Nick's Birthday

We received a letter this morning from the education committee. They have given us approval to homeschool! We are thrilled! They also attached a certificate stating our permission to homeschool, so it’s all very official and formal. Now we have to go about buying the material and getting it shipped over, it’s going to be quite expensive I think, but a price we are willing to pay. If we can organise ourselves quickly enough, we should be able to get the material at the end of December on the ship that comes then, so we can start in the new year.

Church last night was very good. The people are enjoying Nick’s preaching. The boys were much better in church, they sat in their chairs and were quiet. I think there must have been people praying for us yesterday, because I had abnormal amounts of patience and could cope with them without feeling totally hassled. We went to lunch with a church family yesterday (actually, only the mom comes to church and sometimes her two younger sons). She cooked enough to feed about 20 people – tuna cakes, chicken drumsticks, onion rings, roasted tuna, stuffed baked potatoes, potato salad, roast potatoes, coleslaw, beetroot, peas and corn, AND curry and rice!! I’ve probably forgotten something. For pudding we had a trifley-thing, plus tinned strawberries and peaches, ice-cream, jelly AND a HUGE cake, half of which we have brought home. Phew, what a lot of eating. Then straight after lunch we retired to the lounge and she brought out chips and sweets. We didn’t have much of that! We came home after 3 pm and put the boys down for a sleep, then we also slept because we were just so tired after the huge meal. In church last night during the notices the church sang happy birthday to Nick. Other than that, it was a very low-key birthday. Caleb gave him a knife (for cutting fish one day), Aaron gave him Pringles, and I gave him a desk lamp. He was also given a St Helena keyring, a smart white shirt and tie, and a book called “A doctor’s thoughts on the island”, a very nice book full of pictures and interesting medical bits and pieces, like how to treat ingrown toenails and where you inject to anaesthetize a finger and so on. Nice coffee-table sort of book. We think we may buy a few other books on the island for one day when we move on from here. The boys and I did Sunday School yesterday, which went better than last week, probably because I didn’t have such high expectations, then after Sunday School we had a treat – digestive biscuits with caramel and 100s and 1000s on them. Nice messy activity, but it was in the kitchen and quite well contained.