Cars, birds and writing

Today I took Emma and the girls home to their place to spend the afternoon there, but the car broke down on the way. It was completely out of water and overheated, so it just cut out and I couldn’t start it at all. But isn’t the Lord fantastic, we broke down where I could let the car roll downhill into a driveway, and then two men appeared from nowhere who happened to know a lot about cars, so in no time they had the radiator and battery topped up with water (poor car, it was EMPTY), tested the car, and we were on our way. That would not happen in SA! Well, we just need to be careful to check the water from time to time. It hadn’t really occurred to us at all that it might be a problem. The men who helped also checked the oil, but that was fine.

Yesterday and today we had a feathered visitor in the house. A pigeon has decided that there is not enough bread outside anymore, so it comes wandering in the back door, into the diningroom or kitchen to see what’s available. This is not a welcome sight. We have to open windows and let it fly out, or walk behind it until it goes back out the door. It’s not at all scared of us, stupid thing. There are two pigeons that regularly walk around the garden, and since pigeons tend to be rather dirty and are disease carriers, we have taught the boys to scare them off, but then they just fly to the garden wall and look at us.

Caleb has got as far as “t” in the alphabet in writing, and today he wrote “granny” and “grandpa” for the first time. He’s doing very well, but today was a bad day in terms of his concentrating on what he was doing and being serious about it. I had to threaten him with a smack, which isn’t what I want to do with homeschooling. I want him to enjoy learning and be keen for it, instead of dreading having to sit down for lessons. I don’t want to give up either, so we have to try find a way to keep him interested and wanting to learn. He did a puzzle entirely on his own though, a 63-piece that he hadn’t done before. So that was very good. Apparently putting puzzles together is an important step in the whole learning process, perhaps in teaching them to stick to a task.