I’m having trouble getting in the blog groove since the switch, and I don’t know if it’s just that that was a disruption, or if it’s that we have hit a mark here where things are not so new and worthy of comment, or if it’s maybe just winter. Anyway, I’ll try.

Yesterday we went to see Juno. It came out here this week, in a torrent of other Oscar faves, such as There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men, and Atonement. It’s been a long dry spell of reading reviews of those movies, hearing interviews (I’m a little hooked on Fresh Air podcasts), but having no access. Anyway, I loved it. It was a delight. Many of you probably enjoyed it six months ago :)

For the shortest month of the year, February stretched on for ages. Finally James starts the permanent job on Tuesday. Nick is going to stay in the Danish as a second language program, rather than switch schools, so he won’t have to switch twice (due to our moving into Copenhagen this summer). He has been going to the after school program on a trial basis, in preparation for the time when he has to go there for real, and it’s been fine. This is the one we sent him to last year, and almost immediately pulled him out of again, because the kids were picking on him and there seemed no adult supervision. His Danish is quite good, and he knows the kids at school now, and is tight with Noi, the girl in his class, and these things seem to have made the experience a lot more comfortable. Now he just finds it boring. 

Noi has been coming over after school several days a week, and this has been great for Nick, but definitely a language challenge for me. She speaks Thai and Danish, so I have to cobble together sentences to try to communicate with her. It’s good practice, but I always feel like the moment has passed before I’ve squeaked a little something out. It’s probably for the best that I can’t really talk to her much though, because all the time I’m asking, “Er din far og mor hjemme?” (is you father or mother home) what I really want to know are things like, did you ever know your real father? Do you remember much about Thailand? What was your life like before you moved here? Is this really better? Do you like this guy you call far? Is he nice to you? Is he really nice to you?  Sometimes Nick goes to Noi’s house too. Yesterday her dad made them muffins. It’s just a really normal life, except the whole business of having brought a woman and her daughter from a completely different culture to this one to make a family aspect. And I can’t help it, I’m curious.

Speaking of Danish, classes begin again in mid-March. We learned of a school that’s teaching the curriculum of the school we attended last fall, before it was closed down, so Elona and I have signed up. I am happy to get back at it — the clock is ticking on my subsidized language training. And I’m very happy to resume this approach, the cramming of sentences approach, because I really thought it was doing the trick.

 So there you go.