2007

And so starts a new year.

Matthew is now going to preschool 4 days a week. Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri. This is in the hope that it will ease him into the 5 days a week when he starts school in the fall of this year. Wow, Matthew starts school this year! We have decided (#sarcasm in our infinite wisdom #/sarcasm) to try and get him into the AB Combs magnet school. ( see http://combses.wcpss.net/ ). You can read all about this school at this web site. Failing that there is a year rounds school 5 mins down the road will will try for and failing that there is the school was are assigned for. From what people have told us if we stick to our guns and follow all the procedures we ought to be able to get into AB Combs even if we are turned down initially... we shall see.

At the moment, if we say to Matthew.... let's sit down and learn how to read... he is not interested and we have discovered it is not worth the effort trying to pursue it. We just end up getting angry with him because he performs so much. However, we can quite easily teach him things verbally through game play. For example, sounding out words he knows. I quite often play the game of 'what letter does #insert word here# start with'. He is normally right in his answer and then he continues it with a game of thinking of other words that start with the same letter. I am also starting to try and teach him the sounds of the common letters that are put together....for example TH and WH etc. Margaret is starting to introduce him to a little addition now as well which he seems to be ok with. We bought him a simple card addition game for Christmas, when I opened it I thought we had wasted our time as it seemed to be too much. So I didn't even bother with it. I was lying in bed the other day listening to Margaret play the game with Matthew and he was receptive to it. We have also bought him a 'video game' for Christmas. It is a hand held game that you can buy plug in games for but the games all have an educational edge to them. It's really quite funny how if you try and teach them they don't want to know about it... but if you teach them when they don't know you are teaching them then they are fine with it.

Adam is doing great. His vocab is increasing. I know he says more than we understand but I am slowly hearing more words out of him that are pronounced well enough for us to know what he is saying. He is ( and has been since he was 2 ) already happily playing games on the internet ( seasamestreet.com. nickjr.com etc ). He has figured out the correlation between moving the mouse and the pointer moving on the screen, he knows to double and/or single click, he knows that the red cross closes the window and he play various drag and drop games. He can play the DND games if you can click on the object and it gets selected and then you move the mouse and click again to drop it. He can't yet click and hold while dragging..... but it will come. He has already mapped in his head where the games are at each web site that he likes to play...... not that I think he is a genius or anything... but it really quite cool that he can do what he can do at this age.

When Matthew starts school in the fall, Adam will be starting preschool. He will do the two morning a week deal that Matthew started with. Margaret is saying that she will use one of those morning to help out at Matthews school and the other one to squander on herself. She has been doing some part time work at a store called Pottery Barn ( see the web site for what they sell.... furniture mainly I guess ). She did it for the 40% staff discount more than the extra money ( which was really lousy ). But we have pretty much decided than now I am back at work she will chuck it in as it is just not worth the hassle.

I'm still at IBM but it looks like I will be having a job change and dabbling in something I'm not sure I want to dabble in so we shall see how it turns out. If things pan out.... and I won't know for sure for another couple of weeks.... I will be moving back to the 'old' product I use to work on..... the one that was, years ago called CSP... which is the language we used back in my Air New Zealand days. It has change a great deal since then and gone through several name changes. It is now called EGL ( Enterprise Generation Language ) and it's IDE is Eclipse based. Anyway, I will be doing what they call Tech Team Lead. My group will only be small ( 2 maybe 3 people and me ) so that's good.... I ought to be able to stay technical and not have to spend my whole life doing management BS. It will also mean I can have a real effect on how things are done so it ought to be fun.... assuming it actually happens.

All the very best to everyone for 2007... my new years resolution is to change every light bulb I can in the house to use compact fluorescents and do a small bit for stopping global warming.