Licences

We’ve had a lovely rainy day – it rained solidly for at least 20 minutes this morning, not hard enough to soak a person if they were to run in it, but someone said we had 4 mm in that time. Then it drizzled off and on during the day, although it wasn’t cold, and again later this afternoon it rained properly for a few minutes. It’s been nice having actual rain rather than drizzle, and the cooler weather to accompany it – not cold, just enough that you can feel slightly too warm with a long-sleeve top on. Nick and I and the boys went to town this morning because we had to get our drivers’ licenses sorted out – the three month mark for driving around on a temporary international license was reached, so we had to pay £7.50 each and were immediately issued with a valid St Helena license, valid for a year. How easy though – went into the police station, there was one person in front of us – actually one of our deacons, then said to the lady, “we’d like to apply for licenses”, gave her the forms which we had already filled in (just a series of questions about one’s driving capabilities), then she wrote out a receipt and wrote into a little blue card, stapled the receipt into it, and there we had them. No long queues, confusing forms, dangerous places to go to, shuffled from one queue to another or anything one might expect in SA. Nick was a bit concerned that because his SA license has just expired, that he might have to completely redo a license or something, but they didn’t even look at our SA licenses. That being done, we popped into Spar for bread and a few other things. The queue for cutting bread was quite long – there must have been at least 20 loaves in front of me, although only about five people, so I cut the bread at home with a bread knife rather. Our bread here is really lovely, not like your mass produced Albany and such-like – it seems home-make, has a crispy crust, and is deliciously soft. Later in the afternoon, Nick decided that the weather was good to fly a kite, so we went off to the school grounds across the road. Unfortunately this coincided with another good shower of rain, so that was short-lived.

I did some more words with Caleb this morning, we learned some new ones, and now he’s confident with “ee” as a dipthong. We are still struggling a bit with “th”, but will soon move on to “sh” and “ea” and others. It’s quite incredible to watch him read though, I mean, he’s actually doing it! I’ll string together a sentence (eg “Caleb has been in the car” or “the big pet dog can run and jump”) on the fridge with the magnetic yellow words, and he’ll spell the words out first and then go back and read the whole sentence slowly. He doesn’t appear to have any dyslexia or anything like that. Aaron has a problem with lying at the moment. At supper, for example, he was taking so long with a piece of meat that I eventually went to get the wooden spoon. When I came back, I asked if he had swallowed yet and he said “yes”. I said, “let me see” and there was a big wad of chewed steak. I therefore gave him two smacks, one for not swallowing and one for lying! We talk to him very earnestly about this and explain how serious it is, and he looks very downcast, but two minutes later he is laughing his raucous laugh again and doesn’t appear very repentant! I’m trying to teach Aaron to say “the” instead of “ze” and “th” instead of “f”. Other than that his speech is very clear and there is much of it. His latest word is “actually”. I’ve just heard him say, “I’m actually finishing bathing”, and now he is out the bath and drying himself.