Lukas was watching Marie practice the violin and said he wants to take violin lessons, so I gave him the same answer I gave Marie four or five years ago: you have to learn the piano first. (Lots of reasons, but that's not the topic right now--maybe I'll write about why another time!) So Lukas asked for a piano lesson, and very, very happily, the place we're staying has a piano. Our piano books are all in the shipment, which won't arrive for another few weeks, but his interest is NOW, and in any case, we should take advantage of having access to a piano for the next couple of weeks, since we're unlikely to have a piano once we've found a place to rent...

So I started out by asking Lukas to describe the piano, which he did: "Well, it has keys that make the hammers inside hit those big strings to make a sound, and brakes (peddles...), and shiny wood, and a thing to put up to put the notes on, and designs, and a bench, and our piano at home had a lot of dust on it." (Our piano back in Germany probably doesn't have any dust on it anymore, as we sold it to a German-German family...) I rather liked his description. :-)

We went on to talk about black keys and white keys and patterns and up and down and the musical alphabet and he found all the C's and learned middle-C position, and we're finished for today.

Having received much scolding about not updating my blog, I'm going to try to write something this morning. We'll see how far I get...

To start with, I've already given up on the idea of anonymity--I'm just not any good at that. :-) So the absolutely most current updates on each member of the family: my husband, Jörn, is still in pajamas and is standing at the stove making scrambled eggs; Marie just heard me ask Jörn what he is making and suddenly decided to be awake, so has just gotten up;  Jacob just had a shower and was hanging up his towel when I started this sentence; Lukas just got out of the shower himself (it's taking a long time to write this sentence...), Katie is dressed and playing with Legos, and Helen is also dressed and is sitting in the buggy (stroller, pushchair--you know, a thing on wheels for transporting small children, or, in our case, mostly for putting them someplace while I'm typing so that she doesn't "help" me) next to me, watching Lukas set the table. Katie and Helen and I were up at 7:00 and have already had breakfast, and then Lukas was up next, so I gave him Helen so I could have a shower and get dressed.

As for where we are: in the guest flat of an "internet friend" (whom we have now of course met in real-life!), in a very nice neighborhood in Larnaka, Cyprus. We stayed in another guest flat the first almost-week, then came here three days ago. The children have been having a wonderful time with the Legos, K'nex, and books, and I've enjoyed the books and piano, but neither as much as I'd like, since we also have internet connection here, so I've spent more time on the internet trying to catch up with e-mail and my favorite blogs than I have reading or playing the piano. Helen, Jörn, and I have a very comfortable bed with a duvet (we don't do well with separate sheets and blankets!) and have no desire to change beds. Then there's a nice room with two beds, in which no child wants to sleep: everyone wants to sleep in the sofa-bed. They keep switching around who sleeps where, so last night Marie had the room with two beds all to herself, Lukas and Katie slept in the sofa-bed, and Jacob slept UNDER the sofa bed.

We're looking for someplace to live. I'd really like to live in this area, where we can get downtown and to shops and so on on foot, and it's also not far from a big park by the salt lakes (which have water and flamingoes right now, but dry up later on), where there are lots of trees, a great playground, and wide paths where the children can run and yell without driving everybody crazy, and where we could ride bicycles, if we had any. (We brought Lukas's bicycle and the bike trailer is coming in the shipment, but I didn't end up having time to wrap up my bike for bringing, so left it at a friend's house for her to sell, and we'd already sold Marie's bike and given away Jacob's, as neither of them were very good, so we need three more bicycles. Jörn doesn't ride a bike, and Katie and Helen can ride in the trailer.) We've looked at a house and three apartments here, two of which we're still considering, and we'd like to see a few more.

We also looked at two houses out "in the country" closer to where Jörn is working. One of them was very easy to rule out, as it had a big, totally un-fenced swimming pool, and the owner repeated several times while we were there that one of the neighbors lives in Israel and only visits a few times a year, but we would need to be very quiet while he is there. Yeah, right. It's not like I would MIND if the children were quiet for a couple of weeks at a time several times a year, but I haven't figured out how to make that work yet. The other house was nicer and Jörn could walk to work from it, but the biggest drawback is that there would be NO place for the children to play. With the beach about 20 meters away, I'd be paranoid about letting them out by themselves. No playground, no park, no place for a six-year-old to ride a bike, the children couldn't go to the bakery or anyplace else by themselves. It had never occurred to me that I might someday have a choice between the city and the country and would CHOOSE the city! I grew up in the country and loved it--but I wasn't the one doing the driving of five children to dozens of different places, and at home, we had four acres of land, lots of trees to climb and places to hide, and lived at the end of a (then) very quiet road, so could roam pretty far pretty safely. If we could have something like that here and could have some animals, I'd be willing to do the driving, and we'd be happier at home with less desire to GO someplace anyway. But that's not what we would have: the children would have considerably less freedom than in the city, especially with big bodies of water (whether a swimming pool or the Mediterranean...) nearby, we wouldn't have animals, AND we would have to drive anywhere.

And the "city" isn't exactly big, nowhere near the size of where we've lived the last seven years (or, for that matter, any of the places I've lived in the last 17 years). And my husband would still only have to drive about 15 minutes to work, and if I did want the car, I could take him to work and pick him up, just as I often did in Germany. Not that we have a car yet, either, but we're looking for one...but this post is more than long enough already, so I won't go into those debates right now!

I meant to write about the last few weeks, instead, I spent a bunch of time trying to figure out why the link to my old blog wouldn't work. I wasn't successful (it keeps claiming a different URL than I typed in!), so here it is the old-fashioned way: www.homeschoolblogger.com/sheilalange/ .

And I think that's all I'm going to write for tonight after all, as I'm very tired! No culture shock, as such (although I'm still confused about how to cross streets...), but somehow exhausting anyway. It's only 9:45, and that would only be 8:45 German time, and I'm going to bed. (I'm sure I'll read at least a little while first, though. :-) )

My newest idea for procrastinating is to create a new blog. "Create" might not be quite the right word, seeing as there is nothing new under the sun anyway, and looking through the templates available here, I still liked the books best, so here I am. :-) As for the exciting new title, it was my husband's idea! He did mean it as a joke, but he didn't like any of the suggestions I had, either, so I figure this title is as good as any other. My purpose for this blog isn't to gain a huge readership, but just to keep people who already know me updated on our crazy life! :-)

By way of introduction, I haven't decided yet just how "anonymous" I'll try to be here--I had good reason to try to be anonymous before, and didn't bother, so I'm not likely to stay so on here, either, but for now I'll just use initials. We have three daughters--M is 11, K is three, and H is 3 1/2 months--and two sons--J is nine and L is six. We also have three babies waiting for us in heaven, T, A, and C, who were born, respectively, at 12, 8, and 10 weeks gestation.

For anyone who has stumbled across this by accident and has read this far and is at all curious who we are, "Trying to Homeschool in Germany" was my first blog and gives a fair picture of our lives in the last few years, I think, but I do intend to slowly get more information on here. If people ask questions, I'll answer them! But not necessarily immediately, as procrastination can't go on forever and I have plenty of other things that I HAVE to do. In three weeks and five days we're moving to Cyprus, and one week before that, the stuff we're taking (mostly books--lots and lots of books!) will be picked up for shipping. I'm very good at packing, but very bad at sorting!

I did pack one box tonight, with all sorts of odd things such as the pegboard for keeping track of which child is supposed to be doing what and who's in trouble (the children were happy to see that go into a box!), art supplies, doll clothes, a few stuffed animals (they make great fillers!), and some other miscellaneous toys. That makes 14 boxes packed for moving so far (9 of them with books--still have a looooong way to go with packing books...), and we've already taken 6 boxes to be stored in a friend's attic, so progress IS slowly being made!