Settling In

Bit by bit we are really settling in. We finally managed to locate a car - a 2001 Honday Odyssey. It got checked out by our mechanic today and B"H passed with flying colors. There are a couple of minor things that could be fixed, but nothing urgent. I like it better than our old Odyssey. It seats seven instead of six, and there is WAY more room in the rear for groceries. Came with a nice cargo net too.

We had another lovely shabbos with a meal here and a meal out at the neighbor's house two doors down. We all made it down to shul in the morning. I also found out they have childcare for the younger kids, so I might actually go and daven next week. Wow! On Sunday night, the kollel had a nice rosh chodesh dinner and we all went to that. Amirah had a friend spend the night afterwards and they spent much of Monday playing. Together, we made purim masks and had a lot of fun. Then we had the rest of the family (minus two absentees) over for dinner. Our first guests! And a really lovely family with four kids of similar ages.

We've been steadily getting back into our learning time. It was a little slow getting going with the viruses we had, plus just the time it takes to adjust to a new home and the myriad of errands that goes with that. I'd say we're back up to 80% now. A little behind where I had hoped to be at this point in the year, but beyond first grade in everything so nothing really to worry about.

Here's a quick version of what we're doing this week in kodesh:

• daily davening and parsha/torah stories
• adding many new verbs to our biblical Hebrew vocabulary
• reviewing a lengthy of list of nouns and prefixes
• stuyding about purim and learning/revisiting some purim songs
• planning our purim costumes and mishloach manos baskets!
• copying out the morning berachos from the siddur (one per day) and learning what each word means

And in chol:

• reviewing months, seasons, days, dates, abbreviations and initials
• narrating back chapters of books we are reading aloud
• copywork from various books
• weekly spelling list
• fine-tuning our handwriting to make it very neat and completely legible
• should be up to lesson 150 of 231 in our phonics book this week
• learning to add and subtract one-digit from two-digit numbers
• the rise of Rome (and how that affected the Jewish world)
• bird migration and nesting habits
• reading The Hobbit for our readaloud book this week (really nice to get back to readalouds!)

So all is good. Savannah just really feels like home. We continue to be so glad that we moved here. Eli says spontaneous little tefillos to hashem in the middle of lunch, thanking hashem for bringing us to Savannah. And WE keep saying thank you for getting an offer on the house so quickly. We're doing the repairs the inspection turned up. There's a pretty good list for our A+ wonderful contractor to tend to. BE"H all will be finished next week and we can sign the final papers. WOW.

Signing off...