Six Months Down The Track...

It's been nearly 7 months since my last post (I almost feel like I'm in a confessional!)...the last time I wrote we had just returned from China, and had plans to be in Singapore for a long time. Now as I type, we are halfway through our final year here in Singapore - in another 6 months time we will be farewelling this wonderful city-state and heading off on our next adventure - to the Netherlands! We are very fortunate to have been offered what we see as an opportunity of a life-time - to live and work in Europe :-) We will be living in a town called Wassenaar and teaching at/attending the American School of the Hague (ASH). Lachlan and Caleb are excited about experiencing winter, spring and autumn, in contrast to the tropical heat we have here year-round...and they're also excited at the prospect of no school uniform!

Within a couple of hours of us telling the boys about our impending move they had already searched the internet and discovered that there are three Legolands and one Disneyland relatively nearby in Europe :-) There is much to plan and organise over the coming months but I love that challenge and am already immersing myself in real estate websites and Netherlands information. Very exciting!! It won't be easy to say goodbye to Singapore though - we have loved living here and we have many friends whom we will be sad to say goodbye to. Hopefully we will have lots of visitors in our new home...

Caleb is enjoying 2nd grade - he has a wonderful teacher, Trent Williams, who really 'gets' Caleb's quirky humour and outlook on life. He has a best friend, Joshua, and lots of other good friends, and enjoys every subject area - although he says RLA (Reading Language Arts) is his favorite. His cartooning skills are constantly being honed, and his version of doodling is to to draw little characters with funny speech bubbles on all his work (including his spelling tests!). It seems that Caleb has appointed himself as the class clown but, fortunately, even with his goofiness he is doing very well at school. He continues to learn the piano, has tennis lessons every Friday afternoon, and is passionate about all things dog-related. He has also become an enthusiast of our new Nintendo Wii (an unexpected, but much enjoyed, Xmas present!) and his boxing moves can be quite entertaining:

Lachlan is in 6th grade which, in our American School system is the first year of middle school. For the Aussie's reading this post, 6th grade here is very much like the first year of secondary school in Australia - a different teacher and room for each class, lockers for all belongings, and an expectation of organisation which has been Lachlan's biggest challenge so far! Having said that, he is doing very well in his subjects and has achieved mostly A's with a couple of B's for both the first and second quarters of the school year. He continues to learn the violin and actually has his first ever violin exam in a couple of weeks. I think I am more worried than he is - his laid-back approach to life means that the word stress rarely enters Lachlan's vocabulary! He is a sociable child who will greet anyone with a smile and a friendly conversation. Of the four of us, he will probably adjust to our new school and home the easiest as he loves to meet new people and approaches new situations with an ease that I envy :-)

Darrell is currently in the midst of preparing for a trip to India at the end of March. He is taking a group of strings students and together they will perform for, and with, the music students of Woodstock school where we taught in 1995. They will also get to do a bit of touring which will include the Taj Mahal so it is a very exciting trip to look forward to and one which he has been trying to organise for a couple of years. Two weeks ago he very successfully helped coordinate a major music festival (International Honor Orchestra) held at our school from February 4 - 7. In the past this festival has been held in other countries and Darrell has taken part as a teacher or conductor, but this year he was an integral part of the planning. It was a huge undertaking for which he was extremely organised and insightful. I was very proud of him - this was one of the biggest festivals of its kind with a total of 180+ students coming from around the world to participate in 3 days of tutorials, rehearsals, master classes and concerts with world-class teachers.

I continue to potter along, relishing my family of boys, enjoying my job as K-2 ESOL teacher, and soaking in the lifestyle that Singapore offers. In the Netherlands I will be teaching mainstream 1st grade which will be a change but one I am looking forward to. 1st graders are so quirky with their mouths full of loose or missing teeth and an enthusiasm for school that seems to diminish as kids get older!

I have become a fan of Facebook over the past 12 months and through it have been able to reconnect with many friends from the past. The itinerate lifestyle we have chosen sometimes makes it difficult to maintain contact with family & friends, but Facebook and emails help make that so much easier. If you are on Facebook and are not yet my 'friend' please let me know! How did we ever survive before the internet was created?!?

We had a wonderful break over Christmas catching up with our family in Australia. Darrell's family are all in the Newcastle area so we had a week, including Christmas Day, with his Mum, as well as his sister, brother and their families. We then moved on to Tuross Head on the NSW South Coast where my Mum and Dad have recently moved. 16 of us, including my parents, us, my sister + family and my brother + family all lived in the same house for a week - and survived to tell the tale!! It was a wonderful week - my boys got to spend loads of time with their cousins, and the adults all had plenty of time to just relax, hang out, and catch up. I also got to catch up with some of my cousins and their extended families so it was a very happy time :-) On our way back to Singapore from Australia we spent a week in Bali, one of our favorite holiday destinations. For the first time ever, we all got sick at the same time: 'Bali belly' hit us with a vengeance! Fortunately it only lasted a day or two with each of us but it made for a very quiet week with little adventure or touring.

During the past 6 months we have had three birthdays in our family: Caleb turned 8 in November, I turned 43 (yes, it is deliberately small so you can gloss right over the number!) in September, and Darrell turned 50 on January 21! I can officially now say that I am married to someone in their 50's - makes me feel SO much younger! Darrell didn't want a party or fanfare so we marked his big day quietly - he feels that his real present is our move to Europe:-)

Lachlan will turn 12 on March 10...and Darrell and I celebrated 19 years of marriage on January 1. We worked out that at the time of this particular anniversary we had spent exactly half our married life living in Australia and half of it living out of Australia :-)

That's it in a nutshell... I hope 2009 is shaping up to be a good one for you - keep in touch...