technonaturalist

I have this gorgeous little boy. This one right here. Recently, he turned 4.

The day he turned 4, I teased JJ about feeling old. We missed kung fu training so I could cook a sausage stew for his birthday dinner (JJ is perfectly capable of making sausage stew I think, but the kids seem to think he doesn’t do it right). He wanted to go to the zoo on his birthday but because it was on an adults at kids’ prices day, we put off to the weekend so JJ could come too.

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8yo

8yo decided to do Khan Academy for maths, and happily worked through a few addition/subtraction stacks. After he giggled at me a few times for taking longer than he had to work out the problems, I told JJ that he could supervise at least 8yo’s maths from hereon (it won’t happen as I’ve said that a few times from about two thirds of the way through last year, and I’m still supervising everything except when I’ve asked JJ to supervise due to work). He didn’t watch any of the videos as he understood the basics behind the stacks and just needed some assistance with the 4 digit stuff.

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First thing I noticed attempting to swing to theAbysmal time, it’s HARD now, because Monday was technically the middle of theAbysmal week and we kind of like having weekends with the person who works full time out of home, and also I’ve just noticed that something awkward has happened between my two copies of the converter. The form says it’s C03r and the block in the blog sidebar says it’s C04c. Meantime the official version says it’s Month 2 Day 2 (I expected to be a day ahead and two days sometimes due to observing leap years on different years). So for now I’ll have to keep track of tAT but continue using Gregorian.

It’s been a while but we’re slowly getting back into it.

A few days ago I took an old sock (tucked into the waistband of my shorts to help with scenting) and Tali’s giant rope bone to the footy oval and we did a couple of easy tracks to see if he remembered how to do it. He had exactly no trouble remembering how to do it, and the fact it was a black and grey sock on green grass probably didn’t hurt. He can at least use both his eyes and nose at the same time and even managed to find it when I draped it over the fence above his head.

I have a “family tree” in MacFamilyTree which contains a lot of family saplings as it contains every named major and minor character and several unnamed but otherwise important ones (such as parents of siblings, as you need to list parents to be able to link people up as siblings). The main part of the family tree seems to be tracing The Art from Taha’ne through Ter’wyn down to My’rai (currently the last descendant on the list, the character is about 8-10 in my head in his current state and I also have an idea of him as a teenager but only have snippets of story for him) which is rather entertaining as there is 1723 years between them. That’s a lot of characters even given that the Dragonkin live an average of 120 years.

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Seeing as I’m rejigging everything else anyway I think when I throw the boulders back in the river it will be following theAbysmal Calendar. It’s going to make date conversions interesting (suppose I better write that module at some stage) but even in the current rudimentary stages I’m finding date projections and calculations easier with theAbysmal than with the Gregorian (where I need to look at the calendar because it doesn’t always visualise correctly in my head). Yes I have actually had a plan for this year (since November in fact), no I haven’t written it down and sorted out all the final details yet, I’m working on it.

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Stuff to keep going

Bookwork for pocket money was working out nicely (up to the point where it fell apart catastrophically from September while the dental work was being done and then again in December because of silly season). Been pinged for not doing literacy and numeracy every day again but none of us feel like bookworking it every single day and I honestly don’t know how much more literate and numerate I’m supposed to be getting after reading every single night (they are read to and the big ones read passages aloud, more if we can get them to read more), voluntarily playing Reading Eggs, counting how much pocket money they’ve saved up and how much more they need for whatever it is they want to get and working out how many blocks they need to build this thing in Minecraft and other random bits and pieces that seem to magically crop up without too much deliberate intervention by me.

Because I always seem to manage to completely forget how to do something this basic.

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This work has been marked as dedicated to the public domain

That’s how old my Little Big Boy is.

My goofy scrawny scrawnlet with a prodigious appetite and no apparent storage area chose to go to Maylands Water Park for his birthday (aka “The water park we went to for [his friend]’s birthday”) where he had a round of mini golf with Daddy:

In no particular order:

• no more massacres (that’s everything from American schools to mass murders politically correctly defined as “war”)
• free quality education for everyone (including how it’s received)
• equal access to resources for everyone
• marriage equality for everyone
• everyone for everyone

Happy solstice/theAbysmal New Year/Yule/Christmas/end of the world/whatever you celebrate at this time :)