five years in the books

This week marks the 5th anniversary of D’s entry into the Foreign Service. While our first two tours flew by at breakneck speed, with hardly a break between them, the last half-year of language training has offered a measure of calm. Emerging from a long winter and even longer break in our travels, we are looking forward to the new adventures that await. Rwanda beckons this summer, and before we turn our attention to Africa there is also an overseas language immersion trip in our more immediate future.

DC in bloom

The Cherry Blossom Festival is Washington, D.C.’s worst kept secret, drawing well over a million visitors each year. This is the first time we have been in the nation’s capital at the same time that the cherry trees blossomed. Despite our general aversion to large crowds, we decided to join the throngs of festival-goers this weekend, the peak of this year’s bloom. Here are a few of our favorite shots.

and in the meantime…

Though still many months from the start of our next tour, we’ve started turning our attention towards Rwanda. There are preschools to research, housing options to explore, vaccinations to update, and the most difficult part of any transition – a new job search for S. Munchkin, meanwhile, has settled into a nice groove at daycare. He even asks for his teacher by name every morning. He is still very young, but this will likely be the last transition he won’t remember at all.

picking up where we left off

After wrapping up our travel posts, we wound up taking a bit of an extended blogging hiatus. We left off on the eve of Munchkin’s second birthday, so it makes sense to pick up the thread there. Both sets of grandparents came down to DC for a long weekend; we’ve since gotten a few nudge-nudge emails from relatives wondering why we’ve been remiss in sharing pictures of the celebration…