This week Maren had her first day of school, both Maren and Linden had their first soccer games and practices, and Jeff had his first week of soccer coaching. He volunteered to coach Maren’s team, because it seemed like otherwise no one would do it and there might not actually be a team.
Maren likes her school, which is good. She is doing second grade again (even though she did second grade last year and did well), because otherwise she would be with kids a year older than her, and this way she is with kids her own age. The age cut offs in Canada and the US are very different, so she is too young to be in third grade here. Overall, it seems to be going well.
The kids are loving soccer. Jeff was quite stressed about coaching at first, since he hasn’t played since he was in kindergarten and actually doesn’t know the rules or anything about soccer. But the first week went well and hopefully it will get even better from here. He seems to be doing a great job.
And the other news this week is that we bought a new car, which was unplanned, but overall fine. The short version of the long story is that we can’t register our car here, because it doesn’t have a particular safety sticker, and Toyota has stopped cooperating with imports. Since our car is Canadian, even though the exact same model is sold in the US (Prius V), we can’t legally bring it into the US unless we pay exorbitant import fees, which are about half the value of the car. So we bought a brand new RAV4 hybrid, and Jeff has to drive to Vancouver BC to sell the Prius.
I am hoping this is the last ridiculous, cross-border moving thing we have to deal with, though I actually expect more to come up. This move has not been particularly easy!
And here are some fun pictures from the past week or so:
This week we moved to Corvallis. We are finally in our “for now” home, while we wait to find the right home to buy (and wait for our Saskatchewan house to sell).
We are hot, tired, trying to make our 2400 square feet of stuff fit into a 1600 square foot space, everything is a mess, and the amount of work left to do before life is semi-functional is overwhelming. Not to mention the wildfire smoke, which is intermittently trapping us indoors with no AC.
But, we are glad to be here. Once all the hard stuff is done, I think we are going to be very happy. In fact, we have already had some pretty good times 😊
Today we visited the Oregon coast. It was Linden’s first time seeing the ocean, and Maren’s first time in five years. It started out cloudy, but turned out to be a beautiful sunny day, and everyone had a fabulous time.
I apologize for the very long delay in posting, but man, moving is kind of exhausting. We did make it to Oregon, though Jeff was delayed by four days because of some issues at the border (a story for another day). But we haven’t exactly moved yet, because we still don’t have a place to live in Corvallis. We are renting for the time being, and it turns out that finding a place in Corvallis (not even a nice place, just any place) is actually really difficult. Hopefully that will be figured out soon 🤞
In the meantime we have been doing the many tasks associated with the process of moving to a new country like getting bank cards, moving money from our Canadian bank to an American one that it turns out doesn’t accept wire transfers (also a story for another day), getting cell phone service established, etc, etc, etc.
We have also been enjoying what Oregon has to offer, like Fourth of July celebrations, beautiful nature and short hikes, teddy bears picnics, parks and playgrounds, deer in the backyard, county fairs, and of course friends and family.
A very crazy, unsettled time, but also a memorable one.
st
k
ng) 
) 