Fall 2008

Well, it's been a long while... First we were super busy, then the computer broke, then my camera had no batteries so I couldn't transfer the pictures and suddenly we are in the end of October. For the record, our computer got fixed. The IT student services of the university did it for free, a week before Leland's one year membership ran out.

Some developments: Stoney is pretty much toothless now. He lost his first tooth a while ago and then lost three more in a period of ten days. He looks like this:




Fall has started here. It’s not super cold, but it is pretty chilly in the morning when we bring the boys to school. We already dug out the mittens just for the frosty mornings. What also comes with fall is the amount of spiders that uses our back yard as hunting ground. You can see one of us in the morning sticking a broom out in front of us like it is a jousting pole, to get rid of all the spider webs when we are making our way to the trash can. And then I haven’t even talked about the slugs yet. I mean, you are watching the broom stick, watching for spiderwebs the size of a small car… so you don’t look at the ground and then step on one of the hundred slugs that seem to reappear every night. Smash. And then you end up tracking slug guts all over the house. *headache*

Meanwhile we are getting settled into the school routine again. Monty and Stoney are both in a class of just 11 kids which means a lot of personal attention. Monty is enjoying kindergarten a lot more then he did last year. Stoney does enjoy going to school again, and is learning to read very quickly i think, but he is not to thrilled about the lack of play time in 1^st grade. They are learning cursive writing from first grade on (not sure how they do it in the US) and he thinks practicing letters is just the most boring thing to do. But other then that, he is excited. They go swimming once every two weeks and have PE every week and those are some of his favorite things.
In Stoney’s school –which is a non denominational school – they get religion education from 1^st grade on but they have a large choice of what religion education they want. Obviously, LDS is not one of them though. The choices were: Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Islam or non conventional (which means pretty much the philosophies of men – god is not supposed to be mentioned in those classes) So after a lot of agony, we decided to have Stoney take the Protestant classes, because we figured he might at least have some bible stories taught to him. Most of the kids in his class are either Islam (there are a good number of Muslims at his school, probably because they offer Islam) or Catholic (but we didn’t want him to be with a large group of kids who all will do their first communion next year). So anyway, we ended up with prostestant. Well, turns out, he is the entire kid in the entire school taking that class ! But they have a teacher especially for him. It is kind of strange. So far he has enjoyed it.

Here are some fall pictures of the boys.

From okt 2008

From okt 2008

From okt 2008

From okt 2008

I am also posting some pictures of the Abby close to our house. There are a lot of water birds living in the lakes right there as well and a group of cows. I have given them names: Virginia, Triangle, Horizon, Freckles, Gorbatsjov and the five white ladies. Naturally, Leland shakes his head at me and reminds me that they are just cows that will end up on someones plate some day.

A cow related question from Stoney: if cows make milk from grass, why can't we make milk from grass?