Celebration!

I passed the NT2!  Granted, I just barely made the cutoff for the listening section, which was tricky because for a lot of the questions, it wasn't so much "What's the right answer?" as it was "What's the most right answer?" But surprisingly I didn't do too badly on any of the other sections.  Whoop di doo.

But it's one less thing to worry about as the summer draws to a close and the Little It's birth day starts looming on the horizon.  It means that the gemeente won't be taking almost €1000 from my bank account to pay for the Dutch classes (one of the conditions for free lessons is that you must pass the NT2).  It means that I can get a permanent-permanent residence in 2014, when my 5-year permit runs out.  And it means that I don't have to worry about the damn thing while I'm taking care of the Little It--because my deadline for taking the NT2 was 2013.

This being said, I would still hesitate to consider myself bilingual.  Even though I can get by pretty well these days, I still prefer English, and while I'm reading kids' books in Dutch (tweener-level lit--more imaginative and less mundane than "real" literature) I get the feeling that there's a lot of context that I'm missing that makes it more of a slog than it has to be.  But considering where I began when I arrived five years ago, it's a pretty vast difference.