School, traveling and more

This past week has been busy. We spend 5 days down in North Carolina with cousins, which is always fun. The girls have really become great friends and love playing together from dressing up to barbies and the new one polly pockets. Raquel came home requesting barbies and polly pockets, I guess I know what I'll be getting her for Christmas.

This week we moved Raquel from 2 days/week to 3 days a week preschool, I think she likes it so far but we will give it another week. She did request to go back to her other class but I think its just because it was smaller which will change next month since they are adding more kids to make it full. She is really enjoying school and learning to identify all the letters in her name. Just today I put a movie on for her and the credits came up and she said there is an R like in my name and A and L. We sure are proud of her and how well she is learning and playing with others at school.

Natalya turned 10 months this week and is getting cuter everyday. She has a new tooth making two total and as soon as I can capture it I'll try to take a picture with her cute smile and teeth. I enjoy the time that I get to spend with Natalya alone now that Raquel is in school. Lots of it is spent with Natalya napping but the few hours a week that we get is lots of fun. She is learning to play by her self and not needing to be next to me all the time and is growing up fast. We are working on saying dada and hopefully she will have mastered that by the time Mike gets home. She gets so excited when I show her pictures of Mike and say dada.

Here are some pictures of Natalya showing off her teeth.

We are all doing well so far since Mike left, the girls seem to be fine and I'm holding up. We have had lots of nice friends and neighbors have us over for dinner and play-dates which helps break of the day.

Mike is doing fine, he has spent his time setting up a trauma bay which they hope they never have to use and spending time at the TMC. He has had no real trauma issues to deal with, except for a solider who fell which resulted in a concussion and a very large laceration. Some days are pretty boring, but boring it good! Which may result in him never wanting to watch a movie again, since he has been able to walk a few. He has had a chance to go and have dinner with the Germans a couple of times. This last time he went to one of the German BBQ's with some other soldiers from Greece and Belgium. I guess the Germans have a pretty nice hospital facility with state of the art equipment and they even have a pool. The Afghan people seem to be very nice and polite (the few he has met), there is poverty everywhere. He went shooting the other day and about 20 kids were around them waiting to collect the brass (which is not a good thing for the soldiers.) Unfortunately his internet is so slow that we can only email and not video or even voice chat like we had hoped. Internet is still better than snail mail!