This morning for breakfast, we had a rare and wonderful treat: 

American cereal!!

The boy on the left is J, who comes to our house in the mornings for seminary with me and Jess.  He eats breakfast with us, then catches the bus to school with our kids.  J's mom has access to the American embassy commissary, so she made a very gracious donation of Cheerios, Honey Nut Cheerios, and Raisin Bran to our breakfast table.  Don't let the grumpy faces fool you - we were singing many praises this morning!

This Fall, I am enrolled in a German language class through the local Volkshochschule, which is like community education.   It meets 4 days a week for 4 hours per day, so it's pretty intense. 

I had my first class this morning, and I was kind of nervous.  Luckily, by the end of the class period, I was still breathing, and I found that it wasn't bad at all.  The class is made up of students from all over, so our only common language is German, which none of us can speak.  Nobody takes themselves too seriously, and it's no big deal to screw up.  I have to admire the teacher - she did a lot of pantomime, drawings, and repeating sentences over and over to make sure we understood what she was teaching us.

This is the building where the class is held.  My class meets on the second floor behind that row of windows.

Tonight for FHE, we weren't feeling super spiritual, so we had a family Dance Central competition.  Jess totally skunked us all.

Tonight, I went hometeaching with Brad.  We visited a couple in which the husband, Buck, is American and his wife is German.  Buck was here in the U.S. military when Berlin was an occupied city, and he met his wife when he was in the hospital - she was his nurse (isn't this romantic?).  He didn't speak German, and she didn't speak English, but after knowing each other only two weeks, he proposed and she accepted.  They've now been married 20+ years.  The amazing thing is that they still don't speak each other's language.  They understand each other fine, but he only speaks English, and she only speaks German, so every conversation is bilingual.

Another amazing thing is that Buck graduated from Orem High School, which is my high school.  He pulled out his old Tigerama yearbooks from the early 1970's, and I had a great time looking through them at pictures of my alma mater. 

This year, for one of my birthday gifts, Brad arranged for a housecleaner to come to the house once a week to do the heavy-duty cleaning (yes, AWESOME!!).  The woman he hired, Annalie, came for the first time today, and I think I'm in love.  She did a great job with the bathrooms, floors, and windows, but the cherry on top was my shoe closet. 

I totally did not expect her to organize and tidy the mess that is usually my shoes!

Let me remind you that my closet usually looks like this.

Just a random shot of some random street in Berlin.  This was a holy-crap-I-can't-believe-I-live-HERE moment.

After dinner tonight, Luke, Jess, Pep, and I retired to "The Cave" to watch our latest TV obsession, The Glee Project.