Update

It has been a difficult week. There is no easy way to say this. V lost the baby on Tuesday. She stayed at the hospital overnight and came back home on Wednesday. We were prepared for this so it has made it easier for all of us to deal with. This is the kids last week of school so we have been taking them to school to keep a regular routine for them. My mother, who is visiting, came down with a cold, probably from flying in the airplane, so I had to take the kids to school yesterday. Today I am back at work and catching up on everything. Also, we have a pay gap which will make it a little difficult to do things for Christmas. There was a note in my pay stub this week that they are switching from depositing the money in the bank on the 15th of each month to the last day of the month. Why they chose December to do this with Christmas coming up I cannot fathom. I am reminded of my father saying that bad things always come in threes.

Sorry to be so negative. On the bright side we have furniture in our apartment now from the kindergelt money and back taxes we received last month. Our living room and dining room is very nice and homey now. Also, some orchids that I have been raising for over six months now have finally bloomed and they are very pretty. We have a Christmas tree set up and some Christmas lights around the window in our living room. We are planning to go to a Christmas market this weekend so my mother and the kids can see what they are like. One thing that has been really getting to us the last few weeks is the lack of sunlight, but today, finally it is a clear sky and the sun is out. For my lunch break I am going to take a walk and get some sun.

One more negative point that has been a real frustration here in Germany. The kids had a "Christmas market" at school yesterday. I knew about this and this is one of the reasons I wanted them to go to school yesterday and took them myself. Because I don't yet have a German drivers liscense we have to take the bus, and it is so slow and expensive that it only makes sense to stay in town until the kids are out of school and them come back with them. I dropped the kids off, said hi to the people at school, then walked to town and read some things I brought with me to work on while I waited in a bakery. Then did some small grocery shopping to kill time and walked back to the school later to pick up the kids. It was then that the teachers there said that they were sorry I couldn't make it to the Christmas market--no one told me before hand that I could come. Apparently parents are expected to attend and we were the only parents that weren't there. This keeps happening over and over, especially at the kids old school. The teachers don't understand that we don't know which activities we are invited to or what holidays the kids are out of school. They seemed to think that I didn't know about the Christmas market or what day it was on. I kept trying to explain that I did, only I didn't know that parents came, this seemed to be off the radar for them. They seemed to think that we have school Christmas markets in the US and that parents attend, so why wouldn't we know to do this here? Just as they seem to think that the religious holidays are the same at schools in the US as here so why wouldn't we know about them? It amazes me that I keep having to explain to Europeans that different cultures have different traditions and that they are not always obvious to someone from another culture, so it is useful to us to point things out a head of time. Anyway, on the bright side the kids had a lot of fun and M actually made some real money from crafts she sold at the market.