Fall Days

Fall is my favourite season of all, so it's nice that it starts earlier here than at home! The dark mornings take some getting used to, but, right now the neighbor next door is getting a new roof put on, so the workers turn on the floodlights just before 7am, and they shine in the windows so that helps! Jeff came downstairs yesterday and said "just FYI...the roofline next door is at the exact same level as the bathroom windows. Just do you know." Right. Use the bathroom downstairs when its dark outside and you have lights on inside. Good tip!

When I went to pick up the boys from school, I saw Anders right away walking around outside, but had to look quite a bit for Torben. He wasn't with any of the kids he's usually playing with in the afternoons. Then I saw him...

He was just chilling out, relaxing in an old log that seemed to be cut out specifically for that purpose, reading a map he took out of a magazine earlier this week. I'm not sure where he wants to go, but he does seem to have inherited Jeff's love of maps! It was so cute to see him just laying there reading. It was a very nice fall day, and the teacher said they'd been outside since 9am. So that was about 6 1/2 hours by the time I got there. She said they might want to play inside when we got home. They even ate lunch and their snacks outside. Today seems quite similar, so I imagine they will be outside most of the day today as well, except for lunchtime when they are going to one boy's house for his birthday party. I still think that's such a great concept...the school brings you all to the children's house during the day for a birthday party, and then you all go back to school. It doesn't cut into family time on the weekends or evenings, and you get to celebrate your birthday with all your friends. Genius!

Jeff's new class on Immigration starts today, so he has been reading and researching a lot for that class recently. It should be an interesting one. There are several movies and books about both Danes moving to other places, and other people coming here. He is also going to have one of his friends from Rotary who moved here after she married a Dane come to talk about her experience as an American living here for 15 years now.

The highlight of today might have been our discovery that the chocolate had been refilled in the coffee machine! It sounds trivial, but the machine that makes hot chocolate, tea, espresso, and the like has been out of chocolate for more than 3 weeks. Even the students were frustrated about it! Every few days we would go and check to see if more had arrived, and discover that it had not. So, we tried again after dinner last night and found that there was chocolate! There is nothing quite as delicious as an espresso choco (for me, hot chocolate for the rest of them) on a dark and chilly fall evening. Kind of akin to the first pumpkin spice latte of the season.