Settling into Houston

As the title says, we arrived here in Houston on Wednesday afternoon. The flight itself was great, the children were fantastic, Henry slept most of the way and the girls kept themselves occupied with stickers and watching television. Actually getting onto the flight at Aberdeen and Amsterdam however was an absolute nightmare. As it turns out now KLM failed to issue Henry a ticket properly and so we almost missed both flights. In the end we had to buy Henry another ticket so we could get on the flight.

Our temporary accommodation is great in that its plenty big enough and right outside the backdoor is the kids play area and beyond that the swimming pool. However location-wise its sort of in no mans land, its a gated community just off an 18 lane highway!! There is nothing nearby and to be quite honest it feels quite isolated....but it is only temporary and I must keep reminding myself of that! We drove around some more residential areas yesterday and past one of the schools we are considering for Fearne and those areas had a much nicer feel about them.

We have so much to organise that its difficult to know where to start, so far our priorities have been a kettle, a mobile phone for me, a bouncy chair for Henry, an ipod dock and a water table for the girls....oh and the obligatory trip to ikea for toy storage! But amongst that we have managed to fit in a trip to the downtown aquarium and yesterday we drove down to the coast and visited the beach at Galveston Island.

I've also been quite brave and had a go at driving, that might seem strange considering I'm quite used to driving in the UK, but Houston drivers are quite honestly insane. So far we have learnt that indicating is pointless, that just tells the other drivers to speed up and not let you in and cutting in front of each other and weaving dangerously in and out of traffic is the only way to get anywhere. Today my challenge to myself is to go to the supermarket on my own, thankfully SatNav can always get me home!

Chris starts work tomorrow, so I'll be stranded here until we get another car, but since I don't really fancy going far on my own with 3 children, I'm honestly not too bothered. Just need to decide what to do with the girls this week while we are at home and make sure we have plenty of supplies today.....plain paper, crayons, stickers and lots of cold drinks to keep cool.