March in Melbourne

The nights are definitely getting longer.  When we first moved in, the beginnings of daylight would show through the windows by 6am.  Now it's still dark at 7am.  And sunset comes earlier, too.  A few trees have specks of yellow in them.  Fall term began at the university.  The trams are crowded with students and other faculty, and I can't always get a seat, even coming home, when I get on at the first stop.  And the equinox passed.  It is definitely autumn. 

One thing that hasn't become less strange in these last three months are the inverted seasons in the southern hemisphere.  The church program advertised an "Autumn Easter Dance" for singles.  Easter and Autumn don't seem to fit together.  Rather than bunnies with spring grass, bunnies with orange leaves?  My head doesn't like it. 

So far, aside from less daylight and yellow-speckled trees, fall isn't much different than summer.  Of course, we're only about a day into it.  Temperatures have hovered in the 20s Celsius, which runs from 68 degrees to the mid 80s.  Pleasant. 

In school today, Jonathan's class was in charge of Assembly.  Every class in the school takes a turn.  They spend the last 30 minutes on Friday reading announcements, presenting awards, and showing the other students in the school what their class has been doing all term.  Jonathan was chosen to tell the school about the film they saw on a field trip to the French film festival last week.  He gave his entire summary ... in French!  Because of his five years in a French immersion school, he is quite advanced in his French language.  He is still attending a weekly French class for native speakers.  We're proud of him. 

We were also surprised to find that he had earned the school's weekly P.E. award.  It wasn't for his skills in sport, but for the fact that he got a very high score on a nutrition quiz.  That's my boy. 

He is still well ahead in math, but depending on the question it can still be a challenge.  Last week he told us about a math word problem in which he was told that a certain train was going a certain distance at a certain speed ... and so how long did they spend in New South Wales?  Although he thought he could do the calculation, he needed to know where the state of New South Wales began and ended to answer the question.  So the teacher sent him on a geography lesson instead.  You see?  He is learning. 

One other story about Jonathan's school, and then I will stop.  While practicing his spelling words last week, Jonathan told me that his teacher hadn't let him put "debauchery" on his spelling list.  My eyebrows rose a little.  Your spelling list?  Apparently the boy has done well enough on previous spelling tests that the teacher lets him pick his own spelling words now.  He goes in search of ten letter words in the dictionary, like "balustrade", "deviation", and "catafalque".  Catafalque?  "A raised structure on which the body of a deceased person lies or is carried in state."  We are all learning. 

Happy autumn to all of you.