wednesday (april 11, 2012)

having taken no pictures today i feel like i've got a blank canvas to talk about anything i want.  but it's late.  i considered saying something about cancer as it's breast cancer awareness month, but i don't want to be a downer and i think that's how a BC awareness month post from me would come off.  of my 610 threeyearsindenmark blog posts, 7 are drafts that were never published.  one was completely blank.  of the six remaining, a full three were posts having to do with cancer that i never published.  one had a ton of pictures on it and no text, but i think i must have published all or most of those photos in other posts.  one was me complaining about my struggles with the language, and the last one was this, which was titled 'wednesday', which i'll share now... maybe it actually did get published in some copy and paste scenario.  otherwise, i'm not sure why it remained a draft.  it's from wednesday, april 11, 2012.  back when we had been here for less than two months.  it's surreal to imagine back to that time, to think about everything that's happened since then, to imagine henry as a baby (well, a one-year-old baby) that might fall asleep in my arms.  aww.

without further ado, i give you my thoughts as they appeared on wednesday, april 11, 2012...

it's hard to put down your reflections of the day with just one hand to type with, and yet that is what henry is requiring that i do.  ever since the sickness, and today being the least sickly of them all, henry has been difficult to put into his bed. i hope it's just a temporary "shift" in the bedtime routine.  he's always been so easy to put down (once he's fallen asleep mind you) in comparison to his brother, who was always difficult to put down (even after falling asleep).  it suffices to say that these boys have never been "easy" to get to sleep, the way that some babies (all danish babies-- just kidding) are, so this one-handed typing thing isn't outside the bounds of normal nighttime parenting for us.

okay, now that i've spent fifteen minutes typing out the preface, let's move on to the substance of the day.  my great-aunt, evna (a.k.a. lennie), died yesterday, which i learned of this morning.  she was 97.  i guess your age, any age, becomes one of your defining "traits" (?) once you die-- well, okay, when you're alive too.  anyway, hers was a "respectable" age to end on.  she has an older sister, still living, who is 101.  no one's going to say they didn't stick it out for the long haul.  they were/are my grandmother's sisters. i like what my own sister said, "i hope she is sharing a Blatz beer with grandma somewhere now!"

also, we went back to school today-- henry's--  and i missed my first day-- an excused absence-- of danish lessons (which i mistakenly put on the calendar as "first day of english classes!"  which, though a foolish mistake, is surely much better than writing something like, "first day of dutch lessons!").  we have homework already that one of greg's co-workers brought back to us.  i'm a little excited to have homework again-- and you can choose to emphasize either little or excited and both would be correct.  i hope it's not too much.  i haven't had to do the homework thing and the kid thing before and i like it that way (despite daydreams of going back to school while i'm here, since it will probably take me two and a half years to find a job and i might as well make myself useful-- but alas, i don't think the free tuition perk applies to residents).

things went relatively smoothly at henry's school today.  except he kept pulling off one kid's glasses.  a kid older than henry, but still much too young to defend himself and probably much too young to realize he's even wearing glasses, except whenever henry ripped them off his face.  my son, the unwitting bully.

good news! the super best had maple syrup today and coconut oil-- the newest cooking fad, which i am embracing.  if nothing else, it has a pleasant smell.

i think that's all the news here.  goodnight! 

oh, here's a picture of the fjord from this evening...