Upside Down

Did you ever have one of those days where one little thing changed, and it turned your world upside down? I can think of two of the top of my head: the day I found out I was pregnant, and the day Paolo found out he got the job here in Germany.  Now that I've somewhat recovered from the latter, I've been thrown for a new loop: I didn't get into university.

Now that may not seem like such a huge deal to you, but to me it's kind of made my life crazy. Firstly, I've never been outright rejected from an educational thing before, so it's kind of humbling me. Secondly, I had all my eggs in that basket. I didn't realize how very limited places there were for international students, and how many people would apply.. only the top 6.7% got in, and most were in university partner schools. Had I known that statistic, I would've found more solid back up plans. Anyways, now my plan is to just keep taking German classes until I either find a job or am fluent enough to work speaking German.

So no big deal right? Nope.. See, we live on the south side of the city, and Paolo works in the north. It's about a 1 hour commute each way for him. So we were trying to find a new apartment somewhere with a better connection for him but still south, so that AJ and I could be close to our school. Well, now that I have no school, AJ also has no school because his daycare was (apparently) only for university students. We have no ties left here in the south, so now we're moving our apartment search north. Which is ok in general, it just means starting back from square one. But then we also have to find a new school for AJ. Ideally, he can go to the little half day school at my school while I am in class, but he's on a waiting list. Not to mention that even for a half day school, he has to have a three week integration period, which means I have to be there, and he can't stay full time (not that he's been in daycare since he was 11 months old or anything). That doesn't work for me because you know, I have class 4 days a week (just upstairs from the daycare). It's so impossible here. It's hard to find a daycare, and then hard to start the daycare. When we find out which area we'll be living in, we can expand the daycare search.

It doesn't help either of these things that AJ and I were planning to fly to Italy in two weeks and stay the whole month of August (we are both on summer vacation then). Sounds like a lovely time, but if we come back homeless and school-less, I bet that'll be kind of a damper on things.

These transition times are always hard; we always manage to get through them, but so many things have to fall into place in order to make it work. I keep hoping these uncertain times will be fewer and farther in between, but I guess that's just life. It always works out in the end, so I'll just keep on keeping on. At least today the kindergarten AJ is in now showed some mercy on me, and told me he could stay through the end of September while we're still living in this side of town. That's a huge relief; we have one more month to search for a daycare. We have three houses to look at this weekend. Who knows, maybe one will be "the one". Now here's for hoping that when we find "the one", the owners choose us. Yes, the housing market is so competitive here, you must be chosen. No room for negotiation at all, you just hope and pray you're the lucky one that gets to pay for that overpriced small space.

I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.

Ciao for now,

Kathleen