Light and Dark

Playing around with light and shade today. This was my favourite. These trees, right by the pool, have grown to the height of a five storey building since 2002 (I know the date because the cement truck brought in to do the pool knocked them down). They deposit leaves in our pool year round. And they're too spiky to use as firewood (and spark a lot too). They are spiny acacias, in case anyone's interested. Anyway, since they're such a pest, and now too tall to easily (read, cheaply) fell, I thought I could at least get a blip out of them.

A day of light and shade today. Katherine professed to be "oh, just so booooooorrrrrrrred" by the helpful fractions tutorial I sat her in front of on the computer while I did reading with Conor. Turned out by 'bored' she meant 'unable to understand'. She had already done all the same work with her dad, but it just hadn't stuck. So we did it again. And I'm sure her dad will have to do it again, again when he gets back. Maybe by then it'll stick. In lighter news, they both got on well with their Islands of the World project - and Katherine even managed to use the internet and a real life encyclopaedia competently and willingly. She has rumbled my tactic of making her write long numbers out as a way of getting her to practice handwriting. Back to the drawing board....

Two viewings today, one with the estate agent so I just kept out of the way, the other was one I organised. Lovely family from Cairo, seemed delighted with the house and hung around for an hour or so having a chat while the kids played. Nice to have some grown up company other than the builders next door (though as we don't really have a language in common - French very clearly being their second language too - we barely get beyond polite 'bonjour'ing.)

Mr B's been having a bit of a rubbish time back in Scotland: our car wouldn't start and the attempt to jump-start it catastrophically broke his dad's car. The garage (it's an electrical fault so has to go to the marque garage) are being woeful and not even looking at it. Apparently you should never use a modern car to jump-start another car - it's just way too likely that there'll be some kind of surge of power back from the broken car and blow something electrical. They don't say that in the manual.

I was going to bore you all with my thoughts on gender-stereotyping in childhood today, after yesterday's clothes line toy blip, but I've lost the urge. Kids are all different, and some of those differences are due to chemical/physical gender differences and some are due to how we bring them up. I think it's a mistake to ignore either of those influences. My kids both play with all toys, but each show distinct preferences. Maybe those preferences are my fault, or nursery's fault, or society's fault, or maybe from brain size/chemistry. But so long as they play happily, I'm not going to judge them - or myself - for it any more. They will both be taught to cook, iron, drive, set a fire and saw wood. And then maybe they can teach me how to make my PVR record two things at once. And how skype works. And how to get past the swimming pool levels on Plants vs Zombies.