When we got here, we stayed in a hotel for two weeks until we could move into our housing. The second day we were here, we drove by our new neighborhood, and I decided that I hated it, so we spent the following four days desperately scouring the Internet and lurking down streets trying to find another place to live. We found relatively little in our price range (the BAH - housing allowance - out here is quite small comparatively, and that sucks). Bug hated looking at houses. Bug hated doing everything. We found one that we really liked that seemed too good to be true (although not in the school we wanted) and it turned out it WAS too good to be true, since we were told the wrong amount for rent, and didn't find out until after we had already submitted the application, I had mentally moved all of our stuff in, and they called to tell us that we got it, and confirmed the rent and I was all, wait what? That's a nine-hundred dollar discrepancy over what we were told when we first toured it.
Distraught and frustrated, I called our original housing office and begged (bullied?) our way to see a home on the inside before our move-in date. I figured seeing the inside may help me not be so depressed about the whole thing. And it did, sort of. I decided, after attending my first PTA meeting (I know, right??) I wanted the elementary school so badly that I would suck it up with minimal complaining.
Then Bug started Kindergarten from the hotel.
But this is across the street from our house, so, OK.
The Golf took forever to get here, too, and Matt has pledged to never ship a car again because it was pretty much an enormous disaster. When it did finally arrive (three days after the van was back in the shop and we had borrowed assorted cars from friends and then got a rental car to get around...) it was covered in oil and filth and oh, also pretty dented on the top. Don't worry, I have to take it to get two separate estimates, then send those in with some other sort of form to start the claim process to get them to fix that. Argh! Moving is the pits.
The kids at the boardwalk.
Other things in not necessarily chronological order:
- The new school called an IEP meeting the first week. It's now the last week of September and we have still not come to Jesus about what it's going to say. I was frustrated in the first meeting, because they kept asking me questions that were not my job to answer. Her previous IEP was written for preschool, because she was in preschool. I do not know how to translate that to Kindergarten. That is YOUR job. I do not know what goes on, specifically, in a Kindergarten classroom, or what a typical Kindergarten student should or should not know. I sent an email after the meeting expressing this frustration to the group, and got a personal phone call from the Assistant Principal (she is the main point person from the administration, who handles all of the IEP stuff) making sure that I knew that they had her best interests in mind, blah blah blah. I'm glad that she called, and I appreciated that, but...
We still do not have a final document, because... I don't know why. I have sent them two sets of revisions, and none of the changes are made when I get it back. I write copious notes on the document, asking questions, explaining things, adding background information, and NONE of it gets answered or applied. There are also an appalling number of grammatical errors that they refuse(?) to correct. I'm not trying to change the goals, or the hours, or how the service providers do their work. What I am trying to change is all of the background information on Bug so that it reads in a sensical, accurate manner. I have a meeting tomorrow at school (my suggestion) so that I can just sit down with them and watch them make the changes. In theory.
- We lucked out and didn't have to sit on a waiting list here in Virginia to get respite services. We met with our respite coordinator the first week we were here, in our hotel room. We were excited! Wow, what luck that we didn't have to wait another six months! But the joke was on us, because A) no one here in the Bible Belt wants to work on Sunday mornings (which is our number one day), so we got NO responses from anyone, and B) even when I gave in and changed the schedule and said "so if it's not every Sunday, that's OK" we still did not get any responses, because "no one wants to drive to _____," which is the military base that we live on. So no one who works for this military service wants to drive to our home on base to work. We don't even live that far from everything! I am baffled and frustrated and mainly irritated. I wrote a super strong email to our coordinator about my thoughts on this, and I got an out-of-office reply... that she was on bereavement leave. FUCK. I'm pretty sure her mother passed away, as she mentioned when we first met that she was really sick. So now I'm sitting here feeling like an ass about being frustrated when this person just lost their mother, BUT STILL. I would like the hours we are entitled to. Right? Right.
- I ran a race this last weekend and was the third woman to cross the finish line! Podium finish! It was the windiest race of my life. There was supposed to be this big Neptune Festival this weekend on the boardwalk and they canceled most of it due to the weather. They changed the races, too, moving the course and bumping the 8K (what I had originally planned on running) to a 5K (a totally different race to run, strategy and fitness-wise -- meaning, an 8K has some strategy, where a 5K is "run as hard and fast as you can"). Luckily the rain held off during the race, but the wind was 30+ mph which was INSANE.
Getting a high five and my award!
- Matt turned 32!
- It is so humid here, I can't even.
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