Wow! Nice work on the drums!

Well she is from Pennsylvania. :)

super cool!!

Thanks, you can or rather cannot hear her smack her own paw right at the beginning of the solo. I thought she was gonna tank or something but it was just one beat.

intentional, probably. psyching up, getting the adrenaline flowing. you remember the thread about the self-harming-for-performance athletes, doncha?
:rolleyes:

Your kid is playing the part where the rabbit bites its own head off. I love that part.

Awesome.

Thanks... I think.

Zing 2 has landed an internship with one of the big accounting firms.

:thumb2:

I'm not proud of this but it belongs here. My 21 year old son (the magician; yes, I said magician) is living with a Ben-Gal cheerleader.




And he's dating a Puerto Rican young lady who works at an establishment called "Cheeks" I believe.




I'm so proud.

Beans thinks she can walk -- she'll be five months old this weekend, and has a long way to go before she can stand, let alone really walk. But she loves walking all around the house like this.

That is super cute!!

What's the old adage ?
If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it's yours.

Sam has been assigned to working out of the Nehalem River hatchery in northwest Oregon.
He is tagging returning winter steelheads with radio tags and then chasing them up-river
with directional a radio receiver to monitor their travel rates and distribution.

For a fishing addict, bushwhacking into remote holding places
on a "wild" river is close enough to being his perfect job.

That's heaven, Lamp.

Oh, Beans is sooooooooo cute!

and that's a good looking boy you've got there Lamp.

(the fish is kinda gross, but the kid....cuuuuuuuute!)

Minifob learned to ride a bike today!

Go Minifob!

Yay for minifob!

Max had his first day of kindy today. Its been awesome. :) I am going to pick him up soon. I guess this lovely peace and quiet will be shattered then. :S

Bike riding and kindergarten, two big milestones!

Wow, Kindergarten already. Is he 5 now? Man, how time flies... how did he like it?

:confused:

In the Southern hemisphere, school "summer vacation" is from October-December. (Which I learned not from Aussies, but from Argentinian computer programming contractors at an educational software company who kept screwing up our default school calendars in their code.)

He's actually just coming up to 4, so still 3. Over here, they have kindergarten the year they turn 4, then Prep, then grade 1 and so on. Prep is full time school in the place of pre-school which used to be a 5 day fortnight program centred more around play than learning. It's all about using those early years for greater learning. Not sure if I'm on board with it or not, but I guess I will have a better opinion after Max completes Prep next year.

He loved his first day. Can't wait to go back next week, so that's a win for all of us.

The big boys are back at school again now too of course. Aden is in yr 12, so last year of formal schooling for him. Hopefully he'll follow through with his plans and get into the uni course he wants next year. Mav is in yr 11 and so far is most impressed with his new subject, Film and Media. So anyway, everyone's doing well except Eva who is teething and driving me nuts. :(

Ah, that makes more sense. Here, "pre-school" refers to optional private programs (unless you're in special ed but that's different,) and includes infants up to age 5, essentially the same as daycare. Then Kindergarten is the beginning of the public school system, and you must have already had your 5th birthday in order to begin.

Wow, so that means kids are turning 7 in their first year at school? Is kindergarten full time over there? I didn't realise there was such a difference. I thought we were the country who was running behind with educational programs.

Kindy is optional and not government funded in so far as you have to pay $20/day for the program, but they do have early childhood teachers in the education programs. We decided to put Max in because he's quite bright and might be better off in that environment a couple of days per week now that Eva is here and taking up a lot of my time in one way or another. Also, we wanted him to socialise a bit more with kids his own age. He spends way too much time with teenagers and almost none with little kids, which at times is not so desirable.

As an example, Aden was annoying Max a few days ago (tickling him or something silly) and Max told him to 'F**k off Aden!'. I'm pretty sure he learned that from Mav. Not that the big boys swear a lot, but kids Max's age only have to hear it once to learn it.

Kindergarten is full time over here, and they go straight from kindergarten to 1st grade. So we start at 5 and graduate from 12th grade at age 18.

The kids here finish mostly at age 17 in our state (Qld). So they start Prep the year they turn 5, then do years 1 through to 12. I think they start a year later in the southern states, so they're mostly 18 by the time they finish.

When I was a bairn we only had play-school. Which was all play and no school and only twice a week.

And we were not allowed to start regular school until our 5th birthday. Bearing in mind mine is in July, I effectively missed out on a whole year of school. Didn't hurt me though - I always wanted to do everything Laura did, and could read and write and do numeracy up to and including tens and units by the time I started.

In England, children who will be five in the school year starting in September start school then. Those whose birthdays fall after Christmas attend half-days until the New Year. We have all our Reception intake for 2012/13 at school all day now.

Much of the education is "child-led learning". They have the freedom to choose what they will do, but there is an educational element in all the activities. Tiger always just wanted to go outside and run around. It was up to me to encourage interaction, imaginative play and discourse. I think I have helped him some in socialising and feeling safe in his environment. Also in listening and accepting compromise.

But the bigest single change has been the switch in the way the school teaches phonics. Which I knew wasn't working for many children 2 years ago. But the evidence was against me. And after all I am an LSA, not a qualified teacher.

Since the switch, his reading ability (middle of the class I'd say) has just improved so much. He's at the right level comprehension-wise, but his sounding out and blending of sounds is so much better. He even attempted to sound out the names of two Chinese illustrators the other day. He came as close as I would to getting them right.

I co-teach the advanced phonics group. We're less about sounds and more about tenses, suffixes, mnemonics etc. Blimey, it's hard keeping up. I don't have perfect grammar myself, although my spelling (bar typos) is better than average. Better than the average at school anyway - teachers and TAs check their spellings with me (yeah I'm boasting - I don't have much to be proud of!). But learning the rules? OMG. I absorbed them via voracious reading. So the exceptions never bothered me. Now I am coming across them all the time and having to figure out whether they are real exceptions ("No not in this case. Just because.") or known variations ("Well that one is because..")

Bloody mongrel language.

Our Anna Beans is 5.5 months old. Accomplishments now include: rolling over from front to back, conversational laughing, trying to break out of her booster seat, and testing gravity by throwing a ball off her walker tray and watching us pick it up.

Why do all babies respond when you say, "Oh really?" to them. lol Eva is the same. I think it's just the tone of voice that gets them suckered in. hehe

So cute!

Thor is an Academic Games State Champion :D

Cool!

Way to go Thor!

Huzzah!

Congrats!

I'm not familiar with Academic Games. What is it?

Zing #1 has been admitted to the Masters program in accounting at the college of her choice.

http://agloa.org/

His team are returning StateChampions in both Equations and OnSets (elementary school level). But get this... the teams split into subteams of 5. If one subteam wins, the whole team are champs. His subteam "Princess Zelda" won! They fucking won!!!! He needed this break more than anyone has eever needed a break. He didn't go to States last year because he just wasn't mature enough, It was touch-and-go this year, but we promised......

Wow...go you clever kidlettes! :) Well done all round.

I looked over the web page. It's a great idea - give academics a chance to shine.

Congrats to Thor. Love the team name.

Middle school daughter made the cut for the high school marching band next fall. I've got mixed emotions. Proud of her and happy for her. But sad that we'll be stuck here for much of August while she's in band camp. That's when we usually head up to Maine for vacation. Still, she's thrilled, so I'm happy for her. I guess it also means we'll be going to all the football games.

What instrument does she play? Does the school buy the instruments or do you have to? What about uniforms? How often do the practice? Does this explain all the "this time at band camp" stories? Should I not have reminded you of that? Is band camp really camp with tents and fires and stuff?


Sent by thought transference

I honestly don't know most of those answers.

But she plays trombone. We initially rented a trombone for a year, but I thought that was a real racket, so I bought a nice used one off Ebay for less than we had paid for a year in rentals. That was a couple years ago. Then a neighbor had an extra one kicking around, and it's been on a permanent loan to us. It works out well, because she can keep her good one at school, and use the neighbor's for practice at home. A trombone is a little on the heavy/bulky side to carry back and forth to school each day. It's a mile walk.

She's pretty good for a kid. When her tutor comes over once a week, he sounds amazing, and I make the mistake of mentally comparing her to him. This guy plays routinely for the President. He's in The US Army Band, so it's not a fair comparison. Anyway, she's good. This marching band is the top of 3-4 bands at this particular high school, and one of the best in the region.

My dream is that she practices a lot and gets really good, and gets a scholarship to college. She's probably not that good, but I can dream.

at the high schools here, the kids who play instruments -be it orchestra, band or marching band- have to go to "camp" for a week prior to the start of the year. Here, they go to Interlochen, I think

http://camp.interlochen.org/summer-arts-programs

many kids go to music camp for a week in the summer. Blue Lake is where all the Ann Arbor kids go. except ours.

http://www.bluelake.org/

A week at a YMCA camp is also not uncommon

http://www.annarborymca.org/programs...-gon-quian.php

Very Addams Family ;)


i guess it's whao families witth two working parents need to do in the 13 week break.

Y'all got some great kids. Smarts. Talent. And i hear many of them are quite funny. :)

Somebody is doin' stuff right.

OOOh i missed Zing1's news! Fantastic!

Hooray for all the kids.

Band camp for glattina!

Lil Griff walked into band this week and the director pointed across the room at a kit with a wonky bass drum and said, "Fix that." She then proceeded to take it apart, fix the leg, put it together, and tune it. She was pleased with herself. She'll be the drummer for Les Miserables this Spring. :)

Congrats to Lil Griff. :thumb2:

Congratulations to Thor, Zing #1, glattina, and Li'l Griff. It's a good week for kid news, ain't it?

Let's hope so, she's taking her SAT this morning.

Congrats to all the wonderful cellar kids and their parents for their guidance.

Yes - so much great kid news. Congrats to all of them and to all of you hard-working, caring parents.

SAT on Sat.

Coincidence???

She sat the SAT on Sat?

That's that.

She wants results, stat!

She sat ze SAT on ze SAT Sat

I predict a score that's fat.

Somehow I missed this until now. What a great laugh!
And "Booster Bust Out" Holy cats, you guys don't stand a chance. She's way too smart. Just stay on her good side.;)