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......