I’m sorry that I haven’t been great at updating the blog lately. The last two weeks have been Spring Break for the kids. Even John finished up his language class and had a break before officially starting work with TeachBeyond. So we spent the time mostly relaxing and enjoying a few outings. We even got to spend some time with our friends the Greathouses.

The weather unfortunately was not very spring-like. We hear from Germans and Americans alike that this weather has been quite odd and frustrating for this late in the year. This week promises to start getting warm and then hopefully we’ll be able to enjoy an actual Spring in Germany. We are all ready for it.

John’s time off meant we accomplished some things that had been on hold for us. We bought a van! It’s a old VW 8 passenger van and we’ve enjoyed a couple shopping trips in it already. Thanks to the Greathouses we were able to figure out the buying/registering process. And thanks again to the Greathouses, who were selling a great bed, John and I are now no longer sleeping on the floor.

This week John has been setting up meetings and starting plans for work with TeachBeyond, as well as getting both his home office and work office set up. Will started back to Kindergarten, but then unfortunately caught a stomach bug that is making its way through the Kindergarten. In fact so many teachers and kids were ill that they have closed the Kindergarten for the rest of the week. Thankfully Will seems to be improving pretty quickly. Elise started her week with a 4th grade retreat in the Black Forest. She will get back later this afternoon, so I don’t know yet how it went from her point of view, but I did get a glowing report from her teacher. Seth and I are attempting to get back into our regular weekly schedule as well as thinking through ways to interact more with others in the community.

I’ve included some pictures, most of them are actually from an outing we took before Spring break on a rare warm day. We went to the castle ruins in Lörrach, which is a city very near here.