One more day!

We leave for Spain on Sunday and the checklists have been made, the tickets printed, passports found, and the spanish workbooks packed.  We Skyped La Familia Voltas yesterday and told them to GET READY!!!  Once The Craft's land on spanish soil those Spaniards won't know what hit them!  Señor Voltas made an expression of horror which lets me know me that they understand American humor.  Señora Voltas reassured me that we will be well cared for and she promises not to kiss Callie our youngest (who cannot tolerate kisses of any kind, even from her parents).  She also invited any of our kids to stay with them for a year to attend school in Spain and we all laughed because there's no way at this age any of our kids would leave us or that we would allow them to go.  The interesting thing about this is that in Europe,  it is quite common for kids to do foreign exchange starting at a young age.

I have decided that when I get to Spain, I will blog in both languages to get my mind to switch into Spanish mode.  The tricky part of this is that I will stumble on words in english.  Yesterday during my Skype session with La Familia Voltas, I was so excited and was talking so fast that my spanish was coming out like gibberish.  I took a deep breath and spoke more slowly and things got better.

I will also start documenting the developing language acquisition of my children at various ages via video clips.  Bella age 12, recognizes and can come up with many words and phrases, however she doesn't initiate conversation…yet.  Jaime age 11, is surprising me with her understanding.  She is using a lot of context cues and picked up a lot from getting spanish once a week in grade 4.  I would say she is in the lead.  Sam age 9 seems to know the least, but I predict that his spanish will surpass all of his siblings because he exudes confidence and is very sociable and uninhibited.  Finally Callie age 7, is very close behind Jaime.  Callie's accent is excellent.  Because she was introduced to spanish at such a young age, she was able to mimic the phonetics well and she absorbed some of the language as a opposed to trying to remember it.  We shall see!

I am trying to budget well as things will cost more in Spain.  Today, $1 converts to .74 euros.

The jeans would be $109.77.  I just ask Siri on my IPHONE and she gives me the most current rate.  I also using this app to convert measurement as well.  I exchanged $700 US  to 518.57 euros to start us off in Spain.