Early Days

Just a quick message and a few photos to start off our adventure in American Samoa (and as virgin bloggers)...photo taken on top deck of our house over looking the backyard.


The poor kids have been restless cooped up in this large house with hardly any toys. One of the ladies from church gave us a few toys for the kids which entertained them for all of 2 days and then it was back to the fighting. We have joined up at the local DVD Shack and we have been constant visitors. We don’t have cable TV yet, but it’s coming apparently. The children are up at 6am or shortly thereafter so it’s a looonnng morning if you have nothing to do. They’re in bed by 7 - 7.30pm so that is not too different from NZ.
I have finally enrolled the kids into school, Noah is going to go to Montessori preschool. It’s run by an old English Nun from the Cotswolds she’s been here for 19 years! There are mainly Samoan kids which is good, I think there is one other ex pat kid there. It’s just around the corner from Talia’s school so that’s handy too.
Talia is now enrolled in Pacific Horizons she was supposed to go into preschool because of her birthdate, you have to be 5 years old before 31 August in order to go to kindergarten (K5 - Year 1). We weren’t thrilled about her going into preschool and sitting with 3 and 4 year olds so there was a K5 readiness test she could sit. I felt like a real pushy parent insisting she sit it but she is already reading so she sat the test. After quizzing Talia what was in the test we weren’t so sure, she said it was about Israelites (confused with Sunday School?), she had to read a book about a Rabbit who ate a cookie (we had just been watching a Blues Clue episode about if you gave a Mouse a cookie) and she had to count to 100! So anyway she passed, her reading put her into kindergarten I’m not sure how she did on the other stuff.
Noah is terrified of dogs, he screams like nothing else just a the sight of them friendly or not. That might be a good thing here in Samoa because the dogs are not that nice. There’s a pack of 5 dogs that wander through our property and sit on the back lawn just looking at us - the scrawniest one seems to be the ring leader.

Noah is wearing undies, he likes it a lot and prefers not to wear anything else. We do insist on pants when we go out. He is dry at night so he’s doing well in the toilet training dept, except this morning when he was dressed up as Joe from Blues Clues, he was wearing his long pants, long sleeved tee and boots (in 30 degrees!). He tried to go to the toilet but couldn’t get the pants off over the boots. Oh well.