Repeats

Samuel is now 6 months old. Where does time go?! He is now with the crowd that rolls over, almost sits up, and eats mashed veggies and fruits. He is amazing and I'm so proud of the little rolls on his legs, as this is not something my other 2 had very much. (I am so excited that this baby is well fed!) I was flipping through some photos of Jesse when he was small, and, man, do those 2 (S and J) look almost identical. I am happily carrying Samuel in the backpack carrier now, something I enjoyed immensely with my other 2. (It was one of the things D wanted me to get rid of when J and L were too big to ride in it, but I was sentimental about it and couldn't let go. So glad.) Cooking is now made easier if I can just bear some slight shoulder pressure, greater girth in our small kitchen, and a bit of hair pulling.

Luci has been happily going to reception since it started. Even with how social Lu is, I did view her initial experiences there with a bit of trepidation. But today I realised that we are basically back into the complete comfort zone she had in nursery. She is running up to her classmates and cheerfully exclaiming their names, and they are happy to see her, and I am so happy to see her so exuberantly happy. I think i may have even made peace with the school uniform which has definitely taken away her self-expression through dress. I just don't like it when she occasionally says, "You know Mum, my favourite colours (NEWS ALERT!: my computer's spell check is preferring British English!) are black and light blue. The uniform is navy and light blue but Luci doesn't distinguish the darkest colours yet. The strangest thing has happened to Luci's speech. She has gone from speaking in a general English accent to Cockney almost overnight. Yesterday, I could not believe my ears. She is not pronouncing the d's and t's within words or at the end of words. So instead is instea and wanted is wa-ed with a big emphasis or where the letters are missing. This may bore you, but this rapid transformation is fascinating to me.

Jesse is amazing and showing us repeatedly that he has a HUGE love of learning. For several days in a row, when we asked him his favorite part of the day, he would say that it was when there was free time in school and he spent extra time on his writing assignments. Tonight, while I was putting Samuel to bed, he showed me some more work he had done during free time. It was sums of double digit numbers.

It was quite humorous last week when he complained that, after filling in his spellings chart, he wasn't required to make sentences with the words. He also came home beaming from his first in school piano lesson yesterday. (Somebody say "little Darren!")

Jesse has been doing hockey one day a week after school too and I am soooo happy as I felt he's needed to exercise the muscle of getting boy energy out in a sport rather than dissecting parts of the house, etc.

As, you can see life is good right now in soooo many ways. But it has also been trying as many things we've tried to be involved in are not going quite as planned. We are hoping that our visa situation works out so we can stay here without too much hassle and my friendships are reconfiguring a bit as I now don't have the same contact I used to have through Lu's nursery. Suddenly, I am having to engage with a new set of parents as I line up with Luci at the reception door. Call me spacy, but I totally missed that this would be a reality, until the first day of school. And I am missing one particular friend who has moved from her spot a block away. We can no longer do a late night food exchange and our children's schools draw us to different places. So I'm trying to work out the kinks of being in this new space, this sense of newness and rebalancing that is needed. But at the same time, it is really good and enlightening to see how God provides outside of the box. I guess I'm always learning to think outside my boxes and ways I assume things work.