Anders has been pushing his boundaries this weekend. First up, the “new year’s ball” with his class at school. The teacher told us that the kids would dress up, like nicer than jeans, so we went shopping last weekend. He said “fine” to a shirt and pants, and of course we had to get good shoes too. Shopping is tricky for him now, he is in between boy sizes and men sizes. We found some great deals on small men’s clothes, it’s nice to be in a size that isn’t very in demand for awhile. But look at how dressed up those other kids are! We were surprised by the ties!
They had dinner (pizza and soda), games (they are thinking hard here about some word game), and 
dancing (he said he just stood around with the boys). Even dressed up, they are still 7th graders.
Mange takk to the parents who organized! I stood around and chatted with some of the parents for a short time (på norsk mostly!)
It’s fun to watch the kids make friends. Yesterday Anders went to a handball practice and really liked it, and won the 
shoot off. There are some girls in his class that play, and the girls and boys teams practice together, but no boys that he knows. He will be going back next week.
Today a friend invited him to go sledding, skating, then watched a movie all afternoon. We walked to the store while they were out on the ice to say hi, they were outside for hours. It was a nice sunny day.
Nora met some friends from school for sledding and they came back to our place. They tried Mad Libs, now they are playing Sleeping Queens. One friend is really into speaking English, this is the girl that the teacher paired up with Nora to help her at school. She isn’t pushing Nora to try norsk at all when she is here, and Nora is loving the teaching English aspect, rather than learning norsk. I tried to sit with them and ask what some words are in norsk, but Nora clearly wanted me out of there. The other two were not interested in speaking English at all, they relied on Ronja for translation. That girl will be a world traveling translator someday.
