Developments

It's amazing to me, every day, how smart Odin is. He can figure stuff out that I've never shown him. Today I told him to wait for me to get my pants on before going outside and he found them and brought them to me. I'd never told him what pants are unless I was putting them on him, but he made the connection. His pronunciation is getting better as well, he can add consonants to the ends of his words (finally) and he's working on complicated sounds like "f" and "th" and he can say "sh" for fish. He's also really got the hang of people's names. He knows who he's talking to on the phone (another thing he loves to do lately) and he'll call out their name. He's finally started calling Dad "Zaideh" and I can't wait to see if he'll call Mom "Nana" when we go up there.

Speaking of which, we're going to be making a trip to Portland this Thursday evening or Friday morning and staying until Sunday evening. For those of you up there who want to visit, we'd love to see you. We'll also be at Jeff's Hanukkah party so I'm sure we'll see some of you.

Last Thursday night we spent the night at Dad's place to see how Odin would do away from home for the trip to Portland. We had a few adjustment problems, but he got used to it later in the night. Yesterday we met Dad at Barnes and Noble and Odin got some new books. One of them has an erasable marker so he can learn how to draw shapes and letters.

Alyssa and I just barely survived this term, but we made it through and passed all our classes (except one). Alyssa had this ridiculous assignment where she had to copy the score of Gnarly Buttons by John Adams into the computer, which is a horribly long and meticulous undertaking. She spent 2-4 hours a night on it for the last 2 weeks and 8 hours a night the last 2 days. And she still didn't finish it. Some final for a class with only two people and the second one didn't even finish his mid-term. Luckily the instructor still passed her.

I squeaked by in all my classes except Latin. It says I didn't pass it online but when I add up the points I got I should have passed. Either way, I saw the teacher before end of term and she said that she can see my progress and that even if I don't pass I can still take 102 and just keep going.

We're enjoying the feeling of having nothing to do. There's no requirement on us to stop what we're doing and attend to something else. No need to manage our time or make sure we're done with something. We can binge all we want on a particular hobby without having to think about all the work we're not doing.

That's all for now, more later.