Cotton-Pickin’ Days

Stephen received his end-of-school-year report yesterday and after each section, there were suggestions for games and activities parents could do with their children at home. Here are some that made me laugh and others that made me reflect on what I’ve done with Stephen.

1. Join your local toy library.

Are you kidding? We are the local toy library! (See picture of Stephen exhausted after a playful day. Actually, he was just pretending. haha)

2. Play games where people take turns inc. handing round biscuits, etc.

Here I can proudly say that although Stephen isn’t a perfectly behaved child in school, he willingly shares his after school treats with his friends. I don’t think there’s a kid in that class who hasn’t received a small candy, chocolate, or potato chip from him.

3. Show your child how much you enjoy reading & writing.

Just the other day, we were talking about what each of us collects. Stephen said that he collects toys (see #1), I collect books (beams proudly), and Marv collects video games (raised eyebrow). As for the time I spend on the computer, he says, “You’re working; sending messages, talking to Popo (my mom), and writing.”

4. Talk to your child about favourite TV programmes or things you have done together.

While some parents may not want to encourage TV watching in their children, I’ve actually gone out of my way to order special Transformers books for children to encourage Stephen’s reading. I am definitely not one of those who believe TV is evil. And while I don’t necessarily agree with everything unschooler Dayna Martin and her family have chosen for their educational path, I did appreciate her article on anti-TV elitism despite the fact that I am a “book worshipper” and a magazine worshipper and an Internet worshipper,….

5. Draw your child’s attention to, and involve him/her in daily reading & writing routines.

Thankfully, Stephen has a natural interest in these things but we also do about 15 workbook pages a week. Currently, he’s working on one workbook for handwriting and another for addition.

A June example of a sentence Stephen constructed:

TuoMIS has a FeD
TuoMIS brIs MaX hoMo to VIZT

Translation: Thomas has a friend. Thomas brings Max home to visit.

6. Laying the table.

Oops. We don’t eat properly at the dining room table and because of Marv’s irregular working hours, we hardly ever eat together either.

7. Talk to “grannie.”

Eh?

8. Play with different media.

If only different media didn’t also mean big mess! Sometimes paint, play dough, sand, and other crafts are better done at school.

9. Turn pages.

I guess some kids rip pages instead of turn them? At ages 4-5, I would have expected something a little more advanced than this.

10. Make percussion instruments from tins, containers, etc.

Good lord. Does he not make enough noise just going through his LEGO pieces?! Who knew a bajillion little pieces of plastic could make such a racket!

What kinds of gems were in your child’s report card?

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Reading online is nothing like reading a book or a magazine. When I read a book, I take my time, read almost every word, and re-read parts that I didn’t quite understand the first time. When I read online, however, I tend to skim so rapidly that I often miss key bits of information.

Instant messaging conversations are probably the worst. Each party is so busy typing out what they want to say that it’s easy to miss a question or a comment the other person made. I’ve reviewed important or long IM conversations before and been appalled at some of the stuff I neglected to respond to. And a lot of times, the other person doesn’t even ask again because the conversation has already swept along to another unrelated topic.

Just now, I received a forwarded email from someone asking me to buy something for them. First I’d like to say that emails should be kept to-the-point rather than stuffed full of meandering sentence fluffs, preferably with lists if there are items involved. Anyway, I have no excuse for not reading the email carefully (even though I went over it twice) and ended up wasting time figuring out what specifically the person wanted when he’d already spelled it out. I still think the primary blame lies with the writer. HA!

Most of my online reading originates from Google Reader where I have 322 RSS feed subscriptions for news, information blogs, and personal blogs. Over the last 30 days, I’ve read (skimmed) 5,525 items for an average of 184 bits of info a day*. That’s not a lot compared to some people like Robert Scoble who has apparently read 28,433 items in the past 30 days from 739 subscriptions. But I wonder just how many he reads carefully and how many details he can recall.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter in this day and age when you can hop on Google and pull up whatever you need. But it sure is embarrassing to find out that you’ve missed key points that were right in front of your face.

How do your online and offline reading habits differ?

*FYI, if you use Google Reader, you can find these stats under the Trends link in the left sidebar. I’d be curious to know your stats too!

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Last Friday, I was minding my own business when I saw this note on Chris Garrett’s Facebook:

Chris is wishing he had ordered more Nespresso pods.

That piqued my interest because I had recently used a picture of someone’s display of Nespresso capsules at Eye on DNA although I had no idea what those things were. The wall hanger happened to look like two colorful X chromosomes and I liked that. Definitely a sign.

So I spent the rest of Friday researching and obsessing over Nespresso. By the end of the day, I’d put in an order for a Nespresso D290C Concept Automatic Espresso Maker. It arrived this morning. And exercising great restraint, I only tested one regular cappuccino and one decaffeinated. Marv even went out of his way to get me amaretto syrup for my latte tomorrow morning.

The Nespresso coffee is hot, strong, and smooth. Perfect! Here’s a video demo of the machine I purchased.

Happy 35th birthday to me! (Six weeks early to boot.)

Update: Nespresso is clearly not going to leave any coffee lover high and dry when they run out of coffee capsules. I ordered the one-time offer welcome package yesterday and it was just delivered a mere 24 hours later. Very impressive.

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Scott Adams in The Dilbert Blog says:

ROUNDERS: This group rounds things off. A problem that’s a two on a scale of one to ten gets rounded to zero. If a rounder has five problems that are all about a two on a scale of one to ten, he’ll tell you he has no problems.

That’s me. Blinders on. Head in the sand.

Scott also hands out an assignment:

Your assignment for today is to describe your own job in one sentence, preferably in a humorously derogatory way.

This is mine:

It’s my job to make a big deal out of nothing.

~Hsien, biotech commentator and consultant

What’s your job description? (Don’t miss the reader responses to this at The Dilbert Blog.)

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China is an enigma to me. The closest I’ve ever been is Hong Kong and Macau. The more I know about China’s history, however, the more incredible it all seems. Life and Death in Shanghai by Nien Cheng and The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang (and Chang’s subsequent suicide) shocked and saddened me. And today I read this in Wild Swans by Jung Chang:

One day in 1960, the three-year-old daughter of my aunt Jun-ying’s next-door neighbor in Yibin went missing. A few weeks later the neighbor saw a young girl playing in the street wearing a dress that looked like her daughter’s. She went up and examined it: it had a mark which identified it as her daughter’s. She reported this to the police. It turned out that the parents of the young girl were selling wind-dried meat. They had abducted and murdered a number of babies and sold them as rabbit meat at exorbitant prices. The couple were executed and the case was hushed up, but it was widely known that baby killing did go on at the time.

For every day that I’m alive, I should be grateful to be who I am, where I am, and when I am.

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You all know I love toys and one thing Stephen lacks is a decent playhouse but I’m not so sure if the Detacho Playhouse is a good choice for us.

The Detacho Playhouse is a re-configurable toy house which can be separated and made into multiple homes to replicate issues such as divorce and the changing make-up of many modern day families.

Not only are the houses modular, you can get a range of “Personal Figures” from casual women (?!) to step-grandfathers.

Top picture: “Separate houses for each parent.”
Bottom: “Magnetic parent dolls kiss when the head is turned to smiley face; parents repel and cannot be pushed together when turned to sad face.”

Brilliant!

via Neatorama

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clipped from news.bbc.co.uk A Canadian mother has frozen her eggs for use by her seven-year-old daughter, who cannot have children naturally. Should the girl opt to use the eggs and gain regulatory approval, she would effectively have a baby that was her half-brother or sister. Professor Tan said this was the first case of mother-to-daughter egg donation. There have been cases of donation from sister to sister. “In psychiatry we are hearing more and more of children suffering from identity problems, and specifically a condition called ‘genealogical bewilderment’. Could it possibly get more bewildering than this?”

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77%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

And with this, I’m off to tackle the dreaded ironing – 11 dress shirts or thereabouts. UGH.

via Jayvee

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One of the mums brought these chocolate krispie cakes to school one afternoon. Stephen loved it so much he was nearly in tears when he dropped the last bite on the ground. Fortunately, the generous mum gave him another. We tried making it ourselves today and it was a big success! Here’s a simple recipe from Essential UK.

Chocolate krispie cakes

Ingredients:

• A big bar of chocolate
• A packet of rice krispies or cornflakes
• Paper cake cases

Method:

• Break the chocolate into pieces.
• Put the pieces of chocolate into a bowl
• Melt the chocolate in a microwave
• Mix rice krispies or cornflakes into the melted chocolate
• Put a spoonful of the mixture into the paper cake cases
• Put the paper cases into the fridge for an hour
• Eat the chocolate krispie cakes!

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