Wednesday, July 14, 2010

A year in review since we’re too lazy to do any actual posting…

O'Bryen finished 4th grade while being on the honor roll the whole year. She has also finally been accepted into the gifted program for next year. Gavriella finished 2nd grade with excellent marks as well. It was discovered this past month that she is far-sighted. So she now has a snazzy pair of Pokemon framed reading glasses. Speaking of Pokemon, the girls are absolutely obsessed. They talk about it ALL THE TIME and seem to know everything about all of them. Their parents however have no idea what they are talking about. Gavriella also learned how to ride a bike this year. She was terrified of it for about 10 months, but then figured it out and now she looooves it. They both joined scouts this year. O'Bryen was a Girl Scout and Gavriella was a Brownie. They had a great time and made new friends.

Siobhan finished her first year of preschool and had a great time! She learned so many things and made a lot of friends. She is currently taking a dance class here on base and is loving it. Hopefully she can do it some more in the fall. Malcolm is turning into a little boy. He uses sentences now and tries to do everything his big sisters do. He also thinks that boys are awesome and loves to go out and play with the big boys. He’ll be very happy to go to school in the fall where he can play all day.

Chris was promoted to Lieutenant Commander last month. We are all very proud of him and the hard work he did to get there. He has had to do even more traveling since November when I last posted. He has been to Germany many times and in fact is there this week.

I have taken up skating again. I forgot how much I loved it. I haven’t done it as much as I would like, but am hoping to start skating more. I pretty much spend my time holding down the fort and keeping things together. I realized just the other day I was doing laundry for 4 days straight. Currently it’s all in my bedroom waiting to be folded. Hopefully I can finally get those done today.

Our beloved dog Rivka who was still in the US died in January. The kids and I were devastated. Hopefully when we move back we can get a Chi from a rescue group. However also in January, a local stray cat decided she needed to live here. She made herself welcome and everything, it was strange for a stray to do that. But anyway, she did and was also pregnant. So we did our best with her and she had her kittens in our office. It was really cool to see. She had 3, a boy and 2 girls. The boy and one girl we gave to a couple here on base and we still have the 3rd kitten and mama. We also got mama spayed so she’ll never have kittens again.

As far as traveling, we spent a day last month in Capri. It’s an island in the bay here. It was gorgeous and we did see the Blue Grotto, but it was jam packed full of tourists. There were a few cruise ships in town, so we were surrounded by Americans. It was kindof weird. Chris had a conference to go to in Germany in April, so we went with him. We stayed at a resort owned by the Army. It’s a very popular destination for servicemembers in Europe. It was very nice, but very expensive. I don’t know if we’ll go again. It was in the mountains in Bavaria, along the Austrian border. We drove the 12 hours there, so we drove up the boot for the first time. Italy is gorgeous. We don’t see the beauty living in Naples. There’s way too much trash and mafia influence here. But the rest of Italy is lovely. It was nice to see it finally. I’m hoping we can take some trips before school starts. The last week of June the big girls and I went to London for 5 days. Honestly, we went because They Might Be Giants were playing a show for families, which they never ever do. So we went and got to spend more time in London since we didn’t get to spend as much time there in November. It was fabulous, but we were missing the babies towards the end. And Italy. I was ready to get back to Italy. Hopefully we will go to Israel this fall and next year to Ireland. The girls and I are hoping that Chris can get orders to somewhere else in Europe for our next tour. We’re loving it over here and are not too eager to live in the US again. We’ll see.