Well, its happened. England actually managed to produce copious amounts of snow while we were here on holiday. Here are some early pictures of snow-play. There’ll be some more arty ones later that Chris has done.
Click here for snow pictures. Remember to press ‘Hide Text’ to remove the ugly writing at the bottom.
The final event of Jeyanth’s time at Burnside Public School was presentation night. Overall, primary school presentation nights are marginally less interesting than watching paint which has already finished drying, but of course we went and sat through three hours of stuff for the sake of the 4 minute Kindergarten song “It isn’t easy being green”. Jeyanth at least got to stand next to his best mate, Stephan.
Jeyanth has had a wonderful first year at school, thanks in no small part to the wonderful Mrs. Ore who eventually managed, without squashing his enthusiasm, to convince Jeyanth it was possible to not talk all the time….
Jeyanth has always been a keen builder, but recently he has taken to more imaginative lego constructions. Last week it was ‘Wall-E’:
We haven’t ever given him any of the technical lego sets, but he was determined to make a car which would go. So, with a little bit of parental assistance, and pieces salvaged from several broken down toys (two motors, a battery pack and a switch), some blu-tac, some tape and a lot of trial and error, he came up with this:
Yes, it did go. Sort of. Mostly round in circles, and only if you carried the battery pack. But he’s already planning his new, four wheel drive version… once he finds enough motors.
Jeyanth and I had a lot of fun on Monday afternoon taking apart a toaster which wasn’t working any more.
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We had decided that our aim was to work out why the lever stays down when the toaster was plugged in, but didn’t now we had unplugged it (yes, we unplugged it before we took it apart!). The moment the cover was off Jeyanth pointed to a small coil of wire and announced – “it uses an electric magnet to hold the bar down!”.
Without wishing to tempt fate, it seems as if Maya has done a pretty good job of toilet training herself with almost no intervention on our part. Two weeks ago she suddenly decided that she didn’t want to wear a nappy, and that she would decide when she needed to go. The first couple of days went without an accident; since then we’ve had the usual occasional slip-ups when Maya’s been having too much fun – but even in those cases, she is ever so good at stopping herself and keeping a small incident from turning into a big one.
The main downside is that she’s also learned that “I need to do a wee and a poo” is a guarantee of parental attention – especially in the hour or so after bedtime, during which she has managed up to half a dozen potty trips.
Oh – and she’s already started to say she doesn’t want a nappy at bedtime either….
[I don't know why, but I failed to post this when I wrote it on Nov. 15th]
Maya seems to have grasped the concept of representational art a little earlier than Jeyanth did. But she shares his initial subject matter – in particular, cars.
OK, I admit that the image would be a passable hedgehog as well, but she explained it was a car as she drew it (the ‘eye’ is a headlight, and I have no idea what the spikes are).
Maya's car
Overheard this morning
Maya: “They don’t fit together!”
Sureka: “What don’t fit together?”
Maya: “This – and this.” (pointing at her shirt and then her socks) “They don’t fit together.”
Sureka: “Oh darling, purple and pale pink look lovely together…”
…a few moments later, when Maya was about to put on her shoes…
Maya: “I want purple shoes! These don’t fit! They’re not the same!”
Also over the weekend… Jeyanth started Cricket training :).
Over the weekend, we finally took Kat up on her offer to give the kids a ride on “Sam”, her very friendly (and quite big) horse…
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| More images from Riding Sam the Horse |
In the past couple of months Jeyanth has completely fallen for two software programs, to the extent that his television and DVD watching has fallen to zero, with every moment of his designated screen time absorbed on (my) computer.
First, it was Art Rage, a wonderful graphics package. He was sucked in by the free trial, with its oil painting style, but was totally sold when we bought him the fully featured version with spray paint, tube paint, metallic effects and the like.
Jeyanth's 'smeary painting'
Just as his excitement at Art Rage was starting to wear out, we discovered Phun. For a boy who loves building and gears and machines and cars it’s simply amazing – a 2D physics model of blocks and gears and motors and springs and chains and water and lasers, out of which you can build anything you like. For the geeks amongst us, it even allows you to control density and friction and coefficient of restitution, to graph the energy of objects and trace their paths. I’ve been playing with it most nights after he’s in bed.
One of Jeyanth's creations in Phun (with a little help)
Yesterday Jeyanth was walking home from school with a boy from the year above him, who was trying to tell Jeyanth about all the cool games he had on his x-box and his DS. Jeyanth listened for a while, then observed “But those games all have rules which tell you what you have to do. I like games where there aren’t any rules, and you can make anything you want!”.
And to finally convince me that this wasn’t sucking all his creativity into screen-based activity – today he announced that “the next thing to do is to get a load of gears and wheels and things and make some real stuff like I make in Phun”…
[Both Art Rage and Phun are available for Mac and Windows. We've since upgraded to the full version of Art Rage and to Algodoo, the commercial version of Phun, but the free versions are really worth a go.]
