Another kid update

Natasha has been wonderful so far and seems very happy still. No doubt some major conflict is lurking in the wings but we haven't seen it yet.

And Kasia is now home. She and Natasha and Anya are all sharing a room as of last night.

We had to bring the Princess home right away, rather than at the end of this semester or even next week, because the jerk over at the district transfer office told us that if Kasia wasn't home by the end of this week he'd kick Natasha out of Seven Lakes. So Dessie's mother has made Dessie promise to get his name and phone number and give it to her, so that she can call the man up and scream lots of unkind things into the phone at him.

That would not be, by the way, because she is Kasia's grandmother. It would be because she is the TAKS test coordinator for all Fredericksburg schools, and she knows that there is a TAKS coordinator at Seven Lakes as well, and this week is TAKS week. (TAKS is the state-imposed test that the legislature in Texas uses to ensure that students are taught to pass the TAKS test rather than actually being taught useful things -- just an absolutely terrible idea from every possible direction, but the kind of thing meddling politicians love to impose.) Why is this relevant?

Because there is hardly anything you can do to any member of a Texas public school faculty that is worse, than to make the TAKS coordinator deal with transfering a child into or out of their school during TAKS week. So this unreasonable, incompetent jerk has just forced an unimaginable amount of inconvenience and frustration on both Dessie's mom and on whoever is the wretched TAKS coordinator at Seven Lakes -- because he wouldn't give Kasia until next Monday to get back to Katy.

At any rate, Anya and Natasha and I went up to Austin on Saturday (Kasia was at a slumber party there) and brought the Princess back home. And now all eleven of us are living in Katy. Good times. (Seriously.)

Kasia's new roommates: Natasha (left, refusing to let us see her 1,000-candlepower smile because she hates having her picture taken) and Anya (right, obviously with no such objection)