Saturday, January 14 (This Last Week)

     First off, my sincere apologies for not posting sooner.  I did  mean to post on Wednesday, but that was the first day of school, and it just didn't happen... then we had the wireless router knocked out by lighting, and things just happened so that I didn't end up posting until now.  Anyways, all's well that ends well.
     Monday and Tuesday were filled with school shopping and preparation - who knew 6 kids could lose so much stuff in one term?  We also had my new classes to prepare for, and shoes/clothes to buy for those kids who had grown.  Honestly!  They just don't stop growing!  After 3 hours of shopping, we were, needless to say, a little grumpy and ready to get home.  Then, Tuesday, we had to sort all the new supplies into kid's piles.  New calculators, new books, new pencils, new, new, new.
     And then came waking up at 5:30 on Wednesday.  I had gone on Youtube and found some good Christian Wake Up! songs to add to our playlist, but it was still hard to force myself out of bed an hour earlier than I had gotten used to over break.  After the typical morning rush of getting into our uniforms, finding our bags, packing our lunches, eating breakfast, and clambering into the car, we left at 6:35 - right on time.  That is, for a normal weekday.  But this was still holiday, and, lo and behold, there was hardly any traffic.  We arrived at school at 6:45, 45 minutes before we needed to be there.
     Better early than late, however, and, thankfully, lots of other kids get to school early as well, so we just socialized for the next three-quarters of an hour.  At 7:30, everyone made their way down to the Assembly Hall, and we had our start-of-year assembly.  There was a lot of reminding of school rules, a couple of new rules, some announcements regarding sports, and general year-beginning jabber.  The rest of the school day was meet the teachers, meet the class, get papers on the lesson plans for the rest of the year, and socialization.
     Thursday and Friday we started in on the actual learning, and so far, I'm loving all of my classes.  I took a pretty heavy class load: Biology, Natural Sciences (Chemistry and Physics), History, A.P. Maths, as well as self-studying Art and Spanish, but I'm loving the subjects after only a couple of lessons of each, so I have no regrets.  Teresa has moved up into the College as an 8th grader this year, and has started off her year (as all 8th graders do) with Orientation.  That's a big word for showing the 8th graders that they're now little fish in a big pond (whereas the year before they were big fish in a little pond) and that they need to respect their new teachers and matrics (seniours).  Teresa headed off to Orientation camp on Friday and just came back today after 30 hours of building team unity.
     Last night we had Stan Doer and his friend David over for dinner, and, since they were from the states, they brought Christmas along with them!  Well, it seemed like Christmas anyways, since they brought along stuff from the states that Aunt Amy had been holding onto for us.  My phsyics book, our Rosetta stone Spanish program, our photo books, my shoes... Christmas!
     Today, I got to try out "normal" Church of Christ youth group for the first time, with their every-other-Saturday teen devotional.  This week they had a "leftover" American speaking about Courage and It's Role In Our Lives - I say leftover because most of the Americans left on Sunday, but he hung around for another week.  After the devotional was socializing time.  Most of the youth from Church of Christ that I had met over the last month were their, back from their holidays and also prepping for school.  Overall view: I loved it.  I'm so glad this is the church we picked to attend.
     Now that we're out of the "start-of-school" phase, I should be able to continue with my Wednesday-Saturday-Wednesday-Saturday posting.  If anyone has any requests for posts, post them in the comments!