Today was Erik and Daniel's first day back at school. Inger-Lise went with them in the car at 7am and I waved them off. Inger-Lise was a bit sad because in Norway today would have been Daniel's first day at school, which is a big thing over there. We have happy memories of Erik's first day at school - walking to school excitedly with his friends, the assembly in the playground with a brass band, the headmistress's speech and activities for the family.

The years have been mixed up and new classes made, so we were a bit anxious to see who their teachers will be and who their classmates are. It turns out that both Erik and Daniel have new teachers and they both seem nice. Erik's teacher is Mr Welchman and Daniel's teacher is Mrs Ghandour. Daniel is not with his friends Mathew and Connor from last year, but that could be a good thing because he'll make some new friends. Erik is in the same class as William, the other Norwegian boy at the school, so that's good.

Both boys came back tired but happy, so that's a good sign. Uli and Aksel also came back to play in the afternoon, which was nice (not much homework the first day).

Mathilde also went "school" (a.k.a. the playgroup at the Kingfisher club) today. She was really keen and had her backpack on well before she had to leave. Lots of her her little friends were there; it was nice for her to see them again and Inger-Lise caught up on the gossip from the mothers!

Otherwise, today has been spent sorting out the driver situation. Statoil has agreed to give us our own driver during the week, another Statoil driver in the weekend and use of the car pool in the evening, so we are very happy about that. We also got a lot of the irritating things fixed which were not working when we arrived back (apart form the phone which is still out of order).

A good day all in all :-)

Jeremy