EMP in the US

Yesterday was very very cold. I think it was about -12° Celsius in the middle of the day. This made everyone reluctant to hang about outside for long, so we mostly stayed indoors. I did eventually wrap the boys up and make them walk around the Circle at around 5pm:

I have a plan to gather all the photos of the climbing tree and make a montage of “The Climbing Tree Through the Seasons”!

This is just a random photo of a brief snowstorm we had on Thursday:

Yesterday David took Ollie out for a sleep-drive (that IS as bad as it sounds). This gave Thomas and me a bit of time to do the sort of things Thomas likes to do. He wanted to play the Kids’ Chess game that he got for Christmas (from the Thrift Store!). He has made a lot of progress in attention span, so that he is beginning to understand how the pieces move, and also the concept of empty squares being “under potential attack”. Then we made a game of battleship (with just a 5×4 grid) to learn how to use grids (as recommended by “Chess for Kids and Parents”. This didn’t hold his attention for too long, though we did both get two out of three of each others’ ships (or blobs) before he didn’t want to play any more, and I think he can now use a grid.

This morning the boys surprised me by playing Connect 4. They took turns nicely, though the strategy was fundamentally flawed! They must have played for at least 5 minutes before the fighting broke out.

Also this morning, Thomas got his kiddie chess set out and set it all up properly, and looked like he was playing a game with himself. When I asked him he said, “NO, mum! I’m not playing with myself, I’m playing with my imaginary friend!” Well, of course, silly me! He went on, by way of introduction, “Mum, do you remember Penny from “Bolt”? Well, that’s who I’m playing with”.

Yesterday the sun was shining, so I took the boys out for a walk on the golf course, though by the amount they complained, you’d think I was making them climb Mount Washington. “my legs hurt” “I’m too tired” “I can’t walk any further!” Luckily, they became entertained by hazardous walking conditions:

Ollie might as well have stripped off and swam considering how wet he got:

Not all the ice was soft, so it was tricky to know whether you could slide across the top without your foot disappearing:

I got to take pictures of pretty ice features, which could have been really good if I’d had a decent camera (or any photography skills):

…better stick to easy subject matter:

I thought I’d mention a little about the mornings we are having at the moment. David is getting up pretty early (for us anyway!) at 6am. Somewhere around this time the kids wake up and come into our bed, usually bringing various toys, books and teddies with them. I’m then sandwiched in-between the two boys. If I have my back to Ollie, he has started pulling up my pyjama-top, and pulling up his pyjama-top and then lying with his tummy against my back skin-to-skin. It’s a bit strange, but quite nice in an affectionate way. I usually manage to doze for a while, notwithstanding various plastic objects, lumpy teddies, and sharp book-corners that inevitably poke me with every position-shift. Then finally Thomas says “MUUUUUM! We need to get up! Pleeeeease get up! We’re so hungry!” This morning I mumbled something about being so sleepy, and he returned, “you can sleep on the sofa! Just get us some breakfast!”

Yesterday afternoon, Thomas came in with his “The Secrets of Droon” book, and said, “Mum I must show you this!” He then read me a passage about a boy with a sprained ankle getting it healed with sparkly dust, and said, “isn’t that amazing!” I think he is grasping most of the concepts in the book, though there quite a few words that challenge him, like: ’scene’, and ‘ancient’. One problem we’ve come across is that words are sometimes split and hyphenated at the end of the line, which is a new concept for him, and I think he struggles if he can’t see the whole word at once.

Before I leave the subject of books, I went along to a “Read With Me” free course at the childcare centre last night. I was inspired to go by my friend Karoline, who thought it would be a good way to find out what the most popular books people read to their children here in America. It certainly was. While some of the talk was about things we knew already (talk about the pictures with your kids, sometimes move your finger along the line etc etc) it was nice to actually talk about why they are good things to do. Also, the speaker, who is a professional story-teller (what a cool job title!) introduced us to a few good books. We talked a lot about nursery rhymes, and how they have been transported across cultures. (I had a lot to say about that!) and then we were given free books to take home!

That Mother Goose book is worth $23! It’s great to compare the words with the british books we have. It turns out Margaret Wise Brown who wrote “Goodnight Moon” which was one of our favourites, is also very popular here, and you can see “Big Red Barn” is one of the books we were given, also by her. We discussed illustrations in a lot of detail, and she pointed out that adults tend to be text-bound, so we don’t spot all the detail in the pictures. She made us cover up the text to see it from a child’s point of view, who cannot read, and we all spotted all sorts of things that people who had read the book millions of times hadn’t spotted before! Karoline and I also managed to sneak in a quick drink in town afterwards, which is always a treat!

Finally, yesterday, we made Ollie’s “Happy Chart”. I made Thomas’ in Uxbridge when I was having particular trouble with getting him to be happy in his bed. I found lots of photos of him doing of things he enjoyed doing, and a picture of him being very happy and we made a sort of poster. Well, Ollie doesn’t really need any incentive to go to bed, other than a good story, but I thought it was a shame that he didn’t have something similar to enjoy. I think he was pleased with it:

So today it rained, and how! This melted a lot of the snow, but not all of it, and this morning, the rain all froze to the road, but that had all cleared by the time we ventured out. We live about 15 minutes walk from the Conneticut river (it’s big) and also near the “White River” (in Spring, it’s white). Someone was telling us that as recently as the 80s, it melted so fast that huge icebergs pelted down the river and took out the bridges! There are flood warnings being issued tonight.

We decided to venture out in it anyway. It felt very warm today – it was about 12°Celsius! This made everything steam:

The head’s finally fallen off the snowman, which I’m quite glad about, as it kept scaring me when I had to close all the blinds at night and it loomed in the (inadequate) streetlight. The driveway looks good for skating tomorrow!

We also have our own private little indoor flood, which I am expecting to be even greater in the spring – more ice and snow have been forecast for tomorrow, so let’s hope it freezes up again for now!

(In case you are wondering where the water comes from…)

So I finally took Thomas to the library to try and get him into books that are not about violence and gangsters with guns, (Tintin) or use politically incorrect terminology when referring to people of non-white race (yup, Tintin again).
So, we got a huge pile of books out of the library. He chose almost all of them, but I picked one as the inception of a cunning and subtle plan…

And here is where I admit I did actually encourage Thomas along a bit with his reading today. I got out a book which was more like an 8-year-old book. Firstly, it’s a fantasy book, which I knew would appeal to Thomas, and although it’s mostly writing, there are a few pictures dotted around, especially at the chapter titles. Normally with this sort of book, Thomas decides the writing is too small and doesn’t try to read it. So this is where I unleashed the second part of my cunning plan. I read the first two chapters to him at bedtime, and stopped just where they discovered the magic staircase into another world… Needless to say he was hooked, (having fidgeted all the way through the plot setup). He wanted me to read more, and I said “no, but you could read it yourself if you want”, thereby actioning the third and final coup de grâce and let him have the light on for 10 more minutes after kiss-n-cuddle. I’m not overly keen on encouraging the reading too much, but it was frustrating for both of us that he has pretty much read all the books in the “early readers” section of the library, (that aren’t clearly for girls, or kids who’ve travelled in time from the 70s). I’m hoping this book will open up a whole new shelf for him at the library. He still likes to read picture books, and sneaks in behind Ollie to hear his little brother’s story.

After lights-out, he has a torch to indulge a bit more.

We had a totally awesome day on Saturday. Ollie and I headed off to Occum pond where we met our friends for an afternoon’s sledding. We just had a totally brilliant time, which I tried to capture on video. (inspired by my friend Karoline!)

You can see Moritz starting off next to us, and then when I swing the camera around (it’s a bit jerky!) you can see Yarik and the girls following.

Then we all bundled back to next-door’s where we rounded off the day with a gorgeous feast and a supply of mulled wine. YIPEE!

There are some better pictures of our great day here: sledding link and if you look closely in the video at the bottom, you can see Ollie in the background, having just slid down with Charlotte (his favourite sledding partner!).

We’ve really got into taking things apart lately! The boys’ megasketcher had developed a bubble which was annoying, so we thought we’d fix it.

The boys scrabbled together various tools to help too.

And we did fix it, though instead of just the one obligatory left-over screw, there were two. Nevermind, it seems to work pretty well!

Thomas has just started to get into comic books. He told Ollie to be quiet so he could read his Tintin book:

And finally, I had managed to bury this memory until today when I came across the “object”. Thomas’ classroom currently has a “creation station” where they are allowed to stick cardboard boxes, tubes, and other random packaging together, along with stranger items. Well, I went to pick him up on Friday and he very proudly held out his creation saying, “Look, mum, look what I made!”

I tried to disguise my horror, and said, “that’s nice, what is it?” (standard line for pre-school artistic experiments). He said, “well, I can take the top off and put things in it”. Another mum had glanced over and I noticed her reddening, though I think she was more amused at my horror than at the actual creation. I said we would quickly put it away so it wouldn’t get broken, and squirreled it into a lunch bag. Thankfully, I think he’s forgotten all about it. I hope he makes a rocket ship this week…

So I haven’t written for a few days, because since my first two days kid-free, which were spent frantically playing with Logic 8, I’ve had basically nothing but Logic 8 in my brain. I’ve agonised slightly as to whether I really wanted to put the early attempts on here, but frankly, this is supposed to be a record of my life, and these aren’t tracks, they are studies, or exercises, and might serve as a reminder of how to do things, by showing how I learned them.

This first one is an “ambient works” study, obviously favourite, Aphex Twin in mind, and maybe a little Future Sound of London “Lifeforms” too. This was an exercise in learning to use the sampler. It was easy to assign multiple samples across the Korg, but I struggled a little to assign 1 sample across the whole keyboard, but this turned out to be because I’d set the pitch to be out of audible range! Oh and for some reason, there’s an incongruous cymbal in the middle that I simply cannot find in any track to remove it! It drove me crazy for a while, but I had to move on!

jan15th10.mp3 (click to listen)

The next is really just 3 elements of a cheesy house track, as I really couldn’t figure out a bass for it. This was an experiment with Ultrabeat – the drum machine & sequencer. This is really a study on “Lost in Love” by Legend B from Reactivate 10.

Cheesyhousejan10.mp3 (click to listen)

Then on Monday it was “Martin Luther King day”, so schools were out. I went out to clear my driveway:

..but I got distracted into building a snowman. I had help:

Finished!

This is why our neighbourhood is so great for the boys – lots of friends to hang out with:

Then, because there was no teaching, David came home early and we went to Occom Pond. I had hoped to take Thomas skating, to try out some new double-bladed strap-on skates that our friends had given us for Thomas. However, there was a lot of water and slush on the pond, and while there were quite a few skaters out, I didn’t fancy getting soaked. As it happens we got soaked anyway – sledding. This didn’t happen before, as it was so cold, there was no wet, but the weekend has been pretty warm – it was 4° C at the pond. Also, the fresh snow was very powdery, which slowed the sledding down quite a lot. It was still slippery enough climbing the “big” hill though:

And I just liked this photo:

Today I dropped both boys off at childcare, and David off to work. Then first things first, I met with my friends for coffee and cakes!

Then I got straight down to multi-tasking. I couldn’t wait to get music-making, but there was washing-up to be done. SO, I put the music I wanted to be inspired by on Pandora for the iphone and used David’s Christmas present in the kitchen to pump out the music while I washed up. (by-the-way, if you say you were “washing-up” in the states, it means you were washing yourself. “Washing-up liquid” is called “dish-washing liquid” here, so I should really get used to saying “washing” instead of “washing-up”!). I bought him this, which was actually pretty cheap, but it’s not a bad output, and it has a normal radio built in too:

And actually, before I move on, something I found interesting in slightly geeky sort of a way. I had actually put last.fm on our main stereo before it occurred to me to use the kitchen one, and I entered the same artist into both (Cobblestone Jazz). The music Last.fm came up with was much better than Pandora-for-iphone. (but that could have been just on this occasion – I might have to investigate further!).

Anyway, having managed most of the washing (-up) I settled myself into our spare room where I have set up a sort of space for myself.

Unusually for this sort of equipment, the midi interface worked first time with the Korg and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I have a bit of catching up to do, but I have some tutorials to work through to get a bit faster with Logic. I’ll be sure to let you know if anything decent happens…

Ollie enjoyed almost a full day at childcare today, and by all accounts he loved it. We got an email from his teacher saying: “hi! i wanted to let you know that Ollie is having a great day. he literally ran to his nap mat and climbed right under his blanket! he is one happy boy!”.

Yesterday, Ollie went to childcare for a settling session so Thomas and I had an extremely rare time with just each others’ company. We fixed his remote-controlled car (which I hadn’t intended to do, as it’s noisy and destructive!) This was his main Christmas present, as he’d asked for a remote-controlled car. Happily for me, we found one for $5 at “Family Dollar” which is like “Poundstretcher” in the U.K, which meant we could return the $20 one we had originally bought from K-Mart, and was actually inferior. It was, however very badly made, and broke almost immediately (Boxing Day I think). Thomas was very excited to take it apart and have a look inside. We found that all the usual suspects like a disconnected power cable, were all solid, so when a different wire fell out, I thought that it needed to be re-soldered. However there was no solder on the end, and tracing it back to the circuit-board I found that it was the antenna. It had been placed where it was (I think) shorting out against an LED. I tucked it out of the way, so that it now sticks out the top of the car, and it now works again. Thankfully one of its wheels is irreparably broken, so it only has 3 wheels to damaged the skirting boards with!

Later on we went ice-skating, as if you go after 1.30 you can rent skates at a “half-day” rate. Thomas’ were $4 and mine were $9. I was quite out of practice so we struggled a bit initially. However, I think we did OK for his first attempt. He learned to balance so that he could stand without falling over, and I also made him learn how to get back onto his feet after he had fallen over. He fell a lot, but laughed every time. Towards the end he fell and hurt his wrist, so there were a few tears, but I made him get back up to finish on a positive note.

The boys IKEA night-light has suffered quite a lot over the years, , having been dashed to the floor on many occasion. I’ve had to find an american transformer to fit it here, and I’ve had to take it apart a couple of times, but yesterday it suffered quite a blow when the plastic securing the power socket finally broke. I was inspired by a facebook group I joined recently called “If you can’t fix it with gaffa tape, then you haven’t used enough”.

All of a sudden, Ollie has a lot to say. Every day he finds time to let his tongue loose on the new playground of vocab and grammar that has fallen into place in his head, and with gusto! The air is getting quite crowded with words at our house. This video is about 11Mb, so I’m afraid it’s not terribly bandwidth friendly…

We finally managed to find the shortcut between the golf course and our house. It did, however get a little scary! We set out for a walk on the golf course. I say walk, but I have to pull Ollie along in the sled alot, as between his thick snow pants and the snow up to his knees, it takes a lot of energy to walk even a few paces. The golf course was beautiful in the sunshine. This is a photo of the “unmaintained” part where you don’t have to pay to ski. You can see a lot of x-country ski tracks in the distance:

The problem with the golf course where we are is that it’s a big hill down from the road where we access it, which means it’s fine going, but coming home is really hard work! The boys started to get a bit weary, and I didn’t know whether it would be better to try to climb back up (it was quite a long way at this point) or to try to find the shortcut back to our house. I’ve tried to show you on this map where we were, but unfortunately you can’t see how steep the ground it, and of course it’s all covered in snow, but this is the general idea:

I’m sorry the label “FIRE STATION” is cut off, but it’s only really there for people how have actually been here to show the distance. The fire station is on the main road.

We headed into the woods, where we could see some snowshoe tracks, and I figured out a way to go using google maps on the iphone. However the wood is quite dense, and when we went off the track, we had to break quite a lot of branches to get through. finally we found a deer trail (there were no more “people” trails here!) and climbed though deep snow and deer poo.

In some places it was so steep and the snow was so deep I had to lift Ollie and carry him a few steps to a place he could stand up. I started to worry a little that I’d really not made a good choice, and that we would need to be rescued (I was comforted to have the boys’ water bottles, and a pot of raisins in the rucksack!). Finally as we came to the top of the hill we saw a welcoming sight…

A HOUSE! We scrambled the rest of the way and I rustled up some protein-rich eggs for lunch. I have started giving the boys milk with their lunch to raise their vitamin D intake, while we’re not getting much sun on our skins (it’s all covered up!).

I also decided that Thomas needed a haircut, as he was starting to look a bit straggly. It was clippers as usual.
Before:

After: