One month. That’s how long it took me to fall down the stairs of our new house. I was walking from the top floor down with my daughter to get her ready for school, when I slipped and went down, one leg went out straight while the other bent under me and I bounced down a few wooden steps on my shin. I stopped myself and did everything I could to keep from pulling her down with me. The damage to my legs took weeks to heal with my husband begging me to go to the emergency room and me refusing time and again. The following week our Aunt helped me put skid tape on each individual step.

When we started building this house I speculated that I would fall down the stairs fairly quickly. I don’t know why I have such an issue with them but if things keep going the way they are I have a feeling my dear husband will install a some kind of harness system or worse, an electric chair! When I was in college I fell down our carpeted stairs so often that my roommate stopped checking on me! I always blamed the carpet but now with hard wood, I think it may be worse!

In our previous house there was only one set of carpeted stairs, that I didn’t use as much since our room was on the ground floor. I was always good at finding other things to trip and slip and fall over. I miss my sweet neighbor there who was always good about coming over to take care of me or the kids when I would have an accident!

For two months I have been careful. Until one evening last week I went downstairs to the basement and at the last three steps I turned to call something up the stairs while also reaching for the light switch and again, I tumbled. This time the opposite leg getting injured. Instead of my knee bending under, my foot rocked forward and my entire weight rolled over my small toes on one foot.

Like I always do when I get hurt, I try to act like everything is fine. I try desperately to keep my kids from knowing I am in pain. For a week I have limped around sure I broke my toe and saying there was nothing that could be done for a broken toe.

There is a great system here in Germany using an app where you can text with your doctor and I have mine on speed dial at this point! She’s great and is always very responsive. When I started to get concerned about the swelling she sent me for an x-ray and referred me to an orthopedic doctor. The D4/D5 metatarsals for sure have a fracture.

While meeting today with the new orthopedist only 800 meters from our new house, and getting a new x-ray, we found that there is indeed fracture AND my second to smallest toe is also broken. He gave me a prescription for a great new expensive shoe and taped my toe to support it. I will wear this for the next three weeks so at least that ought to keep me from falling over myself.

On another note, my silence lately in posting to this blog has been for a number of reasons; the move, the holidays and the injuries at the top of the list. I’m finding I feel like I have more time and more to say and hope to put up more posts soon! Chronicling the move and buying a house here in Germany is at the top of my list.

Don’t let the title fool you, being in our home is awesome, but I recently taught my five year old to respond “Sweet” every time I say “Dude” and as a teen from the 90’s I happen to say Dude a LOT!

We recently got the keys to the house we have been building for the past year and (Pausing to jump up and down) now the real work begins again, at least it’s the final leg though!

We are sleeping on air mattresses and our new sofa and things are slowly coming together. Each day something gets done, today we had one room measured for an installation of a closet going in soon and I learned how to use the washer and dryer that were delivered yesterday. The pile of laundry is overwhelming to look at but I will slowly make my way through it! The new washer and dryer send messages that pop up on the television screen to let me know that the cycles are done and the clothes can be changed or removed, it’s both nice and nagging at the same time!

While we are getting ready to get settled in, there is still much construction being conducted on our street. I believe the houses across the street are around six months behind ours for completion which makes for a fun show outside our window. In this picture you see that the ToiToi has conveniently been relocated directly in front of our living room windows, right next to the tent that is being prepared for a lunch taking place to thank the workers tomorrow… On the same day our moving trucks will be here…. (Rolls eyes and sighs heavily)

Thursday and Friday we have hired a company to help move our belongings from storage into the house and also reassemble everything that was meticulously disassembled back in April. This will be a long two days and will probably consist of many arguments as my husband and I try to decide where things need to be. One thing is for sure though, Friday night I will sleep in MY BED AGAIN! At least I can if they find it here.

Our final deliveries and construction time lines put us having everything complete in time for Christmas, this includes our kitchen install at the end of November and closet installation in the beginning of December. For now though, we can unpack the things we haven’t seen since Texas and try to find places for everything in half the space. And this make shift temporary kitchen will make do until the real one arrives! I have two portable burners, a mini fridge, microwave, Ninja Foodi, toaster, coffee machine, and of course, my brand new ice machine! I’m sure the next month will fly by!

One thing to note about homes and apartments here, most don’t come with kitchens or light fixtures. We were lucky we had bulbs installed as most also don’t have that either. We have ordered fixtures for the stairs, bathroom mirrors, ceiling lights for all the rooms, outdoor lights for the patio and terrace and ceiling fans for the bedrooms (which was a concession Markus made for me when I couldn’t get air conditioning). It’s going to be a lot of work to install them all.

At least there is always a show happening on our street. Today they delivered the driveway holders for the trash cans, which was pretty interesting to watch. There was one guy who looked really young running around with a remote control attached to his belt maneuvering these giant concrete boxes into place. He did everything all alone, and was very professional and efficient!

Now that the holders are here, we can move the trash cans from the garage and put them there. Now we just have to learn the pick up schedule for the four different types of trash and we are all good! Well there are only four types picked up, there are additional types that have to be dropped off on our own. Learning all this is going to be fun on top of all the other German stuff I am trying to wrap my too old brain around!

The next few days will be a lot so I hope to update again when the move is complete!

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We are inside the week countdown until we have the keys to our new home. We started this process over a year ago and it felt like this day would never come. Here we are though, last Friday we did our walkthrough to make note of all the final things that need to be addressed. For the most part the house looks really good, there are mostly a few cosmetic things that need touching up but we are optimistic that when October 13th comes, we will have the keys to our own home here in Germany!

An insight into the length of time it takes to build can be gained by considering that in Germany, homes have basements and the walls are made of cinder block. Its nothing like what I grew up in where you could get angry and kick a hole in the wall or punch a hole in the wall way easily. In fact Markus once told me he never understood that on TV as a kid because how could you be strong enough to punch a whole through cement!

Our home will have heating in the floors so there won’t be any wall heaters to worry about. There is no air conditioning but I did get Markus to agree to ceiling fans which are not very common.

We did luck out finding a new development in construction with 48 homes total. Everyone will be new to the area so we can all find our way together! There are a ton of kids and I am excited to see ours grow up with them!

Over the course of the next two months we have a key handover, followed by two official days of move and reassembling our furniture from Texas a week later. Our container contents have been sitting in the storefront and warehouse belonging to our parents and I am sure they will be glad to have some space back. Then there are deliveries and assembly of our kitchen and furniture for the entire house that will take place all the way through the beginning of December. My spreadsheet of all the things is long and confusing but it documents all the items from different stores, purchases, deposits, timelines for delivery and pick ups and all in all the beginning our our new home.

Lainey will turn nine three days after we get the keys and three days before our official move so we decided to pitch a tent in the unfurnished house and have family over to celebrate. We will have pizza and roast marshmallows on a small fire pit we found and overall just enjoy the space and let the kids have fun! We hope that the new park will be finished in time to let the kids explore it on Lainey’s birthday!

All in all we are looking forward to the next few months and finally having everything in place to celebrate the holidays in our home. Our kitchen will be installed just in time to celebrate the first Advent and what I will be calling our first German Thanksgiving!

There are a number of things that are different for us here, but I want to pick some topics to elaborate on. Let me talk about washing clothes in Germany for a minute! I am not someone who wants someone else to wash my clothes so it’s really hard for me to let that go while living in my In-laws home, no matter how much my husband tries to convince me it’s fine.

First, the water is extremely hard and the high levels of chalk, or calcium and magnesium, which can make your clothes wear out much faster. Our new home will have a water softener system in the future to help with this but I’ve never seen anything like it. My stainless steel classes usually have a dusty white film in them when they dry and it’s just something I have never experienced. I will do another post about the effects of this hard water that you would never consider in your everyday life. I was able to learn more about this here!

Second, the size of the washing machines is around half the size of what we are used to. Our machine in Texas was approximately 15 kg and it was one of the biggest drums I could find. Here I am now sitting at one of the few Waschsalons (aka laundromat or washeteria) I could find in the general vicinity and I have 6 machines going because they are only 5 kg apiece! There is a “super” machine at 16 kg (€9) but it’s always in use.

A third thing to note is the cost, it’s €3,50 for a wash load and €0,80 for 10 min of drying time. Most of the time I usually walk out of here spending between €28 and €35.

Location, a fourth thing to note is that the location of these Waschsalons is almost never convenient. Located in the middle of downtown and with limited parking, it’s usually a bit of a tricky walk to get here and back to the car with all the clothes and the kids! Most of the time my husband is able to help out with this too. One of our cheap last minute suitcases that we got to carry our last minute purchases from Texas serves as my Waschsalon suitcase and I keep it with all my supplies and use it to go back and forth! It’s always nice to walk down a cobblestone street with a heavy wheeled suitcase making a racket! It’s even better when you are pushing a stroller with one hand and pulling the suitcase with the other while trying to get your two more mobile children to help or keep up! There is usually a park conveniently located in the walk path to distract from our mission and result in multiple promises to return that will probably be broken before the day is over.

Until our house is finished I will happily come sit at the Waschsalon for around an hour and a half to get all our laundry done! It’s actually usually nice to have all of it washed, dried and partially folded in that amount of time. Once we move, I anticipate many many many trips to the basement in my future. While I hope this does help my ass and will serve as a form of cardio, I am not looking forward to it!

With our final handover date in set and the count down on for moving into the house our search for some of the appliance has become more serious! While shopping for our future Washing Machine and Dryer I have run across so many different questions I have to find the answers to. Average machines are around 7 kg and they try to keep them as small as possible because not everyone has a lot of space. There are even dual machines that are both washer and dryer that you can get and you will find those in the kitchen in a lot of apartments! This won’t work for a family of five so my hunt is on! Hoping to keep everyone posted on our findings!

Last week while trying to plan our schedule, I glanced at the calendar and realized that it has been over three months now that we are living in Germany with our in-laws. To say this time has been easy is an absolute lie. I don’t even feel like the time has flown by. It has been a hard few months. We knew when we made this plan last year that these would be the hardest months of our life, and our marriage.

This is the longest I have ever been away from Texas. This is the longest I have ever been a guest in someone else’s home. This is the longest I have ever nursed one of my children. Those three things may not sound related but if you have ever moved with small children you get it. The roller coaster of emotions has been barreling along on the edge of insanity.

We realized that we are over the half way mark. We are approaching the time when our home is completed and finalizing many things in the meantime. We are buying new furniture and setting up our kitchen and by the end of the year our home should be complete and our move into it finished as well. So what I want to do for the rest of this post is talk about the things I have learned and some things to note so far.

American Food Stores are few and far between here and the costs are over the top but if you are homesick enough you will justify a €9,00 bottle of Mrs. Butterworths and a €7,00 pint of Jiffy Peanut Butter.

You will justify the exorbitant price for items you can get for cheap in HEB by telling yourself the shipping and having to beg someone to get them shipped to you are factored into the cost making it cheaper to pay for that.

You will promise yourself you will not buy it again but are already planning your next trip to see what is in their upcoming shipment.

Germany is a hard language, not an easy one to learn at all, but nevertheless everyone does expect you to learn it.

Finding German classes is hard and expensive and you will swear that no one actually wants you to learn the language despite their insistence you have to, but once you find a place such as this, you will feel right at home with the wonderful people!

Getting a drivers license in Germany is hard and expensive at 18, but if you have a valid license from a reciprocating state all you have to do is pay for the license and it will get issued to you. This process is wildly complicated if you do not have a license from a state with reciprocity.

Driving in Germany can be very hard and confusing, but those open highway speed limits make it all worth it.

There are something like over 100 different road signs, I don’t know if I will ever learn them all.

A lot of customs for driving, recycling and other things require Germans to honor the systems, and they do for the most part.

A good VPN app is worth its weight in gold when you want to watch Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Paramount+, Apple TV, and Disney+ without being restricted to the country you are currently in.

At some point I am sadly and under protest going to have to cancel all my streaming subscriptions.

There are some truly disgusting foods that I cannot for the life of me understand, and if they didn’t make me want to puke smelling them it probably would have been much funnier to learn about this strange one. See Handkäse mit Musik .

My kids are surviving on Fleischwurst, brötchen, cucumbers, salami, pasta, and occasional Schnitzel.

The ice machine which requires manually adding water, we got on sale the first week we were here is single handedly keeping me sane and in shape.

I go through approximately two liters of water a day in ice alone.

American brown sugar is hard to find here, but I was able to procure molasses from Amazon and make my own.

Learning to read military time or a 24 hour clock is actually not hard at all!

While going to the washeteria seems like such an inconvenience, it sure is nice to be able to wash and dry 8 loads of laundry all within two hours.

The time difference sucks for keeping in touch with friends.

Tax being included in the price is actually very nice.

While our container was delivered, we are still waiting for the delivery of our 40 overflow boxes, which should be delivered next week.

German furniture stores are an awesome outing on a Saturday, you can eat well and for cheap, and drink a beer, shop for everything from housewares to lawn furniture to kitchen supplies, toys and baby gear, and some of them even have giant playgrounds to run off some of the kids energy.

German furniture can take anywhere from 9 weeks to three months to be delivered and even then when it arrives you may have to assemble it yourself.

Nearly every park here has a zip line for the kids.

I am far too old and out of shape to show off/try to ride on the zip line.

I have cooked a total of four meals here, and from what I can tell, I am the best cook when I haven’t had my cooking in months… OR I am just incredibly homesick and everything I taste is a bit skewed by that.

I have King Ranch Chicken on my list to make this week with some €20 for three packs of 20 home made corn tortillas and I can’t wait! Here is the recipe I am planning to use!

I will try to keep writing more like I was in the beginning, its hard not to let my emotions get in the way. I enjoy these posts when I take the time to do them though.

We knew that this would be hard. We knew that we were moving to another country where things are different and that for a while it would be a transition.

Food is different, you don’t realize how different until you are trying to find a new normal for your morning routine and nothing feels right.

Most important meal of the day has shifted. For me it was always breakfast, but here it seems lunch is usually the focus. I get the reasoning but that doesn’t change the way my body is built or what helps me fuel my day!

The weather is all over the place! Now we are coming from Texas where the seasons are summer, extended summer, summer in hell’s sauna, a sprinkle of fall and a couple days where hell freezes over. We anticipated that we would have all the seasons here but last week was hot as heck and this week the highs are at 70.

Allergies seem to be different as well. All of us seem to have a runny nose or little cough. We assume it’s because our bodies are adjusting to our new surroundings. You don’t consider all the things that will have to adjust when you make a move. I assumed that getting away from that “pine curtain” called The Woodlands would magically cure all allergies, but new ones come along! There are flowers and plants and fields with things I’ve never spent much time around. Growing up around rice fields, it was a bit eye opening when we went for a a walk and had a wheat field on one side and a flowering potato field on the other. Our bodies will adjust but it will take sniffling, coughing, itchy time.

I long for my regularly scheduled programming. I have been telling myself “It’s summer, all they are playing are reruns” but I know that I will be missing summer favs like Big Brother and miss having my shows to watch! At least we have the Euro Cup going on and that’s what’s playing most of the time. It’s been almost two months though and I have finished rewatching (playing in the background kind of watching) all ten seasons of Friends and 12 seasons of The Big Bang Theory! Up next is How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family!

School pick up and drop off are so very different. Let’s start with the drive, it just went from a two mile drive to the school, pull through the driveway and let the daughter out, and then a thirty minute Starbucks and Chick fil A run to now being a 51 kilometer drive one way, and having to get out of the car and walk her to the door. Almost four hours of our day is spent on school drop off and pick up. Now this isn’t forever, just until we move when we will be 10km from the school.

We got a new car. One in which I personally feel is a mid-sized SUV compared to what I am used to. The overwhelming response though has been sort of negative, as friends a family continue to tell us it’s too big and we aren’t in Texas anymore. Personally, I don’t see any issues with it and don’t anticipate having issues parking or getting places but I guess we will see. To me, it’s the same size as the mini van I left behind but with way fewer pockets and places to stash things!

I love German furniture stores!! Let start with size! They are huge! We recently visited both XXXLutz and Segmüller and in each you have combined a Star Furniture, an IKEA and Gallery furniture all in one building! The only thing missing is Mattress Mac! You also have an At Home and the home section of Macy’s with bedding and kitchen supplies added to make the one store all in one! We have been to two so far and it’s been fun to walk around! I can’t wait to start filling our home!

German radio is interesting. Somehow they broadcast traffic and new reports over your radio regardless of what you are listening to and as soon as I can understand them, it will probably be really helpful!

Somehow I always thought that I wasn’t meeting people or having friendly conversations during the day because of the language but it’s possible it has more to do with the less than outgoing nature of typical German people. The need to say hi and smile or wave to everyone is strictly a Texas thing, or maybe a southern thing but it doesn’t happen here. Sometimes it can make you feel like something is wrong with you, but as I have always said “People don’t think about me as much as I think they do!” And here it absolutely is true!

A final thing we did was to take our CDC Vaccination cards to a local Apotheke and get the digital certification of vaccination for the new Corona-Warn App. We were worried it would be hard since we had American vaccination records but the pharmacist was able to get us the QR code to scan into our app so that we can now show proof of vaccination here in Germany without worry that the CDC card won’t be accepted. Some simple difference, BioNTech is the same as Pfizer and dates are written Month first were debated for a moment, but in the end we got what we needed. A Negative test is still required in most places in order to be able to sit down to eat or even enter, but things are slowly getting better.

All in all we are still happy with our decision to move, we knew this time would be hard and adjusting will take time but having many visits with family and a few friends has been awesome! Having the kids get to know Oma and Opa so much better is worth all the hassle! We will keep the updates coming, with summer holiday coming we should have more to talk about!

We have been watching the online car market place for months, trying to figure out what the right car will be for us. There are so many vehicles that are common to the US that simply don’t exist here in Germany, unless they were imported by the owner. Mini Vans, larger SUV’s, trucks, are all harder to find. There are also many cars for the German market that you would never find on the US market. You will find things like the A & B class Mercedes, smaller cars that have a much lower horsepower and higher fuel efficiency. There are also a ton of brands that I have never heard of.

One big difference in the German market is that there are many more former company cars on the road, as the majority of professionals have a company car that will be traded in after three years. In many cases, you can find a very good deal on a relatively new car with minimal miles and in great condition. Many of these cars were purchased with many extras by employees who waited up to six months for the car to be delivered. This is also part of the reason buying used is popular because it would be hard to find your chose car and extras on the lot as they don’t keep a lot of inventory, which results in long wait times for cars to be delivered new.

Used car salesmen in Germany do not care if you want to buy a car or not, it seems they do not work on commission. This makes the process much less frustrating on one hand and much more on the other. The first time we went to look they salesman didn’t even leave his office. We kept having to go back to him to get keys for the vehicle we wanted to look at. We also weren’t able to do any test drives in that moment because an appointment was needed for that.

We finally selected a used Volvo that we want to purchase, it’s a hybrid but we won’t get any tax incentive or rebate for buying it used. When you get the paperwork for the car, the reason that it is for sale is listed. In this case the car was delivered with the wrong stereo, it was driven for sixteen thousand kilometers while the owner waited for the car with the right stereo system. This one is basically brand new, so we are pretty excited! The Harmon Kardon stereo is exactly what we would have wanted to its basically winning!

Once we have agreed on the price and signed paperwork, the job is now ours to register the vehicle and apply for the license plates, which we have to take with us to pick up the car. This is the most frustrating part of the process for me. Even for the test drive, special dealer plates were put on the car so that we could leave the parking lot. Temporary plates are not allowed.

A fun part is that we get to pick our desired license plate. The first two characters are the abbreviation for the town or village where the car is registered. This will change in six months and we will be required to go through this process again. The second two characters are also letters and most people will pick their initials. The last three characters are numbers and many choose three that represent their birthday, favorite numbers, anniversary, etc. I love this but I also find this to be almost too personalized in that you could easily identify a lot of information about a person simply by looking at their license plate!

Our chosen plate has a new letter at the end, an E! The E is new for Electric cars, we haven’t seen a lot of plates with it yet. Sadly when we move into our new house, we will have to get another set of plates for our new city. One of my favorite things to do in the highway is to try to identify what letters stand for what city.