You’re now at 38 weeks 4 days, well past even Linus’s 38 weeks 1 day, and there are no signs that you’re on your way. A growth scan yesterday reassured us that you active and healthy and being well-served by your placenta, and are only tracking ever-so-slightly smaller than expected for gestation.

I spent the two week April holiday laying low and being hyper-sensitive to any “signs” of imminent labour, constantly expecting you to arrive in the following few days.

Now that you’ve established that you’re going to defy any expectations, I’m surprisingly at peace with the idea that you’ll come when you come. Life in the new term is ticking along, and at some point in the next three weeks we’ll finally get to meet you, name you, cuddle you, introduce you to your big brother and sisters, and get into the swing of being a family of six. YAY!

(But please, NOT on my birthday.)

Favourite Activities

• Painting animals: I don’t mean depicting them on paper, but putting paint on toy animals. This was your idea on the first day of term that ended up a recurring activity for you (and Zoe) over the whole term.
• Cat-play: Almost every day at Playcentre you turn into some type of cat. You sometimes use dress-ups, sometimes face-paint, and sometimes just your body and voice.
• IG and NG: Tuesdays this term found you spending a lot of time with IG (4yo) and NG (IG’s dad), often involving paint, face-paint, or clay.

My Goals

This term I hoped you’d get the opportunity to expand on your love of storytelling (“Do you know what?…”) and challenging yourself physically.

You have had a couple of activities this term that have involved storytelling:

• Telling others about your art (e.g. playdough, drawings);
• Dramatic play with other children your age;
• Combining music and storytelling with JD and OM.

Your gym class (bars, beam, floor) and around home (doorframe-climbing, trampoline) have been the main places where you have extended yourself physically this term, but Playcentre has also added in:

• Riding tricycles;
• Monkey bars (old and new);
• Careful climbing, balancing and sliding play with smaller children.
• Face-paint: This terms that has been a good seed for dramatic play with other children, particularly the girls your age.
• Playdough: This has had a resurgence this term at Playcentre, partially thanks to Jess, and you’ve enjoyed working with it in various ways.
• Group baking and cooking: You enjoy getting involved in these activities and stay focussed on them well, usually for the whole task.
• Lots of happy solo, self-initiated play AND lots of joining in well with a variety of other children and adults at Playcentre.

Other Activities

• Face-paint: This terms that has been a good seed for dramatic play with other children, particularly the girls your age.
• Playdough: This has had a resurgence this term at Playcentre, partially thanks to Jess, and you’ve enjoyed working with it in various ways.
• Group baking and cooking: You enjoy getting involved in these activities and stay focussed on them well, usually for the whole task.
• Lots of happy solo, self-initiated play AND lots of joining in well with a variety of other children and adults at Playcentre.

Types of Play

Her activities have included many old favourites:

• Face-painting: it’s quite hard to find a photo of Zoe at Playcentre without her face painted! She’s even relenting and putting on barrier cream first… sometimes.
• Toy animals: imaginary play (often with Ada), grouping them into families, lining them up.
• Being animals: often with Ada, and often involving the face-paint and dress-ups.

He’s very into playing Lego Star Wars on the Playstation 2 and has watched the original three movies, and this obsession has been his focus this term. One of the Playcentre supervisors RW worked with Linus to make a light sabre out of rolled-up newsprint, and somehow these light sabres have bred – most of the boys at Playcentre have constructed (or requested) one, and there is a huge stash of spare ones building up in the collage area.

This single interest has led to or supported lots of different activities and learning for Linus.

Arts and Craft Projects

Until now, Linus has never shown much interest in arts and crafts. However now he has something he loves to apply it to, he’s starting to get the idea of putting effort into producing output in the collage area. Thanks to a book from Aunty Andi and a morning without sisters, he made a robot costume at home with Nana. He followed this up by asking to make a knight costume, so we took the book to Playcentre and – in a team effort involving him, me and two other adults – produced this snazzy outfit (not to mention the fantastic face!):

Playfighting

Linus and Ada have enjoyed playfighting for a very long time, but now Linus is getting lots of experience having “battles” with other children. Our Playcentre has lots of boys who are around 3 at the moment (CV, DV, OG, HW, OM), and many of them are giving Linus the opportunity to hone his playfighting skills: establishing ground-rules, making sure everyone is on board with what’s happening, knowing how far to push things, paying attention to other’s reactions, etc.

New Relationships with Adults

Linus is by far the oldest child at Playcentre – the next oldest boy who goes on his days is 3 1/2! So while playfighting with children gives him some satisfaction, he has really enjoyed engaging in battles with willing adults this term, in particular with SK and CT.

SK enjoyed extending Linus by introducing ideas like “duelling” and “honour” to their battling. However Linus wasn’t too impressed when she suggested that they were fighting over SK’s daughter’s hand in marriage… I think 6 years of age may be when the ability to feel embarrassment really kicks in!

Other Developments

Less pronounced changes and interests this term have included:

• Friendships with other children, especially 4-year-old boy HB (sadly now gone to kindy) and 3-year-old boy HW;
• Offering to read stories to other children (he’s been doing this at home too over the past few weeks, especially with Zoe – so sweet!);
• Interest in documenting his own learning – this was only a one-off, but I got Linus to sit and narrate captions for a series of photos of things he was doing. He sat with me at Playcentre and captioned an impressive 8 or 9 photos before he got tired of it, so I must continue to give him these opportunities!
• Increased ability to focus on a task, e.g. 1 1/2 hours spent at the carpentry table a couple of weeks ago.

Daddy Long Legs

The other day we happened to find a Long-clawed harvestman. Regular harvestmen (a.k.a. “Daddy Long Legs”) are common but this is the first time I’ve seen a long-clawed one. It looks like a regular harvestman but the two front legs are thicker and blacker and are straight up and down. When I held and constrained the harvestman (carefully) for closer inspection, the tiny claws (yes, claws!) on the end of the front legs started trying to bite me. Of course my human skin was no match for it’s feeble-yet-unsettling attempts.

I didn’t manage to get a photo unfortunately, but this website has a few up-close shots (remember, this thing is just a normal-sized harvestman) I did dig up this information about them. It seems that the long-clawed harvestman is actually native to New Zealand.

Have you seen one of these?

Inland Navigation

Inland Navigation is the correct term for transport with ships via inland water (canals, rivers, lakes etc.) between inland ports or quays and wharfs. One of my long-time favourite simulation games is Transport Tycoon – and thanks to the efforts of open source developers, there is a freely available true-to-the-original rendition of Transport Tycoon game available, with a long list of extras. One of the extras is the addition of canals, locks and aqueducts to the game, allowing you to route a ship across land, up and down hills and across valleys. I was playing this and Linus and Ada came over (attracted to the screen like moths to a flame) and were very interested in the game. We discussed a little about how locks work and how it’s possible to make a boat be able to go across a valley. The potential for learning more about transport via the game seems huge.

Brewing Beer

My plan to automate my retirement are under way – the kids helped me start another batch of home brew beer the other day. They were involved right from the start of opening the home brew kit (contains sticky wort, very much like treacle) and a can of malt (regular maltexo from the supermarket). Ada helped sprinkle the yeast (or “seeds” as she called it) into the barrel and Linus measured the temperature and helped fit the air lock. Over the past couple of days there’s been several visits to the barrel to check to see if the air lock is bubbling (which it is) and to check the temperature (which is sitting at about 18 deg C). The next step will be to do some bottling in a couple of weeks.

There’s some interesting stuff here for kids, especially with regards to the air lock and the bubbles – we got to talk about what yeast is, what it does (in this case converts sugar to alcohol and creates CO₂) and how the gas makes bubbles. It’ll be a little while yet before they are able to fully appreciate the end result.

You’re at 36 weeks 1 day gestation, so you’ve beaten Zoe’s “cooking” time*!

Let’s see if you can stay in longer than Ada and Linus did as well  :)

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* Provided nothing changes dramatically in the next five hours!

Card games

But since kids arrived, playing cards* has disappeared from our lives. Our various decks of cards are safely stored away out of children’s reach. Our recent trip to our local group’s home education camp reminded me of the fun and learning that kids get from card and board games. I realised that I have a window of time to open up this world to my children.

Why Now?

I’ve been reluctant to do this to date for lots of reasons:

• Babies: I’ve always had babies around who distract attention from the game. Mobile babies chew on cards, lose things, and do other damage to sets that have to be complete to work properly. Mobile babies potentially choke on dice and other playing pieces.
• Tedium: The theory of introducing an individual child to a game is attractive, but the reality is tricky. By tricky, I mean tedious and un-fun and fraught with lots of dilemmas: relaxed fun versus respect for rules; how to be a good loser (and winner); how much to “let” your child win.
• Company: Until now, Linus wouldn’t have had any non-adult to play a game with. While it can be tiresome for an adult to play with a child, I’m sure the opposite is also true: where’s the fun in being “let” to win or knowing that you’ve no chance of winning fair-and-square?

Now – for the next six months or year at least – I have no mobile baby to deal with. Zoe is no longer engaging in wanton destruction, and has much more ability to focus attention, follow instructions, and entertain herself when she can’t be involved in games. And – perhaps most importantly - Linus and Ada have each other to enjoy learning with. While their age difference means they’re not absolutely equal in skills and abilities, they’re close enough in age that they can enjoy playing games together in a far more even way than when they play with an adult. It also means they can continue to enjoy their games when Mummy is taken away by a baby or a phone call or another household distraction.

The Plan

I want to bring cards into our lives this year in a couple of ways.

Firstly by role modelling (i.e. Nana and I playing cards) while the kids are around. I want them to know that playing cards isn’t a “just-for-kids” activity: I’m sure they’ll find it more appealing when they realise it’s something that grown-ups do and enjoy. This means identifying some games that Nana and I can enjoy but which don’t demand too much focus: in-depth strategy games requiring memorising cards and complicated planning will not be compatible with the inevitable distractions of children. (For example our beloved Canasta will be a strictly post-bedtime activity!)

Secondly we need to introduce Linus and Ada to some games that they can play. I’m very reluctant to start with Snap because it’s so highly competitive and quite subjective in its determinations of who “got it”. Strip Jack Naked was one I remembered from my childhood and identified as having potential, and we browsed through a couple of game books to work out some other simple starters: War couldn’t BE more basic, and some others will quickly follow as the kids get more familiar with cards.

I hope to use normal playing cards for as much as possible. There are many very specific game sets available out there – like Happy Families, Skipbo, Uno, Rummikub – but collecting any of these isn’t really compatible with my attempts to minimise and declutter my increasingly crowded home! It’s also far more intellectually appealing for us all to learn how to entertain ourselves in a thousand different ways with a single, compact set of 52-54 cards.

Learning

There is SO much to learn from and about playing cards, some of which are so elemental that it’s a struggle to even identify them. However when Nana and I played a couple of games we quickly realised how much we take for granted that will be new to the kids as they start with the basics and progress their way to more and more complex games.

• Fine motor skills: dealing, shuffling, handling a flat deck, handling a fanned hand.
• Etiquette of cards/games: following rules, who to deal to first, direction of play, turn-taking, tabled turns.
• Reading and writing: understanding rules, score-keeping.
• Social skills: negotiation, honesty, integrity, fair play, winning and losing, handicaps.
• Mathematics: counting, colour and shape grouping, arithmetic, score-keeping, logic, probabilities.
• Strategic thinking: memorising, planning ahead, deducing others’ motivations and plans.

Good Friday

Yesterday was a quiet Good Friday, and Nana happened to be staying. We chatted a lot in the morning about cards, and then while the kids had some screen time we dug out a complete deck and taught ourselves Rummy as a game we thought had potential for our own interest. (Nana won.)

Then we played a game of Strip Jack Naked as a potential first game to teach the kids. It proved to be a good game with simple rules that we felt were at a good level for Linus and Ada. It has the advantage that it’s entirely based on luck, so Linus and Ada will both get to win and lose. (I should also point out that PLAYING it made Nana and I want to stab our own eyes out, but if all goes according to plan we won’t have to play it again often!)

Later, Nana taught Linus and Ada how to play Strip Jack Naked. I didn’t see the “lesson”, but it sounded like it went OK. Hopefully it is the first of many games to come.

Nana also played Concentration (aka Memory) with Zoe, and Zoe enjoyed the basic version of simply matching black to black and red to red.

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* Don’t be too sad for us… grown-up board games are still alive and well in our household.

Cover and Image

TITLE (done by Linus): MY HOLIDAY 2012 TAIERI MOUTH

IMAGE (picture and caption done by Linus): THIS IS A BLACKBERRY

On the way to the beach we found wild ripe blackberries. Linus ate one. Said it was way too sweet and spat it out.

Diary

This is Granny’s story of things we did from 25.2.12 to 29.2.12.

Day 1

Linus was collected from his home by Pop-pop + Granny.

Nana, Gaga, Ada + Zoe all said goodbye and have a nice time.

We drove into town and went to the Big Boys Vege shop. Linus chose apricots (his favourite fruit) and a cucumber. We got other things as well. Also steak. Yes the Vege shop has a meat area. Then to Briscoes and bought a new toaster for home. Our home one went to Taieri Mouth as my 39-year-old one gave up.

We had a party on Saturday night to celebrate my birthday + our 39th wedding anniversary.

Day 2

The next day we got up and had porridge for breakfast.

Busy packing up Linus and I went to Taieri Mouth. We unpacked and went to the beach. Pop-pop arrived later with KJ and the cat.

Linus chose to sleep upstairs. We set up his bed. He chose a soft pillow. He read comics and went to sleep.

Day 3

He said he slept well. Rice bubbles, banana with yoghurt for breakfast.

We went to the beach again. Also set up Linus’s wooden train track using ALL and called it a “track to nowhere” as it didn’t join up.

We had lunch. Pop-pop and Linus set up his fishing rod with some new gear Pop-pop bought. They went to the wharf. Didn’t catch anything. A man gave Linus a sea horse.

The rest of the day Linus did painting with Granny’s art set. Read books, watched a DVD. Played with KJ with her scruffy toy.

Yet another day over. Linus was watching Australian Junior Master Chef. It was getting too late so away upstairs for another night.

Day 4

Next morning it was the same for breakfast. We went for a drive to see an animal park that Pop-pop knew about. It said “CLOSED” at the gate but we drove round and saw:

• a big fat pig with hiccups sunning himself
• peacocks
• peahens
• ostrich
• llamas
• alpacas
• donkeys
• Shetland pony
• geese
• hens and chickens
• ducks
• Linus said sparrows”.

Then off to Livingstone Park. Great play area set up. We have many photos from there.

We found some mushrooms. We went to the beach. Some American tourists were there and said how beautiful the country is we have.

We came home. Cooked the mushrooms we found + heaps more.

Oh forgot to tell you we had a party tea the night before. Linus fed me lollies + cream. I did the same for him. He blew out the candle which did Happy Birthday music.

Linus painted again. Made popcorn. Linus ate it all. Yum!

For tea we had macaroni cheese. Linus said it was just the best and ate it all. Then fruit salad, ice-cream, cream and choc hail.

Yep bed time yet once again.

Day 5

This morning Linus chose porridge which he said was great. Pottered round outside – read books and watched a DVD. We had no rain until the day to leave. It was only spitting. Finished off the macaroni cheese.

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Hope you enjoyed this story. Linus can tell other things, e.g. digging up crabs, the drift wood house, AND he can tell you how news happened!!

Ada is super. No doubt about it.

She loves gymnastics, and this term is completely at home at her gym class: she’s confident, involved, and enthusiastic. She especially enjoys being on the bars. She loves challenging herself physically outside of gym as well: climbing up the door-frames (hands coming off halfway up to do a few claps!); doing headstands (often pushing up into handstands); showing us how strong she is at lifting things.

She loves animals (including insects). Not  just a surface love of one type of animal or an obsession, but a really engrossed interest in everything about them – how they’re feeling, why they behave how they do, how to care for them.*

She plays wonderfully with her big brother. Play-fighting is one of their favourite “games”. The other night I’m sure they spent 15 minutes waging war against each other as big sister tiger (Ada) struggled to protect baby tiger (Zoe) and Mummy tiger from a wicked predatory antelope (Linus). Infinite apparent “close calls”, yet no one got hurt. They are skilled!

She plays wonderfully with her little sister. Their play usually centres on families of animal toys: dragons, dinosaurs, lions… occasionally food at the table will even magically transform into a little family soap opera!

She loves to draw and sing and take photos. She puts the washing on for me. She helps out with baking. She can spend ages doing the vacuuming: not a lot of vacuuming gets done, but boy does she have fun!

She’s affectionate and caring with younger children at Playcentre, and I’m SO looking forward to seeing her as big sister to Buzz!

She’s my shining star.

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* The other day we were talking about how much she loves macaroni cheese, and I suggested that when she’s grown up she could make macaroni cheese every night. She looked thrilled, but then her face dropped into despair. “No, I can’t!” When we asked her why not, she said “Because I’m going to be a zookeeper!”