Monday, February 15, 2016

Twenty seventh weekend

The cold seems to have returned this week. No snow, and it's bright and sunny today, but the air is cold and makes you cough if you breathe too deeply outside. Spring is coming, though, you can tell. There are tiny white flowers and tiny yellow flowers in bloom -I'm not sure what they are, but they're pretty and they tell that spring is on its way.

The kids have gotten so excited about perler beads lately! We spent much of the weekend making and ironing various pieces of artwork. Even Svea gets in on it sometimes, though they are a bit small for her still. There is one patchwork-style circle that one of the boys' friends made at their birthday, and she gave it to Jeff, so Svea has decided that it's hers and she loves it. I decided to make a bunch of different colours of red and pink hearts, since it was valentine's day afterall. Forgot to get them hung on the strings in the windows yesterday, but they are ready for next year. Then I started on some green ones, which I discovered can be put together to make a shamrock. We told the boys about a book that gives you ideas for things to make with perler beads, and Anders hasn't stopped talking about when we will get the book for them. He's really very creative with things like this, and with drawing. Torben is creative as well, though his preferred medium is recyclables. He likes to build sculptures out of various pieces of cardboard and paper and then colour those, rather than just drawing a picture. It's fun to see the differences in their approach to creativity.

The students at the folk school were having a Night at the Oscars theme party on Saturday night, so we decided to stay home. Apparently the food was some of Henrik's specialty, but fancy dinners just don't work very well for us. Instead, we made gryro-seasoned chicken, roasted garlic and thyme mushrooms, mashed potatoes, and broccoli. We also prepared an apple pie, but waited too long to bake it so we had it on Sunday instead. Anders wanted to help me peel the apples, and I discovered that he can do it perfectly! They are growing up so fast. Last week he made scrambled eggs for himself and Svea without any help -though I was in the kitchen to make sure no one got burned.

It's fun to see how well the three kids play together. Several times this weekend they had an impromptu dance party in the livingroom, and all of them were doing variations on the same dance moves. They were laughing and jumping and having so much fun! Whenever songs come on whatever show they are watching, they all start dancing too.

Friday night, of course, we hurried home from dinner to get jammies on to get ready to watch Disney. It's fun how excited they are to watch Disney each week, even though we are more liberal with our tv watching than typical Danes I think, so it's not like they don't get to see anything between one Disney night and the next. They all three know that on Fridays, we come home from dinner, get jammies on, make popcorn, and sit down together to watch it. We didn't make the popcorn right away this weekend, and about 5 minutes in, Svea started asking where it was. It's fun to have that tradition, sitting together in a row on the couch, trying to all fit under one blanket -there are lots of blankets, but the one on the couch is the favourite of everyone, so we all try to fit.

It's getting so much lighter now. This morning, the sky was turning to dawn by 7:15, and in the evenings it's dusk at about 5:30. That's almost an hour earlier in the morning, and over an hour later in the evening than it was a month or so ago. I'm still tired of how long it's dark, but it's helpful that it's so obviously changing now. Soon the trees and flowers will start to bloom and the sun will be up before we are. And then hopefully our weekend adventures will start up once again. Jeff has three weekends where he is the staff on duty this spring, and the second is this coming weekend. Then he's mostly free for the rest of our time here, except once when they all return from Scotland, since the rest of the teachers will have been working that whole week, he is taking that weekend. We haven't decided yet whether to take any longer trips around Europe for a long weekend, or whether we'll just do some shorter day-trips like we did when we first arrived. It's hard to decide whether it would be fun, or whether it would be too stressful for everyone and we wouldn't have a lot of fun if we tried it. The kids are still young enough that they think short day-trips are a lot of fun, and they get to sleep in their own beds too. And, we will have season passes to Legoland, so maybe we will go there several times also. They are so excited to go there!

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