Birthday!

It has been another busy two weeks, but very happily busy with the 'business' of celebrating Delphine's birthday!  It is amazing to see how she has grown into such a real big girl!

The birthday was necessarily a bit different than previous years, given that we have just moved and she hasn't had the time yet to make really good friends here.  So we celebrated it in San Diego with her friends there one weekend, and then again here with some friends from school last weekend.  Great opportunity for us to practice our cake baking!  And it was fantastic for Delphine to see Simone again and to have her school friends over for the first time.

The parties went really well and everybody had a great time.  Delphine is over the moon about her presents (thank you all) and really liked it.  Both parties were a little less well attended than planned because some people had urgent other things to take care of and on a small party, that makes a big impact.  But luckily there were enough kids left to have a great time and it gave us time to really talk with some grown-ups, which was absolutely great.

On top of that, the girls went to Orange County Discovery Cube last Friday, which was an absolute blast.  The went with Lea's brother, mother and sister-in-law, which was great because Lea's brother will be away until March or so, so a great goodbye was in order.  After the little girls played for ours and discovered a lot, they also had a great dinner at the cheesecake factory.  Yum.

Molly (our cat) is really settling in and has started to explore the neighborhood some more.  She often goes out now and has so far always come back when we call for her.  One of the first nights she got stuck on the roof of our neighbor's garage, but she has since found out how to get down from there.

You will hear more from those neighbors in a little bit because he makes the biggest and scariest Halloween display of the whole town.  Apparently he spends about three days just to set it up, applying all his knowledge from propmaking for the movies.  I am really looking forward to it but he warned us it just may be too scary for the kids....

Lea is working away, staying only just ahead of the students each week.  It is very stressful and too bad that with our busy Summer first and Delphine's birthday now, she never got the time to really get ahead of the class. Luckily she has a plan for her two courses and she mainly needs to create new slides, but that still is a lot of work.  On top of that, she will have her first teaching observation by a member of her tenure committee this week, so more reasons to be nervous.  Of course, she will be fine but it is stressful.

Dirk is still on the beach:  The project he was on got delayed, then it was stuck because the scope was not clear enough and now they are waiting for hardware, software and approval from other departments of the client.  If the project goes through it would be great, from what he knows it combines the results of big data and analytics with a user friendly dashboard.  Right up his street.

our storage place - full

Finally, we have found a great baby sitter (the tall girl on some of the pictures), who has really helped us out in the last few weeks when Jenna had to come home from the nursery twice.  She will also look after the kids some this weekend so we can hopefully get rid of all the boxes that are still stacked around our bed.  There is still a lot to do, so not sure if we will complete it this weekend, but progress would already be fantastic.

A Monday afternoon visit to the beach