Tiny, TheSmidge and Cub

Today Tao was spinning a tale about a house a bit bigger than ours with olts of people.  Then he starrted talking about golden statues.  I asked him where, he said "somewhere else".  I said somewhere could be anywhere, could he be more specific?

He said he thinks Kenya.  Then asked me where Kenya was.

I said Kenya was in Africa.

He asked if we were in Africa.  I said no, we're in Australia, but I can show him where Africa is on the map if that would help.  He thought it would, so up came Google Maps, showed him Australia, and said see here's Western Australia, and the red dot is Perth, which is where we live.  No, he says, we live in Gosnells.

...

Well yes, we do, but Gosnells is in Perth.  Okay technically if you count them as separate but neighbouring cities, then Gosnells is near Perth (seeing as it is the City of Perth and the City of Gosnells), though if you count Gosnells as a suburb of Perth then it's in Perth, and it's all very confusing.

Anyway.

I showed him Africa.  The entire continent is Africa, and this shape here is Kenya.  What the red dot? No, that's Nairobi, that's the capital city of Kenya.  Kenya is this shape inside the country of Africa.

I don't know how much he eventually got out of that. 

Again with the attempt to keep up recording.  I have a funky silver Smiggle diary which I'm going to be using for homeschooling notes, and if I remember I'll transpose them on here and point the relatives at it, as well as anyone else who's interested in homeschooling or unschooling, just on the offchance :)

Anyway, learning styles.

This is one of those things that gets bandied around a hell of a lot, and every school in the history of the known universe claims that they cater to the child's individual learning styles.

I've yet to actually see that put into practice.  Seriously, it's gotta be tricky when you're trying to manage 40 kids in a classroom.

I know a little bit about individual learning styles.  I don't know enough to comprehensively state what Tao's and Ruan's are, because they're nearly 4 and 2 and I don't know if these things develop over time or are inherent and just need to be observed.  I'm observing as hard as I can ;)

Tao

Maths

So Tao is pretty good with numbers.  Earlier this year we made a bit of a deal about teaching him the alphabet and counting.  He recognises letters of the alphabet, and he seems to be able to read some words, but other than a few promising fits and spurts, didn't really take to reading.  Considering he's not 4 yet, we didn't consider this a big deal.

Numbers now.  It was fairly evident from early on that he didn't just parrot the numbers.  At some point he understood that when you held up three fingers there were three fingers there.  Not long after that he worked out that the squiggly thing that he was originally writing as an E, and then Mummy told him to write the E backwards to get it right, was a representation of three objects.  3 was the first number he wrote, maybe because he's 3, and he's going to be 4 on his birthday.  1 and 5 followed soon afterwards.

Then we were at the Medicare office waiting for our ticket to be called, and I had exactly no idea that he recognised numbers up to 14, seeing as he seemed to have difficulty counting to 12 (though he can go to 10 forward and back).  Well, who needs to parrot numbers anyway if you can read and manipulate them, I say :P

I remember Josh taking him through the extreme basics of maths once, using a counting book that one of the relatives had given him for Christmas.  At the back of the counting book were all sorts of illustrated sums, like you have four chickens and add another three chickens, how many chickens do you have? He didn't seem to get it, despite Josh's very patient explanations.

Sometime after I took him through the very basics again, but I was using Stuff.  You have a pen.  There's another two pens? How many pens? Fwee, he says.  Yes.  And now how many apples in the fruit bowl? Coiunt them.   There were seven.  Now he has one and Ruan has one, how many left? Five.  Good.  There's your lesson in addition and substraction for the day, and about all he had the attention span for.

Fast forward a little bit again with the absolute once in a blue moon explanation of addition and subtraction as appropriate situations come up.  Josh has been raiding the local video store lately, and hired out weeklies for the kids.  They got 5 videos.  Tao watched 2 of them.  He then told me that he had borrowed 5 videos, and watched 2, which meant he had 3 left to watch.  No prompting, no explanations, just him straight off the bat.

So today I took a plunge and broached the subject of multiplication.  He had been foraging in the fridge for a snack, and asked if he could have some of my chocolate (Whittakers, yum!).  I said there was a bit up the top already broken off that he could have.  He took that, and asked if I'd broken it off for him.  I said no, it was the other half of the bit I'd eaten earlier, I'd broken it because I didn't want to eat too much chocolate.  How many pieces did he have in his bit? Four.  That was half of what was there originally, which means there was twice that, two lots of four (four plus four) is eight.

Tao started nibbling it down block by block, cheerfully announcing "Now there's three...now there's two...now there's one...all gone!" Very cutely, not that I'm biased or anything,

Biology

When we first told the kids we were going to have another baby (many months ago now), and that it was growing in Mummy's tummy, Tao of course wanted to know "How did it get in there?"

Josh perhaps stupidly hoped that Tao would be satisfied with "Daddy put it there."

Yeh, right.  "How?"

if I could have thought straight I would have explained it to him but I was laughing much too hard.  Josh being slightly prudish successfully managed to distract him before he could press for further answers.  I'm sure it will come up again.

To date I've been showing him fetal development stuff online, he knows that boys can't have babies because they don't have uteruses, and that babies get food through an umbilical cord (which looks like a rope) from the placenta (which is made of meat), and when they're born they don't usually have teeth and have to have booby juice until they're big enough to have food.

Come a long way from when he last asked me a question about proteins (and I wondered where the hell he'd gotten that from), and had me telling him I couldn't remember and would have to look it up, and we looked it up on Wikipedia together.  (associated skills - research and The Authority doesn't necessarily have all the answers ;)


Ruan

Currently not so quick on the uptake in the numbers department, but she loves being read to, lots.  She's much quicker on the predictive/memory words thing than Tao was.  You know, where you're reading them a familiar book and have them "guess" the next words in the sentence.  Tao didn't really start saying the next words til 3-3.5, Ruan is a bit over 2 and does it often.

At least we got the toddler babble word attempts with her though, Tao went straight from baby babble to recognisable words with heavy toddler lisp at 11 months or so, sentence fragments at 1.5 and hasn't stopped since.  Ruan on the other hand intermittently spat words out from a bit after 1 but has only just started talking.

She's also a lot more into drawing than Tao is.  Tao loves painting and scribbling, he will quite happily throw himself into it when I bring on the art stuff, but doesn't ask much.  These days I think it's because he knows the house needs to be organised so I can find the bloody art stuff.  He can take it or leave it.  If the inspiration takes Ruan though, and she is denied her crayons for whatever reason or not presented with the opportunity to paint, she takes matters into her own cute little hands and will scrounge around for a drawing implement (usually one of the pens on my desk) and something to draw on (usually an envelope, if she can find a bigger piece of paper even better, these days she even asks me if it's okay to draw on).

In the meantime I'm trying to work out where this girly girl came from, she loves pink, loves her "butterfly" dress (pink fairy dress mother in law bought her for her 2nd birthday), also loves orange,  butterflies, loves dressing up (seriously, she will go through 2-3 outfit changes at least if we let her).  Sometimes her dress sense gets a bit garish but for the most part she's remarkably colour coordinated.  Not just in the sense that she wants to wear say heer yellow undies with her yellow pants and yellow top, but on another day it's a stripey pinck shirt and stripey pink pants and she WOULD NOT REST or get dressed until she had also found stripey pink undies.  Good thing we actually had stripey pink undies, and that the colour and pattern matchings don't need to happen all the time!

Yes, I haven't written for ages.  No that's not likely to change :)

Erm.  Got me a notebook to see if I can get any better at this recording thing next year, practising while Tao is kindy aged.  Also still working on ze homeschooling site, though that got pushed back again as my sister and I had a couple of jobs drop into our laps (one decent sized).

And I'm pregnant again.  Due end of Feb though if this one follows the trend it'll pop ut mid Feb.  I reckon it might pop out way early end of Jan though just so I have a consecutive run.  Josh suggested we have nine more months to fill then and I told him I would cut his nuts off.

Going to Christmas Island on Monday!

Been a very bad parent lately.  It's one of those things.  We lost one of our cats to a car (nobody cares what you think, you are not and never will be a good enough driver to be speeding along normal roads) and we bought a new house which we will be moving into in 12 months after settlement.  My clandestine operation is still in full swing though I'm feeling a tad stressed seeing as I may need to change plans partway through as I have no idea what the money situation is going to be like, specially seeing as the person I need to email me hasn't yet.

So once more the kids have been watching way too much TV and playing way too many computer games.  Though they did get to go fo a walk with Josh, seeing as he came home to help out as I was feeling extremely off.

And I've gone and picked up webmonkeying for money again.

Currently trying to swing my headspace into something more useable so I can get back into some kind of groove and properly into doing stuff with the kids again.  Poor little neglecterinos.

We dropped in to see my uncle and aunty yesterday (myself, my sister and the kids) to say hi and to return my aunty's cake board that we'd had forever, and my uncle was giving us advice about the block we're working on buying and then he asked when Tao started kindy.  I said he would be starting next year if he was going, and he made the comment that he thought Tao might be ready pretty much now.

There are 3yo kindies around the place that I've noted in passing but I haven't been that interested really, and not really interested seeing as we're homeschooling.

That (and the fact Sprat and I have a job on at the moment) got my thoughts meandering ont other websites such as the one I want to be doing for the animation (which I haven't started as I've been working on the models) and the homeschool diary thingami that I'm going to piggyback off it (hurray for drupal and multisites), and that I should probably get off my arse and actually do it.  Josh kept telling me I was starting early when he was 2 and I was trying to do it and I told him it would take me a while to get my act together and see, I was right.

I am tossing around a few ideas in my head, it's probably a bit more developed than when I had the original idea but still needs a lot of working through, and I thnk I might actually be able to work out the Content Construction Kit these days.  Maybe.

And speaking of homeschooling, Tao is currently playing on the Starfall website.  I'm going to have to be careful he doesn't pick up an American accent :)

Had playgroup today.  It'ws one of those nic days, warm in the sun but not hot, cool in the shade but not freezing.  It was particularly nice today as Tao had great fun playing with his friends, there are four of them including Tao around the same age (3-5) and for almost the entire time they were playing together, who knows what but pirates and dinosaurs and sticks were involved.  The boys went up with Kirsty at some stage and played around the memorial pond and the rest of us were watching from the usual spot and thinking how adorable they were and it all was.  I'm wondering if the other mums were thinking the same thing I was, like this was the way it should be with the kids having fun playing together as they were.

Tao loves the playgroup get togethers and they always wear him out, and is always looking forward to playing with his friends every week.  We're kind of building up friendships and stuff within the group too which is great, having fun hanging out and chatting.  One of the mums was saying how her boy who was happily running around with Tao and the other kids, would be at kindy or pre primary this year and he would probably lack that loving relationship he currently has with his yearling brother.

Everyone was saying something to the effect of how days like this it just helped affirm the decision to homeschool.

The other night we were bagging coins to take to the bank and while Ruan was having great fun trying to scatter our piles when she wasn't helping to bag things.  Tao was getting a very quick and dirty lesson on monetary values, and how to make piles equalling different values.  I don't know if he understood that twenty 50c pieces make $10 but he did work out how to make one pile as high as the other one as he helped to count out the 50c coins.

Occasionally I have a freakout when the kids decide to show massive leaps in brain development along the lines of "yeesh how the hell am I going to keep up with them" and then realising that if I have to run to keep up a teacher who has to mind 40 other kids as well will have no hope in hell.  That and we're saving on school fees which is great seeing as we are in the process of trying to buy a block.  Works for us and we're all happy :)

Recently Josh had the SciFi channel on Foxtel.  I can't remember now what it was we were watching on the SciFi channel, but Tao looked at it, then looked at us and said quite confidently "Dat's sky fi."

Sky fi.

Most of the words he's looked at to date have a hard "c" sound and neither of us have ever referred to it with that particular pronounciation.  I have occasionally called it "sci fee" as it's not "science fike-shun".

He also correctly identified the number "3" when we went out for lunch and got given one of those number things after you order but that's starting to become more of a regular occurrence, as is identifying individual letters.

What are we doing? Reading books and signs to him.  Nothing more.

Also, for both kids, when walking through shops and they want to stop on a ride or something, I will usually let them have to the count of 10 and then they get off.  Ta understands how it works and is very cooperative.  The first few times with Ru predictably resulted in tears and tantrums as she didn't want to get off whatever it was she was playing with usually.

The same day that Tao read out the number "3" accurately when we went out for lunch, I had to take Ruan to the toilet and upon finding it too late, changed her nappy.  While I was packing up, she jumped into the "big red car" that was in the change room.  I was about to automatically snatch her out and walk out when remembering my manners, I said, "Count of 5 then we gotta go, okay Ru?" Then counted slowly to five while she played, and lo and behold, after five, she was quite ready to leave.

She's 1.

They're currently "reading" a Flip the Flap Phonics book together.  Awww.

I am starting to think that maybe I should just get my act together, get the website that I'm intending to build for the kids up and running and either throw this thing in or get an rss feed up and running or something, considering how much I remember to update.

Last couple of days, Tao has either been going to bed himself ot crashing in with Josh.  Tonight he agreed that he was indeed tired and wanted to go to bed after I told him he looked very tired, and I asked if he wanted to crash in his bed, with Josh or in my bed.  He opted for his bed.  On the way there I asked if he wanted me to stay with him or to go.  He said he wanted me to stay til he fell asleep.

So I lay on my bed with my hand on his body while he lay there glazed.

Both of us were temporarily roused by a screaming fit from Ru who woke up very wet and in a daze of sleepiness completely didn't see me and crawled out of bed crying to go find me in my usual spot (in front of the computer when they're asleep).  I told Tao I'd be back after resettling Ru, swooped on the unsuspecting baby and carted her off to the bathroom where I whipped her into the old blue BubbaJ, which is kind of useless on either of them now as the elastic in the legs no longer exists in a useful form.

Oh well.

Resettled her in not long, then went to see how Tao was doing.

He was asleep cuddling his teddy bear.  This may with some luck become a habit.

Definitely on the up, and not as likely to slide, although that still happens every so often.

The other day (when? Who knows, I don't usually make distinctions between days, just aware of the sun moving :P) something Tao was doing was shitting me, Josh had denied him something and he was wailing and carrying on and complaining.  I was getting irritated by his whinging as he'd been on and off all day, on and off the boob all day and I was feeling slightly short tempered.

I really wanted to give the child a decent clout and tell him to shut the hell up.

What I did was say "Poor little bugger, you really wanted to [do whatever it was that I've now forgotten] didn't you?"

Tao paused in his wailing, stared at me, then tearfully replied "Yes!"

"Yeah I know, it was good fun, but we can't do it right now.  Let's have a cuddle and we'll go find something else to do."

We had a cuddle and then found something else to do, though again I can't immediately recollect what.  It worked out so much better and was so much nicer than yelling.  And it works because on average (even when I'm feeling bad about the days where I've yelled too much) I do that more than I yell, and thus I don't really have much f a clue about the phenomenom often referred to as "the terrible 2s" and "the terrible 3s".  I have no doubt that it exists but it doesn't seem as big a deal as it's been made out.

Josh's parentage are apparently going to be retiring in Perth soon, sometime in the next couple of years or so Josh keeps saying.  I might see if Nanna is interested in having Tao for part of or a full day one or two days a week to cut me a break, and add Ruan to the mix when she's 2 or so (whenever she's ready to be left).  Hopefully then I'll be able to get a decent amount of work on the animation done as well as get back into kung fu.  Will see how we go on that front.  In the meantime I'll jhust have to continue struggling along as I am.

Oh yeh, and silly season.  It went well, though because I'm stupid I forgot the camera, so no Jurien photos.  Tao had a blast playing with Josh's cousins, Ruan cuted everyone out, Ruan got a stash  of very cute clothes and a couple of books, and Tao got a pile of books and workbooks aimed at 3-5yos.  A few of them are awesome because they are wipe clean ones and he has been having a blast with them, although Ruan broke the compartment that contains the magnets on one of them.

Tao also got a big as Tonka dump truck from us.  He loves it.

Things are looking mostly clearer in the home education department as the kids get older and I can work out what to do with them, and the option is looking better and better every day.

And now time for bed, seeing as my thoughts ar emore disjointed than usual.

Slowly I am getting back into the "unschooling" groove and our life is becoming happy again after a week of horror where Tao and I were trying to adjust to his testosterone levels, with Ru not sleeping and teething on top of that.  It's still trying at times as he is being extremely aggressive at the moment, I really need to play "the killing game" or do more kung fu with him, he's always so much calmer afterwards.  Anyway.

Yesterday while Ru slept, Tao and I played Scrabble.  Which is to say I got out the board, emptied the tiles on the table and we had fun moving the tiles around and making words.  We did the usual "TAO", "RUAN", "WIGGLES", the names of all the Wiggles, "XYLOPHONE" was a new one.  He recognised some letters but not others as expected.  He knows "T", "A" and "O" go in his name and what they are but is having trouble recognising "TAO" as his name, was what I was getting from the game.  Then all of a sudden he comes up with "P.  R.  E.  O."

I say "Preo?" with an air of "wtf?"

He looks at me like I'm completely and utterly dense (he's not too wrong there) and says "Preo heave ho Dockers."

Of course.  Duh.

After I stop being completely shocked and find my voice (which had for some reason buggered off temporarily after that revelation) I say "Shall we put that in tiles? Freo actually starts with an F, can you find the F?"

It took a while coz even though he seemed to be able to spell it in his head, he appeared to be having trouble relating it to the stuff on the tiles.  And for the record I've never spelt it for him and Josh is never home to do it :)

Until he repeats it, I'm writing it off as weird flukey thing :P

I've actually been posting more stuff on the baby board and forgetting about here, or intending to copy/paste here and not doing it.  Maybe if I remember I'll carry some stuff over.  I should also start tagging entries, I still haven't been able to find this entry I wanted to find for someone.

Anyway.

The other day we were headed to Freo to renew our Dockers membership when we passed the construction site happening between Murdoch Uni and the retirement village.  Tao wanted to know what was going on, and I told him it was a construction site, and that they were building something.  The predictable follow-up question then was "What are they building?" I responded that I didn't know.  Tao observed the mountains of sand, then looked at me with those big bright eyes and announced "They're building a SANDCASTLE!"

Earlier he was getting into a packet of Wiggles number biscuits, and asking me what the various numbers were.  He then found one which I figure is probably an =, as it was kind of short compared to the other numbers to be 11.  He asked me what it was, I glanced at it and said I didn't know, maybe it was broken.  His response, "It's not broken.  It's a pause!"

I think we've been watching too much tv :)

I should probably update the userpics at some stage.

I have two nearly toilet trained children.

After a week or so of occasional accidents on the carpet or starting to go before stopping himself and then going to the toilet, Tao is suddenly saying that he needs to go before he goes.  There isn't the biggest time buffer in the world but it's plenty of time to get from wherever we are in the house to the toilet.  I have no idea how we will fare out and about if he ever needs to go when we're out but I have flat nappies (for wiping up messes), spare underwear and shorts in the backpack for him these days.

Need to buy Ru some underwear, as she is used to either going nudiebum and using the potty or doing wees in nappies.  And I haven't yet had the guts to take her out without a nappy.

We're going so well I'm considering palming off Tao's remaining waterproof nappies.

And speaking of nappies, Ruan is quite possibly finally growing out of her size1 BubbaJs.  Although she could also just be chubbing up for a grow, I'll hang on to them for a little while longer.  Miss Skinnybum still fits easily in 000 pants seeing as she now doesn't have nappies to bulk her bum up.

Tao is still trying to learn how to read and recognise letters.  Still loving the puzzles.  Ruan likes to dance and tumble, and has recently discovered the joys of drawing.

I really need to be doing a lot more with them, they seem to want/need the stimulation.  Been a bit slack the last few days, combination of going to bed late and really wanting to work on the animation.  Going to have to try to organise time with webmonkey work and animation.  Sigh.

Other than that, all is well with the world.

Tao can do them now.  Proper jigsaw puzzles, not the usual kiddie kind of match the cutout piece to the shape on the board.  So they're only 6 piece, but on the Bob the Builder website they not only click and lock into place when you put them with other right pieces, you can also rotate them and you don't always start with them the right way up.

I have no idea when he learned how to do them.  He couldn't do them two days ago.  I was meant to show him but was in the middle of something when he asked, so I said "If that's a bit too hard right now go and do something else and come back to it later."  And by the time I got to a stage where I could help him properly he'd moved on to something else.

So.  Yeah.  I'm slightly shocked.  And pleased obviously :P

Copy-pasted from AB coz I'm lazy.

Very slightly creeped out by Tao

An artist on Art is Murder submitted this image a day or so ago (I've lost track).  Tao spotted it and proclaimed it a "big tarp wemus!" I got the big and sharp and asked him to repeat the last word a few times.  He kept repeating the sentence.  So I said, "A big sharp remus?"

"Yes!" he says in his cute matter of fact voice.

"What's a remus?"

"Dat!" while pointing to the artwork in question.

I passed this along to the artist and like me the only "Remus" he knew of was one of the mythological founders of Rome (as in Romulus and Remus, raised by a wolf).  Sprat did a Google search and discovered that there is also a moon called Remus (again named after aforementioned mythological founders of Rome).  I then utilised Google image search to see if there was any pictures of this Remus moon and discovered that there was.

How's that for coincidence?

Right now, Tao is playing with the playdoh set that was in his Wiggles showbag, and Ruan is falling asleep on the boob.

Make that, Ruan is in bed and Tao is on the boob listening to "teepy baby moooozik".

I do seem to go in cycles don't I.

Things seem to be getting easier. I never realised the local "Zest" health club thing had a pool, and they're doing swimming lessons from 5 months. Coordinator is going to give me a ring tomorrow and I'll see about wimming lessons for these two. Walking to the end of the street for swimming lessons rather than driving somewhere is appealing even if I'm not crazy about the chlorine stench.

I had a brief word to Josh about possibly doing a little bit of cross training or something at the gym to cover the few things kung fu doesn't cover once I get the kung fu sorted out. Generally we're pretty blaaah about gyms but he didn't say anything outside of "yeah okay".

Things are working out all right, although the kids current spoat f staying up late at night is shitting me as I use night to work. No biggie if they ust potter and play quietly til I'm ready to go to bed but yeah right, they are usually whining at me coz they're tired and cranky. Still they seem to be settling into their own rhythm so just have to try and work with it as much as possible as they have been known to go to bed at 8 :)

And I think Tao is thinking more about dropping the day nap, he's trying to go to sleep and refusing to get off the boob but he's been on there for close to an hour or so and he's getting really bloody heavy.

Both of them.

Ruan, not so bad aside from a bad habit of leaking all over the place.

Tao, well. As well as the runs, the cyst on his eye is infected and he's getting a double whack for it, both an eye cream and oral antibiotics. He has a rash on his chest and is listless and lethargic.

Yesterday the house was covered in bicarb. I vacuumed it up only a couple of places hadn't completely finished soaking and drying. Eww.

I need some heavy duty carpet cleaner. Less carpet would be wonderful too.

On the upside, Tao seems to have cottoned on to this toilet training thing, and awesome timing.

Appointment with specialist tomorrow to get the cyst removed.

I suck at blogging.

You can learn a lot from doing not much. As most people know, I do 3d. I seem to know bits of geometry, crap I never would have picked up at school, mainly coz it was in the higher level maths class and I suck at maths.

Currently I'm learning a little bit about Russian history (there's a doco on sometime in the next fortnight that might be helpful) and researching titanium alloys. Why? Roleplaying :P

Who says you need to go to school to get an education.

Ru has been crawling a lot less, and walking a lot more. She still totters and toddles very cutely but the bipedal bit is happening with a lot more confidence. We walk around the shops a lot more. Ruan walks quite a way for a small girl. We did the same thing with Tao which I think is why he seems to have more stamina than a lot of preschoolers I observe , although said preschoolers seem to have mothers with more to do than me so they get strapped in prams while the mums rush around getting errands done.

I have all the time in the world. More or less.

Tao's language development is going off. And I lucked out with an awesome toddler, he follows me in the shops and doesn't (usually) run off. Not too many tantrums from him either.

Maybe I lucked out because someone somewhere knew I wasn't cut out to be a mum. Or maybe there is a slight chance that I may be doing something right after all, just for a change :)

( body part references, don't read if you're a prude )

Ru broke her record of 6 steps today by taking 8. 2 of the steps were after she turned a little. She was so pleased with herself she giggled, bounced on the spot which caused her to land on her bum but no matter, she clapped her tin hands together and continued giggling.

Crawling is still the primary mode of locomotion.

And yes, I need to update my icons. I might do it eventually.