A Very Gray Day

We’ve had more rain the last few days than we’ve had all year. I guess the weather has been exceptionally wonderful (and not A4) since we've been here. I’m quite sure we wouldn’t have enjoyed it half as much if we had the kind of rain we’ve had the last few days, for the entire year. Kory was in Norway for five months in 1971 and all the time he was in Aalesund that summer he only remembers a few days of sunshine. That would get old. But the whole global warming thing is to Norway’s advantage on the one hand, because the weather is so nice now, but on the other hand, life is changing fast north of the Arctic Circle with everything melting so quickly. Days like today are just great for getting indoor projects done, so I’m not complaining. We just haven’t seen the mountains out our window for about three days now and the big grey wall of clouds hiding them, isn’t nearly as entertaining.

At school today The Good Teacher Inga gave us all a practice “speaking” test by asking us each to describe our “dream house.” Since I already have that back home, it wasn’t a hard assignment, and surprisingly, I passed the test, so woo hoo again! I only went to school for half a day then skipped out early to go be with The Praying Women. We had another refreshing time of prayer and talking about all the answers to prayers we’ve seen lately. Gotta love that. I used my afternoon and evening at home planning more things for our upcoming road trip. I was reading up on things to do in the areas we will be traveling, trying to get a good mix of history, culture and fun so we all remain happy campers.

Kory spent his morning down at the auto shop getting our van inspected. He found out a few things he didn’t know, like the fuse was out for the tail lights and turn signals, so it’s a good thing he got the inspection. Then he spent the rest of the day chasing after parts to fix all that he can fix himself before he schedules time at a repair shop. He has to get the car re-inspected before we can get the little sticker to put on our car showing it’s safe to be on the road. He thinks we’ll need new brakes, too, so hopefully everything can get done in the next few weeks. All it takes is time and money.

Kaleb didn’t have a very good day at school today. He got shoved and knocked around a little more, but didn’t seem as upset by it as he was yesterday. He didn’t pray for any of the boys before or after it happened, but I was praying for him all day. On one hand, I feel badly for him, but on the other, I’m glad he’s able to experience this kind of stuff because most of it is just normal boy stuff – they are rough with each other and he doesn’t have siblings to knock him around so he doesn’t realize it’s just part of life. The only thing I hate is he comes home and wants to demonstrate to me, exactly what happened to him at school, and often he hurts me in the process. I keep telling him he doesn’t need to carry through with things, he can stop short of actually smacking me, but I really think he gets pleasure out of knowing I feel his pain. I had him do a little extra homework today because he was bored and a little irritating. He wanted so much to go up to the neighborhood where all his friends live so I told him he could go if he got his homework done before two o’clock. Just as he was sitting down to do it, he dropped a glass that shattered into a million pieces, so he had to clean it up. Once he gets something like a vacuum cleaner in his hand, he completely tunes out to everything else. He must have played with that thing for a good 30 minutes, so he missed his window of opportunity to go, for which he was crabby about the rest of the day. Finally he put on his rain gear and rode his bike down to another kid’s house that lives by the school, as he had prearranged a meeting time with him, but when he got there, the kid wasn’t home. So he struck out all the way around. He came home feeling rather dejected, then played math games on his computer and read a Norwegian children’s book. I told him I would give him extra time on his Nintendo for every page he reads in Norwegian. He picked up a very advanced book and sat down and read three chapters. I had him tell us the synopsis of what happened in each chapter then Kory pointed to very difficult words and asked him what they meant. He knew everyone. If Kory asked him the word by itself, he couldn’t say what it meant, but when he read it in context with a sentence, he knew the meaning right away. We were both stunned as some of the words Kory didn’t even know and he had to look them up in the dictionary. I guess we don’t have to worry about his ability to learn things school – just his ability to roll with the punches – literally.