Monday, February 05, 2007
Sunday, February 04, 2007
Imagination
Isn't it sad that we loose it. A couple of days ago Margaret stuck some white paper on top of an empty box, drew some circles on it and told Matthew it was a cook top. Matthew and Adam then spend the best part of an hour and a half pretending they were cooking things and eating them.
I was laying in bed this morning and Matthew was hurtling up and down the hall way passed the bedroom door pushing a dump truck. On one pass he tried to change course and come into the bedroom. He wiped out. He came in telling me he had hurt is elbow and side. I asked him how he had done it and replied that he had been going past and tried to turn the corner but his socks wanted to go straight ahead.
I was laying in bed this morning and Matthew was hurtling up and down the hall way passed the bedroom door pushing a dump truck. On one pass he tried to change course and come into the bedroom. He wiped out. He came in telling me he had hurt is elbow and side. I asked him how he had done it and replied that he had been going past and tried to turn the corner but his socks wanted to go straight ahead.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Winter domain
...it's winter...
and I have purchased a web domain and have the beginnings of a site going here.
This is why the blog has undergone its drastic change in look. It is not currently possible to embed this blog into a page of my site and so I could have either hosted my own blog using something like wordpress or link to this blog. Hosting my own blog would have ment I would have had to gone through the pain of moving all my entries over from blogger to wordpress... there is no import/export between the two. So I took the lazy way out. As best as I can I have made the blog page look like the rest of my site..... just have to figure out how to stop the blogger header from appearing. So it almost looks like part of the site.
I have a new web address to add to my expanding set.... guy@sladetowers.com :-)
If any of my family want to have an address like this they can ping me and I can give them more details ....... robin@sladetowers.com, robyn@sladetowers.com, jenny.who.use.to.be@sladetowers.com
We are all recovering from colds at the moment. Adam was so miserable this morning that we took him to the doctors as there was the potential of an ear infection....we just have to cover this base blindly as he never gives us any clues that he has one. Anyway, he was clear but he has his top 2 year molars coming through.
Margaret and I went to an open house for the magnet school we are thinking about for Matthew.... AB Combs. It was a very nice school, full of color and very polite well behaved children..... If Matthew gets in I'm sure he will soon change that :-).
and I have purchased a web domain and have the beginnings of a site going here.
This is why the blog has undergone its drastic change in look. It is not currently possible to embed this blog into a page of my site and so I could have either hosted my own blog using something like wordpress or link to this blog. Hosting my own blog would have ment I would have had to gone through the pain of moving all my entries over from blogger to wordpress... there is no import/export between the two. So I took the lazy way out. As best as I can I have made the blog page look like the rest of my site..... just have to figure out how to stop the blogger header from appearing. So it almost looks like part of the site.
I have a new web address to add to my expanding set.... guy@sladetowers.com :-)
If any of my family want to have an address like this they can ping me and I can give them more details ....... robin@sladetowers.com, robyn@sladetowers.com, jenny.who.use.to.be@sladetowers.com
We are all recovering from colds at the moment. Adam was so miserable this morning that we took him to the doctors as there was the potential of an ear infection....we just have to cover this base blindly as he never gives us any clues that he has one. Anyway, he was clear but he has his top 2 year molars coming through.
Margaret and I went to an open house for the magnet school we are thinking about for Matthew.... AB Combs. It was a very nice school, full of color and very polite well behaved children..... If Matthew gets in I'm sure he will soon change that :-).
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
iPhone
Wow, Apple have definitely done it again with this one. It's really expensive and the most memory you can have is 8GB. But Samsung will be releasing their 32GB memory chip soon so hopefully the iPhone will eventually have something like that in it. Then it just has to drop to below a couple of hundred bucks and I'll be in!
Check out the iPhone demo here it is truly an amazing gadget. The other phone makers are going to have to get their thinking caps on.
Check out the iPhone demo here it is truly an amazing gadget. The other phone makers are going to have to get their thinking caps on.
Friday, January 05, 2007
But which language?
Adam can count to 5. His pronunciation is not perfect but understandable. The weird thing is one to three is in English and four and five are in Spanish...... TV is to blame.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, December 24, 2006
oh soo tired
Margaret and I are tired at the moment..... late nights, organizing xmas stuff etc etc etc. We were talking today and it went something like this...
me: blah blah
Margaret: blah blah
me: blah blah
Margaret: Do you remember this time last year when Matthew was very sick and just wanted to lie on his bed and sleep all days for those two or three days?
me: yeah
Margaret: wasn't that nice
me: blah blah
Margaret: blah blah
me: blah blah
Margaret: Do you remember this time last year when Matthew was very sick and just wanted to lie on his bed and sleep all days for those two or three days?
me: yeah
Margaret: wasn't that nice
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