brrrrr

The cold is upon us, so sad, so sad. I haven't actually turned on the heat in the house yet, but the day is coming very soon. Today we're just wearing sweaters and socks.

The news from school this week: M's a great reader! OK, we already knew that, but it's nice that he's appreciated. His class is, of course, quite diverse. There are some kids who only speak English at home, some who are bilingual English/something, some who speak other languages at home but attended English preschool, a few who are totally new to English. Anyway, it makes the kids like M look brilliant. His best buds so far: one is Polish/Japanese and one is Ukranian/Norwegian. As other international school parents have told us, we're one of the boring families -- everyone's from the same country? Snore.

We threw a big housewarming party this weekend. We were hoping to have it partially in the backyard, but it was too chilly. So we learned what the capacity of our living room is. I think this is by far the most people we've ever hosted for before and it went pretty well. Actually it went really well, except for my being stressed about it :) We had plenty of food and plates, etc. I learned that fruit with dip was way more popular than chocolate cake (I'm not sure this can be taken as a general rule, can it? Seems so counter-intuitive.) I was a little worried that the big kids would be bored with the lack of X Box or other exciting stuff, but they amused themselves in the garage with our moving boxes. Too much fun, apparently. The only real downer was V -- the girl's just having adjustment issues right now. When the first family arrived, she started pulling on my sweater and pretty much fussed until people started leaving. This is quite normal for some clingy children, much to their parents' dismay, but not normal for V. Alas. I really thought she'd be happy with the extra mommy time she's getting now, but she's more attached to M than I thought? She seems to need lots more attention than before school started.