Next steps

I’m sitting on the floor in my pjs, surrounded by passports, birth certificates, immunization records, and visa information and scanning the documents one by one. We don’t have orders in hand, but we’ve been given verbal notice that we will be moving this summer so that means I have a mountain of paperwork to tackle to get the kids registered for school next year. I’ve already spent 3 hours on it and I’m only a fraction of the way through. I say this every time we move, but doing everything times 4 really becomes a logistical nightmare. At least since it’s all submitted electronically this time I’m not getting cramps in my hand from filling out forms times 4. On the flip side, it would be faster to do it by hand since my internet has been stupid lately. (like right now when I’m trying to publish this post and it’s down again.)

Scan Camille’s passport, upload to school database. Scan Caleb’s passport, upload to school database. Internet dropped out midway through the upload. Log back in, get back to Caleb’s application, find his passport scan, attach and upload and cross my fingers that it will go this time. Figure out how to turn a jpeg into a PDF so that I can submit Calvin’s passport in the proper format since he’s out of the country in Germany this week for a school conference and has his passports with him. I can wait until he gets back, but I work better when I have momentum and when I can do each section for all the kids at the same time.

Josh came home over the weekend. Just in time to save me from a big water leak in the kitchen. The dishwasher broke while he was gone and the repair people came to fix it and then reconnected it improperly so anytime we turned on the kitchen faucet water would run out of the pipes below the sink. Good times. And the internet is still spotty, but at least he’s around to commiserate and share my pain.

I know I haven’t said where we are moving. I didn’t forget. Knowing the Marine Corps and how things can always change, I’m reluctant to share it until it’s in black and white, hard copy orders. If I told you where we might be moving, then yes, that’s where we’re going. The reason there’s a rush to get the school admission forms completed is because the kids are applying to a American private school where there’s a long waiting list, but because they are US military kids they have priority for any available spots until March 1st. So I’m taking the verbal, “expect to get orders to XXXX soon” as confirmation and running with it.

What else is going on here? We’re in the middle of soccer season(s). 
And firmly in the middle of our winter. I think it was 55F which in this part of the world comes with a freeze warning. 

But we bundled up and made the best of it.

Some came better prepared than others. Caleb, who is rarely cold, didn’t think he needed a jacket — lucky for him, Carter let him put on his sweatpants for a few minutes when he realized he had chosen poorly.

The reason Carter was so well prepared was because the week before (when we were sweating and getting sunburned on an 85 degree day, btw), Carter came very ill-prepared for his game. Somehow he only packed one soccer cleat. He had to beg a shoe from a friend who was sitting on the sidelines. 

3 hours later and I’m still working. At least in the downtime while I wait for each piece to be added to our electronic application (grrr, it just kicked me off again while I was uploading Carter’s shot record scans — maybe this next country will have more reliable internet, but I doubt it.) I got this blog post written and discovered there was a Beyonce Super Bowl controversy (really?) and checked in on the US election updates which I’ve decided are best viewed from afar.

Next up? School transcripts, standardized test scores, teacher evaluations/references, passport photos . . . times 4.