Kaleb is such an inspiration to me. He had another run-in with Morton today and I asked him if he’s getting tired of all this and does he still like school. He shouted his answer to me: “There’s only three people that are a problem – out of a school with more than 100 kids– do you think I’d let those three kids keep me from liking school? HA HA HA HA HA!” So that settles it. He really loves school, and I’m so thankful he doesn’t focus on the negative. Sometimes I think it’s typical for Americans to have 99 things going right and then complain about the one thing that isn’t so well. But that’s not Kaleb at all. Hallelujah!
When Kory picked Kaleb up at school yesterday he ran into one of his teachers and he asked how it was going with him. Her comment was “He’s such a NICE boy!” And then last night I went to a meeting at church and I met a woman that knew Sabina and her mom. She said Sabina’s mom had told her that, “Kaleb is SUCH a NICE boy!” So when we find out he’s being talked about in such a positive way, we have cause to celebrate and we want to reward that kind of behavior. Woo hoo. He gets enough negative consequences with the choices he sometimes makes, so we want to be sure to emphasize the positive as well, and have positive consequences follow good things. Saturday we’ll be taking him and a friend to a local play land here as a special treat (it’s kind of like a huge indoors McDonald’s play area.) He’s excited about that. And we’ll find out more details about how he’s doing in school next week when we have our first parent/teacher conference. (I’m sure glad we don’t have those for my school or Kory would get an earful.)
Today we continued the painful study of past tense verbs, but we also learned all the measurement words, weight, height, width, length, kilometers, etc. We learned that there is such a thing as “a Norwegian mile” – which is quite different from an American mile. A Norwegian mile is 10 kilometers (6.1 miles), so when in Aalesund and someone says it’s 56 miles to Oslo, a little math calculation is in order because it’s really 341 miles. Good to know.
For the past few nights we’ve used the dinner hour as a time to just “snakke norsk.” I thought Kory and I would just speak it, but Kaleb joined right in and then started correcting my sentence structure. So we haven’t even been here three months and already we’re speaking Norwegian at home – which is very exciting for me to see we’re making that kind of progress.
The big news of the day is that we finally got some mail from home! Our house sitters sent us a package over a month ago that has yet to arrive, but the one they sent last week made it. It had all the latest newspapers from LaConner so we can catch up on things over the next few days… but last week’s paper particularly caught my eye because there was mention of Kaleb on the front page! Channel Town Press (now called The LaConner Weekly News) did a front page story on Kaleb in January telling about his weekly dog publication and how he sells subscriptions and all the money he raises goes to dog charities. He’s raised nearly two thousand dollars since he started a year and a half ago (but he now just publishes it monthly since we are in Norway.) Anyhoo… the newspaper submitted their story about Kaleb and “The Weekly Puppy” to some big competition that newspapers across the state enter – and that story won second place in the whole state! So we were all whooping it up here over that bit of news and the local paper was proud to toot their horn as well. Go figure – Kaleb isn’t even in the country and he’s still making the front page. I’ve never seen anyone that’s more of a media magnet than him. I’ve Googled his name before and he has an entire page of “hits.” He’s destined for something beyond comprehension, I’m sure. But I'm just thankful that some days, he really IS a nice boy.
When Kory picked Kaleb up at school yesterday he ran into one of his teachers and he asked how it was going with him. Her comment was “He’s such a NICE boy!” And then last night I went to a meeting at church and I met a woman that knew Sabina and her mom. She said Sabina’s mom had told her that, “Kaleb is SUCH a NICE boy!” So when we find out he’s being talked about in such a positive way, we have cause to celebrate and we want to reward that kind of behavior. Woo hoo. He gets enough negative consequences with the choices he sometimes makes, so we want to be sure to emphasize the positive as well, and have positive consequences follow good things. Saturday we’ll be taking him and a friend to a local play land here as a special treat (it’s kind of like a huge indoors McDonald’s play area.) He’s excited about that. And we’ll find out more details about how he’s doing in school next week when we have our first parent/teacher conference. (I’m sure glad we don’t have those for my school or Kory would get an earful.)
Today we continued the painful study of past tense verbs, but we also learned all the measurement words, weight, height, width, length, kilometers, etc. We learned that there is such a thing as “a Norwegian mile” – which is quite different from an American mile. A Norwegian mile is 10 kilometers (6.1 miles), so when in Aalesund and someone says it’s 56 miles to Oslo, a little math calculation is in order because it’s really 341 miles. Good to know.
For the past few nights we’ve used the dinner hour as a time to just “snakke norsk.” I thought Kory and I would just speak it, but Kaleb joined right in and then started correcting my sentence structure. So we haven’t even been here three months and already we’re speaking Norwegian at home – which is very exciting for me to see we’re making that kind of progress.
The big news of the day is that we finally got some mail from home! Our house sitters sent us a package over a month ago that has yet to arrive, but the one they sent last week made it. It had all the latest newspapers from LaConner so we can catch up on things over the next few days… but last week’s paper particularly caught my eye because there was mention of Kaleb on the front page! Channel Town Press (now called The LaConner Weekly News) did a front page story on Kaleb in January telling about his weekly dog publication and how he sells subscriptions and all the money he raises goes to dog charities. He’s raised nearly two thousand dollars since he started a year and a half ago (but he now just publishes it monthly since we are in Norway.) Anyhoo… the newspaper submitted their story about Kaleb and “The Weekly Puppy” to some big competition that newspapers across the state enter – and that story won second place in the whole state! So we were all whooping it up here over that bit of news and the local paper was proud to toot their horn as well. Go figure – Kaleb isn’t even in the country and he’s still making the front page. I’ve never seen anyone that’s more of a media magnet than him. I’ve Googled his name before and he has an entire page of “hits.” He’s destined for something beyond comprehension, I’m sure. But I'm just thankful that some days, he really IS a nice boy.
