Monday, February 9, 2015

Letter to Richard - 9 February 2015

9 February 2015

This last week I did quite a bit of work on my literature review for my Masters, and I finally got all the paper work sorted out to register and paid most of my fees. It’s really nice getting a 75% staff discount :) I’ve more or less got a structure now for my lit review, but it’s definitely hard going, slogging through all the literature!

Josh made good progress during the week. On Tuesday he even asked me to fetch Hannah and Caleb first because he wanted to show them his aftercare! And by the end of the week I was pretty far from his line in the morning, with no tears, except on Thursday when I stayed to do IRP with his class, and he was all sad with me being there…?!? But he told me that afternoon that he was sad because he was anticipating having to say goodbye to me. He’s like Andrew in that way. For the last few days of his leave he’ll be all sad because he’s going back to work, instead of just enjoying the moment of being on leave. But the more we figure out Joshua’s psyche the more we can hopefully help him!

One big thing last week was that Andrew travelled for the first time, with his new position at work. It was a really intense day, because he left home at 5:20 to get to the airport to fly to Durban. Then he flew to Joburg at lunch time, and then flew back to Cape Town and arrived back home at about 8:30. Very intense, and he’s decided that he won’t do both cities in the same day again… He was actually in 3 cities in a single day, which is quite something! But the good thing for us was that the kids and I handled things at home really well. I got them to school even earlier than we’ve been managing, and the afternoon and evening also went fine. It’s a big relief to me to see that we can cope, and I’m also really glad that this has only happened now, with the kids being a little bit older.

On Saturday I attended a training session with Elder Tad R Callister, the Sunday School general president. What an inspirational session! He was talking about how we can be better teachers, learners, parents etc, and I’ve definitely got some things to think about and implement. And what was also interesting was he explained how they are planning on changing the curriculum for 2016, where from Primary to the adults we are studying the same set of chapters each week in SS, and the same gospel topics in the second hour. It sounds really exciting!

And in my class yesterday we were able to have one of our best sessions this year, and everyone participated so nicely :) It was nice to also be able to bring in some of the things from Saturday’s meeting, because the lesson was on when the Saviour called his Apostles, and one of the questions was how are we blessed when we follow the Apostles. So we could link it nicely to what we learnt from, not an apostle, but the general authorities the previous day :)

Yesterday was Jesse’s birthday party, but shame, he was sick… But the kids till enjoyed being all together, and hopefully my kids won’t get sick! The next birthday is Joshua’s and we’ll all be together then, just missing Cindy :(

But things are going nicely in general! We’re settling nicely into a routine, and one amazing thing is that we’ve managed to have the kids at school on time every single day since school started. I don’t know what’s changed exactly in the morning, except that I’m pushing Josh to really be independent and do things on his own. But things are going really nicely! And it’s exciting to be part of the next phase :)

But that’s it from us. Love you lots!

Shelly

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