Who’s Normal Anyway?

Today we’ve had a quiet day at home. M was really pleased with himself first thing, because he completed all of one of the characters in his Sonic game and was so happy to have got through a tough section. And without shouting and bashing the computer!

Apart from working on M’s Japan project, we’ve played computer games together and spent a while in the garden. I tried out the new washing line and then tried to play swingball with M, but L was either crawling in front of the ball or else taking too close an interest in my peppers, strawberries and veggie plot. He sat on half the radishes and then found a lump of soil to try and eat. He’ll have a go at dirt and grass no trouble at all. We gave up trying to play and I decided to water the garden instead. L got even more filthy, because he wanted to dabble in the puddles from watering the veggie patch. He was solid mud from the waist down.

Late afternoon M brought a friend round to play while L was napping and I agreed they could have a water fight if they brought in my washing first. The only trouble was I couldn’t find equal sized water pistols - we had one small one that still worked and then M’s blaster gun with shield. I don’t know what happened to all the rest but I’ll have to get some more in the supermarket when we go tomorrow.

They decided to take turns with the guns, but got rather silly and when M got a face full of water from the blaster he got revenge by turning on the hose pipe. His friend was drenched, so I sent M back with him to apologise to his mum - don’t want to fall out with the neighbours! M also managed to trip over something and cut his leg, but it mopped up easily.

We had chilli and spaghetti for tea (odd combi, but it tasted OK) and watched Blue Peter and then it was baths and bed. They’ve both dragged out going to sleep tonight though.

Looking up information for learning about Ancient Japan with M today, I found lots of interesting websites so I thought I’d post about them.

Ancient Japan was handy for an overview of Japan’s early history and the different periods the history is divided up into. We started off by talking about this briefly and comparing what the Japanese were doing with what was happening in the Roman Empire and Britain at the same time.

Then we talked about traditional Japanese religion and Shinto shrines. I read M 2 slightly different versions of a story about the mythical beginnings of Japan and the Shinto religion and afterwards he narrated it back to me and coloured in a Torii picture to go with it on his poster.

We also talked about the festival of Hina Matsuri, which may be based on the tradition of making grass dolls and then throwing them in the river to cleanse evil spirits/bad fortunes, which dates from the time period we were talking about. I found these origami dolls to make.

In and among all the different sites I ended up at, I found these that I specially want to mention/remember.

Religious Tolerance.org was a site I found while looking up Shinto, but I could spend ages reading articles here. I like how they try to put all sides of religious beliefs and I spent a while reading their comments pages.

Then I found this website with an interesting theory on similarities between Shinto rituals and Jewish observances, the idea being that one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel settled in Japan. Fascinating, though I’ve no idea really if he’s completely bonkers or not, I don’t know enough to read around it properly.

Finally I came across Mama Lisa’s World Blog when I was looking up Hina Matsuri and have spent a while browsing her info on children’s songs and traditions from around the world.

So I think I’ve home educated myself pretty well today LOL!

Yesterday was too early a start after L had been waking alot with his cold and when it wasn’t him, it was M. He woke up 3 times before midnight with bad dreams and feeling unwell, came in with me in the early hours and then woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep at about 5am. So I transfered him back to his bed with a story CD and tried to get some more sleep but it wasn’t for long enough.

Once we were finally up and a bit more together M started on his activities and we did some stuff about Ancient China, including trying counting to 10 in Chinese and looking at pics of the Great Wall.

Thankfully L had an earlyish and longish nap in the morning, so I could give my attention to what M was doing. We stopped for a break and I went upstairs to do some knitting and wait for L to wake up. M heard him waking on the monitor and bounded upstairs, tried to climb over the baby gate so I told him off, then ploughed through it recklessly, tripped over me and my knitting and pulled it off the needles. I was so angry! And I’m not the fastest or most accomplished knitter so needing to pull it back 3 rows to pick up a dropped stitch was not fun.

Anyway, we went back downstairs to carry on with M’s activities and he did some maths. Then a workman turned up to put in a new washing line pole and take down the old concrete one which was crumbling dangerously. He was here a couple of hours. The new post went in easily enough but the old one wasn’t giving in without a fight and he was bashing away with a mallet and chipping the concrete out for ages. All done now though, just need to get some longer washing line.

In the late afternoon we drove to the hospital because L had an appointment for a hearing test, following up on him failing the hearing test at his 7 month check. We were there in plenty of time and sat in the waiting room, which was tiny and filled with about 7 adults and one small boy all from the same family group. I thought I come out with some choice language at times but this lot had a swear word every sentence and were a bit rough. The little lad got called for his appointment, his mum picked him up and he was soaking wet, but she took him in for the test anyway and said he’d have to wait to be changed. A couple of minutes later they came back out because he was uncomfy and she huffed off to change his nappy and trousers. So we jumped our appointment time by 20 mins while they were away. Thankfully both L and M sat quietly and didn’t cause any scenes there.

L passed the hearing test easily, though it seemed a bit dubious in its design to me. He sat on my knee facing an assistant who got his attention with a puppet. Through a one way mirror behind her the tester ran the test, which was playing sounds through speakers on his right and left. To set it up though, they played a loud sound on each side to make sure he turned to it. To reinforce this somehow, or reward responding to sound, or something, next to the speaker was a dark box and when L turned to a sound it would light up and a lion puppet danced. It didn’t take L long to cotton on and he kept looking over to the box to spot the lion. So how they know he definitely turned to the sound, when he was turning repeatedly anyway, I don’t know.

We got back home and had pizza and salad for tea, with some salad leaves from the garden! They were OK, and I think they were salad leaves and not weeds LOL. Both M and L were early to bed because of their broken night the night before. M slept OK, but L woke up every 40 mins until gone 10pm when I was settling him back to sleep for the umpteenth time and he unlatched, rolled over, did a poo and settled off to sleep. Thankfully after that he settled down.

At the same time I was searching for info on Ancient Japan because M said he wanted to make a poster on that today and I hadn’t any ideas what we could do. It took me all evening to find some things and I learnt a lot but basically Japan wasn’t doing anything very developed around the time of other ancient civilisations so it was hard to cobble things together to talk about. I finally went to bed towards midnight, which was several hours later than I’d intended, but time just seems to evaporate in the evenings.