Progress

School starts today.  I will post pics after the munchkins wake up and get dressed.  Grace seemed pretty cool about her new school outfits still being MIA in UAB.  I think all this travelling has been good for her.  Olivia threw on a t-shirt last night before bed and said, "I'll just wear this tomorrow, that way I won't have to actually get dressed in the morning."  They won't be in the same class, and I'm a little worried about how Olivia is going to handle it.  Fingers crossed.

I have been insanely busy getting all the paperwork filled out for school and the new house, but I am so excited about both.  Yesterday we had an appointment with the counselor at Jack's high school and I was blown away by their academic program.  Jack's grades qualified him for all AP classes, but he ultimately only registered for two, so as to ease into a school that actually cares about academics (Um, was that a dig about his old school?  Yes, I think it may have been.).  After he picked his language (seven offered, plus American Sign Language), Spanish, he had one more elective to choose.  The counselor cautioned him to pick something fun to make his day easier.  His eyes scanned the page:  guitar, band, computer animation, game design, art, another art, another art, cooking, baking, medicine, etc.  Finally his eyes lit up.  "I found one."  The counselor looked at it, raised one eyebrow, and said, "Well, I think we have plenty of room in that one, so that's great."  Aaaaand none of you who know Jack will be surprised to know that the "fun" elective he picked was...................drumroll, please..................... 'Personal Finance'.  The only bad news is that high school starts at 7:20 am.  Yikes.

We went to Tyson's Corner Mall (huge doesn't begin to describe the enormity of this place) to celebrate and to kill a little time so the girls could get some Pillow Pets and Henry could get some more Legos at the massive Lego store.  Happily, we finally tracked down our UAB with half his Legos in it, and it will be delivered to the new house on Saturday.  The rest of our stuff will be at least another week, so will still be staying at Oakwood, which has lost it's novelty, I must say.  The dog is terrified to go outside  because of the loud garbage trucks that always seem to  be out there, so we basically have to carry him out to take a shit. The soap they use on the sheets and towels has caused two of us to break out in hives, so I've had to wash everything twice in hot water with my own soap, and the hallways are freezing.  I mean, f-f-f-f-freezing (see  what I did there?  I was implying shivering, get it?  I mean, like, it's really cold out there.)  Anyway, Oakwood tangent aside, the mall had a West Elm store, which is my favorite non-shoe store, but of course once we had the Pillow Pets and Legos in hand the kids were done.  I will revisit when the little suckers are in school, though.  We went to a sushi bar for lunch where the kids pretty much ate everything in sight.  It had a little conveyor belt where you could just grab what looked good to you.  This is not a good place to go with kids if you want to save money, however, they ate just about everything they picked and had a blast doing it.  We felt kind of bad for their Daddy, who was stuck eating crappy cafeteria food at the Foreign Service Institute. Apologies for picture quality.  It was taken with my oft-dropped phone, which actually has springs poking out of it and whatnot.