Back to school

After a long fun summer of visits to Grandma, Oma, two godparents and many friends, we are now back in Hong Kong. Over the summer, we did it all from swim team to karate camp, from a King Tut exhibit to the Amish country, from horse-riding to canoeing. In one particularly crazy week, we even caught up with a friend while at the hospital. Tori’s godfather left the hospital with his lovely new born daughter and promptly returned to the same hospital to visit Adam in the ER with a head injury! Summer was busy and fun and as Royce says best, “the summers just keep getting better and better!”

Being practically old-timers here in Hong Kong, we now return just prior to the start of school, extending summer as long as possible. We came in on a Saturday and the kids had school orientation on Monday and their first day of school on Tuesday. Tori is now at Upper Primary, a school just across the street from Lower Primary. She is in a 3rd grade/4th grade combination class. She now eats in a cafeteria rather than her classroom and is doing her first after school activity, beginning cello! All in all, she seems quite grown up which makes me a little sad but she is so very happy that it is starting to rub off on me.

Adam and Royce are in first grade and in separate classrooms again this year. Their school has a policy to separate twins but they don’t fully understand this. They are always a little surprised when they get their classroom teacher assignments and find out they are in different classrooms. Both shrugged and hoped they would be in the same class next year. I am even more relaxed about their placement this year. The individual classes are broken into “clusters” of four classes that do things together like recess and field trips. I did not even check to see if the twins were in the same cluster (they are!) until a friend asked me if they were.

The first day of first grade was a big one at our house this year. After school we went down to swim at our apartment’s pool and play at the playground. After a few minutes of play, Royce fell off the monkey bars- which she was doing so well!- and fractured her arm. Now in a cast and a sling, she is in good spirits and on the mend. She has not slowed down at all and is getting a lot of attention at school. She gladly recounts the tale of how she “fractioned” her arm but is looking forward to no hot cast and the fractioned arm made whole again soon!