EMP in the US

I have been looking back at my old blog a lot recently, for reference mostly, but also to see the videos of Thomas singing all the songs we put up there. Some of them he was younger than Ollie is now. I wondered if learning the songs was the secret to his clear speech. It’s evident that he had a lot more individual attention than Ollie has had, that is a fact of a younger sibling’s life, but I wanted to start singing some more with Ollie. I’m trying to find a good song to get him started. Ideas on a postcard…

Anyway, Thomas decided to sing his way through dinner today, impressing me with a couple of spanish versions of the songs from school. Then he decided to make up a song – something he has been doing a lot lately, so I told him to pause, and grabbed the old Nokia N73 to record it:

Ollie and I get a couple of days to chill out together each week. The first half of the week we seem to spend rushing around, and with Thomas about it is almost always hectic. The last two days we have started taking it easy. I’ve discovered that Ollie doesn’t really want to rush around being sociable all the time. I always ask him whether he’d like to go to Storytime at the library, but he really doesn’t. So we find other things to do. One of the indoor attractions is the laptop. It must have been a couple of months ago now that I first let him play PBS kids on it, but he found the mouse control very difficult. He hasn’t been on it since but today suddenly his mouse control is much much better – I guess through natural hand-eye-coordination development.

Anyway, it turns out Ollie knows most of his letters. He knows most of them in the lowercase because his favourite TV programme, after Little Einsteins, is “SuperWhy”, which is mostly lowercase. However the letters b,d and n,m confuse him a little, where he definitely know the big B. He really has learned this from the TV, but today I let him play “SuperWhy” on the laptop and he loved it! Unfortunately he didn’t jump up and down with joy when he completed the task in this clip, but rest assured, he normally does! You can see he’s gaining mouse control!

He is also using words that surprise me a little. I remember being astonished when Thomas started using similes. Well, Ollie is now at that stage. This morning as I squeezed Marmite out of the SQUEEZY Marmite jar onto his english muffin he said, “That’s like a Marmite creature!” I’d never heard him say “creature” before. He is also pointing at words and asking “what does that say?”. I know this is a direct copy of Thomas, and in fact when Thomas is reading to me, Ollie will run his finger along the words of his “Little Red Train” book and say them from memory! (we only read this book 100 times a day!)

Just a quick post.

We have finally reduced the amount of colourful plastic in the house: Ollie’s high chair has been put in the cupboard, so we now have 4 grown-up chairs at the table. He’s still a bit short, and my main reticence was the lack of restraining straps, but actually we haven’t been strapping Ollie in since before we moved to the U.S.

Also, our toddler group “Tots n’ Tea” had a halloween party on Tuesday, so Ollie got a chance to wear his costume. Thomas gets to wear his on Friday at school, so they will each get a rehearsal for the actual day. I hope to get some pictures of the two of them together on saturday.

In other news, my blog is heavily consuming bandwidth, and we were wondering if there was something naughty going on, so we trawled through all the google analytics to see if we could see anything strange going on. All we found was that quite a lot of people read my blog. My own theory of what is happening is this: I am using iPhoto to make jpegs to put up here, and when I export I select maximum jpeg quality, but medium size. This gives me photos of about half a Mb in size, which is actually quite big. My old blog was mostly written on my Ubuntu machine, and I don’t even remember what I did with photos, but I’m sure they had smaller file-size. This means I will probably need to work out a better way to post photos.

Just as an aside, I’m posting over the breakfast table, which is extremely unusual, but we’ve had a bit of a strange morning. Anyway, as I type, Thomas is reading the nutritional value table on the jar of jam. He is now chanting “Vitamin D! Vitamin D!” Oddball.

So a couple of momentous developments this weekend.

Firstly, I re-arranged the living-room. It sort of started by accident, as I simply moved the sofa with a view to making more room to have people over. Then while I was at it, I thought i might as well carry on and I went behind our wall-unit to sort out the cables. This is half-way through:

Unfortunately, we didn’t have any proper cable-labelling stickers, so I had to resort to paper and sellotape, which is clumsy and messy, and I will probably regret later when I find I can’t pull my cables through as they have all stuck together in a melted mass of old sellotape:

This is what the finished “tidy” cables looked like once we’d moved the units to the other wall:

Anyway, it all seemed to work OK when switched on again. In my excitement, I have forgotten to take a picture of the living-room in it’s new arrangement, so that will be in the next installment. If I’m honest, it doesn’t work quite as well as I’d hoped. We have shut off the front door. We hardly use it anyway, and the side-door is only 3m away. I think this will work best for the winter, but we will probably have to re-rearrange in the summertime.

The second momentous thing to have happened is I finally managed to install my windows/Debian machine. Funnily enough I came across a useful video on my old blog, which is what I used, although this time I installed Debian Lenny instead of Ubuntu. The link to the video post is in this old post here.

Debian is tricky, and I was struggling with a difficult x-window interface, and couldn’t get it to go into a nice GUI. However, David sneakily managed to get it connected to the wireless network, STILL using the same old battered wireless card as before, which meant I could apt-get update, and then apt-get install gnome, which started brilliantly!

TAH-DAH:

I have apt-get installed PD (Pure Data) but I’m under pressure to switch-off and watch a film, so I’ll have to see if it works at the next opportunity

Today was Thomas’ 4th Birthday. We had probably the busiest birthday ever, which also made it extremely fulfilling, and most of all Thomas felt really important.

It actually started yesterday evening, with an early cake so all four of us could be there. I had been feeling bad that I didn’t actually get around to making a cake, especially when my friend on the other side of the world managed to make TWO cakes for her 5-year-old twins, which were both intricate and stunning: Naomi’s cakes. However, in the end the shop-bought cake did it’s job, and was pretty tasty too!

Then early on the birthday morning Thomas started with his cards: (the photo is blurry because I hadn’t had any coffee yet!)

He opened his presents, including an exciting parcel from abroad to open:

Then we got up and out to go pumpkin-picking with his schoolfriends. I once asked Thomas what he favourite activity is, out of all the things we do, and he told me he loved playing with his friends best. So we were really lucky to have this treat. We first got a look at the chickens and horses, and then a wagon ride out to the field:

Then they were let loose amongst the pumpkins!

The rules were that you musn’t pick them up by the stem, and that you had to be able to carry the pumpkin you picked yourself. Thomas and Ollie found suitably-sized ones.

Though there were bigger ones:

We actually took 3 home in the end, so we will hopefully get to carve them into Jack o’ Lanterns. We just got home in time for an unanticipated Skype-call from Uncle Oriol and Tante Doro in Germany! I wish I had captured a screenshot of the call as they had balloons and candles spelling out “H A P P Y B I R T H D A Y” for Thomas to blow out – we were really impressed! Then we also managed a skype-call with Aunty Jo. These calls all made Thomas feel really special, and he got to show everyone a pumpkin. I think this is the first year he really “gets” birthdays!

Then our Danish friends from Boston arrived. This was really special, as Thomas loves to have people round, and it was great for me too – I talked so much while they were here, my throat was hoarse in the evening! We went into town to mooch around, and got a bus home, had a quick play in the climbing tree, and finished off the cake! Thomas got to hear the Danish Happy Birthday song, which starts: “Idag er Thomas’ fødselsdag, hurrah, hurrah, hurrah!” which I absolutely love, because it is much more interesting than simply repeating “Happy Birthday” all the way through! The visit was a real boost to us, and it was so good to chat to people a similar stage along the culture-shock of the move across the atlantic! I even managed to mumble a few words of Danish here and there!

Then we got a Skype call in with David’s mum and dad from Spain, so Thomas got to hear Cumpleaños Feliz! (and show off the pumpkin again!) And a final rendition of Happy Birthday from Bedstefar and Bedstemor rounded off our multi-national day! It was super – Thomas got to feel like a superstar AND he got an inkling of the cultural soup that is his heritage!

I got to making Thomas’ dinner of choice – Spaghetti Bolognaise while he was allowed to watch a film – yet another of his favourite activities, and the three of us had a cosy dinner with candles. I look shattered, which I was, but really it was a fantastic day – I certainly enjoyed it anyway!

With our new found walking-without-buggy freedom I took the boys to a soft play “fun house” in town today. They had a good time, and luckily it was slightly too young for Thomas which meant that by the time I wanted to leave, he was already bored enough not to complain! I met some nice people – yet another Brit! And I had to meet another mum as Ollie had been busy giving her son a good kicking moments before. Don’t worry – I saw what happened and pulled Ollie out and made him sit at the side by himself, which upset him, but I told him I wasn’t accepting that. I went over and apologised to his mum, who thankfully was pretty good about it. I told her he had never done anything like that before – which is true, and makes me wonder if he’s entered a new stage. I may have to truss him up Hannibal Lecter style to take him out anywhere from now on!

In the afternoon I thought we’d try and bake something other than cookies for a change, so we went to the mini co-op to get some golden syrup with a view to making flapjacks. When I asked an assistant if they had any she said “what is that?” I said it was syrup sometimes used in baking. She had no idea what I was talking about! I’m sure I’ve seen golden syrup here?! Will try somewhere else tomorrow. We baked cookies as usual.

Then at bedtime, we were running a little late. Normally I read Ollie a story and then Thomas a story, though lately, Thomas has taken to reading to me from some library books. So tonight, I compressed the two and got Thomas to read to Ollie. I had actually read this story to Ollie before, but Thomas hadn’t seen it before. I captured a little bit of video, though the audio is appalling.

On Saturday morning, we thought we’d go for a walk in the Pines Park, which is located in the golf course next door. We walked halfway along the golf course, failed to find Pines Park, and headed back along the middle of the course. We stopped at the Dartmouth Ski Jump Memorial – it’s a memorial to the ski jump that used to be there:

It’s a pretty view from up there:

Finally we spotted what looked like a way into the woods, so we thought we’d take a quick look:

We’d found it! However, we’d been walking for quite some time by this point – Ollie too, so I said we should maybe head home. We decided to just go a little further and then head back. It was all very beautiful, and we got to the Conneticut river, and decided to head back. After a while, I realised we were not on the same path we had taken to get there. We consulted the maps.app on the iphone and found that we were pretty much equidistant from anywhere useful. We decided to head into town to try and get a bus home. By now Ollie was really struggling, and hungry, so he got carried for a while. We found ourselves by the Golf Club House where we sat down on a bench and ate the crumbled remains of some extremely stale biscuits that had been resident in the rucksack for some time. Then I carried Ollie and David carried Thomas along the last stretch to the bus stop – the boys had been walking for 2 hours on hilly ground by this point, and Ollie is not yet two-and-a-half! We collapsed at the bus stop to find that there are no buses on Saturdays. At this point David phoned his trusty Technical Assistant to save our asses! He arrived in his big Toyota Sequoia and drove us home. We fed him lunch in return! All-in-all it felt like an epic journey and I let the boys have a bit of chocolate to appease my guilty feelings, and promised that I wouldn’t make them walk that far ever again, unless of course we got lost again!

On the way to the golf course we walk past the fire station, who were having a bit of an open day, so we got a photo of the boys in a “Fire and Rescue” truck:

Also this weekend, I decided to try and install a dual-boot Windows/Debian on my old Dell laptop. Unfortunately, we are having trouble with it’s wireless access, (see this old post for possible reasons!) and we can’t seem to use a wire to our Comcast router, nor work out how to log into it. Anyway, this just means I can’t do the netinstall I was hoping to do, and may have to take the longer CD-burning route. I’m going to keep working at it, when I get a chance. Oh, I grabbed a shot of all the screens, including David’s new Kindle – yet another must-have gadget. Thomas must use up all his screen time in 10 minutes at our house!

And finally, even after our packed day on Saturday, we still managed to bundle the kids in the car to go and watch the lighting of candles on the Dartmouth Green for Diwali. It was a nice occasion, but we both found it shocking how few indian people we saw – mind you, moving from West London to a small town in New England would highlight this contrast!

I remember being very shocked when we were in Uxbridge and Thomas said, “mum, that bus goes to Ruislip”. I looked up at the bus going past us which indeed said “Ruislip” on it. However, it was only a couple of months ago that it occurred to me that he might read “actual” books. I got some of the “first reading books” out of the library which he has been devouring. I have tried on several occasions to capture this on video, but because we tend to read mostly before going to bed, the light quality has been too poor for my measly video-capture devices to cope with (an old Nokia 73 and our Lumix still point-and-shoot!) So I finally decided to simply capture the audio. I’ve been using my iphone’s “voice-memo” app to record snippets of riffs and ideas that occur to me on the piano, like a notepad, so I decided to use it to record Thomas. I’ve edited out some of the sniffs and coughs and gaps, but I’ve left in the bits where he stumbles, and the words he needs me to help with, for reference.

The Fire Cat by Esther Averill (click to listen)

Also, I’ve been waiting for a sunny day to take picture of our climbing tree. I posted a picture my mum took of me and the boys in it on Facebook, which everyone liked, so I thought you should see how spectacular it is from the outside too!

So we’ve had probably our most sociable weekend in years and I had a horrible coldsore all the way through – yuk and ow. We still had a great time though. Firstly we went for afternoon coffee with friends, and ended up staying for dinner too! We are talking a lot about bread with them at the moment, as David has been making lots of bread and Michael has also started making his own bread: friends making bread.

Then on Sunday my friend Jennifer showed me a walk, very near our house, which took us to the top of a hill. It was just perfect, and the weather, although cold was sunny:

You can see the clock tower on the Baker Library at Dartmouth College here (that small white speck!)

We finished off the weekend with dinner at one of David’s colleague’s house. All-in-all I felt very lucky to get out so much and get to sit and chat to lots of people – it’s really making me feel a bit more like my old self and I’m feeling much more at ease with being the mother of two small boys.

Our local science museum has put on an exhibition of dinosaurs which we went to see today. The boys were actually more interested than I expected, but there are also lots of other things to do too.

This next thing held Ollie’s attention forever – I had to drag him away. It was pretty cool actually. The discs are all fixed to the shaft so they turn at the same speed, then there are holes in their edges that you can put white pegs in. The first disc has one hole, the second has two, the third has 3, the fourth has 4, the 5th has 6 and the 6th has 8. The holes are evenly spaced and there are pictures of circles divided up into halves, thirds, quarters etc, showing ratios: 1:1, 2:1, 3:1, 4:1, 6:1 and 8:1. Then behind the discs are light sensors that are triggered by the white pegs. These are connected to a relay which plays a drum sound – each one has a different sound, so that as you spin the shaft, you can hear the rhythms against each other, and by taking some of the pegs out, you can create interesting beats:

And finally we climbed up the outdoor steps to watch the train go past – this is the train Ollie and I took with my mum and dad when they visited: