I am so thankful for our home fellowship group from Bethany Covenant Church. We met for dinner tonight and I laughed and laughed. I haven’t laughed much lately, and I desperately needed it. It’s been a rough week. I now realize why we didn’t speak a word of Norwegian after we got home – because it’s so hard! English takes no effort and when I’m tired, no effort is a good thing. I’ve been tired all week. We’ve had cousin Ingeborg from Norway here since last Friday and with Kory still laid up from his compression fracture, I’m the one that gets to play tour guide and show her around (see photo of her and Kaleb in Winthrop as we were doing the Cascade Loop on Tuesday). She understands very little English so I have been speaking Norwegian all week, translating things to her, and trying to understand her. As Kaleb says, “If I don’t know one word in Norwegian, I have to use three sentences to get around it,” which makes it even more work. Plus I’m making meals, cleaning up, and taking her here and there. We absolutely love having her here, but the timing (unfortunately) couldn’t have been worse with Kory still recovering from his accident and Kaleb starting school this week. (Ingeborg is now with Kory’s brothers for a few days so I can pay bills, do laundry, mow the lawn, open the mail, write my blog, hopefully return some phone calls, and perhaps get some sleep. One can hope.)
Kaleb has been a source of great stress for me this week as well. It started off with “an incident” at a sleepover he had with a friend last weekend. As is usually the case, the friend’s little brother got on their nerves. Kaleb decided to retaliate for the annoyance by pantsing the brother as he was taking off on the zip line. Little did Kaleb know, the kid didn’t have on any underwear, so off he goes to the end of the zip line with his bare little bottom whistling in the wind. It grieved me deeply because Kaleb was pantsed at soccer practice in Norway last year and he knows how humiliating it is. I couldn’t have been more disappointed in him. The only upside is that Kaleb got restricted off anything Pokemon for a month. (At least I don’t have to fight that battle for a while.) I’m sure he won’t be doing anything like that again as he didn’t even pitch a fit when I gave him his consequence. He knew he’d done something terribly wrong.
We didn’t really get a good “first day of school” this week so I’m declaring Monday to be that day so I can dress Kaleb up cute and take his picture. There were too many interruptions and out of the ordinary occurrences to really begin school full-time this week but Kaleb did have his first ever piano lesson, for which I’m extremely proud and excited about. He also thought it was fun, and he’s been showing off to anyone who will listen. I can’t wait to have piano music in the house! He’s got a full-line up of classes, so this Fall will surely fly by. I’m so thankful I only have to teach him every other day as he just wears me out. Why he can take six different instructions from his piano teacher all at once, without making a peep (sit up straight, relax your shoulders, don’t look at the keys, curl your fingers, feet on the floor and speak out loud when you hit the key), but when he practices at home and I tell him to put his feet on the floor, curl his fingers and speak loudly, he just flips out that I’m telling him TOO much at once! Yet I only said half of what she told him. This is where homeschooling has its biggest challenges – being both mom and teacher. I’m just so thankful most of his classes are “out-sourced” this year. He’s taking Physical Science and Web Design from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Talented Youth. He’s already taken two science quizzes this week via the internet and just to get a feel for the kind of stuff he’s doing at age 10, one of the quiz questions was, “If you have an isotope of the element carbon (C) that has the mass number of 14, what other information would help you determine the number of neutrons? And he was given the choices of a) the number of electrons b) the number of isotopes c) atomic mass or d) the atomic weight. I thought I would choke. I was looking over his shoulder and he answered it correctly and was on to the next question before I could even read all the options (I had to have him go back to that screen so I could write it all down.) He likes science very much so I’m thankful I don’t have to teach THAT to him! (What’s an isotope, anyway?) He’s also taking a once-a-week writing course taught by a very talented homeschool mom, so I’m glad I’m not the one to have to teach him THAT. He has an Algebra book with instructional DVDs he works on independently (also, not one of my strong suits), but Kory and I will both be working with him on Norwegian grammar (or, perhaps, Kaleb will be teaching us a thing or two about Norwegian grammar.) I’ll be working with him on cooking and hand crafts and Kory will be teaching him art and woodworking. Some Geography games and History projects are also in the mix along with gymnastics, swimming lessons and a Wednesday night Bible class, so needless to say, next week we’ll hit the ground running and come up for air sometime in December.
Kory is more vertical than horizontal these days so that’s a good sign, but he knows not to push it. He’s been watching a lot of movies and not lifting anything - as I’m certainly the one carrying all the weight around here, literally and figuratively. He is improving, but he feels terrible for all the stress I’ve been under this week. Tonight helped tremendously though as a few good belly laughs went a long way to lifting my burdens. I’ve been in tears nearly the whole day as I just heard last night about the tragic motorcycle accident that caused the death of my cousin, Jolyn. We were pretty close as kids. The Bible says that sorrow is just for the night, but joy comes in the morning. I’ll be looking forward to the morning. In the meantime, I’m glad I got to laugh tonight. Jason, a guy in our home fellowship group, said he developed an addiction to my blog while we were in Norway. He said he tried to stop reading it after we came home, but “it was like a bad train wreck,” and he just couldn’t tear himself away. Now there’s a happy thought – that our lives are like a bad train wreck. So here’s the first installment as we head down the tracks of a new blog….
No comments:
Post a Comment