Doggy IBS

We tried out the English preschool in Garching again today. I'm not sure how much Gerrit gets out of it at this point, as it's a bit above his level. Nonetheless, he still enjoys some of the activities so we'll see if we want continue when we move to Neufahrn. I suppose it all depends on what is available there, and I still can't get a solid answer regarding that. Will have to do more research.

Painting a snail at preschool.

Earlier this evening we ventured out to a second hand appliance store and were successful at purchasing a washer, dryer, and fridge with freezer. The kitchen at the Neufahrn house has a tiny fridge and no freezer, so we thought a second one would come in very handy... particularly when I've had to go out and buy milk literally every other day since being here. Milk is not sold in large containers here. Carlos used to say that in Germany milk is seen much more as a condiment than as a beverage, which I believe is actually true. I haven't seen milk offered many places as a beverage - only really in coffee, tea, or cocoa. We're big milk drinkers, and back home we went through roughly two gallons per week. We would buy one gallon lowfat for us and one whole for Gerrit. By the end of the week we might even be pinching a bit of Gerrit's milk. Here milk is sold in liter containers, which means it takes 3.8 containers to equal 1 gallon. This means we need about 8 milk containers per week. Our current fridge can only accomodate two milks, so it will be nice to have a second fridge. I know that people shop here much more often rather than buying large quanitites as we do in the U.S., but I get tired of having to go to the market daily.

Gerard now wants a big flat screen T.V., but I'm trying to convince him to purchase a cheaper box T.V. My attitude is that I don't want to spend a ton of money unless we can bring it back to the U.S. when we return. Hence, the second hand store for our other appliances. What can I say... I'm cheap. If something less expensive does roughly the same job as a pricier brand name item, I'm all for sacrificing the name to save some money. Next I'll be looking for a good second hand baby/children's clothing store.

Our (literally) daily trip to IKEA.

We will likely be moving to our house either tomorrow or Saturday. Francoise has offered to let us borrow a table and chairs and some linens for now. She took me upstairs to the guest studio to show me where some of these things are kept. When we walked into the studio, to my horror there was dog poop scattered in about 10 piles all over the room. I was mortified! Here is Gerard's boss, essentially, who has been kind enough to let us stay here with our pets, who has had to fight her neighbor and deal with the police because of us- and now our dogs go and defecate all over her house. OH MY GAWD!!! I immediately cleaned up the mess and scrubbed her floor, but the whole time I'm thinking to myself, "How could my dogs have done this? This doesn't make any sense." And then... I remembered...

...Monday we had left for part of the day to run some errands, as usual. This was before we started crating Niki and Jake. We had a bag of groceries on the floor- mostly cans, but also some dry goods. When we came home, we found a pile of torn papers and cartons scattered around the floor. The dogs had gotten into the grocery bag and eaten an entire box of wheat crackers, two packages of cookies, and a box of cheesy butter crackers. They also managed to tear into their dog food bag (also on the floor) and eat the entire contents. When we got home, I looked for any sign of "Doggy Irritable Bowel Syndrome," and was surprised to see none. Well, this all makes sense to me now. My dogs' stomachs were clearly not as hearty as I thought. They must have been ashamed of what they had done because they chose to do "their business" in the most remote part of the house, unfortunately leaving it undiscovered for several days. Argh!!! Francoise was super cool about the whole thing, but it's definitely not the kind of impression you want to leave on your husband's new supervisor.