Kaleb woke up with a fever and as much as he wanted to go to school today, he couldn’t muster the strength to get dressed, so he just stayed in bed and moaned. I had to stay home from school with him this time because Kory needed to go to work. It was actually a lovely day for me, as I never got out of my jammies and I had nothing on the agenda. I helped Kaleb with his homework later in the day when he felt better, and we did some birthday party planning for his big 10th birthday coming up next month. Where have the years gone?Kaleb’s homework now consists of READING. He thinks that’s laughable. They have a big reading challenge going on and he has to read a lot of books in the next five weeks. I usually end up having to curb his reading as “punishment” because sometimes he’ll just sit around and read non-stop and does nothing else (including getting dressed), so he’s in hog heaven these days because he has a lot of homework reading to do! I had to order up some English books from the library in Oslo as he’s already read all the English books in both libraries near us. He is reading Norwegian also, but it’s a slow go and quite painful, but I was impressed today by how much he can translate. One night I was up until 11:30 reading “Matilda” by Roald Dahl (a famous children’s author who is Norwegian but grew up in England – he wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach and many, many others.) Kaleb’s teacher gave him an English copy of the book to read and it was due back the next day. Then she gave him a Norwegian copy to read so he could compare the languages. Kaleb found the book so exciting he begged me to read it so we could talk about it. Matilda is a very bright little girl who loves to sit and read books all day (Kaleb read that book three times). He always gets a thrill when he finds a character in a book that has some of his same qualities. He’s decided he loves Roald Dahl and has read all his books at least three times each since we’ve been here. That kids loves to read, and now his writing is progressing as well. He said he feels like he might become a writer because he’s always thinking of interesting things in his head, and he’d like to put them on paper. I’m all for that! Today he wrote his first paragraph in Norwegian without any help. I couldn’t believe it – his sentence structure was perfect. I’m jealous. I have a test tomorrow and I’m so not ready for it… if only Kaleb could take it for me….
So the headlines this morning in the local paper said, “Only a Catastrophe Could Stop Obama Now.” All the world is watching. (We sent in our absentee ballots last week.) We will be getting a new President, but they are getting a new world leader that will affect their lives as much as ours. It’s a strange thing. A while ago I went to a special meeting at Filadelfia Kirke. They had a speaker there from Kenya who gave a report on how the Bible school is going in Africa that was started fifty years ago by some Pentecostal missionaries from Scandinavia. (He said they’ve estimated there has been a “harvest” of over three million Pentecostal Christians in Kenya and the surrounding countries from the seeds that were planted fifty years ago.) He was a dynamic speaker and he connected the dots in some Bible passages that I hadn’t made or even heard before so it was very interesting to listen to him (and he spoke in English!). Afterwards we hung around and talked with some other folks there and one guy really bent my ear on the financial crisis that has hit America and how that’s just the tip of the iceberg of what is to come. Not that I disagree with him – I do think that America will fall from their power position in the world someday -- but I’m not sure of his timing. He claims there are several prophecies that say that the next president of America will be the last, and that the year 2012 will be the end of the good old U.S. of A. (whatever that means.) He seemed quite concerned that we are moving back to America next year. He has a brother in Wisconsin that’s stocking up on supplies already. I guess if America does come to an end, I’m not sure there are any supplies I could buy that would really make a difference. I just told him I trust God to supply all my needs and that He daily directs my path, so if California really is going to break off and fall into the ocean, I’m sure I’ll be elsewhere that day… but even if not, heaven ain’t so bad. My future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades. Hallelujah!
