Time spent cranking into gear isn’t my favourite part of the academic year; too much up in the air, too many extra things to do; several of which wouldn’t be necessary but for the tiniest bit of joined up thinking and having basic information available. So far we have made three attempts to ascertain Joni’s blood group. So far we have failed to be in the right place at the right time. So far we have discovered that there is only one place in the city where it is possible to find out ones blood group, and we even know where it is, having been there twice, and now we have the (hopefully?) correct information about which half-hour slot they do blood group testing in each day, it might even be 4th time lucky. The one thing I really haven’t figured out is why school need this information at all.
Joni is in the afternoon school shift (school being half days here) which isn’t what we would have chosen but we’re going to need to make it work for this year at least. When he was at nursery in the mornings I used to do all the boring jobs in the mornings, and so when I was with him later I was available to him largely on his terms. Now any admin type chore that needs to be done in the mornings (because that’s when government offices, banks etc. are open) will have to be done with two bored children in tow. And there have been a lot of admin chores of late. Hopefully it won’t be so bad as the year gears up, but the kids will agree with me that this one has been a trying week.
On the positive side, given that school actually is only for three hours a day, we figured that we could well incorporate a couple of out of school activities in order to get him out of our hair for that bit longer broaden his curriculum. I’m thinking that this is the year for swimming lessons given that he loves water and we’re quite often in or near it between Scout activities and family camping. And then he himself out of the blue has decided that he wants to learn to dance. Goodness knows which stork brought him; I was so rubbish that my dance teacher wrote L and R in blue biro on my shoes for the few short months of our relationship, and I can’t exactly imagine his Dad as the Sugar Plum Fairy either. Maybe this is the Latino side of his dual nationality. Anyway, we’re still at the signing up stage, but hopefully we’ll have both of these new activities assimilated into our developing routine within the next week or so.
As for the rest of life, I went to the village for the first time today. Scouts starts next week. Special school activities would have started yesterday but it was raining so that’s next week now. The Instituto Londres (Martin’s English teaching) is at the signing up stage, and prison Bible Studies should spring into action soon. We also have a tentative plan to start an open Bible-study / prayer group in our house, at the behest of the lady who runs the grocery store across the plaza from us. Now we just need to find a time when everyone can make it.