2 year olds should not repeatedly press the power button of the computer!
It leads to the family not being able to even boot up said computer. Which means, in this household, that there is no internet, no email, and (most importantly perhaps) no DVDs.
Fortunately we could still play the Wii, so all was not lost. But it has been an odd week.
It started with the death of the computer (long live the computer!). Fortunately we have a wonderful friend who potters around with the actual hardware of such things for fun. So it has been returned to us in full working order, and luckily, with no memory loss! Yay! No catastrophic data loss! It even remembers my log-ins for things - which is more than I can usually do. It only needed a new motherboard, CPU, power thingie... (no, I don't really know what they do - Merl has tried to explain it, but I confess that my eyes glaze over a little).
Then Merl went to Wellington for more work stuff. Inconvenient. He'd only been back for a week, and was requested back at 'head office' again - at short notice (like, a phone call on Friday to say 'be here Monday morning'). Usually we have at least a couple of weeks notice. Anyhow, it was only a couple of days this time - not a full week like it normally is. And I have friends who are raising children all by themselves all the time, so I should just suck it up. But I do miss him when he's gone. Especially at the end of a long day. AND there was no computer to play DVDs for the children at the witching hour, either.
But all was well, as he returned home Tuesday evening.
Wednesday was great - I felt full of energy and pottered happily around the place. We visited my aunt in the morning and had a good natter over coffee while Miss5 hung out with my uncle outside, setting up their bird-feeder. Then we came home to a freshly cleaned house (I am the only full-time Mum I know with a cleaner - but I just can't quite seem to feel guilty about it!) and got stuck into some actual school work! (I know! shock! actual lessons!). Miss2 had found a CD in my 'teacher box' with a fire safety song on it, so I followed their interest by producing the Teachers Manual for a fire safety unit (provided by the Fire Service) and we made a big poster about fire, and discussed safe and unsafe fires, and how important it is to 'Get Out, Stay Out' if the smoke alarms go off, etc, etc. And then after lunch we made bird feeders ourselves, and I re-hung the auto-feeder for the chickens at a better height for them (I will post more about this in a chicken post later in the weekend I think). I even cooked a real dinner! Wednesday was great.
Thursday was a bit different. I woke in a bit of pain - sore lower back, a bit achy, hadn't slept well, that sort of thing. Then the ligaments in my belly were agonisingly sore for most of the morning - not easing up when I lay down or anything. So I spent the morning on the couch with a couple of wheat-sacks, while the kids engaged in 'self-directed learning' with colouring and reading and finger puppets and all sorts of things. I noticed that I was having Braxton-Hicks contractions. On and off. No real pattern. Nothing to worry about. Probably. I'm only not-quite 32 weeks pregnant, so it can't be... It'll be fine... sweetheart, can you go through to Mummy's bedside and bring me the pregnancy books from the bedside table please?
Hmmm. Symptoms of pre-term labour are - lower back pain, contractions (usually falling into a pattern and getting stronger), lower abdominal pain. Hmmmm. I'm probably fine, I say to myself. There's no pattern there.
Later in the morning I notice that I'm having a 30second contraction about every 10 minutes. But after about 5 of them they go away. So that's okay, I say to myself. They've stopped now.
I have lunch and return to the couch. I end up by having contractions on and off the rest of the afternoon - but still no pattern to them - but I'm starting to get a little more concerned - so when talking to a friend in the early evening on the phone I ask her what she thinks.
She, very sensibly, thinks I should have phoned my midwife hours ago. So I apologetically phone my wonderful midwife (who is flying out of the country on her holiday the very next morning). All her back-up people are busy. She sighs and says "you really don't want to be in labour now - they'll ship you out because NICU is full". I say "I know I don't want to be in labour now - how can I make sure that I'm not?" And she says "well, you'd better meet me at the hospital right now."
The upshot being that, I was hooked up to the monitors for long enough for her to decide that I might be in pre-term labour, and go and get authorisation to do a swab-test for it. I never knew there was a swab-test for pre-term labour, but there is. It's really expensive so they don't do it unless they think there's good reason. It's a check for some sort of fetal factor which, if present, indicates that labour is likely within the next couple of weeks. Cool, huh?
And I was 99.4% likely to NOT be in pre-term labour. Which was absolutely wonderful and my midwife and I happily went home at 11pm. (She to do the suitcase packing that I'd interrupted). But she did warn me to take it very easy over the next few weeks because the test does have a small margin of error, and I didn't want to risk anything.
So today was another day on the couch. And, thankfully, we have a computer again and the girls spent the afternoon reacquainting themselves with Asterix and the Berenstain Bears before we tottered out to the library about 4pm.
So that was my week - how was yours?
Read more...
Jul 3, 2009
Jun 22, 2009
Mathematician's Lament
This is a wonderful article about the beauty and art of mathematics. It's a 25 page PDF document, so go grab a cuppa and prepare to have your concept of 'maths' turned on its head.
This is an absolute must-read if you're planning on conveying any sort of 'maths-learning' to anyone else, and an important read even if you're not!
The Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart, 2002
Short bio of Paul Lockhart here
Don't Read more...
This is an absolute must-read if you're planning on conveying any sort of 'maths-learning' to anyone else, and an important read even if you're not!
The Mathematician's Lament, by Paul Lockhart, 2002
Short bio of Paul Lockhart here
Don't Read more...
Jun 17, 2009
Rodents
It would seem that mice like nice warm houses as much as we do. Go figure.
It would seem we are a trifle over-run. (Apologies to all those who have already heard me go on at length about our mouse issue - there's nothing new here, but I still have a need to get it off my chest!)
I knew we had a small mouse problem - the odd dropping here and there, the occasional full trap, that sort of thing. I figured this level of rodentry was acceptable, given that we have active compost heaps, chicken food, and a lots of hiding spaces in the garden. And no cats or dogs. Some mouse encroachment was inevitable, I figured, so long as it didn't get out of hand! About a month ago I made sure all the food was in mouse-proof containers, found one open box of cornmeal that was well-moused (which I got rid of), and figured that would keep their numbers down, or at least, easily managed by the one trap in the kitchen.
How wrong I was.
Our living area is semi-open plan. There are double french-type doors between the living room and the dining room, and an open doorway from the dining room to the kitchen. The french doors are usually kept open, except in really cold weather when we shut them to keep the heat (from the heatpump) in the living room - usually in the evenings and overnight. Yesterday these doors were closed pretty much all day as I and the girls kept the living room toasty warm. They stayed shut overnight too.
I have once seen a mouse run from the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room and along the living room wall behind the sofa. I have no idea where it went after that - I couldn't find it. I didn't think much of it (except to go re-load the trap) - just "gosh the mice are getting brazen, time to step up the trapping". It never occurred to me that I had just seen a mouse using one of their super-highways.
This morning while sitting in the dining room with my morning coffee I noticed a large amount of carpet-fluff in the doorway to the living room. "That's odd," I thought, and went closer to inspect. Mixed in with the fluff was a considerable amount of mouse droppings. And on closer inspection I found that the little blighters have chewed the carpet bare along where the french doors close - apparently in an attempt to dig through and re-open their super-highway. I then noticed a similar, but much smaller, bare patch with associated carpet fluff at the other door out of the living room.
"How big is my mouse problem?!" I muttered to myself, and stalked through to the kitchen to investigate. One clean and empty trap. The mice have (once more) successfully removed the bait from the trap without springing it. Great. What about the bottom cupboard where the cornmeal box used to be? Oh. Oh dear.
There was a whole layer of mouse droppings in this cupboard (despite there being no available food in it), and in the adjacent cupboard (which has never had any food in it).
With brush and shovel in hand and droppings and carpet fluff cleaned away, I went on a further investigation of the super-highway.
The rubbish bin and paper-recycling area yielded further copious quantities of mouse droppings, and some nibbled cardboard.
sigh.
I turned to the internet for advice. It is not comforting. A house mouse can have a litter of up to 6 pups, each month. One mouse usually means a nest. They don't usually range far from their nests, so if you see a mouse the problem is likely to be yours - not your neighbours (not that I thought for a second that my neighbours, all of whom have large dogs, and are more obsessive about their sections than us, were the source of our infestation!). The advice boils down to: seal up all holes larger then 1.8cm (a U.S. dime was the 'measurement' given - so then I had to look up how big a dime was - annoying), trap, trap, trap the highways, poison in the roof and floor cavities, get rid of clutter (which is a nesting place haven) and if that fails, call in the professionals.
So we went out. I needed to run away from the problem for a little while.
And then we came back and the day continued along its happy course. We had dinner, we said goodnight, we put the kids to bed. I availed myself of the bathroom...
A mouse ran into the bathroom.
I could do nothing except lift my feet off the floor and squeek "eeek mouse! go away!" (I didn't want the kids to leap out of bed to investigate). It ran behind me, and I couldn't see it! And I am now hugely pregnant and can't twist around at all, so I was just stuck there with my feet in the air hoping the mouse would get back where I could see it, because I knew there was no exit at ground level behind me and I sure as heck did not want it climbing...
Fortunately it ran out to behind the door.
I made my escape with all due haste, leaving it an escape route into the laundry (and thence out the back door, I hope!).
I have since set all the traps we have - 4 of them - mostly in the kitchen and one in the living room.
I do not know the exact route the super-highway takes - it concerns me that there were scratchings at both living room doors - trying to get out of the living room. I have no idea where an entrance point in that room might be - unless there is a largish gap in the floorboards somewhere behind the couch or piano, or possibly through our disused fireplace. At 30 weeks pregnant, however, I am not shifting the piano to find out! (Merl can do that this weekend).
There is no earthly way of effectively sealing the underside of this house. We know one entrance point for the mice is in the kitchen, where the sink and dishwasher pipes exit the house, but there are nooks and crannies everywhere for them to come in.
Properly ridding the cellar of clutter is on our 'list of things to do'. The underneath of our house is packed to the brim with hoarded building, gardening, painting, you name it supplies from the previous owner. Loads of stuff that is just junk - it might have 'come in handy one day' if it hadn't been stuck in a damp mouldy cellar for 40 years. Now it's all just a rusted, rotted pile of junk. Which we bought with the house. At some point we will get around to hiring a skip and clearing it out, but thus far that has fallen into the 'not this weekend' category. This provides nesting-sites aplenty for mice - right beneath our floorboards.
And that's pretty much where our mouse situation is at. I heard one of the traps go "sproing" while I was typing this, and I'm in two minds as to whether to go investigate it this evening - giving the trap the chance to trap another mouse overnight - or to wait until morning and check all the traps at once.
I'm also not that keen on actually handling dead rodents. I don't know what diseases they commonly have in this country, but I doubt that they can be good for unborn babies (given that we're not supposed to deal with cat faeces, I can't see that dead mice is any better).
I'll need to find my disposable vinyl gloves.
Read more...
It would seem we are a trifle over-run. (Apologies to all those who have already heard me go on at length about our mouse issue - there's nothing new here, but I still have a need to get it off my chest!)
I knew we had a small mouse problem - the odd dropping here and there, the occasional full trap, that sort of thing. I figured this level of rodentry was acceptable, given that we have active compost heaps, chicken food, and a lots of hiding spaces in the garden. And no cats or dogs. Some mouse encroachment was inevitable, I figured, so long as it didn't get out of hand! About a month ago I made sure all the food was in mouse-proof containers, found one open box of cornmeal that was well-moused (which I got rid of), and figured that would keep their numbers down, or at least, easily managed by the one trap in the kitchen.
How wrong I was.
Our living area is semi-open plan. There are double french-type doors between the living room and the dining room, and an open doorway from the dining room to the kitchen. The french doors are usually kept open, except in really cold weather when we shut them to keep the heat (from the heatpump) in the living room - usually in the evenings and overnight. Yesterday these doors were closed pretty much all day as I and the girls kept the living room toasty warm. They stayed shut overnight too.
I have once seen a mouse run from the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room and along the living room wall behind the sofa. I have no idea where it went after that - I couldn't find it. I didn't think much of it (except to go re-load the trap) - just "gosh the mice are getting brazen, time to step up the trapping". It never occurred to me that I had just seen a mouse using one of their super-highways.
This morning while sitting in the dining room with my morning coffee I noticed a large amount of carpet-fluff in the doorway to the living room. "That's odd," I thought, and went closer to inspect. Mixed in with the fluff was a considerable amount of mouse droppings. And on closer inspection I found that the little blighters have chewed the carpet bare along where the french doors close - apparently in an attempt to dig through and re-open their super-highway. I then noticed a similar, but much smaller, bare patch with associated carpet fluff at the other door out of the living room.
"How big is my mouse problem?!" I muttered to myself, and stalked through to the kitchen to investigate. One clean and empty trap. The mice have (once more) successfully removed the bait from the trap without springing it. Great. What about the bottom cupboard where the cornmeal box used to be? Oh. Oh dear.
There was a whole layer of mouse droppings in this cupboard (despite there being no available food in it), and in the adjacent cupboard (which has never had any food in it).
With brush and shovel in hand and droppings and carpet fluff cleaned away, I went on a further investigation of the super-highway.
The rubbish bin and paper-recycling area yielded further copious quantities of mouse droppings, and some nibbled cardboard.
sigh.
I turned to the internet for advice. It is not comforting. A house mouse can have a litter of up to 6 pups, each month. One mouse usually means a nest. They don't usually range far from their nests, so if you see a mouse the problem is likely to be yours - not your neighbours (not that I thought for a second that my neighbours, all of whom have large dogs, and are more obsessive about their sections than us, were the source of our infestation!). The advice boils down to: seal up all holes larger then 1.8cm (a U.S. dime was the 'measurement' given - so then I had to look up how big a dime was - annoying), trap, trap, trap the highways, poison in the roof and floor cavities, get rid of clutter (which is a nesting place haven) and if that fails, call in the professionals.
So we went out. I needed to run away from the problem for a little while.
And then we came back and the day continued along its happy course. We had dinner, we said goodnight, we put the kids to bed. I availed myself of the bathroom...
A mouse ran into the bathroom.
I could do nothing except lift my feet off the floor and squeek "eeek mouse! go away!" (I didn't want the kids to leap out of bed to investigate). It ran behind me, and I couldn't see it! And I am now hugely pregnant and can't twist around at all, so I was just stuck there with my feet in the air hoping the mouse would get back where I could see it, because I knew there was no exit at ground level behind me and I sure as heck did not want it climbing...
Fortunately it ran out to behind the door.
I made my escape with all due haste, leaving it an escape route into the laundry (and thence out the back door, I hope!).
I have since set all the traps we have - 4 of them - mostly in the kitchen and one in the living room.
I do not know the exact route the super-highway takes - it concerns me that there were scratchings at both living room doors - trying to get out of the living room. I have no idea where an entrance point in that room might be - unless there is a largish gap in the floorboards somewhere behind the couch or piano, or possibly through our disused fireplace. At 30 weeks pregnant, however, I am not shifting the piano to find out! (Merl can do that this weekend).
There is no earthly way of effectively sealing the underside of this house. We know one entrance point for the mice is in the kitchen, where the sink and dishwasher pipes exit the house, but there are nooks and crannies everywhere for them to come in.
Properly ridding the cellar of clutter is on our 'list of things to do'. The underneath of our house is packed to the brim with hoarded building, gardening, painting, you name it supplies from the previous owner. Loads of stuff that is just junk - it might have 'come in handy one day' if it hadn't been stuck in a damp mouldy cellar for 40 years. Now it's all just a rusted, rotted pile of junk. Which we bought with the house. At some point we will get around to hiring a skip and clearing it out, but thus far that has fallen into the 'not this weekend' category. This provides nesting-sites aplenty for mice - right beneath our floorboards.
And that's pretty much where our mouse situation is at. I heard one of the traps go "sproing" while I was typing this, and I'm in two minds as to whether to go investigate it this evening - giving the trap the chance to trap another mouse overnight - or to wait until morning and check all the traps at once.
I'm also not that keen on actually handling dead rodents. I don't know what diseases they commonly have in this country, but I doubt that they can be good for unborn babies (given that we're not supposed to deal with cat faeces, I can't see that dead mice is any better).
I'll need to find my disposable vinyl gloves.
Read more...
Jun 16, 2009
SNOW!
Some photos of last night's snow at our place. I took some at 7.30 this morning while it was still dark (and the kids were miraculously still sleeping!).
And of course, there's the compulsory "children enjoying snow" photo...
Read more...
And of course, there's the compulsory "children enjoying snow" photo...
Read more...
Jun 14, 2009
Outdoor Hour #6 - Collections
Okay, so we did this nature walk a few weeks ago. It turns out I'm even slacker about blogging them than I am about doing them! I've decided to relax about our 'chosen subject' of rocks and minerals, and just keep it to being a simple walk while keeping our eyes and ears open to the world around us. I was starting to 'over-plan' and then not go out for even a simple walk, because I didn't have time or energy to execute 'the plan'.
Typical perfectionism. Which I am learning to recognise and roll my eyes at.
We are still using the Outdoor Hour framework as a guideline, so I'll give you the short and sweet summary for week #6
Read with your child something about your chosen area of study
Take your walk
Note in your notebook anything you saw that is related to the study topic
Give an opportunity to draw or make some other notebook entry
Start a collection, if appropriate
Well, we really just needed an outing in the fresh air. We had had endless days of rain and grey skies and suddenly were blessed with a fine, clear, breezy, crisp winter's day. I suggested a stroll around the neighbourhood to keep an eye out for interesting rocks, and Miss5 asked if she could bring her kite.
So, after a very brief internal struggle ("if we fly kites, we won't be looking at rocks... oh who cares? So long as they are outside and enjoying it!"), we popped the kite into the pushchair, wrapped up warmly and ventured up to the playground.
Let's go fly a kite...We didn't open the nature journal at all once we got home - just snuggled in the warm indoors with chamomile tea and bikkies. (Since reading that Madeline had chamomile tea after falling in the water, Miss5 has taken a liking to it. And whatever Miss5 does, Miss2 will copy, so I've got two little herbal tea drinkers!). And that was the end of our 6th Outdoor Hour.
However, since this is the 'collections' post for the Outdoor Hour, it is a good time to show you our rock collection
Miss5's rock collectionThe rock on the far right is there because Miss5 likes the white circles on it. They are paint or glue or something like that, but since collecting is as much an aesthetic exercise as a scientific one, the painted rock has its place here.
Read more...
Jun 9, 2009
Why Jesus never married
I'm sure this has been a burning question for you. Certainly Miss5 was pondering it on our way home from church on Sunday.
Here is the dialogue that ensued...
Miss5: Jesus never married
parent (can't remember which of us said what, but its immaterial): that's right
Miss5: 'cos Jews never married
parent: Ah, no. Jews get married. It's just that Jesus spent all his time telling people about God.
Miss5: Yeah. Instead of getting married and getting his wife to do it.
So now you know.
As I recall, we were both laughing too hard to set her properly straight on this one, although I think we did make an attempt...
Read more...
Here is the dialogue that ensued...
Miss5: Jesus never married
parent (can't remember which of us said what, but its immaterial): that's right
Miss5: 'cos Jews never married
parent: Ah, no. Jews get married. It's just that Jesus spent all his time telling people about God.
Miss5: Yeah. Instead of getting married and getting his wife to do it.
!
So now you know.
As I recall, we were both laughing too hard to set her properly straight on this one, although I think we did make an attempt...
Read more...
Jun 6, 2009
Found it!
Or rather, the internet has told me where to look for it, and I will do so as soon as the weather stops being truly awful.
Found what? you ask... The dipstick! Of course.
It's in the most logical place imaginable.
Under the front passenger seat.
How silly of me. Of course I should have looked there.
Apparently the Toyota Estima/Previa/Tarago (depending on which country it is sold in) is a "mid-engine car". So the engine is mounted under the front seats, not all out the front under the bonnet. Which makes sense when you actually look at the vehicle - there isn't enough room out the front for an engine.
But does make it an exercise in lateral thinking when looking for things you would normally find under the hood!
On the plus side, my Owner's Manual should arrive this coming week, so hopefully it will hold the answers to all future questions of this nature.
Read more...
Found what? you ask... The dipstick! Of course.
It's in the most logical place imaginable.
Under the front passenger seat.
How silly of me. Of course I should have looked there.
Apparently the Toyota Estima/Previa/Tarago (depending on which country it is sold in) is a "mid-engine car". So the engine is mounted under the front seats, not all out the front under the bonnet. Which makes sense when you actually look at the vehicle - there isn't enough room out the front for an engine.
But does make it an exercise in lateral thinking when looking for things you would normally find under the hood!
On the plus side, my Owner's Manual should arrive this coming week, so hopefully it will hold the answers to all future questions of this nature.
Read more...
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