Checkin' In

Just a brief post to say I'm still here! ConGen is progressing nicely (we graduate next Monday!). We've made it through Passport & Nationality, Immigrant Visas (IV), and Non-immigrant Visas (NIV), and now we are working our way through American Citizen Services (ACS). The work is incredibly diverse and interesting. I have studied everything from how to detect fraudulent documents and micro expressions to interviewing techniques. Today, for example, we role played death notifications. Not exactly light subject material but, unfortunately, a reality of our job. I continue to hear wonderful things about Manila through the grapevine and it just feeds the fire of our excitement, in spite of the fact that we won't be leaving for almost a whole year!

In other news the kids are mostly settled for school. Yesterday J went in for her reading placement test (all 1st graders must do this), and today I took C in to meet with her 7th grade school counselor who helped her pick out her schedule for the year. she'll need to come back next week for a math placement test (a reading comprehension assessment will be done for all students at the same time after the start of the school year). At her last school she took advanced math, which doesn't fit in nicely with any of the offered categories here in FC (i.e. algebra or geometry), so this test will help us figure out where she needs to be. She will also be taking chorus in place of band (I'm tired of fighting over it), continuing with Spanish (she would have preferred French, but they don't offer French A for 7th graders), and this is a civics/economics year vs. History. I'm actually okay with that as one of my biggest worries about attending international schools is the lack of U.S. history and government instruction. As for A, after a bit of a head/heart ache over transferring his IEP (no two states are the same, so they were having trouble deciphering his needs) we have been offered the option of having A enroll in the spec ed pre-school option or just taking outside services (which would equate to just 1 hour of speech and 1 hour of language with an ST, and one hour of OT, per week). Unfortunately, FC does not have the option we pursued in FL, which was an all-day, language based program that mixed neuro-typical kids with mild spec needs kids. The school here is only half-day, and it sounds like it is intended for kids with far more severe needs than A, but I am loathe to restrict his services to just a couple of sessions per week. I think we are going to go with the school option for now and see how that goes. We can always pull him from the program if we think it isn't working out.

To wrap up this quick update, T&V went back to Texas last weekend (back down to 3!)and I finished my last class of the semester with a killer final. Once ConGen ends it will be a little bit of a break for me while I take a few onesie, twosie classes before I launch into language training on 6 Sep, coincidentally the same day the kids start school.