February has been a month full of research for our next posting. We were presented with a list of about 300 jobs a little over a month ago, and told to come up with our 20 favorites from that list. There were some really exciting jobs in great places: Madagascar, Jakarta, Buenos Aires, and many more. One complication however is that other junior officers who have been serving at particularly dangerous posts, like Baghdad and Kabul, get first pick: their deadline for submitting their list of twenty top choices is two weeks before everyone else's. They get assigned their new jobs, and then the updated master list is published. Well, out of our prospective 20 top picks, 16 of them were snapped up before our deadline - all that research we did on our favorite posts went out the window and we had to come up with a completely new list of priorities.

The nice thing about the State Department system however is that the remaining officers are assigned their jobs based on the hardship rating of their current posting; Dhaka is rated at 25%, which puts us in the first tier. That means (not to jink ourselves) that we should have a pretty good shot at one of our top picks. Again, we'll keep our list mum until we get the result, and then we'll share it with everybody.

February also saw Adham head off to Frankfurt, Germany for a week of training. It was nice to be back in Germany for a week, where he had spent a lot of time previously. When the course was over, he was able to spend a couple nights with his old college homestay family in a small town in northern Bavaria, where the snow was knee-deep outside the door. A nice contrast to the heat of Dhaka!

This month also brought another birthday, Tasman's fourth. We had his friends over for a party at the American club, where they played Duck Duck Goose, Pass the Parcel, and Pin the Tail on the Bunny, and had pizza and a great homemade star-shaped strawberry birthday cake. Atlas adores his big brother and loves giving him hugs and following him around.