"Born in the U.S.A."

Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - Day 19 Living Down Under

So being new in town, 4 people have my new mobile number.  Erich, The US Embassy, our bank, and the twins' school.  So when Erich was sitting beside me at lunch and my phone rang, I knew it couldn't be good.  Sure enough, Chaney had gotten hurt in gym.  The school wanted me to check her out so I drove out to the school. She ended up being okay but wasn't happy when it was time for me to leave.  But it all worked out.

Chaney did well during school drop off.  She started to panic a little bit as I walked away.  But I disappeared into the crowd and the teacher took her hand.  Chaney and Charlie are both making friends and we've been invited to two playdates.   Charlie asks a million questions during the day.  Chaney finds the work "hard" and shuts down easily.  We aren't pushing her yet.  The teacher wants her to get settled a bit more and feel good about school.  We have homework  every night and I'm hoping that gets easier. (I'll write more about that in another post)

Today I heard "Born in the U.S.A." by Bruce Springsteen on the radio.  I usually listen to about 1 minute of it and then turn it off because it's a bit monotonous.  This time I listened to (almost) all of the song.  I felt a bit obligated. 

Today we picked up our other new car. Finally!  We now have our own cars.  I feel like I'm pretty confident with driving on the left now.  Every so often I still have a flashback to driving on the right.  And I still get a bit nervous driving places I haven't driven before.  I'm finding it the most difficult to pull into parking spaces. This is a bit surprising.  It completely throws me off being on the right when pulling into a spot.  And I also think that the parking spaces are smaller here. 

My Random Thoughts and Observations...

• They don't sell acetaminophen down here.  No Tylenol. 
• I miss ice makers.  I thought filling ice cube trays was so 1980.  Nope. I'm going to be filling a lot of ice cube trays in the next 3 years.
• This was in the candy aisle and I don't understand:

  

  What in the heck is musk flavor?