name a few and had everything there.  It was really neat to see and I bought a few things, but really just enjoyed walking around on my time and not in a hurry!!!!  Well it is off to bed with me!  Miss you all!!!

WE HAVE STUFF!!!

It was a really busy weekend!!   Also with opening football season I couldn't get online at all.  It was quite ridiculous, but now we have moved into our house and have no internet, but we have wonderful friends that are letting me use their internet.  We went to grab something at the shoppette and they had face painting so Mikey decided he wanted to be batman.  AJ didn't want to have it done.  We got our keys on Saturday morning and boy were we excited!!  Then we took the boys to a movie on post, it was the one here on Vogelweh and it was nice also.  It only has a few movies, nothing like Ramstein, but a lot closer that is for sure.  On Sunday we rented a truck and did a lot of running around, we bought a bed, freezer, two couches, a new bar and bar stools, air conditioner and a few other odds and ends.  David was right, I was a buying machine, but got a lot of great deals and I think we are pretty well set.  We spent from about 10 am to after 6 pm on Sunday, that included unloading twice and getting stuff from the hotel.  I do have to say I can't believe how much stuff we had in the hotel.  I knew we had a bit of stuff, but man oh man.  There are a few other minor things we might need, but I really need to get unpacked before I will know.  AJ was also invited to his first birthday party and it was at the Ramstein pool and I have to say, it is a really cool pool!!  The boys had a great time!!  Michael even used his arm a lot which was good for me.  They swam for a couple of hours and wanted to stay a lot longer!  Speaking of getting unpacked, WE GOT OUR FIRST SHIPMENT!!!  It was so great to see the truck pull up with our stuff!!  It has been two months since we saw it and man it is nice, a big job to get everything unpacked, but hopefully by this weekend (well if David has anything to do with it, it will be tomorrow) we should have everything unpacked and put away.  We have our second shipment that will be delivered tomorrow and we will have all of our stuff.  Michael also had his first day of school today.  He said it was okay, but he is also coming down with a fever so I think that is more of what it was.  He might stay home with me tomorrow.  We shall see.  So I forgot to post this picture that David and I took.  We took a wrong turn and saw these two stores.  Look at the one on the left (adult store) and on the right (is a kids indoor play area) only in Germany.  LOL  David is back to work full time and feeling it.  It has been awhile since he worked a full day.  It also doesn't help that the Seahawks were on last night and didn't get over till 2 am our time and who had to stay up and watch it - that would be David.  :-)  I can't fault him, but soon we will have the DVR and he can watch it his leisure.  Hopefully Friday we will have internet and TV.  Keep your fingers crossed.  Still waiting on my van, still on the boat.  I can't wait until we have two cars again!!!

FRIDAY!!

Happy Friday everybody!!!  It is another beautiful day here in Kaiserslautern!!!  We have been having some wonderful weather that everybody tells us won't last, but we are enjoying while we can.  The walks to school in the morning have been a bit chilly, especially since I don't have any gloves or hats for the boys.  You can see your breath in the mornings.  Only one more walk to school and then we will be at the new house and AJ (yes he decided to go back to AJ, wondering if it is because he didn't want to write Albert on all his homework LOL) will ride the bus.  So we had some excitement Wednesday night, the fire alarm went off and man was it LOUD!!  It was around 11 pm all the boys were asleep and what was really funny, David was the only one out of the three that woke up to the noise.  It is like my mom and dad used to say about me, a bomb could go off near my head and I wouldn't hear it.  Well AJ and Michael didn't wake up until we grabbed them up to go wait with the others outside.  Not sure what really happened, I think it was something down on the first floor.  But 30 odd minutes later we were able to go back into the building.  Luckily both boys went back to sleep pretty easily.  On Thursday Michael and I checked out his new school.  He said he wasn't sure about it when he first walked in but as we were leaving he said he LOVED it!!  So that is great!!  He will start on Monday also going in the afternoon time.  I still want to get him in to Strong Beginnings, but we are on the wait list for that.  No huge plans for the weekend.  We get our keys on Saturday so will start to move some of the stuff we brought and bought over to the house so we don't have as much to do on Monday morning when we check out of the hotel.  Yeah to check out!!!!   David had one of many of his first long days, he didn't get home until after 10 pm.  I am hoping he will get the office in tip top shape so that doesn't last for too long! 

Mid -week

We are still trying to finish up getting everything ready for the new house.  Finished one more thing today and Friday we are going to change over electricity and water and the items the military is lending us.  Man it sure does take a lot longer to put things together here.  David is making fun of me because I have been making a few, okay a lot of purchases on Ramstein Bookoo.  It is a great place to get used stuff.  People leaving Germany are selling their 220V items and it will be cheaper to buy them than run transformers for everything.  So I have made a few purchases and probably will have to rent a truck to move everything, only because I wanted a real bed for visitors here and we only brought the bunk bed and a queen bed.  Or so I keep telling myself.  :-)

I went to my first PWOC on Tuesday.  It was really great to meet some new ladies!  It was their kick off so I haven't missed any meetings.  It is a little different than Fort Huachuca, one thing--much smaller and only two bible studies to choose from instead of six and about 24 people here and about 70-80 people back in Arizona.  The ladies seem really nice and inviting so I am excited to get to know them better.  I also found the scout leader for AJ's age group, it is one of the ladies husbands.  So that was great!!  I also met somebody with two boys the same age as mine!!  YEAH!!!  Making some new connections and learning more everyday.  Our next thing is to go and visit churches.  We are hoping to find as good a fit here as we did in Arizona.

Still haven't decided on a cell phone company, so many different things to consider.  You are governed by German laws and their contracts are solid and you can't get out of them for anything.  So we are trying to be really good and do all of our research.

We have the 10th and 11th set up for the delivery of our goods.  The 10th is the big one (wanted to do that one first since we had a choice and that shipment includes our beds) and the 11th is small.  Unfortunately we won't have internet from Monday till Friday.  They couldn't install until the 14th.  Which is better than a lot of what others have had to deal with, some take up to three weeks to get installed, so fingers crossed we have no problems with it and we do get it installed on Friday.

Michael and I went to lunch with AJ today and had a great time!!  I found out he has 15 minutes from the time he enters the cafeteria to the time he has to clean up to get hot lunch, sit down, open items and eat.  This is AJ we are talking about, it is soooo not enough time.  Even with me there getting him to eat, he still can't finish it.  I think that is just not long enough for lunch.  The teacher even let us stay for lunch recess and Michael LOVED that!!  So did AJ he was such a protective big brother, it was cute.   When we walked him back to his class he had to give Michael a hug and tell him he loved him!!  It is moments like those that just melts my heart!!! 

David's first post

Wanted to take a minute finally and post something on the blog.  Tammy has been awesome about getting this up and running (as she is with everything really) so I thought that since we have been here almost a month I should finally chime in.  Things are going well and Germany is beautiful!  From everything we have heard the weather is definitely not normally like this so we are trying to take full advantage of it as well as just finding reasons to get out of the hotel room.  The Miller's have been tremendously helpful and cannot imagine what we would have been going through if not for them.  The Army has good plans and what not to make the transition easy as long as the people here follow those plans, therein lies the problem unfortunately.  I will see if there is anything I can do to help those that follow along after us so that their transitions go as smoothly as possible.  Other than that things have gone well, it has been great seeing some friends that we have not seen in some time and making new friendships as well.  Looking forward to getting to work, tired of in-processing and hearing about everything I evidently need to fix.  I hear that the people that will be working for me are pretty good folks, just need a little direction.  Hopefully, with a lot of prayers, I will give them that direction.  I am certainly looking forward to getting into a routine again and cannot wait to move in to our new home.  I think all of us are really looking forward to it.  The new hooptie is great, needs a few minor improvements but it is pretty great so far and should save us some money on gas hopefully.  Tammy has been doing a great job of learning German so far and I am really proud of everything that she has done and learned thus far, I definitely married the right woman!  Well I hope that this post finds everyone doing well and planning trips to come visit us.  We are scoping out as much as we can to find the best places to visit and should have some really great places to see by the time our first visitors come to see us!

More photos from the Castle

Our first castle

Well today we went to our first castle here in Germany.  Some wonderful friends of our, the Kearnys, came down or up, not sure which, and went with us.  We went to Burg Grafenstein in Merzalben.  It is about a 35 minute drive unless you get behind three really big tractors on the road, behind bikes and have no place to pass because they make these roads so darn skinny.  :-)  It was a castle they said was built around 1237.  It was destroyed by peasants in 1525 and rebuilt between 1535-1540 and sold to Counts Palatine.  In 1635 is was destroyed in the 30 year war and was unusable in the long term.  They had a festival going on there this weekend.  Many people dressed up in costumes of the era.  Had some great food, saw sword fighting (not sure what they said since I don't know German yet) which the boys thought was really really cool.  Two guys showed up as samurai, not sure why, but man they were completely decked out.  We watched them get their costumes on and it took a good 20 minutes or more.  Also walked up the tower in the complete dark for a little bit, but the view from the top was awesome!!!  They boys conned us into buying them crossbows.  I was going for swords and shields, but they had their hearts set on these.  Look out, they are dangerous.  They had wine tasting, some were pretty good.  David had is first Cola Beir and said it tasted good.  We also had waffle miet, it is basically a waffle with powdered sugar on it.  It was great!  Both the boys LOVED it!!!  I couldn't get Michael to try the potatoes we had, but they liked the schnitzel.  At these places they give you real plates and cups and have a 4 euro deposit on every one of them.  So when you are finished and bring them back up they give you your money back.  Smart, it makes you return them.  We did keep one cup as a souvenir though.  It was a windy road up to the castle and was a beautiful drive!!  AJ asked me when we are going to the next castle.  I told him soon!!