Our Little Fish

Kaeli had her last swimming lesson the week before Christmas.  These are pictures from that lesson.  She's always loved the water, but we are continually amazed at how quickly she learned to swim.  Her favorite stroke is "pizza arms", more commonly known as the breast stroke.  Now, if we can only find swimming lessons in the Netherlands.  We've been told there are lots of options.  Just need to find them!  

Since she no longer goes to swimming, Kaeli has decided she needs to wear her goggles in the bath tub.  

This makes for tremendous bath time fun.  Speaking of bath time fun, here's a recent picture of the girls taking a bath "together", a common theme around the apartment these days.

Our Addresses

OK, so I started sending out our New Year's letters today and remembered that I put a note in the letter to check our blog for addresses, so here they are. I'll post the NL address once we get one.

Our Apartment (until Jan 12th, so don't send anything after ~Jan 7th):
2495 S. Mason Rd. #121
Katy, TX 77450

US P.O. Box (All cards and letters will be forwarded to Celesta's work address in NL. No packages please, they will not forward them! You can send things to this now, but we won't get it until we get to NL and possibly several days after that.):
Name
c/o Celesta White
P.O. Box 4074
Houston, TX 77210-4704

Please keep in touch!!

Bye Bye

Bye Bye, Home.  "We will miss you!"

Bye Bye, backyard.  We will miss you too, but not your

 weeds!!

Bye Bye, Master Bath.  We enjoyed you for the year we had you.

Bye Bye, Astro.  Don't let Grandma and Papa spoil you too much.  Stay out of their trashcan and don't let them feed you cookies!

Our First Blog Post

I've been meaning to start this blog since we first made the "big decision" to move to the Netherlands, but am just now finding time to set up the blogger account.  Kaeli and Avery are asleep, Bryan is having a Wii night with Eric, and I have to stay awake long enough to put clothes in the dryer.... hence, I've got a few moments to actually start this blog.

For those of you who didn't know we were moving and are just reading it now, I'm very sorry for not letting you know sooner.  It kind of came as a surprise, and life has been a whirlwind since we decided to accept the assignments.  Shell is transferring me to the Hague to start a new group in Shell Global Solutions - NL which will enable us to build Reliability Modeling and Dynamic Simulation (that's what I do now in the US) competency in our NL office.  Currently, all 5 of us that do RM/DS sit in Houston!  Bryan gets to continue his current job, just from the Shell Chemicals Rotterdam office.  Since his boss sits in Singapore, and his job is a global role, it really makes more sense for him to sit in Europe.  Then he can work with all timezones in a day without having to hold telecons at crazy hours.  So, big changes coming our way, but at least we don't have to come up a brand new job learning curve.  We feel pretty fortunate on that front!

If I were to give a full recap on our blog in a single posting it would take a while, and the laundry is almost done, so here's the brief version.  After we found out we were moving, we decided to sell the house (my assignment is officially 4 years, but we're expecting 3-4 years).  We put it on the market in October, expecting it to take a while to sell in today's market and economy.  Well, less than two weeks later, we had the house under contract and they wanted us out by December 5th.  We were able to push that back to December 15th, so this past Monday we closed on the house.  This meant that the movers came the previous Thursday and Friday to pack up most of our stuff for either sea shipment or storage (housing is a "little" smaller over there!).  Now, we are in a temporary apartment just around the corner from our first home.  Very strange to not only be in an apartment again after 5 years, but also to say goodbye to the house.  As Kaeli said, "I will miss it!"