In Town

I have two weeks ahead with no planned travel, aside from a nice weekend away coming up with my sweetie pie - two glorious nights at the Rivertown Inn in Stillwater - in the Oscar Wilde suite, out in the carriage house, so very quiet and BIG. It'll be good to have some time away just us two to catch our breath after all of the craziness of our lives. The 7 inches of snow that fell as an insult to all last night are already melting away, and by the weekend it should be spring again.

Isaac tantalized us with a few nights of sleeping all the way through, but since then has at least reduced to one wakeup a night only: Until very recently, he had a 1am and a 4am. Now we seem to have just a 2-3am... and maybe just maybe he'll remember what he was thinking about with those "all the way through" nights... boy that was some good sleeping. He has another tooth coming through which may be affecting his sleep somewhat (it's no doubt affecting his mood - he's been a crabby cus today!)

My experiment with The Rosetta Stone continues: I'm now halfway through Level 1 (which is all there is for Swedish) and I can comfortably say "The boy in the red shirt and his sister with the white dress are in the airplane without their parents" (Pojken i den röd tröjan och hans syster med den vitt klänning är i flygplanet utan sina föräldrar) and "he can't talk now, because he is drinking milk" (Han kan inte tala nu, för han dricker mjölk)

But I have not yet learned how to say "hello", "goodbye", or "I would like a cup of coffee". 44 lessons in, and the first and second person are yet to be found, as are any TACTICAL phrases of any sort. (I'm not looking ahead, so maybe they're right around the corner...) BUT I do feel like a good foundation is being built. So bottom line, I feel like Rosetta Stone is definitely WORKING, but I could caution against anyone using it as a cram prior to a trip: For anyone who has <30 days to pick some stuff up, you've got to do Pimsleur. But if you want to LEARN the language, I'm pretty impressed with Rosetta so far - the lessons are sticking pretty well, and you do learn how to string concepts together, not just learn phrases.

That's the update for now...