We made our second tour to IKEA in three days. To our defence, I can say we also visited K-Mart and Dick Smith, as well as Woolworths. The only one not suffering from shopping intoxication is Fanny. We bought special lunch boxes and busied ourselves ironing the uniform shirt and skirt, as I am guessing many Australian families do on Sunday evenings. Fanny learned to tie a tie…I totally understand why they have undoable ties available, it is quite a complicated procedure.

I think the kids are enormously brave to just jump into a new world as if they have done nothing else. I am guessing we will have some bumps on the way, but just the fact that their instinct is not to say – no way, but go for it, is really something I admire. Johanna is probably the one most my type, not very comfortable in social situations to start off with – until she finds a friend. So I am hoping she soon will, I still remember my first lonely lunch at my Canadian school when I was eight – no fun at all. I was convinced that even the wasp getting at my food was being unfriendly on purpose. I didn’t understand a word of English and no one had told me how things worked. And even if they had – I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to go join some random pupils to eat lunch. I so hope she has a different experience!

We were told that Fanny’s school does not teach Spanish which she has studied for two years, but French, so we ran a crush course of French at the kitchen counter, which did my agonising school-French some good. Fanny found the pronunciation funny, but had no issue quickly learning its rules, along with the conjugation of regular verbs, the pronouns, and some introductory phrases of verbs. À demain! C’est combien? Just as information, we didn’t start at chapter 1, book 1, as the class was on book 3, so we went for that. Not because she is my daughter, but it was really something, the way she met that challenge! Oh, and why not pick up a bit of English mathematics vocabulary while we were at it…