Monday Update

Contagious Disease Report:
The Small Schores are healthy. I repeat, healthy.
I myself am feeling better. On the mend, you might say.
My dearest husband is afflicted. Tuberculosis maybe? Pneumonia mayhaps? Just a really terrible cough? Probable.

But it is rather severe.
And I have been sleeping in another room to avoid the noise and body-wracking bed movements.

So we laid low this weekend. Very low. Like, Derek and I left the house once to exchange a pair of shoes, and no one else left all weekend.
But we were productive invalids.
On Friday, Josh and I had run over to Ikea and bought the rugs and light fixtures, and he spent several hours on Saturday installing las luces. 
And there was light.
And it was good.

Now all of our piso is useable at all hours. What an improvement!

Josh also decided that the time was right to introduce our eldest child to the phenomenon known as Star Trek Wars.
(He hates it when I confuse those two. Apparently one is much more important than the other. I am mostly ignorant of this because I did not see either of them until adulthood.)

Alex likes any movie in which someone bears the title of Princess, and so she enjoyed herself.

This is a fairly busy week homework-wise for Alex. She has a timeline project we worked on over the weekend, and also an Invention Fair coming up in which she must, well,  invent something.
And actually produce it.

Thankfully, science is one of her subjects taught in English.

We have our first meeting with her teacher after school today (they have quarterly parent conferences at the school) and hopefully we can find out more about how she is doing in class.
She's on track to say her "Sietes" today in math. She's doing great with the multiplication, only sometimes the answer comes to her in English and she takes a minute to remember how to translate it.

I still love seeing them in their uniforms.

Derek has a field trip on Friday, and asked me three times this morning to confirm that it is this week, and how many days of normal school does he have to go to first.
Also, he is going to a birthday party on Saturday for three of his little friends from school.
It's so cute to hear him pronounce their names-- he has a much better accent than me or Josh!

Making the RSVP phone call was rather painful for me. Speaking on the phone without the use of body language is so hard. Hopefully she got the message that we're coming.
I would have preferred to skip it altogether, but I know it's important for the kids to be "normal" here, and I suppose birthday parties are part of normal. 

We've been so busy trying to get into a routine and finish settling in that Semana Santa snuck up quickly! The kids will have the week off of school, and since we have the opportunity to live in Europe, we want to do something...European.
So we're trying to research where to go and what to do, all rather last-minute.
Hopefully we'll get a chance to see some other countries, but if not we'll definitely do day-trips to the smaller towns around Madrid.

Here is a picture of a big baby head. It's outside the train station and also where we transfer busses on the way home from school.

 

It faces another baby head, but this one is sleeping. I like it better, because as any mother knows, a sleeping baby is the best kind.

This picture is rather non-descript. However, I am in it.
And if I were to die a sudden and tragic death, it would be nice to have a few pictures by which my children could remember me. 

 And that wraps up the Monday Update.