Who’s Normal Anyway?

We’ve had a pretty good day so far today! This morning M has mostly got on with things and been helpful and hasn’t stropped about anything and L has been good tempered too. So have I LOL! After breakfast M played with L for a little while and we got some washing on because it’s been such a sunny day. They were playing a mad chasing around on hands and knees which involved M wearing L’s PJ bottoms on his head.

Continuing his Leonardo project, today M was looking at Leonardo’s inventions and the types of simple machine. I helped him go through the different sorts and then he took this sheet and went round the house and garden coming up with examples of each type. It worked really well and he enjoyed it - and it also got him spelling and writing with no fuss! Here he is looking at the pulley on the washing line.

M’s remembered me telling him about Jax’s Big learning programming (he has a memory like an elephant sometimes!) so for the last couple of days he’s been bugging me to download the KPL stuff so he could have a go. This morning I did download and install it (got some wierd error after it installed and tried to run Microsoft .NET but KPL itself appeared to run OK, suppose I ought to follow that up).

Once L fell asleep for his morning nap and I’d got him safely put down M and I had a look at KPL together. I have a vague idea of programming from doing BASIC when I was a teenager, but that’s about it. Lucky the software is written for beginners! We downloaded the tutorial too and started working through that and we tried the first 2 or 3 programs. M even managed some of the typing and was dead chuffed he got the program to draw a star and then he changed its colour several times. I think the next thing to do will be to try changing the program to draw other shapes - will see if he’s still interested in trying it tomorrow.

Then M decided he wanted to try drawing his own graphics (ultimately so he could use them in KPL I suppose) which ties in with his Beaver computer badge. I got him started using Paint and left him to it. He drew a Ferrari and then did a second one after I showed him the tools for drawing circles and straight lines.

When L woke up we went out to the post office to post M and L’s passport applications, bought some bread for lunch and called in the hairdressers to book haircuts. We got appointments for this afternoon so we came home for lunch, M did some Miquon maths and then we went back out again for haircuts. I hate having my hair done, I can’t stand the meaningless small talk thing and L just gets upset sitting, but the hairdresser got on with it without faffing about and we weren’t there too long.

When we got home M did some of his spelling and then listened to schools radio for a bit. He’s been listening to the Treasure Island music workshop programmes with David Grant. When he’d done that he went to call for the lad next door and played out.

During this afternoon I’ve sorted out more washing, played with L and made some bread rolls as a put-you-on snack before tea. Then I made some meatballs which are cooking just now.

Now it’s all quiet because L is having another nap and A and M have gone out to rollerskating. So I’m making the most of it and blogging

It was typical bank holiday Monday weather, but we decided to go out and do what we’d planned nevertheless. We currently have several geocaching travel bugs and the idea is to move them on fairly quickly, so we’d planned to do a couple of caches in the morning and send some travel bugs on their way (they have goals such as places they want to visit so you also have to find the right type of cache for each). We revised this down to just the one because of the rain - a “drive by” cache that didn’t take much traipsing in the wet, but still got us out exploring a new area. We went via Norfolk County Cricket Ground so that we could take a pic of the cricketer travel bug there, then found the cache and dropped him off.

Afterwards we drove into Norwich to park (bad mistake, car park cost us a fortune for the afternoon!) and went to Norwich Castle. They were running May Day activities with a dragon theme. M and I made scales to decorate the dragon and we looked around the castle keep and went back through the Boudicca and Saxons galleries to show them to A.

In the evening A had some stuff to finish for work today that he was trying to do on his laptop, except his laptop is on its way out and kept freezing and allsorts of frustrating things. While he was working on that I was redoing our gardening blog and sorting out old photos onto Flickr. L had gone to bed OK just after M, but woke about 10.30pm and just drowsed on my knee. When we went to bed he decided to wake up and was bouncing around the bed for a couple of hours, finally nodding off about 1.30am. We were shattered! Not sure what set him off, but I’m going steady on the freshly ground coffee and the chocolate today just in case!