In many ways being in Puerto Rico is just like being in America, but in Spanish. Driving, however, is not one of them. When it comes to behavior on the road, Puerto Rico is much closer to the third world.

Red lights are mere stop signs. Running the red is so common because apparently there is no prohibition against it. At least, the other day I saw four cars run a red light right in front of a police car without any repercussions. In and of itself, this would not be amazing, I suppose. What does amaze me is when I see people make a right turn from the left turn lane, across two lanes of traffic while running a red light. Or a right turn from the left lane across two lanes of traffic. It's not an uncommon occurrence.

You have to push yourself in to make turns a lot of places because there's tons of traffic, especially when getting out of parking spaces (unless you just park in the middle of the road and block traffic.) For some reason this pushing out makes certain persons extremely irate, which is completely incomprehensible to me as it's just such a common occurrence. But they'll be flipping people off for doing what everyone does, and what everyone has to do in order to keep moving.

The roads are terrible and full of potholes. In many places the markings have been obliterated. There are storm drains which are set very low. This all has the very welcome effect of at least keeping people from driving too fast.

So far, wherever I've had to drive, there is actually enough room for two cars to pass each other on the road. And they drive on the right side of the road.  After two years of not driving much at all I am so thrilled to be mobile once again, who cares what the driving is like!

As I mentioned before, we are sending Conall, Aidan, Aine and Mairead to school so that, hopefully, they will learn Spanish. I do not know if we'll do it for the entire time we're here in Puerto Rico. We'll just have to see how it goes.

Kevin and I had to endure the mind-numbing parents orientation, in Spanish, yesterday. It gave me a headache. It might not have given me a headache in English, but going over calendars, payment procedures, uniform dress codes and policies for dealing with H1N1 is hardly scintillating in any language.

The school we have chosen uses the ACE curriculum. It's an independent study course where the children work through their workbooks at their own pace. It's bilingual in the lower grades, but Conall's will all be in English. I think Mairead, Aine and Aidan will all do fine, both academically and socially. Conall, on the other hand, being a little older, and kind of nerdy space cadet, I'm not so sure about. I hope and pray he'll do well.

There's so much to do to get kids ready for school, and so many things to buy! They all need uniforms (and PE uniforms, even though they only get PE on Fridays.) I hope two sets will get them through the year if I make sure they have a little room for growth. At least they don't need both winter and summer uniforms. And there the lists of books and supplies. They each (except Mairead) need a Spanish-Spanish dictionary, English-English dictionary and Spanish-English dictionary. Of course, they could share those, and their scissors, colored pencils, glue and other supplies as well if they were still at home. And I could just buy things as needed throughout the year, instead of all at once.

Expenses aside, there's the issue of handing over my responsibilities to other people. On the whole, I'm glad to do it for a bit, since it gives me a chance to concentrate on Brendan and Fiona for a while. If I weren't homeschooling anyone, it might be a little harder. While I love teaching all my children, keeping up with them all is a challenge (which certain children know how to take advantage of.) It will be nice to have only two, who are going through the same material, to keep up with.

The first day of school is August 11th, which is now only nine days away! If you think of us, we'd appreciate your prayers that the transition goes smoothly!