Happy New Year

Happy New Year everybody!

Not much is new across the pond. We’re very excited to have a new administration and really hope that the generalized excitement and positivity inspired by the election will continue. Those in the foreign service community are especially hopeful that upcoming changes will be beneficial to the U.S. and it’s reputation/influence abroad.

It has been interesting to watch an election from overseas. Since the U.S. is such a powerful and influential nation, the entire international community was very concerned about the outcome. (With the frequency of Belgian and British news and radio reports on the U.S. election, you would have thought it was happening right next door.) The day-to-day of Jay’s job is usually not impacted by a change in the administration. However, the general morale of the State Department is definitely affected…which does impact him. Jay was hoping that he would have Colin Powell as his boss again, but sadly, that is not the case. He’s trying to be positive about the new Madame Secretary.

Our highlight this month was driving to Dusseldorf, Germany to hang out with Mike. He had a job interview there, so we took advantage of the rare opportunity to visit with family.

For some reason, we thought Dusseldorf would be different. It was smaller and more commercial than we expected. It featured lots of Art Deco and ritzy, high-end shopping. Since we don’t have a lot of Euros to throw around, we mostly just ate yummy food and wandered around while Mike and Jay pointed out a lot of “fahrt” signs. Mike figures that his boys would find Germany hilarious because of the prevalence of “fahrts”. Emily figures that many men are really 10-year-olds in full-grown bodies. (“Fahrt” means “ride, journey, way, or mode of transportation” in German.)

James continues to surprise and amuse us. Our favorite thing about James these days is his little stick-out belly. Some of his shirts are now too small only because they don’t make it past his tummy. He continues to babble almost continually, and his attempts at real words are comical. Buster makes noises that sound like words but they are mostly tonal grunts – like uh-oh turns out to be grunt-grunt (vary the pitch to sound like uh-oh).

We totally rearranged the furniture on the ground floor of our house so that James could have his own space to play in (destroy). So, our dining room has become a family eating area/playroom. We’ll see how well it goes. Emily is just happy to keep the toy mess in one room that glad that James can play in the next room while she prepares dinner.

Buster is getting much better at signing and we are excited to begin a baby signing class this month. A few weeks ago, Emily was helping James eat lunch and he kept making the sign for airplane. She kept looking out the glass doors and around the room trying to figure out why he was signing “airplane.” After a couple of minutes, Emily realized that James wanted her to “zoom” the food into his mouth like an airplane… something she does during many meals, but had failed to do during that one. Once she began “zooming”, James was content to eat his lunch. What a silly kid!