Dear Richard
I made it through, like I knew I would, of course, but it’s
still always good to come to the end of a crazy time :) So last week I was
still lecturing the first years, but it did get progressively better as the
week went by. After pretty much staying at home last Monday to rest I still had
a really bad cough on Tuesday, and coughing over a microphone makes it sound so
much worse! But by Friday it was more or less gone, and a good night’s sleep on
Thursday night also really helped! And now I have about 4 weeks where I’m doing
basically no teaching, which is just amazing! And I must say that I’m glad to
be finished lecturing the first years… What also made it worse is that I was
lecturing the students who did accounting at school, and it was a topic that
they’ve pretty much seen all of at various stages in the past, so really, it
was boring for them :( But I’m only doing one more week with them in October or
so, and it’s on financial analysis, which is pretty new, at least the angle we
do it with.
We had a bi-election last week, because James Vos has gone
to parliament following the general elections in May. So it was voting for a
new ward councillor. It’s the first time I was voting in a bi-election, and
it’s kind of a non-event in many ways. But at least there was no queue at all,
so we were in and out quickly. We were taking Josh for a school-readiness test
that day, so we took him with us first to see how the voting works. He found it
fascinating, just like he does everything… And his school readiness test went
really well! This lady saw Josh 2 years ago, and when she gave us the feedback
afterwards her first words were “What did you do to this child?!?” She can’t
believe the change in him, how he’s grown up so much! And with just about
everything he’s well at the level he needs to be, or even above. The one area
he’s at the level of an 11-year old! his visual perception. So we came away really proud parents :)
On Wednesday evening when Andrew was at meetings I was still
coughing a lot, so I wasn’t going to read a bedtime story for the kids… But
then Josh went all quiet on the top bunk, and then popped his head over and
said that I could read because he had just said a prayer that Heavenly Father
would help me to be able to read! So of course then I had to do it, whether he
had actually said a prayer or not… But that was certainly sweet of him :) I did
manage to read to them too…
Saturday we had Helping Hands. We cleaned up the nature
reserve behind Edgemead High, and it was the first time that we’ve been able to
really have our kids involved and do it as a whole family. The advantages of a
growing up family :) The kids really enjoyed helping out, and we got a lot
done!
I had an interesting realisation yesterday… Last Sunday we
spent the afternoon in Fish Hoek, and so I didn’t get to do my usual kind of
Sabbath activities. We did do home evening while we were driving there, but
then there are so many people in that house who don’t live church standards
that there really isn’t the kind of atmosphere that you want on a Sunday. And I
then struggled the whole week with my spirituality! Of course I was also sick,
so that didn’t help, but I think that a large part of it was also the bad
Sunday I had. But yesterday I did lots of spiritual things, and I think that
things are already going better :)
Today we had a delegation of lecturers from the Tswane
University of Technology coming to visit us to hear about the things we did
with the Large Class Teaching Project, where we made those video clips of a
couple of factories. They were really impressed with it, and it was nice to be
able to share what we’ve been doing.
So things are off to a better start this week, thankfully!
Hopefully next week I’ll have even better things to report :)
Love you lots!
Shelly
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