Babysitting the twins

I had such a lazy morning.  After not sleeping well for so long, even after having my own little apartment I did finally get some sleep last night.  Knowing I didn’t actually have any plans until 2pm I just laid around a lot of the morning.  I did have some things to do online, so I finally made it to the North Adelaide library to use the internet.  I applied for 4 more jobs and finally sent my bank statement to the cell phone company.  As I was getting ready to leave I decided to ask if there was a way I could get a library card, even though I don’t actually live here.  All the channels on TV here are pretty lousy, at least from what I can tell.  Everything seems like a soap opera!  At the hostel I just read the newspaper, but here I’ve got nothing so I end up flipping channels all evening because the most interesting things on are documentaries on China’s Debt or some other such random topic.  The woman was very nice and told me that I most definitely could get a card and since it was just a temporary card I was limited to 5 items at a time.  So I found a travel stories book and headed back to Leslie’s.

Watching the boys at school again this afternoon was easy.  They had a bit of a meltdown in the car on the way home again.  I think running around on the playground with the other kids for 45 minutes just gets them too wound up.  Don't get me wrong, her boys are pretty cute (just sometimes not very well behaved).  She had me listen to their reading homework the other night and it was so cute.  Although we all speak English, we all pronounce things differently.  Leslie is from the UK, but the boys have a mixture of Australian and British English and then, of course, I have American English.  Listening to them trying to pronounce certain words and trying to help them read certain words was a bit humorous to me.  Anyway, back to today.  I started chopping up the chicken for dinner and by the time I was done she was ready to go, which was good, because I wasn’t very comfortable rummaging around in her kitchen looking for things with her still home.  The meal turned out pretty well.  I went into the family room to tell them dinner was on the table and it was getting cold.  They gave me a brief glance and then went back to watching TV.  No skin off my nose, I went back to the kitchen and ate.  Aleksander wandered in as I was finishing and seemed pretty happy about the meal choice.  As soon as he sat down though he realized the TV was still on, so he said he was going to eat in the family room.  I asked if that was ok and he said he just had to get a plate to set his bowl on.  Leslie doesn’t strike me as all that strict, so I told him to be careful not to make a mess and let him go.  Magnus wasn’t showing up and I had a feeling he might not – he doesn’t seem to like to eat, so I took his food in to him.  I get the feeling there’s just no pleasing Magnus.  I don’t think he’s liked a thing we’ve had for dinner all week.  He did eat most of the pasta, I told him to just eat around the broccoli if he didn’t like it.  Watching TV while eating definitely made them both eat much slower, but Aleksander ate all his and Magnus never seems to eat all his dinner, so I wasn’t going to stress over it.

I somehow managed to tear them away from the TV long enough to get them both to do their reading for the evening, partially because I wasn’t going to let them watch a movie until they had done their reading.  Had a close call when it came time to pick a movie, but thankfully they did end up agreeing on one before someone threw a temper tantrum.  It was 7:30pm, which is usually when they’re to be in bed, but Leslie had told them they could watch a movie and they told me she always lets them watch the whole thing.  Leslie said to make it easy on myself, so I crossed my fingers and hoped they fall asleep on the couch.  She came home around 8:30 and the boys were still watching their movie.  We talked for a bit and then she said I was free to go.  I did not expect it to go that easily.  So, thank you all for your prayers, they definitely helped.  We’re going to a school festival after open house tomorrow, so we’ll see how that goes.