Monday, February 17, 2014

Letter to Richard - 17 February 2014 (Caleb's birthday)

Dear Richard

The overwhelming experience this past week has been heat! For those of us here in the much milder Cape this has been intense!!! But there was a build-up of clouds this evening, and the air is a bit cooler, so hopefully it’s going to break soon!

Last week was my last week to take it a bit easier, with lectures starting today. So I did some reading for my Masters, but otherwise also just took some time to do some things for myself, which will be more difficult now. I’m lecturing in one of the venues which has just been upgraded, and we have some space age equipment! The computer and document camera are part of the lectern, and the come out at the push of a button… Pretty cool! My first lecture today went well, and the class is nice and small at only about 90 students J I’m looking forward to a good year!

Saturday was Caleb’s birthday – our baby is 2 years old! It was so sweet to see the kids being really nice to each other all day too J The whole day was really consumed with party preparations, then the party, and then the clean-up. We had what is probably our last party for the family in general (from now on it will really just be parties for the school friends) and everyone except Andrew’s one brother came, even including Andrew’s cousin and his family who have just moved to Cape Town. So 29 people in our little house! But with the heat we spent a good portion in the pool – can you imagine how crowed it was! Thankfully we had also gotten a jumping castle as a special treat for the last party, so the kids quickly decided that that was more fun J I’ll send photos soon hopefully. I’m just so tired out from the heat that even doing this letter is a major thing!

Second Sunday School lesson yesterday, and this time I got every single person who was there to say at least one thing J I think it went really nicely in general. It was an interesting experience, because the lesson was on the Abrahamic covenant, and although I had prepared all week, it was still as I was presenting the lesson that some things fell into place for me. So I guess that was the Spirit working J It just reminded me then of the talk by Elder McConkie this last conference on teaching where he quoted someone who said they always know when they are teaching by the spirit because they learn something from what they’ve said. And I had that experience yesterday! I feel like I have a decent understanding of the Abrahamic covenant for the first time! This is exactly what I was looking forward to with this teaching calling J

And I had a nice afternoon yesterday with Joshua, while Hannah and Caleb had their afternoon sleep. Josh somehow switched on the audio files of general conference on my tablet while we were getting to the car to leave church. Firstly he recognized it as conference, and then he put on a Sunday game. But the two noises were too much for me with everything else going on so I was going to switch off the conference. But he said he wanted to rather listen to conference than to play his game! What a special boy J And then when we came home he wanted to actually watch conference! Hopefully a good sign of things to come ;) So I got to watch nearly an hour of conference! And for the first while he was watching with, and then he played quietly next to me, but he wanted the conference to be on!

So that’s about it. I must say I’m feeling overall weary… We’ve also been sleeping badly ourselves, plus being woken up by the kids. So the overall combination is not fun L But hopefully cooler weather is on its way!

Have a good week J

Shelly

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