First Day of School

Less than a week from the first day of school, we finally found out where C would be attending.  Fortunately, she ended up in the best school available in our district.  The only thing better would have been a “choice school” with a stellar rep — also in our district — but we would have had to enter that lottery back in February.  Of course, we had no orders and no lease back then, so we were ineligible to participate; one of those little things military families sacrifice just so the service can remain flexible within its budget.  Good thing our kids are all brilliant enough without special schools, right?

"I'm so excited, and I just can't hide it!"

Despite our confidence in C, we’re starting the year with a little trepidation. 

Slow Daddy Movement

Patience is really not one of my virtues.  I was painting models before the glue dried, resulting to a gooey, gloppy plastic mess at times. I speed, not in an unsafe manner, mind you.  I’ve been known to pay more for “right f-ing now” service.  I hate waiting rooms; self-explanatory.  I love and I hate Ikea products.  I’m attracted to their put-together style and their prices.  I loathe the putting together part.  It’s not a matter of difficulty or not liking puzzles.  It’s a matter of it taking 90 to 120 minutes of my time to breathe life into particle board, fasteners and fluted dowel pegs.

We just moved into a house with about 400 fewer square feet of space and about 16% of the closet space of our last house, so we needed to add some storage to our bedroom.  My wife graciously assembled two night stands and a short chest of drawers; she does like puzzles and it sounded like more fun than putting shelf paper in the kitchen.  She was running errands this afternoon so I figured I could at least knock out the taller set of drawers.  After I got the cabinet portion together and started in on building six drawers, our 5-yr-old, C traipsed into the bedroom and wanted to help.  I just wanted to get this done (because there’s still much to be done), but I resisted the urge to shoo her away with false claims of being a “grown-up” job.  I showed her how to put the fasteners in that tighten the drawer fronts.  She was a quick study on the cordless screwdriver and helped put on all of the drawer rails.  She swung a grown-up hammer with surprising accuracy, driving in the (silly) plastic fasteners.  She even invited 3-yr-old S to help out in some small way when she joined us.

Once I started paying attention to C and not how long the job was taking, time stood still.  It was just those girls and I, figuring things out together.  I don’t remember which step it was, but C grabbed the screws out of my hand, wanting to start them herself instead of letting me put them part way in for her.  She said, “I can do this!  I watched you do it, you taught me and I can do it!”  People will say that your children are “at that age where they’re curious about everything and they want to help with everything”.  Why does it have to be “at that age”?  Why do so many people lose that burning desire to do and to know?  It was a message to me that, for the short time they’re “mine all mine” I need to grab more opportunities to do and to teach and to be with them.  I need to slow down around them.  If I don’t show, teach and let them do, who will be doing my job for me?

We’ve Moved!

Well, we’ve almost moved.  Tonight’s our last night at the Residence Inn in Mountain View.  Julie and the girls have been here for two weeks; me, a few days less.  Having lived on the road and out of suitcases for going on seven weeks now, we’re ready to drop anchor.  Tomorrow, we take up full time residence in our rental abode in Palo Alto.  While it has a 2-stall garage, I think it might only be a couple of hundred square feet larger than the house we moved out of at NAS Point Mugu when our family was growing by a Roo.  We’ve been doing our best to downsize over the course of this move.  It will be a good exercise in simplification and trying to distill our lives down a little more to the important stuff.  Since our next move is in less than a year already, we might as well start prepping!

Why are we here?  When I was a junior officer, I volunteered (I think) to ride the USS Kitty Hawk over to Hawaii from San Diego when she was replacing the USS Independence as our forward-deployed carrier in Japan.  We flew some new E-2’s aboard so our sister squadron could trade up so, of course, those aircraft needed some sitters.  Long story short, I ended up “stuck” in Hawaii for about 9 days on full per diem with nothing to do.  I ended up standing one 6-hour watch aboard Indy, in port, during that whole stay.  I thought that was the last good ridiculously awesome deal I’d ever get in the Navy.

Fast-forward ten years.  I threw my hat into the ring and ended up getting selected for a Federal Executive Fellowship.  Eleven officers — out of the whole Navy — are selected to serve at policy think tanks for a year.  A year of independent duty.  A year of “civilian hours”.  A year wearing civilian clothes.  A year of networking and working with some incredibly talented and smart people.  Not that there aren’t those kind of people in the Navy.  There are!  It’s just that Navy people are all alike, in some ways.  It will nice to get a dose of something else for awhile.  So, this is the good deal of the century for me.  You know, aside from getting married and having two beautiful daughters to grow up with watch grow up.

Prosit Neujahr! Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!  Ushering in the new year is the German and really much of Europe’s fireworks holiday.  Since our kids can’t seem to stay awake until midnight, we just enjoy the show from our third story window over a bottle of champagne.  By the way, that bubbley was grown on the opposite side of the Neckar River valley from us and bottled in the town of Esslingen below.  For the most part, it’s an all-amateur night, but what the pyrotechnics lack in size is more than made up for in sheer volume, which is voluminous!  Imagine every other house on your block lighting something off, from rockets to shells to fountains for nearly an hour!  The first year we lived here the skies were clear and it looked like a seething river of light all along the valley that runs into the east side of Stuttgart.  Never seen anything like it before!  Last night was a bit overcast, but our neighborhood was alive with its own show.

Since we live just down the street from Saint Dominikus Catholic Church, we were visited early by the Three Wise Men this afternoon.  Traditionally done on the eve of Epiphany, children and a few adults from the churches will go door to door with songs, collecting a few alms for those less fortunate and leaving a blessing inscribed in chalk over the doorway.  As one German culture website describes:

…today’s Epiphany or Heilige Drei Könige (the “Wise Men,” “Three Kings,” the Magi) in German. To this day, the initials of the Three Kings – C+M+B (Caspar/Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar) – plus the year are inscribed in chalk over doorways in German-speaking countries on the eve of January 6 to protect house and home. (Although historically the three letters are supposed to come from the Latin phrase for “Christ bless this house” – “Christus mansionem benedicat” – few of the people practicing this custom are aware of this fact.) In many parts of Europe, including Austria, Germany, and Switzerland, the Christmas celebration does not end until this date, now considered the arrival of the three “kings of the orient” in Bethlehem – and the end of the “twelve days of Christmas” between Christmas and January 6.

It’s just chalk on a door frame, but there’s something substantive about having your house blessed.  That blessing remains all the year long, renewed at the beginning of the year, as all of us hope to be.  Walking through that door each day, having had a reminder that my family was and is being looked after by something bigger than me is a comfort.  I know it helped get me through a year that was challenging professionally, academically and personally.  It works.  I know.  Because I look at what we’ve accomplished and I know we couldn’t have done it alone.  I couldn’t have made it through the year without the patience, understanding and love of the ladies who live behind that doorway.  And we could not have made it through the year without countless blessings from friends and family, seen and unseen, here and beyond.

Blessings to you and yours in this New Year!

Reflections

Holy orbital milestones, Batman!  Can we really be at the end of the year?  It’s been a blur.  Truthfully, tomorrow won’t be much different from today for your humble scribe, but today is something wholly different from the same day a year go.

We’ve lived in Germany for two years.  It’s a fairy tale land with castles everywhere, men running around in lederhosen and buxom fraulines hoisting liters of beer.  OK, not so much.  Except at the seasonal fests and holidays, which average out to every other weekend it seems.  Sadly(?), we’ve probably seen more of Europe than we have of the Fatherland itself.  Prague in January (awesome), Dublin in February (awesome) and Rome in May (fantastico).  We road-tripped through Innsbruck, Austria and Liechtenstein with Grandpa J and Grandma Linda H in July, also stopping over in Konstanz on the Bodensee.  Grandma Linda L visited in October and let us go to (pre-riot) Athens and Santorini Greece (superfantastic) sans kids to celebrate our tenth anniversary.  Aside from time, the limiting factor on travel this year was the abysmal dollar to Euro exchange rate; although it’s made a strong comeback “thanks” to the global financial crisis!

Feeling a bit lot like Jacob Marley, draped in chains for the last two years, I’ve been a grad student after work and on weekends.  The Navy paid for my masters, but the catch is I had to complete everything in two years.  Two classes a semester was fairly manageable until this May, when I moved into a new position at work.  Most nights, I didn’t make it home until after 7pm, which gave me about an hour to see the kids and down some chow before they had to go to bed.  Needless to say, it forced school to completely fill up the weekends and it forced Mommy to essentially be a single parent without any breaks.  Having married an educated woman (and her cousin, Sallie Mae), she understood why.  But that didn’t make it easy.  I don’t know how she did it.  Super.  Hero.  She is.

Kindergarten

Our little Roo turned 3 summers old this weekend.  I’m not sure what that gets you in the US.  Still a long ways away from a drivers license, voter registration and trying to buy beer at the 7/11.  In Germany, however, it means you can start Kindergarten!

"It's this way!"

Before we left for Greece, she had two trial days at kindergarten, the first with mommy and the second without.  She did super and is definitely ready to follow big sister into the world.  The girls’ schools are right next door to each other and they share a playground, so there’s a chance C&R might catch a glimpse of one another after the mid-day snack.

No tears here, let's go!

Each morning, the kids hang their coats up on their own hook and change out of their street shoes into “house shoes”.  House shoes help keep the dirt down in the classrooms, since they’ll play outside in wet or dry weather.  No worries, there’s no “academic rigor” at this age.  Kindergarten is mostly supervised play and activities for the first couple of years.  Other than songs, there’s no rote memorization for awhile!  Roo was thrilled to be at school and barely said goodbye to Mom and Pop before running off with her new teacher.  Her teachers do speak some English, so they’ll be able to understand R but they won’t likely cater to her; she’ll be encouraged to speak German since all of her new friends will.  C was a year older when she started and took to it fairly quickly.  It will be interesting to see how R does.

The bigger milestone is Momma’s!  If all goes well, it means a few hours each day without kinder for the first time in five years!  Who know what she’ll do!