Day 15

I have a feeling that the rest of this week's posts, until we leave on Friday, will be kind of boring :) so I apologize in advance if it's too much of the same...but we have the same schedule everyday: breakfast, lecture, drill, lunch, drill, lecture, dinner, playtime of some kind, then bed time...Last week Gus & I were in different drill groups. This week they put all the married couples together. Yay!! We are also in the same group as the Mollicas, so here are Gus and Massimo, in the middle of the morning drill. Massimo, you crack me up!

Here is Coen, chillin' on the lunch table, while we wait for lunch. He is feeling better, as you can see by his smiles. I'm very thankful his fever was short-lived.

Then after lunch I joined a special group, with Dwight, to work on pronouncing Spanish "r"s. Wow....

Let me just say that I am really struggling with my r's. I can do a double trill, like in perro (which means dog), with 2 r's, just fine. But a single trill, found in a lot of spanish words, for example hermano (which means man), is super hard for me. The only way I can do it is to say otter pop a bunch of times and that r is a single trill. But when I try it outside of saying otter pop, I can't do it. Ugh! Practice, practice, practice!

Here we are in our post-lunch drill. We've made some friends, outside of the Mollicas, who are all also going to various European countries. And they put all of us in the same drill group. So fun! Though the instructor didn't quite know what hit him :) But we enjoyed ourselves. The drills are hard so it's nice to be able to laugh at ourselves as we stretch our mouths to form sounds we've never made before and our tongues in positions they've never been in before.

Then we had a lecture by Barbara about the lifestyles of language learning. It was such a great lecture that I needed to hear.

Here are my notes that I took during the lecture. She talked about how much of a priority I need to make learning Spanish, especially that first year, and how much of a sacrifice it will be to do so. That I will need to make learning Spanish my main focus, above formal ministry, hospitality, and most everything else, so that I can resume that stuff later on but then in Spanish. She even suggested hiring help around the house so I can focus almost exclusively on Spanish-no more dishes! My favorite quote that she said is "Language learning will be my ministry." I hope these notes that I took and this lecture will be an encouragement to me when I'm on the field in language learning class.

Before dinner we went outside for playtime. Cael and Sandro on a bench together, contemplating life.

Someone found a soccer ball and Cael joined the game. He didn't quite catch the concept and used his hands quite a bit but did have fun running to try and kick the ball. I see a future soccer player in him...

Dinner tonight was...well...interesting :) Gus had to run out anyways for formula so they brought back Costco pizza. YUM! I've never been more happy for pizza!

Both boys were naked (as Cael likes to say when his shirt and shorts are off) and in their diapers and pull-ups. Here they are frolicking on the bed, enjoying themselves!

3 more days left of PILOT!!