It's 6.30 am. I'm writing this outside on the verandah, next to the pool. The cicadas are buzzing and the birds are waking up. It's already quite hot and humid, but the ceiling fans cool it enough to make it pleasant out here at this time of the morning.

As I thought, getting up this morning was harder than it was yesterday. We still haved a bit of that school's-just-started energy fueling us, so I think that this early rising thing is going to get progressively more painful as the year progresses.

Steve was rather uncommunicative about his first day at school, but seemed very cheerful, so I am assuming that he likes it. Ems came home rather frazzled, poor little chickie. She'd had a long and boring day. They didn't do anything remotely interesting, just gave the kids lecture after lecture after lecture about dress codes and other admin stuff.

Something that always amuses us is how the schools here tend to dress up rules as "safety issues". So, for instance, you can't wear flip-flops because "it's a safety issue, you could trip". Yet you could, if you so desired, wear 6 inch heels with impunity. They have more, and stupider, dress rules in SA schools, but at least they don't pretend they have particularly rational reasons for them.

Anyway, so Ems didn't do anything remotely related to learning yesterday. Basically, her day was a long, boring, write-off.

Sophie, on the other hand, did tons. We read the creation bit from The Magician's Nephew. Then we read a variety of other creation stories (the Bible one, a Chinese story, an Aboriginal story, and a Native American story), and I talked about the way that people tell stories to each other to make sense of the things they see around them. And then Soph wrote and illustrated her own story. She cast herself as the creator in it - guess we don't need to worry about her not having a good sense of her own importance. We also played some spelling games and some math games, and spent a lot of time in the pool.

Of course I couldn't help comparing Emily's day with Sophie's, and wondering if I could be more successful at facilitating her education than the school will be. I really want the IB program to work out though ... it seems like it would really give the kids an advantage when it comes to college applications. Specially if they want to study outside the US.