More sporting achievement for Björn

Björn had sports day at school today. He competed in the javelin and 200m events. He was wearing his new javelin spikes for the first time and didn't throw as well as he has been lately - perhaps he still has to get used to them. Nevertheless he finished second in this event.

The event he didn't expect to do well in was the 200m. He was up against a county runner and has never excelled in the 200, but was the best in his hall in his year, so he went out to give it his best shot... and won! He beat the county runner going away, and finished in his best ever time of 26.6 seconds. We were delighted and John promptly set him the target of beating his own best times for the 200 and 400 by the time he's 18. He has already beaten my best time for the 100 and 200, as you would expect, but the 400 he is still outside my best - but then, that was my best event.

A quick update

This is the sitrep for the four of us:

Karyn:
I have been offered a place on the MA Ed Studies course at Oxford Brookes starting in September this year. No doubt this will have huge impact on the family, and I will have to put a lot of things on hold while the course runs. I have submitted my application for indefinite leave to remain (often referred to as permanent residence) in the UK. This can take 6 months to process. See more under John, below. Once this is in place, I will set the wheels in motion to get a British passport, then travelling with me will be less of a trial for my family :-)

I am supposed to be running in an inter-corporate team race in London in July, but I haven't been able to train, since I am suffering from the usual upper respiratory complications of my allergies. The doctor insisted it was asthma, but every definition I can find on the matter says asthmatics struggle to breathe out. I can't breathe in. Anyway... whatever.

John:
Off to New York again today for the week. For this he (of course) needed his passport. Sadly, I had submitted this with my ILR application. Happily, the application form guidance listed a phone number for the emergency return of passports. Sadly, this only applies when the application is actually in the system, which can take weeks from the date of receipt (I kid you not). Oh, and the 6 months of processing time only starts when the application actually enters the system. In this age of frequent travel, we must surely not be the first to be in this situation. In the end, John had to go to the hub of bureaucracy and obtain his passport in person. Believe it or not, he had to produce evidence that he genuinely had to travel. Weird - it's his passport, why should he have to produce this evidence to get it back? I was advised that, in fact, it is not his passport, the passport is the property of the issuing country. Ri-ight. Let me rephrase my question: why does the British government need this evidence before returning a Swedish passport? Anyway - he duly got the passport back, and has been given a little sticker to put on it when he sends it back in again. No doubt we will have to go through this rigmarole every time he needs to travel, which might be several times before my application is processed. Sigh.

John and Björn have been playing cricket together for the local Sunday team. He just loves it. He always had this dream of playing for some social team with his boys. Since Torvy isn't particularly interested in sport, it'll have to be just with the one boy. Consequently, they don't play every week - that gives him time to do things with Torvy as well.

Björn:
Had to withdraw from the inter-county athletics champs, having injured his javelin-throwing shoulder days before the scheduled event. This took place during some small scale interschool event which he should have won easily. Poor lad.

At least there was compensation in that he was then able to attend a friend's birthday party which he had previously had to decline. The party involved a visit to the swimming pool. I assumed that this would be the indoor pool arrangement that is typical here, but, in fact they went to an outdoor pool and it was a glorious day. Of course, I had provided no sunscreen, and my son came home with a bright red back.

The requirements for this school year being over, his class starts working towards their GCSEs this week. Having had less than 30 mins homework per week up to now, he has not developed any concept of independent studies and the GCSEs have a huge coursework component for each subject that counts towards their final marks (I wish schools would teach learning skills! Then I wouldn't have to bust my butt so hard when people entered my sphere of the universe as adult learners).

Torvald:
Still sporting his long locks, Torvy is counting down the days to the end of middle school. The current count is 24 (school)days. He has just outgrown his third pair of school shoes this year and desperately needs bigger trousers. The problem is, the high school doesn't have a uniform and I'm not really keen to pay £50 for these items with so little of the school year left. I have browbeaten the school into letting him wear dark trainers to school, but they wouldn't budge on the trousers (I guess I can understand that), so I bought him one cheap pair that will have to get cycled through the wash really quickly each weekend.

On his very last day of Y7, I have promised to take him straight from school to the shopping centre to have his ear pierced. He has wanted to do this for the longest time, but we said not until he was 13. We brought the date forward by a few weeks to allow the ear to heal enough to remove the earring for sports when he starts high school in the first week of September. Since it costs £5 for one ear and £6 for two, I will have a second hole in one of my ears to use up the other half of the deal. No doubt I will pass out on the floor as I have done every time before...

He is practising very hard for the end of year concert, in which he is playing the bass guitar. He is dead keen to buy one of his own to add to his accoustic 6 string. He is hoping to get enough money for his 13th birthday to be able to do this. On Saturday we went looking at basses. They are quite pricy and, of course, he doesn't want one that's hugely heavy, being just a lickle lad.

Heather

Yesterday I finally met the person I gave birth to over 22 years ago. She and her boyfriend are having an "excellent adventure" in Europe for 6 weeks, and she made a brief detour here in order to meet me. Fortunately her boyfriend has a brother living in London, so it was a most convenient arrangement.

I was really nervous in the lead up to the meeting. I was terrified I would burst into uncontrollable floods of tears or say something really stupid that would have some deep, longlasting impact on her psyche. From the outset, it has been my goal to focus on her needs in all my dealings with her. When people asked me, "What do you want out of the meeting?" My stock response was, "That's not important." Of course, my feelings are important to me, but I was determined that Heather should draw out of the situation what was important to her.

I had so misinterpreted the situation that it was almost funny. I thought she needed to meet me to satisfy herself that there were no gremlins floating about in her genes. That she needed to close that loop in her sense of self. What a lot of bunkum! She is completely her own person and just wanted to meet me to meet me. She needs absolutely nothing from me. We were talking about the approach her parents had taken to the subject of her adoption, and I asked if she had ever wondered why. Of course, I meant: wondered why I had chosen to give her up. I had to smile when her answer was purely from the perspective of why her parents had chosen to adopt. For her it's all about them. Which is exactly as it should be.

I suffered such a sense of loss when I left her behind in that hospital. I grieved for a long, long time. When Björn was born, seven and a half years later, and we took him home from the hospital, I burst into tears and wailed, "I get to take this one home!" All down the years, there was this sense of a piece being missing. But of course, the same was not true for her - she had a Mom (and a Dad, which I would not have been able to provide). When I think about it now, that should have been perfectly obvious. But at some subliminal level, I had somehow projected an answering longing onto her. On the one hand, my ego would have been stroked if she had said that that were the case, but the same drive that made me give her up in the first place found utter peace with the fact that she had not suffered any such sense of deprivation.

It was a surprisingly unemotional experience. For me, a missing piece of the jigsaw of my life slipped quietly into place without any fanfare. I was at last able to really let the baby Amy go. Amy was my daughter for 4 days. Heather has different parents and she is a credit to them.

So what's she like? She's vivacious, expressive, confident, intelligent, articulate, animated and has a dramatic flair. She can sing. We found that we have a lot in common - we share a passion for shoes, and are attracted to similar colours and cuts of clothing. Of course, all that can be put down to being female with similar colouring and build.

She looks like her biological father, although her colouring comes from my side of the gene pool. She has Kevin's long legs, and his feet and hands, to a T. Her hair is darker than mine - closer to my cousin Kath's colour, and she has a gorgeous complexion. And she's tall. Very tall. Hardly surprising - her biological father was 2m tall. In the attached picture (ignore the date stamp, I didn't reset it after we took the memory card out), we are standing on a level base wearing flat shoes. Bear in mind that I am 169cm (5'7" tall). She has my hourglass figure - lots up top, small waist and curvy hips. She grinds her teeth trying to find underwear in Australia, which sounds about as well provisioned as South Africa on that score.

We spent a very pleasant day together, and parted on good terms. We plan to keep in touch. For me, a little gap has been filled, a long-standing wound healed. For her, well, I don't know what she gained.

Björn at the County Champs

Sadly we didn't get any stills - only videos which I can't upload to the blog (too stupid, I guess), but we have reason to be very proud of Björn today. He competed in the county champs and came second in the junior boys' javelin event. He gets to compete next week in the intercounties and may go on to the England champs if that goes well.

Just in case anyone else is trying to keep up with his love life, he and Gemma are a thing of the past, and he is now dating Becca. Becca, like both her predecessors, goes to our church and is blonde and pretty. Like Chrissy, she is a year ahead of him at school - that seems far more commonplace than in my day (said she, sounding like an old lady!).

Karyn's quest for a Master's degree

Calloo Callay! It seems that, in spite of never having had the money to go to university, I have managed to piece together enough pieces of education over the years to equal a B Hons degree. After two years of closed doors, I have been unconditionally offered a place on a Master's degree in Educational Studies at Oxford Brookes.

We still have to decide whether I am going to accept - my company is only putting up half the money, so we have to find the other half while keeping up mortgage payments. I will also have to drive through to Oxford twice a week, which will add to the expense.

Whether or not I do this, the fact remains that I have I have been evaluated by an objective body and deemed equal to the task. I find this very validating. As an ambassador for informal education, I am ridiculously (and probably hypocritcally) pleased with this offer.

Race for Life 2006

Well, it's over. This year, the Race for Life was moved from the flat course at Willen lake to the very hilly course full of bottlenecks at Campbell Park. This was the toughest of these I have ever done and my time showed that fact. The pictures show me about to cross the line and a few minutes later.

Having started far back in the field (mistake #1), it took me several minutes to cross the start line when I could at last start running. Then 100m from the start line, we hit our first bottleneck and had to slow down to a walk. Having passed that point, we started on a steep downhill... on a gravel path. The path remained narrow throughout and there were several more occasions when we had to slow down due to congestion. Towards the end there was the flip side of our steep downhill at the start, as we made our way back up to the helipad. It was the most gorgeous day, not a cloud in the sky, and the chosen route was very scenic. However, I think if they're going to stick with this route next year, they're going to have to have more races with smaller numbers of entrants in each. There were occasions today when it was positively dangerous, particularly for inexperienced runners.

I finally managed to cross the finish line in 35:19 minutes. Not good. My time last year was 29:31 and I was hoping to equal that. Some of the people who sponsored me did so on a tiered basis - x amount for finishing y amount for finishing in under 30 minutes. Rats. Ah well, I did my bit and I'm aching in all sorts of unexpected places (now, now, none of that - I mean the arch of my right foot, and the ball of my left foot, for example).