Ex Patria

That addled brain of mine

I forgot things.

Like the fitted sheet for Leah's bed.  She has to sleep on her bare mattress since bigger sheets tend to scrunch up and make her uncomfortable.  Luckily, the mattress does have a nice cover.  It will be dirty after a while, though...  I hope I packed it into the airship and we will have it... soon.

Chocolate chips and brown sugar.  My poor chocolate-chip-cookies-deprived children are moaning. Those oatmeal cookies today came out crunchy because I substituted ingredients.  I do not like crunchy cookies.  (The kids and the husband ate them gleefully, so there's that.)

Books.  I brought ten, I've read five already.  Those Sebastian St. Cyr mysteries are very addictive.  I had figured I'd read the kids' school books, which I do, but they are such short reads...  My husband promised me to find more books for me.

I forgot to bring bowls for mixing and serving and this house has one (1) bowl.  One.  Really.  One.

Those math curricula I bought are too easy for my kids.  I wished I could have had a closer look at them, or maybe I was just too overwhelmed with everything and made poor choices.  In any case, we need another math program but we don't know how to get it here.  The DHL costs and the import taxes are prohibitive - almost but not quite the cost of a plane ticket to the US - so we can't just order the books.  But it's too much to ask someone who is not a well-meaning relative to shelp them over on the plane.  Sigh.  I wished we had had more notice about this homeschooling thing.

I can't find any craft paper in sizes larger than A4.  My Moldovan contacts look at me askance.  I have noticed before that the poverty in a country reflects in a scarcity of craft supplies.  We can do cardboard and cereal box crafts, I suppose.  But sometimes it's a bit tiring if you have to find an alternative for every single thing.

It's mostly really easy living here for us.  Much easier than Armenia, for instance.  So, I'm not complaining.  We like it here, our house is great, the kids are happy.  But I really should have packed more carefully.

Write it all down for the next time, I suppose.

First day of school

So we had our first day of school.

It was - mixed. 

I certainly cannot just use the math program I bought as it was intended - I have to pick and choose because my boys are too math-smart.  I also have the feeling the programs (Saxon Math and Teaching Textbooks, I couldn't decide and got both) are fairly non-challenging.  But then I had that impression from Singapore Math, also.  Maybe it's my boys? 

I can safely advance David to Lesson 30 of Grade 3 (he's actually in second grade in the German system) and Alan to the beginning of Grade 4 with minimal problems.  There are some few things they will have to catch up on, mainly geometry and US money, as well as calculating with Imperial measurements (however stupid those are) but that's easily done on the side.  So, on the whole that's good once we find our path there.

The history part is a bit too slow, I think.  We do a chapter a day and I'm not sure that's enough. They were pining for more and maybe I should accommodate that?  I'll stick with it for some days and will reconsider over the weekend. 

The spelling and the writing programs are both in the air ship which has not arrived yet.  How long can it take?  We don't know.  So I did some printing work with the older boys which they hated, small wonder.  Jacob, though, loves printing and has done a good job writing captial F's and P's.   We're using Handwriting without Tears and so far, it seems quite good.  I'm doing some remedial work with the older boys - mainly David who has developed the habit of starting his letters at the bottom.  They all love the image of the "frog jump" (starting in the upper left corner, going down and "frog jumping" back up to form an F or a P or a B or so).  Such an easy image that helps them so much.  I think Jacob will have a much easier time printing than the older boys had.

All in all it was good.  I kept my cool even though it was chaotic at times.  I let Alan run circles around the table while he answered text questions.  That's his style and that's the advantage of home schooling - he can do now what is impossible in a classroom.   He did answer all questions on the chapters we read with precision and in detail, so it works and that's all that counts.

I do have the feeling it was a bit unstructured, especially since we tried setting up the wireless printer for an hour in the middle.  Without success, I should note.  Structure shall come with time, says the husband.  We shall see, says I.

But I'm beat!  I will go to bed now, and it's not even 9 pm.

Good night.

Packing out

The packers come tomorrow.  We only get an air ship and for some bizarre reason, and because it's us and we don't do things easy when we can do them complicated, all of our belongings have to fit into 20-inch cubes.  Apparently, the freight planes flying to Moldova are really, really small. 

The printer may or may not fit. [It didn't.]  Leah's drawing paper holder doesn't. [It did - we could take it apart.] We cannot take any bikes or yard vehicles.  Or my tripod.  Or, you know, anything that's longer than 20 inches.  We bought a big roof box for our car into which will go blankets, Leah's new toddler bed (35 Euros from IKEA!), and probably all homeschooling supplies.  Because our homeschooling supplies are being held up in German customs.  The officers there could not quite believe that someone could possibly order books worth more than $1,000 without the intent of re-selling them...  In their defense, homeschooling is illegal in Germany, and therefore unknown to much of the population. [Books due tomorrow!]

Anyway, the roof box.  I'm inordinately happy with it - our car seats seven passengers but when it does (or even when it sits six), there is hardly any space left.  I'm really glad we don't have to cramp the kids in for three days on the road.

Yes, three days.  We'll try to push all the way to Budapest the first day, then halfway across Romania and finally into Chisinau on the third day.   Our navigator claims we can get to Budapest in 8 hours.  We shall see.

[One day later.]

The movers came and packed our meager belongings into 14 little boxes, and took them away.  We're having a breakfast invitation with our neighbors tomorrow morning.   Alan's party is on Saturday, his dad and his uncle and aunt are coming to celebrate with him.  We have a nice lunch planned at my parents' house on Sunday - some wild animal with my mom's famous "brown sauce" (as my kids call it).   In the afternoon, we'll celebrate Doug's birthday a day early, with his favorite apple cake from my mom.  I must confess, I don't even have a present for him yet, I was so tied up with the move and everything. 

And on Monday, we'll drive off.  The kids have their Nintendos, we have a DVD player in the car.  We have books.  We will break the trip halfway in Austria for lunch and then push to Budapest;  or rather, Budaors where our hotel is located right off the motorway.  Then into Romania the next day, as far as we can.

The house is a bit of a chaos.  For Lent, my goal is to be more patient - with my family but also with myself.  So, chaos it is.  There are more important things, right?

Right.