The Year in Review - January

One year today we moved to the Northwest. We arrived in time for a snow storm that was to close school for 2 days the first week of school. We were living in an apartment in Issaquah and were quite house-bound as the apartment was up a steep hill and I did not know where even the nearest grocery store was. Here are the kids showing the snow behind the apartment.


See the snow!

Madeleine started at the French Immersion School of Washington (FISW) in Kindergarten. We chose the school partly because of my fetish for French and partly due to the public schools here only offering 4 half days of kindergarten. In TX, Madeleine had already had 6 months of full day, 5 day per week kindergarten. Since we had both very successfully made the transition, kindergarten in the public schools felt like a step backwards. The school was a great decision and almost from the first day Madeleine had new friends.

Today, looking back, I can't believe how easy this part of the transition was, yet was the one we dreaded the most. (Madeleine had made the summer of '04 pretty miserable for us as she cried about missing her TX friends and how she didn't want to move.) The hunt for a house and the sticker shock overall was a much more difficult part of the transition. Luckily T-Mobile was very understanding and we were housed for almost 5 months in the lovely apartment in Talus.