Moving and the 4th of July

Nate, Reese, Jaeger and I are no longer residents of Binsfeld, Germany...we now reside in Arenrath which is all of about 3 miles from Binsfeld. We had decided back in March, when we found out that we would be adding 3 years to our stay in Germany, that we wanted to move to a larger house after Reese was born. Finding places out here that are nice and functional is a little difficult to do because Germans build their homes in a very closed off way, there is no openness to the space so things often feel very cramped. Plus there aren't any built in closets so when you look at a room you have to imagine the space that the wardrobes are going to take up in it. Luckily enough, a guy from Nate's shop was moving out of a house in Arenrath and we decided to move in. It's a two story house plus it has a basement and an attic, which is nice because we had zero storage space at our last home. Downstairs there is a large office, a living room, a dining room, a guest bathroom, and a super dinky kitchen (I'll post some pics a little later). Upstairs there are 3 bedrooms and a really nice large bathroom. Basically we have all the space we were looking for and it's nice to have a guest bathroom that doesn't contain the only shower in the house and the washing machine like the last place did. In fact, here we have a laundry room in the basement with an AMERICAN WASHER AND DRYER!!!!! That won't mean much if you haven't seen a german washer dryer, but the german ones are really really small, like they only fit 3 bath towels kind of small, so it takes FOREVER to do the laundry. Plus at the old house I had to take the laundry from the washer and go outside and down to the garage to put it in the dryer, not the most convenient set up. Another bonus of our new place is that we have our own backyard which Jaeger really enjoys. There are definetly things we miss about our old place, but all in all we're very happy with our new place.

Well since we moved into our new house the end of June we decided to have some friends over for a BBQ for the 4th of July. We had a lot of food and Nate even talked everyone into playing Rock Band, which for the record I like to play but he always wants to play so it gets a little old. Once it got somewhat dark we went over to base for the fireworks show which was actually really good. Reese was really cranky when we got there, but she fell asleep a few minutes before the show started and didn't wake up despite the ridiculously loud booms. I admit I was a little scared for her hearing so I covered her ears and held her super close to me. Oh and the next day I checked her hearing by dropping stuff behind her and seeing if it startled her, it did so I guess she didn't have any damage.