Our New Home

We are now offically in our new house. We moved in yesterday. Robert and another driver rented a moving van - it looked like a convoy vehicle from MASH complete with the flaps - loaded all our stuff in under the watchful and disapproving eyes of our apartment landlord and drove about 5 minutes away to our new house. (Our apartment landlord was unhappy because he was trying to scam more money from CEELI because we arrived later than everyone thought, but the lease clearly says that the 10 days started upon my arrival.) He was also unhappy because Austin threw a snowball at his dog.

Anyway, back to the new house - it is 2 stories with the bottom floor containing a large living room with a hard couch, hard loveseat and 2 hard chairs. There was leather in the room, but we agreed that the landlords - who live next door to us -would take the leather and buy us cloth. Didn't realize that the cloth furniture would be stuffed with wood.

Some issues that still need resolving: Madisen's room has no heat and the "office" is cold despite the heating apparatus that is in the room. Madisen's room was grandma's room so not sure how she survived. There is no hot water in the upstairs bathroom, but plenty in the downstairs one with the tub. We also have only 1 phone right by the cold front door. For the next few days, we share with the landlord and another neighbor then we will get our line installed.

For the good news: we have more TV channels than we have ever had, in more languages that we can imagine, and even some in English! Mom has been going through each channel deleting the channels that would shock the kids and result in many questions that we really don't want to have to answer. There are TONS of those channels.

I also have DSL hookup! No more dialup unless we download and upload so much that I can't afford to feed the kids.

We also successfully went to the grocery store in a taxi and bought all sorts of stuff to keep us satisfied for awhile. The kids are still not used to all the smoking – Cole Ryan quickly pointed out that our taxicab driver lit up.

Armine, the nanny, started today. So far, so good.