First day on the Taxi for Ezra

I have been putting this off for a while. I don't like to separate from my kids very much. Their anxiety is perhaps overshadowed only by my own. Ezra's first attempt to drive to school in the special Taxi was a disaster. He screamed, kicked, cried, and started shaking uncontrollably, he was so beside himself. It took me 45 minutes to calm him down. Today, about 2 weeks after our first attempt, I had his teachers put him in the Taxi after school, and I drove behind him. We got home fine, but tears were still streaming down his cheeks. He was so mad at me he continued to yell and scream all evening. Still, I'm proud of him for making it home alright. It's not an easy thing for him, the unknown, the break in routine. I'm still not convinced this school or in fact our stay here in the Netherlands is the best thing for him. The school is certainly our best option here, but the fact that it is in Dutch is troublesome. But what else could we have done? A job is a job. Aaron was lucky to get one while also being able to get his PHD at the same time.

In other news, I'm totally mad at the dutch license plate department. We looked before we came what we would have to change on our car, so we could tell if it was worth bringing it. There wasn't much that needed changing according to the website, but now that we're here, we have to special order all these parts from the US, and the whole "change" will cost us between 1500-2500 Euros in cash (which is on top of the money it cost us for the inspection), which we of course don't have lying around, since we used all of our savings to get over here in the first place. And on top of that Philips didn't take out the health insurance from his pay check the last 4 months, so they just took out 4 months worth of premiums from our account. Things are a bit rough this month, financially. I'm only posting this, because problems like these tend to work themselves out, and I want to be able to look back and see how they did, so I won't have to freak out next time.