Specs Appeal

I'm very short-sighted (around -9 diopters in each eye, to be precise) and I first had to wear glasses when I was 7, in the first year of Junior School.  I'm not quite sure how short-sighted I was at that point, but enough to be given glasses and to have to wear them all the time.

Doug also need glasses, but unlike me can actually function without them - I tend to walk into large objects like houses and land masses if I'm not wearing mine.

So when Jacob announced last year he was having slight issues reading the board at school, we marched him down to the opticians straight away.  At that time, there was only a slight prescription and not anything that warranted correction, but he's just been back for a sight test and his vision has deteriorated enough to warrant glasses.

At this point of time he doesn't need to wear them all the time, just when he's in the classroom or watching tv/playing on the computer at home.  And for reading, obviously.  But not for playing or in the playground etc.  We'll go back in six months to see the Optician for another eye test and to see how he's dealing with wearing glasses.

He's very excited to have them.  And being Jacob, he chose a very cool pair of specs :)

Dinner for four

I'm not entirely sure whether this is the norm or not, but we have previously found ourselves firmly in the "two dinners" camp i.e. I cook something for the kids at around 5pm, and then something else for me and Doug at around 8pm once the kids were in bed.  This fitted neatly into our lifestyle - we didn't really want to eat the same food as the kids day in day out, and Doug didn't get home from work until 7pm anyway.  We did try other options i.e. me eating with the kids and then Doug reheating a plate of that or cooking for himself when he got in, but that didn't really work. So two dinners it was.

A couple of things have changed recently.  The first is that the kids' bedtime routine has changed entirely and they're going to bed much later, which means that eating after they've gone to bed is no longer an option.  The other thing is that they're both becoming much more adventurous with their food tastes.

I was once told that kids should "acquire" all their tastes by the age of 18 months and that you should aim to expose them to as many different foods as possible.  And if you don't want to expose your children to the amount of salt and sugar in pre-packaged food, this means cooking it yourself.  However, I also found that there was a direct link between the time taken to prepare food and the likelihood that the kids would reject it out of hand.  So, by and large, the things I made out of recipe books specifically for children, the Annabel Karmels of this world, would be met with a "don't like that."

That's not to say that the boys have had a boring diet of chicken nuggets and chips - they would surprise me occasionally with the stuff they'd eat (last summer, the pair of them polished off Doug's smoked fish carpaccio in a restaurant in Italy), but I was always a bit wary of giving them "adult" food, mostly because I dreaded the possibility of creating a battlefield over food.  I try very hard not to get cross when they don't like something I've cooked, but it can be particularly trying at times, especially if I'm tired or a bit out of sorts.

However, I do think I'm getting to grips with the sort of things they'll eat or won't eat, and I'm getting quite good at guessing which of "our" regular dishes they'll take to.  They've always liked things like stews, rich pasta sauces, and mildly spiced things like kedgeree and korma/tikka type curries.  So recently I've tried things with stronger flavours - pork porkalt is a total winner, and they've enjoyed chicken basque and all types of stir fry.  They've loved "proper" beef bourguignon and stews with less savoury flavourings (redcurrant sauce etc) and Mexican food (fajitas, tacos, quesadillas, enchilladas, you name it), and when we go out for lunch or dinner, they love going to Chiquitos, Nandos and Wagamamas.  Chinese takeaway?  That'll do nicely.

I've got a couple of recipes that I think they'll take to (ossobucco will probably be a hit, although not entirely sure about a Risotto Milanese accompaniment, and goulash and stuffed chicken spring to mind), and when I look through the stacks of Delicious and Good Food magazines that my mum gives me, I'm spotting more and more recipes that would qualify as "Dinner for Four."  I know there will still be times when all they'll want for their tea is fish fingers, chips and peas, but that offers me and Doug the opportunity to have something like a hot curry that they're years off enjoying yet.  And I know that there will be things that they'll never like, no matter what, but it is satisfying to get to the point where they're enjoying *and* appreciating freshly cooked and prepared food that is out of their normal comfort zone.

Closing Ceremony

After the brilliance of the Opening Ceremony, and the fantastic games inbetween, this was something of a disappointment.  All the more so because I reckon it was only a decent edit away from being belting.

The main problem was that it was a concert featuring different performers, unlike the Opening Ceremony, which was a performance that wasn't about individuals.  When one individual did get up to sing (Macca), everyone groaned - so they were on the back foot from the off by making the Closing Ceremony almost entirely about individual performers. Twitter was full of people slagging off each and every perfomer appearing, with countless moans of "why couldn't they have X or Y instead?"  You can't please all the people etc.

I'm assuming that the line up was confirmed before the Olympics started, when it was all a bit of a worry whether GB would actually be able to put on a decent show, so I can imagine the bookers had a torrid time trying to get some of our big names to appear;  when George Michael said "yes, I'll do a couple of songs, but one of them has to be my latest single", instead of "do one", they probably sobbed "yes please" down the phone at him.

Anyhoo, if you were to give me the licence to change things about and a handy time machine to travel back about a week, I'd make the following changes:-

For me, it was a matter of pace.  It was too long by far and I'd trim at least an hour off the running time.  The stuff with Stomp and Timothy Spall and the Nandos ballet dancers and people sweeping up would go - it wasn't needed, it was just too slow and uninvolving.  The floats going round the stadium really worked, apart from some issues with the sound (the Massed Bands playing Parklife had me in stitches) but Emeli Sande slowed things down way too much.  She got her shot at the Opening Ceremony, she wasn't needed here.

There was some griping that they replayed stuff while the athletes filed in instead of finding new stuff - I suspect this was just an oversight and that the athletes were expected to be in while Elbow played their two songs.  Again, the pace of the Elbow songs was too slow and I'd have shifted them to the end while they extinguished the torch and instead had the athletes filing in to a medley of songs by some of the bands/singers who weren't performing.

I quite liked the Kate Bush thing prior to the medal ceremony, but the David Bowie/Fashion montage would go - it was rubbish, unrelated nonsense and it stuck out like a sore thumb.  Likewise, Russell Brand - he's not a singer and he's definitely not the Walrus.

For me, what worked worked well.  George Michael (new single and all), Annie Lennox and Liam Gallagher all sang their songs well, and I particularly liked things that had an element of spectacle to them - the entrance of the Kaiser Chiefs and the giant rave octopus with Fat Boy Slim in the middle.  Even the Spice Girls on top of their taxis was something to see (if not listen to), and I liked Jessie J, Tiny Tempah and Taio Cruz arriving in their mini Rollers (even if singing that it wasn't about the price tag from the back of one was rather ironic).

And the final bands, Take That and The Who were great.  I like both of them, I make no apology, and unlike Macca, Daltry can still belt out a top choon.

So that's what I would have done.  Made it faster, more of a spectacle, and kept the music playing.  I'm sure there's probably an old showbiz maxim about not giving the audience time to think, and this was the trick that was missed here.

Opening Ceremony

I was a bit worried, to be honest.  I've been to an opening ceremony put on by Britain for a sporting event (Euro 96) and it made It's a Knockout look classy and expensive.  We couldn't match Beijing for sheer scale, so how to follow it?

With creativity, invention and humour, that's how.  And how.

It was fantastic.  I loved it.  The kids loved it (and they stayed up right to the start of the athletes' parade at 10.30pm before going to bed); they didn't get a lot of the cultural references, but they loved James Bond and the Queen, Mr Bean and all the villains from childrens' literature.  And the music!  a soundtrack with some absolutely belting tunes, and even here there was some humour injected (the athletes of Fiji walking round the track to the Bee Gees!).

And there was supremely nice touches - the bearers of the Olympic flag (Doreen Lawrence, Shami Chakrabarti, Ban Ki Moon et al) and the fact that the lighter of the cauldron was not a famous athlete but athletes of the future.  And that cauldron - beautifully designed.

Well done Danny Boyle and Stephen Daltry, well done all those celebs who pitched up to do their bit and WELL DONE all those volunteers who took part and performed flawlessly.

Dyspraxia

We've wondered for a while now whether Sam had dyspraxia; he's as bright as a button, but anything requiring co-ordination and focus can be a challenge.  He's an absolute whizz on his scooter because he only needs to push it along with one foot and steering on a micro-scooter just requires pressure on the handlebars - but put him on a bike and the combination of balancing, moving the pedals *and* moving the handlebars to steer is too much for him.  Likewise, learning to swim is proving to be a very slow process - some days when he's in the zone with concentration and focus, he does really well, but on a day when he's tired or his hay fever is playing up, it looks like he's got lead weights on his legs as he ploughs across the pool.

As parents, we had observed this without too much concern and a certain amount of amusement - Sam is totally adorable in his clumsy endeavours.  However, last March his teacher raised concerns about his handwriting and his inability to hold his pencil in the requisite pincer grip, and I decided that perhaps we should be more proactive about the whole situation.  I read an article on teaching dyspraxic children and it rang so many bells, it was as if a group of campanologists had taken up residence in the house.

Sam doesn't have all the symptoms listed in the article by any means, and as he's in the gifted group at school for literacy and numeracy, there are no worries educationally.  But if there's one thing I've learned from getting his verbal dyspraxic diagnosed and treated, it's that you have to be the prime mover in getting things done, that you can't expect anyone else to do it for you.  His teacher and the SNC at school seemed a little taken aback that I was going to get a medical opinion, but I see no advantage in dealing with this any other way.

And so, last week, to the Paediatrics Consultants at the hospital.  Who were brilliant.  Sam did the whole series of tests that he did as a 3 year old when his speech problems were diagnosed, and he did them perfectly with a sly sense of humour that obviously delighted and amused the medical staff.  Developmentally, he's fine (which we knew) and there's no neurological problems that they could discover, but they watched him write his name and examined how he held a pencil.  They agreed with the teacher that this is going to prove a problem, that he won't be able to write quickly, neatly or form smaller letters if he continues to hold then pencil in that way.  The fact that his hand hurts when he holds it with a pincer grip for longer than a few seconds is also a problem.

The next steps are for observation - both on our part and on the part of Sam's new teacher in Year 2.  There is then a questionnaire for us both to complete and send off to the Occupational Therapy department for evaluation.  The best outcome for us would be for him to receive OT help with his handwriting whilst in school - I'm perfectly happy to do work with him at home, but having this done by a proper professional in the school setting would be ideal.

This is all very positive stuff.  We haven't been sent away with nothing or dismissed as worriers (which I think the school were inclined to do, to be honest), and any help we can get will be a massive bonus.  In situations like this, the NHS comes into its own, without a shadow of a doubt  - can you imagine trying to do this in a country where you need health insurance just to see a GP?

Summer Holidays

The summer holidays are here.  The past school year seems to have simply flown by and it doesn't seem possible that the long break is upon us once more.

I always slightly dread the summer holidays, to be honest; I like the fact that we don't have the daily mad rush to get to school and that my day isn't determined by school pick up times, but at the same time it is very daunting to have a whole six weeks stretching out in front of us with nothing in them.

Usually we go away for our family holiday in the summer break - I accept the higher prices as a trade off for breaking up the six weeks with a fortnight in the sun.  But not this year.  We decided to stay-cation and do some camping, which is quite possibly the worst decision ever, considering how bad the weather has been.  After the first three days of the hols were beautiful we looked at campsites for next weekend only to find that the wet weather is forecast to return with a vengeance.

So far, I've managed to arrange one thing to do every weekday of the holidays for the first fortnight - and thanks to the Council and School, these things have been either free or subsidised.  We have a trip to watch the Olympic football at the beginning of August and then I'm taking the boys to stay with my parents for a few days.  And then...... nothing. The free school/council-arranged activities peter out and we shall be left to our own devices.

Obviously, there is always the library, the swimming pool, the parks, the soft play areas and the stately homes with their large gardens.  And I'm sure we'll do the lot, many times over.   In the meanwhile, let me just have a look at last minute deals for a fortnight in Menorca.......

Sports Day

At the beginning of the week, the weather forecast was so dreadful it looked like neither of the boys' sports days were going to take place.  As it was, the weather gods smiled on them, and they both went ahead.

Not so much fun for the parents, alas.  The Infants sports day is pretty tedious - they take a very long time to get all the kids to do their running races, followed by skipping or egg and spoon, and then an obstacle course or sack race.  It takes hours, even when they have separate sessions for Reception/Nursery and Years 1 and 2.  Last year I was unfortunate enough to have to sit through both sessions.

It wasn't too bad this time - Jacob had a doctors appointment and was then told not to go into school that day, so we missed Sam's running race, but did see him compete in the skipping race.  He was last by a country mile.  We're pretty sure that Sam is dyspraxic, so anything requiring the co-ordination needed for skipping is a bit too much to ask of him.  That said, bless him, he persevered and skipped all along the course - if extremely slowly and badly.

At this point, Jacob decided he was bored, so we didn't stay to watch the obstacle race - it was going to take about 45 minutes to get round to Sam's group - so we went home.

The Juniors Sport day was much better organised.  Rather than taking it in turns for small groups to compete and everyone watch, they competed in their classes where they were divided into school houses.  They moved from area to area, doing a race or activity, and the parents moved with them.  It was v well organised, and the kids didn't get bored at all.

Jacob was always a bit rubbish at sports day at the Infants, but he seems to have blossomed at Juniors.  He was last in the 100m out of his class, but he didn't care and, more importantly, had a good time running.  He was great at things like skipping and the sack race and because each race only had a small number of observers, it wasn't quite so intimidating as the Infants races with the entire crowd watching everyone.

I'll give Junior Sports Day the thumbs up and be genuinely disappointed if it gets cancelled for bad weather in future years.

World Book Day

Jacob's school celebrated World Book Day by inviting all the kids to go dressed up as their favourite character from a book.  Now, what this normally means is that the kids just turn up dressed in whatever fancy dress they have at home and so you get loads of film and tv characters, footballers etc, and not many actual book characters.

So I was really pleased when Jacob announced he wanted to be Asterix.  He adores Asterix; in fact we've pretty much exhausted York Library's supply of them!

Here he is in all his Gaulish Glory:-

Sam is Six!

Or should I say, Samuel is six.  Samuel is the name I put down on his registration forms at school, and Samuel is the name by which his teachers call him.  If you ask him what he is called, he says Samuel.  At the Lego Discovery Centre on Saturday, he couldn't find us when he left the soft play area and went up to a member of staff and said "Hello, I'm Samuel and I'm lost".  No one in the family calls him Samuel at all, not even in anger; Samwell and Samwise, but never Samuel.

Anyway, Samuel is six.  He arrived in the world three weeks early, delivered by emergency C section, and spent the first 19 days of his life in the Neo Natal Unit at Kings College Hospital suffering from very low blood sugar levels.  But he thrived and was soon on the 91st growth centile for both weight and height, and he's now almost as tall as his older brother.

The main problem we had with Sam was his lack of speech.  We still have no idea what it was that stopped him from speaking his first words until the age of 3 ½; the paediatrician said Verbal Dyspraxia, but the Speech Therapist disagreed.  Once he'd said his first words, there was no stopping him; he acquired language in the space of the summer holidays, astounding nursery staff and health professionals in the process.

And once he started school, he began to astound me.  I always worried about Sam because a) he's my child b) we spent a long time being told by health professionals that slow speech development could point to learning difficulties and c) he spends most of his time away with the fairies. So I wasn't really expecting great things from him.  But waddya know?  The boy's a smarty pants.

His teacher, Miss Courtis, summed him up very nicely when she told us at parents' evening: "We have to send Samuel round to the year two corridor to get his reading books.  And then we have to send someone to fetch him because he's forgotten why he's round there."

Happy Birthday Samuel.

January Update

At the end of December while I was flush with ideas about how to generate some cash and independence, I promised to write an update at the end of January as to how it was all going. 

I had a crack at doing some work on Mechanical Turk.  It's a bit of a black art finding something that you can do quickly that generates enough cash to at least nudge you over the minimum wage level, but I found a task where you had to write 150 words on a random set of topics; this paid the princely sum of $1, and without any interruptions I could write about 10 an hour.  That's c. £6.50, at the current exchange rate. The good thing about this was that I could sit and write for an hour and then, if I found myself near a computer later on in the day, I could write a few more whilst doing other things (waiting for the kettle to boil, or the kids' tea to be cooked etc). 

Luckily for me, I only did this for a few days.  Otherwise I'd be even more pissed off than I am.  Because, despite saying in their FAQ that you can transfer your earnings to your bank account, once you actually attempt to do this you discover that if you're a UK resident, you can only be paid in Amazon.com gift tokens.  And not even ones you can use somewhere useful like Amazon.co.uk.  I had a brief look at shipping rates on the .com site and they were around the $40 mark; so I'd have to go back to Mechanical Turk and work for another two or three days to earn enough to pay for the shipping on anything I spent my earnings on.  I read somewhere that after the US and India, the UK has the most MT workers - but why, if you can't do anything useful with what you earn?

Anyway, that was a giant pile of poo and a waste of my time.  But I've found some more crowd-sourcing sites that do pay you in real live money, probably because they're not part of some big shopping empire.  So I registered with one (Clickworker.com) and did two of their basic assessment tests - a grammar one (quite long, not particularly easy) and an author one.   The fact that these tests were considerably more rigorous than anything I'd had to do on MT was quite encouraging; I thought the work available might be more of a challenge and better paid.  And then I got the results back from my basic assessment tests - grammar test passed, author test failed due to plagiarism.

God, I was indignant!  I'd had to write a 120 word review of a film, so I wrote one on Rise of the Planet of the Apes which we'd watched the night before.  I'm assuming that they use plagiarism checking software which is, apparently, rubbish, so the fact that I used the film title, phrases like "motion capture" and name-checked a couple of the actors and characters meant that about a third of my 120 words were the same as in any review of said film.  I wrote a vitriolic email to the company pointing out that I have a degree in English and am perfectly capable of writing 120 words on a given topic without having to resort to nicking it off the internet.  But then I deleted it before I sent it and felt much more grown up for having done so.  Doug says that I should write to them nicely and ask them to reconsider, but it's probably easier just to re-register using a different email address and do the tests again.

Because of that, I haven't actually discovered whether the work that Clickworker.com offers is worth my time.  Nor have I got round to investigating the other crowdsourcing sites, although I'm planning to do that this week.  I have, however, found some audio typing agencies that welcome CVs from people who want to work from home, but I'm still reluctant to send off my CV just yet; I've been practicing, but I'm not 100% sure I want to take a typing test just yet.  However, I am drawing up a list of things that would need to be included on an audio typing services website, and then Doug is going to help me produce a little brochurewear site that I can use to offer my services independently of any bureau.  No idea if that will work, but nothing ventured etc.

My conclusions from the month of January are as follows:  it seems to be a lot more difficult than perhaps it should be to earn random bits of money from the internet.  It may be that I need to work at it (and I'll carry on for a bit) but it's been a frustrating experience so far - I just wonder if I'm going to do it for a period of time and then come to conclusion that if you want to earn money, you have to get a proper job.

Shoes

Back in August, my mum bought the boys their school shoes for the coming term.  A pair of Clarks for Jacob, some Startrites for Sam.  Not much change out of £80, which is why I'm glad she buys them.

On Wednesday, I noticed that Jacob's shoes had split - one piece of leather had come out of it's stitching all the way down the side of the shoe.  The other shoe was starting to go in exactly the same place. That's not very good, imo - £36 shoes lasting less than five months; Jacob isn't particularly hard on  his shoes and apart from the split, they looked to be in pretty good condition.

The most irritating thing about this is that when we got him trainers in November, he'd already gone up a half size from August and will have grown more since then.  If only his feet had stayed the same size I could have gone into Clarks in a state of high dudgeon and got a replacement pair - I'm not sure they're going to be quite so accommodating if he actually needs them in a bigger size....

Cats of stupidity

At the beginning of December, Cosmo the cat got a small blade of grass stuck in his nasal cavity.  The vets did all sorts of exploratory poking and prodding before they worked this out, and consequently we didn't get much change out of £500, all told.  Thankfully, the insurance paid up and we were recompensed for everything but the excess and the additional dental work that was required.

On Thursday, the stupid moggy did it again.  I didn't rush him to the vets immediately as he'd already managed to bring some of the stuck grass up and out, and wanted to see if the rest would come out too.  But on Friday night he was coughing and retching and unable to keep any food down longer than a few minutes, so on Saturday morning Doug took him to the vet.

This time we knew what was wrong, so despite the vet saying "it might just be a tummy bug", Doug insisted that they put him under and wash his nasal cavity out; a few hours later, I got a call from the vet to say that they'd removed an enormous piece of grass from his nose and throat.  Once again, they gave us the grass as a memento - last time it was a tiny piece about 1 cm long and so thin it was almost invisible, but this time it was about 5 inches long with barbs at the top; as the vet said, "I wouldn't want that stuck in my nose either".

This cost us £85.  We should get £35 back from the insurance, but I'm starting to wonder at what point they write to us to tell us that grass removal will no longer be included in the cover.

Stupid cat.

Bedtime Reading

We're great ones for routine in this house.  Ever since the kids were babies, we've had the same bedtime routine of bath, drink of milk, story, bed - although nowadays, I don't have to sing them to sleep (thankfully) - and we only deviate from the norm when we're on our hols.  And as a rule, they go to sleep fairly soon after that - around 8ish.  Only occasionally do they have nights when they can't settle and we still hear them mucking around upstairs after 8.30pm.

However, just lately, the routine has become disrupted.  For a while now, Jacob has preferred to read his own bedtime story; because he doesn't like being on his own upstairs, this still takes place in the same location where Sam is having a story read to him.  Occasionally, he'll curl up and listen to the story, but mostly he prefers to read something of his own.

Sam, for the most part, has been happy to be read to, apart from when he's going through his "tablet phases", where he wants to "listen" to an interactive story on the tablet - we have quite a lot of these, mostly Doctor Seuss stories, and as he is a whizz on the tablet, we aren't required to sit with him while he listens.  But he too is starting to want to read by himself - probably because he very much wants to be like his big brother.

Slowly the bedtime routine is being eroded.  And eroded further still by the fact that something has gone wrong with the mixer tap in the bath, reducing the hot water flow to a trickle - quelle horreur, no bath!!  They've been having showers, instead, and I get the feeling that they're really enjoying this as it gives them much more time to read later.

So the only thing remaining from the routine of 7 years is the warm milk drink.  This is one thing that they don't seem to want to do without, even in the summer.  And I'm strangely hopeful that it continues, even if it feels like something a character in the Secret Seven would do......