ho ho ho

yayy I have finished work for the year!
We are still having to do some fall clean up. Leaves still seem to invade Margaret's garden. The front slope of our property is looking much cleaner now. We let it go for several years and didn't realize how much overgrown it had become until we found some old pictures. So last year I attacked it from one side and this year Margaret attacked it from the other and we met in the middle. I have a couple of largish saplings to cut down and then we are pretty much done. I have also recently chopped down the three very large holly trees that had been planted too close to the house. The house looks bare now without them but it gets a lot more light and Margaret likes it.
Margaret finally made me hang those silly icicle lights that many Americans hang from our house....

I managed to not kill myself. The hollies were at the two corners of the house and a third at the end of the garage ( that you can't see in the picture ).

Here's a picture from a couple of years ago with the hollies in....


Matthew is hoping for snow again this year.... we shall see, didn't get any last year and I can't say I miss it.

Happy Birthday Adam

Adam turned 2 on the 20th.... yeah, this is a little late. He had a good birthday. He opened his presents in the morning (with much enthusiastic help from his big brother). Matthew went to 'school' for the morning and so Adam got almost 3 hours of uninterrupted play with Mummy time. I made it home in the early afternoon and we all went out to a place that has a number of those big blow up bouncy castle things that kids can jump around on. We stayed there for a couple of hours. Then back home for dinner and birthday cake. Adam knows about singing Happy Birthday and then blowing out candles. So we did that.... 3 or 4 time.... and for 3 or 4 evening after that while there was still enough cake to put a candle in.

We have finally got the leaves beat.... I hope. It has taken 3 odd weekends of gathering them all up and dumping them into the wild areas of the garden (I love my ride on tractor). Finally the trees have no more leaves to drop. Matthew has made us save on pile of leaves at the bottom of the slide......

Halloween

Some Halloween fun...

Talking

Adam is finally starting to throw out a few words! Things like 'shoe', 'head', 'mouth', 'eye', 'nose'. When he is playing with us on a bed he will reach for a blanket, pull it up and say 'ni ni mama'. The other day he had a sandwich that he didn't want as there were strawberries on the table that he could see. So he grabs the sandwich, tosses it across the table and says 'bye bye wich'. We got the hint. He is still super smoochie and always comes running when I get home from work with a hug and an 'awww'. While hugging us he will also pat us on the back.

BTW, I am really loving a new feature of Firefox 2.0. That is the real time spell checking. No matter what you are doing in the browser ( and I use Google mail so I answer mail from within the browser as well ) if you are typing then Firefox will underline any words it does not recognise. ( like the word 'recognise' because I have an American dictionary so it wants me to spell it as 'recognize' ). You can right mouse click on the word and it will drop down suggestions. Sweet.

I am also using bloggers new beta blogger. It now works like it ought to have in the first place.... like pretty much every other blogging software does. When you publish a posting what you are doing is just saving that post into a database and when someone is looking at my blog it is building the page dynamically. Before it would completely rebuild the blog and so the more postings you had made, the slower it was.

Another really cool feature (again not revolutionary as other blog software has it ) is the ability to label posts. Which is what I am now doing. So if someone wants to look at all the postings I have made of 'Matthew story' then they can just select that in the 'Labels' list on the RHS of this blog and they will get a list of all postings I have labeled as such.

Thomas the Tank Engine...revisited

We went to see Thomas again ( this is the third time now ). He comes to the North Carolina museum of transport once a year. It's about 120 miles away in a place called Spencer.


Thomas having a laugh cause he knows he's just made the hole in the ozone layer above NZ a little bigger.


Adam saying Hi to Murdoch

Stop it

Matthew was upstairs with Adam in the 'playroom'. He was making a lot of noise ( for a change :-) ). I yell up at him...

me: Matthew!!! What are you doing?
Matthew: nothing
me: well stop it please
Matthew: ok

and it was quiet again, and the people were happy.

Bad Night

A couple of nights ago Adam had us up at 1:30am. We brought him into our room and he probably spent an hour of tossing and turning and kicking us in the face before he drifted off again. Fortunately ( or not depending on how you look at it ) his butt was in the proximity of my nose and I quickly smelt why it took him a while to settle back down. I was very tempted just to roll over and let him stew in it until the morning but he has had bad nappy rash before so I decided he ought to be changed. I woke Margaret up and got a clean diaper (nappy). We changed him and of course he woke up again. I think it was gone 3:30am before Margaret took him back to his crib and got in with him to get him back to sleep.

If felt like I had just dropped off when I woke up to Matthew crying in his bed. So I went in there and he was sobbing because he had dropped his red train into the stream and it had 'sunk a long long way' and he couldn't get it back. So I told him not to worry and that Daddy had jumped into the river and found it for him. He then asked me if it was James and I said yes..... big mistake.... it wasn't James he had dropped into the river it was 'a red train with no face'. By then Margaret had come in from Adam's room and asked if Matthew would like Mummy to lie with him. He did, so I got up and left. I found out later that Margaret then told him that Mummy and Daddy had been fishing at the other end of the river and had caught the red train, a blue baseball bat, and various other toys and had put them into a big basket to dry in the play room. This made him happy and he went back to sleep.

Of course in the morning he was all...... so where's the big basket of toys

School

The work has begun educating ourselves on the education system here in the states. This time next year Matthew would have started his schooling career. Currently he is in what they call 'preschool'. This is what most of us would know as kindergarten. He is going 3 mornings a week ( 9 to 12 ) and after Xmas will transition to 4 mornings a week. A couple of times a month he is eating his lunch at preschool as well. This is all to get him use to the school environment. Next year he goes to what they call Kindergarten here, which is what I knew as primer-1 back in NZ. After that it is grade1, there is no equivalent to primer-2 here ( if there is still a primer-2 in NZ ).
As far as schools goes here they have 'traditional school', 'year-round school', and some other school that I can remember. Each has different term lengths. There are also what they call magnet schools, which focus more one one thing or another.... for example math, or arts. The magnet school in our area for the elementary school level ( or primary school as we all know it ) differs from the rest because it is a year round school, not because it specializes in something. I think there is also a second magnet school in our area that has a traditional school year but has some emphasis on 'leadership qualities' I think I remember someone telling me they start teaching the kids things like looking someone in the eyes when talking to them, firm handshakes etc etc.

But Margaret is the one who went to a meeting today, not me, so I will become a little more enlightened tonight.

They have a cut off date here for getting into a school year. I think it is around October. So if your child turns 5 before the end of October then they go to school the next year. if they turn 5 after October then they have to wait till next year. This means that Matthew will be on the younger edge of the class being born in June and Adam will miss the cut off and be on the very edge of the oldest kids when he goes to school.

More decisions to be made regarding the kids.... more wondering if we made a right decision or not.

Pandoras Box

If you have a broadband connection and want to listen to free music that tries to tailor itself to your preferences then check out www.pandora.com

You create 'radio stations' and seed it with one or many songs and/or artists. Through analysis of the songs pandora then tries to serve up other songs it thinks you may like. You can help it along ( if you want ) by saying yea or nay to the songs it plays. You are allowed to skip over a certain number of songs in an hour ( I don't know what the number is ).

What it has done is introduce me to artists and songs that I would not normally listen to, or have never heard of. I have discovered a number of new artists that I like through Pandora.

and it's free

Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

This is a kids program about Maggie (who is a little girl) and her adventures in nowhere land with Hamilton (who is a pig) and the Ferocious Beast (who is a ferocious beast). The ferocious beast roars very loudly and in general tries to be ferocious.

We were sitting down at the dinner table having dinner (yes, we sit down at the dinner table to eat our dinner) and Matthew was being his normal loud self. After several times of asking him to quieten down and reminding him we were all sitting right next to him and did not have hearing problems he let out some god awful yell about something or other (probably asking me to pass the tomato sauce or something... that would be ketchup in American speak) and I finally yelled at him to use his 'inside voice' and to stop making so much noise. To which he replied "but Daddy, I have to be loud. I am after all the ferocious beast".
This is what the beast tells Maggie when she asks him why he is so loud..... well it was funny at the time.

Don't look now.... but there's a snake in the bed

At some ungodly hour last night Margaret and I were woken up by a scared little boy crawling into our bed. We asked him what was going on and he told us there was a snake in his bed. This has been the first time he has ever come into our bed since he got his own bedroom. He actually prefers to go to sleep in his own bed to ours. In the morning we asked him about the snake. He told us it was green with a red stripe and a snake mouth ( I was glad to hear it wasn't a mutant snake with a spider mouth ).

Matthew and I bravely went into his bedroom this morning and with him hanging back and stretching his neck I fully checked under the sheets and pillows. Then he went up on tip toes and looked at the top bunk, so I dutifully climbed onto the top bunk and checked it out for him. Then he bravely went onto his knees and checked under the bed. No snake was discovered and so we both agreed it must have been a dream. So with any luck we won't have a problem tonight.

of course, we didn't check the closet.........

New PJ's

Q T 3.14

Blow

Matthew brought a cold home from the Y camp and shared it around. Adam duely caught it. It was heavy and snotty and he ended up with his 3rd ear infection of the year. The drainage starts about 10 mins after he wakes up.... two yummy thick green slugs that slowly appear from his nose. We have to be on the look out for his sneezing as a sprint to the tissues and back to him is required..... if you are too slow then a new shirt is needed :-)

It was ammusing the other day, I had a tissue up to his nose and said "Adam, blow for daddy". Adam put his lips together and blew.

Independance Day

Last Tuesday was independance day. The IBM site I work at shut down on the Monday as well so I took the other three days off and had a week off. It was a week at home as we have less than no money after doing the attic and two bathrooms. When I had the time ( which is difficult with the two kids ) I was out in the garage trimming it out and trying to tidy it up and clean it out. It is still not finished and both the cars are still parked in the drive way..... maybe this weekend. We went to the pool almost everyday and also went to Jordan Lake on the Sunday for a picnic lunch and swim in the murky water.

The week before last Matthew went to bible school for the week.... they start the brainwashing early in the bible belt. It was fun for him, they sang songs and played and he got to hang out with one of his friends. It was for 3hrs a day in the morning. This week and the next he is going to the YMCA each morning to do stuff.... play and have some supervised fun with a bunch of other kids. This means Adam benefits from some one on one time with Margaret

I'm still managing to work from home 3 days a week. I heard on the radio driving in to work this morning that they are predicting fuel peaking at $4 a gallon over summer so there is even more reason to try and work from home. IBM recently introduced a new thing in our area... "Think Friday". This is where we are encouraged to inovate. They don't want us to work on the 'normal' tasks but to pull our heads from out of the sand and see what the market is doing and try and come up with new ideas to lead it. Considering the super tight deadlines we always seem to have I'm not sure how well this will work for us plebs in the trenches, I think it is trying to target more of the upper management than us. But we shall see. I am taking the opportunity to take a look at ajax and some of the open source tools available out there. I have recently installed MySQL, the Apache HTTP server, and ruby on rails onto my machine at home. I also have grabbed the ruby on rails eclipse plugin. I have managed to get it all configured and running together ( which was NOT a simple task ). Now I am going to write me some rails code and a few web pages to use it and then I'll have a go at ajax-ifying it. We sadly lack any tooling to help ajax develoeprs and so I don't think it will be a bad thing to get a general understanding of how it all works.

Swimming

Matthew can swim! It's pretty ugly to look at but he stays afloat and moves forward! At the pool we go to there is a diving board area that is 8.5 foot deep (259cm). matthew can jump off the diving board and swim by himself to the edge. He kicks, moves his arms and comes up for breath. cool!

Here are a few shots of the kids at a local lake....

of speech and yellow jackets

Both Matthew and Adam recently went for check ups at the doctors. Matthew for his 4 year appointment and Adam for his 18 month appointment.
Matthew's weight is now down to the same point on the all important growth curve as his height ( you must fit within the bell curve! ). He is 90th percentile for weight and height for his age. Up until now his weight has been off the chart and this worried everyone as you MUST fit within the bell curve.

Adam is 85th percentile height and 60th percentile weight. Neither of which is a concern...as...you guessed it.... they are both within the bell curve :). But the doctor made us worried as Adam is not speaking yet. He babbles but does not speak and according to the doctor ( probably due to a bell curve ) he should be saying 10 clear words by now. So we started to worry.... did he damage himself when he went head first onto the concrete floor at a store from the shopping trolley because his stupid parents let him ride in it instead of buckling him into the seat? ( let's not go there). Then we talked to a number of other parents who just laughed and told us not to dismiss it but not to worry about it.... but you do.
So he is not talking but then we see this sort of thing happening.... we are at the pool swimming and when the lifeguards take their 10min break. Margaret take Adam and Matthew to the little snack store at the pool and buys them both a Popsicle. Adam obviously likes the Popsicle and knows they come from that 'place over there' so we watch him toddle back over and climb the little step they have at the front of the store. This gives him enough height to be able to put his hands onto the counter and peer over it. The people in the store have a laugh and talk to him. But this is not what he wants. Meanwhile Matthew is playing diving with a friend. The friends mother is tossing coins into the water for them to dive and get. Adam gets down off the step, walks over to the friends mother, grabs some coins off her, walks back to the store, climbs the step, puts the coins on the counter and pushes them to the people in the store and waits there...... smart kid..... pity he didn't steal enough money for another Popsicle.

I don't think there is too much wrong with him.

Then there were the yellow jackets.... and not the group. One day Matthew got stung...once thank goodness looking back at it. We didn't know by what. Someone told us to mix baking soda and water into a paste and put it on the sting. I have since found out that a better one is a tablespoon of sugar and a tablespoon of water.( look it up ). A couple of days later I was in the same area of the garden and dragged a hose over the yellow jackets nest. man, I didn't know what was happening but it sure hurt. They stung me around a dozen times. Luckily I was not immediately next to the nest so I didn't get the swarm over me. I went back that night and poured petrol down the hole and gassed them. My ankle swelled up and it was itchy as for 3 or 4 days after. nasty little buggers.

it's just snot right

One day Jill, a neightbour of ours invited Matthew over to play and have lunch. She has a couple of boys, John and Ben both who are a little older than Matthew but Matthew has a really great time playing with them. John is around 10 and is the best behaved young man I have met by a country mile. Anyway, so the story goes like this....
Jill: What would you like to have for lunch Matthew? Do you like Ham?
Matthew: yes
Jill: and do you like cheese?
Matthew: yes
Jill: and do you like carrots?
Matthew: yes
Jill: and do you like watermellon?
Matthew: yes
Jill: Matthew, what don't you like to eat?
Matthew: Yucky stuff
Jill: Yucky stuff? Like what Matthew?
Matthew: snot

Jill told Margaret this and Margaret had to fess up and admit that we feed our children snot for lunch.

Blisters

Firstly, I am writing this using an on-line word processor from thinkfree ( www.thinkfree.com ). I believe that the on-line office suite is the way of the future. All of your docs, presentations, spreadsheets are stored on-line and accessible from any computer you happen to be working at. There is no software to install as the app is browser based and all AJAX driven. Is see that google agree with me and are slowly pulling together ( through company acquisition ) an on-line office suite of their own. Not being a power office suite user I suspect that I am not going to miss any Microsoft Office features that are currently missing.... not that I would know they are missing as I probably don't know they exist in the first place. So, allegedly I can easily publish this doc to my blog.... we will see about that in a little while.

Matthew went for another visit to the dermatologist yesterday and she put some more of the cream on the remaining moluscums. Margaret said she was more heavy handed than normal and Matthew's skin has really blistered up ( the cream burns, I guess it is something like what you can buy for burning off warts but much more potent ). Margaret had to wash Matthew down after a few hours to remove the cream and she could barely manage it. Matthew was crying (screaming) so much he was making himself gag. Man, it is a mess and must be so painful for him. We have been wrapping him in gauze and then sticky bandage. We are changing it morning and night...so twice now.... and both times the burns have weeped into the gauze and made it stick to him so it hurts him when we peel the gauze off him. He keeps asking me to make it stop hurting.... but what can you do? We are giving him kids pain killer to try and take the edge off it and that's pretty much all we can do. I really hope that this time we manage to get rid of the majority of them and not have to go back for any more of the burn cream.


Ok, let's see how easy it is to post this!

Well, it looked easy but it kept throwing errors so I gave up and cut and paste it.... oh well, I'll try again later

Kid update

man, look at me, can you tell I am doing stuff at work I'd rather not be doing.... 3 posts in two days!

Matthew:
Apart from the nasty virus things going on with him he is doing great.... well I assume he is... everyone says what he does is typical of his age. He is becoming very competitive with the kids he plays with... it's all about who saw what first and who can jump the highest or run from a to b the fastest. When one of us picks him up he wants us to run so he beats the other one of us to the house, or car, or where ever. He is more and more fascinated with words, he is forever asking us "how do you spell blah?", He can spell his name, 'daddy', 'mummy' ( although someone point out to us...that's great, if you live in England but here it is 'mommy' )... and the word STOP. He is forever berating me when I don't come to a complete stop at a stop sign and tells me the police man will give me a ticket. He also checks to make sure that I have two hands on the wheel and are holding on tight ( I have no idea where that comes from ). We have bought a book on teaching your child to read ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671631985/sr=8-1/qid=1148254932/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-7871768-8554450?%5Fencoding=UTF8 ) and when school has finished this summer ( next week in fact ) Margaret is going to start the book with him. I sometimes find myself listening intently to him speaking. It amazes me how he is learning to pad out his sentences with the right words so that they now sound correct... all these little extra words we put into sentences without thinking, a lot of them not really necessary for the meaning of the sentence as I have learnt since kids don't use them and parents totally understand what the kid is saying. But his speech is so much more 'correct' ( if that is the right word ). You can totally see how a kid who grows up around adults speaking incorrect english is going to carry on that fine tradition.
I remember a while back reading about Bill Crosby having a real go at the African American community here about their lousy english. He was trying to point out that to raise themselves as a race they need to stop with the ebonics and slang and speak properly... as he rightly pointed out, you don't see professional people ( lawyers, teachers etc ) speaking like that. Maybe the Maori should take a leaf out of his book.
Matthew has one more year of preschool and then he goes to school for real! Wow, I feel like if I blink again he will be a teenager. In about 6 months time Margaret and I will have to start working on what school he is going to. People round here actually go and talk with the heads of schools and check it all out before applying for their kid to go to a particular school.
Matthew is big into role playing when he plays now. When Margaret or I play with him now he wants to make stories up about fires and earthquakes and then we drive the police cars and fire engines to the 'fire' and put them out. The police catch the baddy and we put him in jail... all good fun :-).... at least for the first 30 times.
A friend of his from preschool had her grandparents look after her a couple of weeks ago for a week and we had her over for a couple of afternoons to give them a break. She calls her granddad 'poppy'. Matthew made me feel really bad a few days ago. We were playing and he was role playing that one fireman was the 'poppy' of another fireman. Then he stopped playing and looked at me and said "Daddy, do I have a poppy?". I nearly bought tickets back to NZ there and then.

Adam
Matthew seems to have more of my personality...more mellow. Adam has Margaret's temper! If you take something off him that he wants or move him away from somewhere he wants to be then you'd better look out. He will throw the most god awful fit about it. It's quite funny sometimes, you take something off him, he starts his fit and if you try and give it back to him he will bat if away with his fist out of temper. Matthew does not like being hugged or touched very often. He will tell you to get off, or to stop it.... this is Margaret. Adam loves hugs and will often just come and lay his head on your shoulder and sigh, or give you a kiss..... that's me. Right now Adam is just in the most super toddler CUTE stage. He smiles and laughs for no reason. He flirts with women anywhere. He is babbling nonsense... no words yet. He loves playing at the train table and pushing cars around and 'flying' planes in the air. His fine motor skills are leaps and bounds ahead of what Matthew were at this age... he has been using a fork and a spoon since about 11 months.

oh well, back to my test cases...

My Desk

... who says this blog is all about the kids??

Now that the attic is pretty much done ( except for a couple of lingering things that the builder needs to do and won't get any more money out of me until he has ).... I am enjoying my new desk. It means that I am now telecommuting ( geek speak for working from home ) at least 2 days a week and often 3 days a week. Where we are in the lifecycle of the product release means I am able to do this, but it will probably be down to 1 to 2 days a week during phases of whatever the next release is when we need a lot of team interaction ( design work mainly ).
What does this give me?... I have a 40 mile round trip (64km) to the office and back. So working from home 3 days a week saves me 120 miles! It also gives me around 3 to 4.5 hours of my life back a week. I'm not stressing in the traffic with the crap drivers we have around here. I also get to spend a whole lot more time with my family which Margaret appreciates ( I think ).

I can go up to the attic or the second floor ( or here it would be the third floor since they count the ground floor as the first floor ), I can close the door and not have to reappear until lunch time if i don't want to.... I have a small bar area with a fridge up there, a bathroom, and a big screen TV ( but I NEVER have it on while I am working ).

Anyway, here's a badly lighted photo of my desk.....