Nothing really about homeschooling in this entry, at least not formal, but plenty has been happening!

We went to Norway last weekend (Saturday to Monday) to meet with a couple from YWAM Cyprus--they're Norwegian, and are on a sabbatical for a year, but will be returning to Cyprus next summer. Our time together went really well and my husband is extremely interested in working with them. We won't make a final decision until after South Africa, though, I think.

The trees and everything were covered with frost, which looked like snow, but technically wasn't. We even went sledding in the stuff! I'd never seen anything like it. Then we came home, and guess what: on Wednesday, in my 17th winter in Germany, we got the same thing here! (And it's still like that.) It looks absolutely gorgeous. :-) (Maybe I should try to figure out how to put photos in here.)

In the meantime, we didn't sell our apartment yet and it's now not officially on the market. The upstairs neighbors will be taking care of it again, as they did when we were gone for six months last year and as they do every time we're gone. They're great neighbors. :-) But if anyone wants to buy it while we're gone, we'd probably sell, if they're willing to pay extra for a moving company to pack up everything and move it to a storage facility...

One not-so-great thing on the weekend, though, was that we got the news that my uncle, who was very special to me, died late Saturday night. He was amazing and loved by more people than anyone else I know. The guestbook for his on-line obituary has one entry (so far), that, as far as I can tell, is by someone who didn't even know him by name. That seems pretty cool to me.

Things are looking good for South Africa. After many delays for our visas (they kept requesting more documents, etc.), when I telephoned on Tuesday to ask to whom I should return my passport (I'd had to ask them the week before to send my passport back to me so we could fly to Oslo, as it's my only valid ID in Europe--my children flew on their American passports and my husband on his German ID, as all five of their German passports are at the South African embassy in Berlin), I was told that the visas are all ready, they're just waiting for my passport. So we should hopefully have them very soon. (I'll be sure once we DO have them. One thing we were told we needed was study permits for our school-aged children, as "all children in South Africa for longer than 3 months are required to attend school"!! I wrote back quoting the appropriate part of the South African law, and never heard anything else. I also wrote to the South African equivalent of the HSLDA, and the president himself wrote back to me and assured me that there was no such law, and that even for registering as homeschoolers, there's nothing anywhere referring to three months--that was apparently simply invented by the SA embassy in Berlin!)

 Thank you to all those who wrote postcards, anyone else wanting to may still do so! :-)