To rewind, L started language school a month ago and last Friday completed the first level through an intensive course (and passed his exam with flying colours! #proudwifemoment). An intensive course is 20 hours of classroom time a week, plus homework and vocabulary learning, and is every week day morning or afternoon for four weeks. There's a lot of material that is covered in a course, and a lot of speaking and listening, so there's a constant feeling that your brain is about to explode.
For the last month, I've been studying the first level material at home with a language helper, as we'd decided it was too much for us both to be out at language school so soon. However, for the second level, I thought I really needed to be in the classroom and getting some more speaking and listening practice. And it has worked out with J that I'm now able to leave him in an afternoon, so language school was suddenly a real possibility.
It's usual to take a month to consolidate an intensive course before starting the next level, however you can just about get away with it between the first and second levels. And, considering that it's already getting fairly warm here and that it will be even hotter in July, L decided to continue onto the second level course and dive straight back into another intensive month.
And then we decided to bite the bullet and see if we could make it work for me to do the second level at the same time as L. This means L being at language school every week day morning and me there every week day afternoon.
I managed to pass the placement test for the second level course, but up until yesterday morning, we didn't know if the afternoon course was going to run or not - but L messaged me when he got to language school in the morning to say that the course was running and starting that afternoon!
So, yesterday we started our slightly crazy month. Our language school is about a 40-45 minute walk from our flat, a few minutes less if you take the metro one stop. The class schedules mean that L goes off to school in a morning, whilst I look after J and get on with things in the house, vocab learning etc. J and I have an early-ish lunch, then we set off for language school and meet L halfway-ish. We swap J between us, I continue to language school and L takes J home for the afternoon. The biggest challenge is to get J swapped between us and back to the house without him falling asleep, otherwise he won't nap in the afternoon and we will have a super-grumpy baby the rest of the day.
Heading off yesterday lunchtime to meet Daddy half way between home and language school
Two days in, and it is working okay, so far. It is hard work, but we knew it would be. And on that note, I'm off to do my homework (yes, we really are back at school!). And before someone asks, we have different teachers and so different homework assignments, so no copying!
