I just checked this site in the new Internet Explorer and it is very broken :S

I will work on this and get back to you. In the meantime, why don’t you non-tech people download a much better browser: www.getfirefox.com

Something we’ve definitely taken advantage of here in Belgium is the Child Development Center (CDC). Almost every friday night they have a “parent’s-night out” where they will watch the kids from 7pm-midnight. We’ve used it 4 times already and will do this at least once a month. It’s so nice to have because when you are new somewhere, you don’t know anyone to watch the kids, but you still want to get out and go to a bar or a museum, etc.

My goal is to get Drew to take at least one day off each month while the kids have school and he and I can go venture around town doing grown-up things. So far so good.

Another Halloween has come and gone for the mighty Smith Clan. I thought that we took it seriously, but in reality the Belgians go hardcore and don’t stop. They take a whole week off after the “blessed” day, and do nothing. They actually are celebrating all saints day (the day AFTER Halloween), but I don’t have to acknowledge that and neither should any of you. They do take the whole week off though… which is good because it makes driving around easy. But I am getting ahead of myself.

I was lucky enough to be home for Halloween and got to see the boys walk from house to house saying trick or treat. Abe of course trampled every flower in every front yard we went through and little mister E told on him the entire time. So there you had Anakin Skywalker and Chewbaca walking around a truly international comunity and people actually recognized them for who they were supposed to be. Another triumph for American pop culture!!

I think that it could have been better only by my being dressed as a Mad Cow or something equally offensive. Maybe an Insane Clown from the posse. Where do I get this stuff? Who knows? I have hit my head on the various low hanging parts of this Belgian house five times this week!! Crap… double crap!! Maybe that is where it comes from.

Overall, things are going as well as can be expected from here. On the US front, we still haven’t sold our house yet. We have a contingency offer, but it is still showing.

The boys are doing pretty well! Ian has a lot of fun with school and is turning out to be quite the goalie in soccer. On his team he has french, german, spanish, and american teammates. I think it’s pretty cool that he gets exposed to all of these kids. A definite once in a lifetime experience. Abe is also doing great. He goes to daycare part-time and will start pre-school in decemeber. Here in Belgium they start at 2.5 years old

Drew is adjusting to work better. He took command on October 1 and is having a blast with that as you can imagine I will probably not get a job locally here in Belgium unless I really master the french language. There are programming jobs on base, but I’m not looking at anything right now though.

This coming week is a school holiday so we will be taking a couple of day trips. One day to Paris and another to Amsterdam. I will update with pictures then. I hope everyone is doing well!

Well, when I decided to start this blog a few months ago, I asked a friend if she could design an image or a header for it and she came up with the image of the 4 of us with the globe behind us. I’ve been wanting to take the time to redesign the site around that image, but just never had the opportunity. This weekend I made that happen.

So, this is the official “Wandering Family” design. I’ll be making tweaks here and there, but overall, it’s complete. I hope everyone likes it. I think it’s pretty damn neat!

Enough said

Normally, this wouldn’t be cause for it’s own blog post, but with SO many things going wrong (our toilet broke today and Grace had explosive diarrhea in the middle of the night), but last night, Drew got the satellite working for our Armed Forces Satellite.

We don’t have many chances (7 I think), but I do get to hear someone speak in a language I understand and I’m watching the Denver football game even if they aren’t playing very well. So right now, I am enjoying this moment.

The boys are very happy to be together again and to have each other to play with. I know it won’t last forever, but it is really cool that they are friends right now. They really miss their friends in Georgia and ask about them all of the time. They like to look at their pictures.

Abe is definitely in the terrible two’s stage. He is much different than Ian and he expresses it differently. He doesn’t really do the screaming for 30 minutes thing; he just gets pissed off and has no problem letting you know.

Ian on the other hand can’t quite understand how it is Abe, rather than he, who always seems to be in trouble. He has been very good at school and pretty good at home too. It is certainly nice to not have them both in trouble at the same time.

Ian lost his first tooth last week and yesterday was his first day at kindergarten. He is pretty excited about it all.

To the uninitiated, this, my friends and family is a blog. In case you are wondering, what the heck is a blog, I will fill you in. A blog is short for the word weblog. In a sense it is just like a journal. But because it’s on the web, it is public and open for everyone’s comments.

What we want this website to be is a place for us to record our what’s been going on with our family. You can leave comments and ask questions on anything you’d like. Eventually we will get a photo gallery up for everyone to see.

Because we move around so often, it is hard to remember to email everyone in our family as well as everyone that we’ve grown close with. So now the pressure is on you. If we keep this updated as I hope we will, you will have no reason to NOT know what’s going on. If you want to know how we are, just check the website!

This better not replace phone calls, but being that there will be quite a large pond between us, it can get kind of expensive and I hope this will help!

-Sara