Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Climbing Trees

Spring is coming! You can tell everyone is anxious about it -there are more people around during the day, and walking in the evenings even if it's dark. One by one little green plants are peeking up through the old leaves, and we've turned the dials back on all the radiators.

Monday after school, Anders went to his friend Rolf's house -Torben went there a couple of weeks ago- and they had a good time playing outside. It was fun to hang out with just Torben for a while, too. I went to pick him up at school while Jeff stayed home with Svea during her nap, and he wanted to stay for a bit and colour a picture, so we did. It seems that no matter what time we get there to pick them up, they always want to stay "just a bit more" to do something; even if we came at a later time, they seem to really like the "just a little bit more" time also. So I sat at the table with him while he coloured one side of a paper, then the back of the paper, and then realized it was a big folded paper so now he had the whole inside to write a story in. He stopped at "mom" and "dad". Then when we were walking home, he saw his friend Dagmar and her brother and mom and dog walking in front of us, and ran to catch up with her. It was fun to walk home talking to Anne. They live just down the street so we walked most of the way home together.

Yesterday Jeff was also home in the afternoon, so I went by myself to get the boys while Svea slept. They both wanted to show off their tree-climbing skills. There are really some great trees for climbing at the friskole -and whenever the kids are outside there are kids in them.









I'm excited for when they will get to spend hours outside again as the weather warms up a bit. They are still outside quite a bit when it's cold, but not as much as when it's warmer. Starting in April, though, they have class in the morning and the afterskole in the afternoon, so I'm not sure how that will change their schedules. By this time of year, the 6 year olds in the preschool are getting to be quite a bit bigger than the little kids -several new 2yr olds just started recently- and are ready to be moving on to something bigger. So that will start in a few weeks. They will get to be with their friends from the folk school in the afternoons, then, which will be fun.

As we were walking home from school, the boys were taking their time and enjoying the spring afternoon. We have been walking through the courtyard between the bank and the old grocery store, and it's paved with a variety of brick paving stones. I thought it was quite interesting that the boys were walking about 50 feet apart, and at exactly the same time both decided that they could only walk on the light grey stones to get across it.
There were probably four shades of grey, a couple shades of red, and maybe some others, and they both decided the light grey was the only one they could step on. Twin minds must think alike sometimes. It certainly wasn't the direct route through the courtyard.

One thing we've noticed about the folk school students this spring compared to the fall ones is that they tend to linger over meals and hang around longer than the former students did. After dinner last night, the boys and Svea decided to join in the fun too, and played a little foosball. There was a round-robin game of ping pong going on next to us, and I remember how much fun that used to be in high school at youth group events.




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