Finally Friday!

I’ve been glued to the news coverage of all the flooding in Washington State and I just hate the feeling of being so helpless. Friends of ours have been flooded out of their home, and if we were back there, at least they could come live with us. But here I sit, only able to pray. Fortunately, prayer is not the LEAST we can do, but the MOST we can do, so I have to trust God to take care of things because He has a lot more resources than I do. But here I go with that “survivor’s guilt” again because we have it so good here when so many don’t. Compounding the guilt is the fact we bought tickets today to go to Rome next month! All the airlines are having super deals right now and we can fly to Italy very cheap – so Kory said it’s my Valentine’s Day present and Kaleb said, “Isn’t that ROME-antic?” (I would be pretty excited if I could stop feeling so bad for our friends back home.)

Kaleb had a better day today than yesterday. Yesterday he finally succumbed to the urge to fight back with Morten. Morten threw a snowball at him (while they were in the dressing room), and Kaleb threw the remnants back at him, which enflamed Morten (who has otherwise been very kind these last several weeks). Morten pummeled Kaleb – he pushed him to the ground then repeatedly kicked him and hit him while he was down. The teacher came in when she heard Kaleb crying and had another “talking to” with Morten, but she also talked with Kaleb and suggested he just tell a teacher in the future when Morten does something, and not try to take matters into his own hands. Kaleb is fine, but I was a little disappointed in him for striking back (Kory said he doesn’t blame him one bit.) Today was uneventful on all accounts which was good because he’s had a tough adjustment this week going back to school and has asked me repeatedly if I can homeschool him again as he misses it so much (mostly, I think, he misses sleeping in and not having homework). As a compromise he’s decided now that he no longer wants to go to the afterschool program because he wants more time to do his homework right after school so he can play with Tobias every day. As it is, he doesn’t get home until after 4pm Monday to Wednesday and he uses every waking minute after that doing homework, eating dinner and getting ready for bed. There has been NO playtime during the week once he gets home (the afterschool program however, is ALL play time, and why they won’t let them do homework there is beyond me.) Kaleb’s plan is to come home on Mondays, when the weekly homework sheet is given out, and do the whole week’s worth of work that day so he’ll have the rest of the week free to play. I’m not sure it’s possible, but he’s insisting we give it a try. So I filled out the paperwork to stop the afterschool program next month and we’ll see how it goes.

In my class today we continued our discussion on health and the body which was interesting to hear about the old “wive’s tales” from other lands. The women from South America said if you cut an orange in half and smell it when you feel nauseous, it takes away that feeling. I told them something I learned in Norway years ago, about breast milk being a decongestant. The cousins here all told me on my first trip to Norway with Kaleb, that if he got a stuffy nose, just a drop of breast milk would clear it right up – and they were right (it works for adults too!). One of the women in the class, who is breastfeeding, offered her milk for those in class who are currently sick. We all got a good laugh out of that one. We are spending more time having class wide discussions now rather than just hearing all the rules of grammar the whole time. I’m still a little behind in memorizing all the grammar rules, which shows up drastically when I do any kind of writing in Norwegian. We just had a chapter review test this week to see how much we all forgot over the Christmas holiday and nearly all of us failed the test – including me! I only got 32 out of 52 possible points so I was pretty disgusted with myself. It’s my own fault because I spend zero time doing homework – I just do what I can on the bus in the morning and never really sit down at home and try to concentrate. But now, I must. I can’t be a slacker anymore.

Kory spent the day drawing. He took on a huge challenge as he’s doing the Borgund Stave Church we saw on our road trip at Christmas. He still insists he’s not an artist, and he doesn’t understand why I can’t do what he does because “all it is, is just drawing lines.” Sometimes he’s so irritating! Especially tonight when we had family game night and he kept winning all the games. We played Aggravation like it was the hit-man edition as everyone didn’t care about winning as much as they cared about wiping out the other guy. At one point I was so frustrated with Kaleb I said, “You are dirt.” And he said, “Yeah, but that just means you are older than dirt.” Ha ha.