Is SICP supposed to be hard?

I just began SICP yesterday and I'm about halfway through chapter one. The problem is that, on the first set of exercises, I basically fucked half of them up(two of which I had no idea how to answer). Is this "normal"? I'm very interested in computers and programming, but I imagine someone like RMS didn't have much trouble with these problems.

Fuck why does it not make a new thread?