Chloé is now 4 years old. We celebrated her birthday with an early wake up call, presents and an evening bowling on the 17th May.
She was quite spoilt this year. We got her a new DSI XL
She also asked for a Bean Bag
As it was still early last night after I printed off those maths worksheets, I decided that I would get Ryan to complete a few for me. I explained what he had to do and he done the rest himself. I am really impressed with his work! He had no trouble at all!
Of course, I had to record a video of him doing one! He’s completing the Greater Than, Less Than, or Equal To 1 – 5 worksheet in the video.
While he was doing the worksheets, I also snapped a few photos!
This is the set up that I used to film him doing the worksheet!
I have looked around for teaching materials that I can use to help Ryan ( my son ) develop his maths skills and have found a brilliant website, http://www.tlsbooks.com/, that I can use to download and print out some worksheets for him.
It seems that this is an American website, but as maths is a universal language this presents no problems what so ever! It seems that tlsbooks.com also provide worksheets for other subjects as well as maths, which means I shall be coming back here in the future!
Some of the maths worksheets I have downloaded and printed out for Ryan;
Everything adds up to around 20 pages of work for Ryan to complete. With some time over the next week or so, I believe he can complete each and every one of these. I will post his results when he has finished.
I haven’t done a photo blog in a while and I thought I would share some of my recent photos with everyone. I hope you enjoy!
A while back now we asked the doctor about a tonsillectomy for Ryan. We did this because whenever he had a throat infection his tonsils increase in size dramatically, rendering him unable to breathe properly.
Yesterday Ryan underwent the operation. Ever since we got the letter through from the hospital, we told him that he was going to have the operation to remove his tonsils. We have explained the procedure and what he needs to do to prepare himself to the best of our ability. As with everything, we tell him the truth, so he knows what to expect.
While we were waiting to be seen by the anaesthesiologist and surgeon, Ryan found it very hard to sit and chill. He was excited in a way, which was a good thing. Luckily the hospital have got their own room dedicated to toys for the kids, which was good for Ryan as it gave him something to do while waiting for his operation. They even had their own Wii that the kids could play with. It had one of the games that we have at home, so Ryan was well away, owning me on Mario Kart.
At 10.10am it was time for Ryan’s operation. As we walked down to theatre, we were told to be “on the look out” for the people in the funny hats! As we approached the theatre, Ryan shouted, “There’s one!” pointing at a surgeon. He smiled and nodded at Ryan
We walked into the operating room, which felt familiar. It suddenly hit me; this was the same room that I had my vasectomy in!
The anaesthetist put Ryan’s cannula in his hand. Ryan was very brave; there wasn’t even a slight whimper out of him. The anaesthetist then put the anaesthetic in his cannula, literally five seconds later, he was snoring! Amazing stuff!
It had just gone 11am and I got a call from the nurse to say that Ryan was ready to be brought back to the ward. I walked with her down to the theatre and picked him up.
He was quite upset that I wasn’t with him when he first woke up, but soon calmed down when he saw me as he left the recovery room. The next couple of hours were spent relaxing in his bed on the ward. He eventually came home at around 5.30pm.
We got a camcorder to record those “special moments”. I have been testing it since we got it, this is one of the videos.
The day actually started off all right. Kate and myself got up at 6am, got ready then woke the kids up. We presented them with their stockings, the majority of it being chocolate and a few small toys and loads of glow sticks. For some reason both kids love them.
We started to get the kids ready and before we knew it, we were bring asked, “can we open our presents yet?!” Being me, I was going to make them wait until after breakfast, so were all proper awake and in the mood for the rest of the day of arguing, shouting and the general “dad, she took my toy, tell her” crap. Instead I thought, fuck it; “They can open one present now before breakfast”.
This time every year the kids get to perform their schools version of the nativity. Both Ryan and Chloé were in the chior. i took some photos, but as I have never taken pictures in low level lighting, it was quite hard for me to get a decent image with out a lot of noise, so they haven’t turned out quite as well as I had expected.
While waiting for Ryan to finish getting ready after his play, I grabbed this picture of Chloé, she looks so cute!
The truth is a funny thing when you’re dealing with kids. What should you be telling them and at what age is seen as a major factor. A while back I wrote a similar post about Ryan asking Katie and myself questions about sex. We eventually settled on answering any questions he had about the subject. Should the same be applied to everything else in life?
I believe so! I believe in a world where information about any subject, be it sex, religion, drugs or things such as Santa Claus, the Easter bunny or the Tooth Fairy should be free and distributed to anyone who has any questions about any of them.
If we live in a world where we keep things from people because “of their own good” all we will achieve is making a generation of people completely ignorant to the way things really are and should be. This is NOT a good idea! My main issues at the moment centre on religion and such things as Santa Claus.
I’ll start with religion. Each week, Ryan’s school has an assembly with some people from the local church to talk to the kids. As atheists, we have decided to pull Ryan out of these assemblies, as they simply do not have any other people from other religions in to talk to the kids, which would go against our beliefs of giving them as much information as possible to make their own decisions regarding this subject.
We would rather there be an assembly or multiple assemblies with different people from different religions talking to the kids about various religious subjects, which will help the kids to make their own decisions about religion.
If you were in my shoes, would you handle my situation differently? What would you do?
Santa Claus, ugh, I hate this subject because it’s even more controversial than my views on religion. We all know that Santa is not real and the idea of Santa is constantly being commercialised by companies to dupe parents around the world into spending billions on their kids and not even getting the credit for it.
When I finally found out about Santa not being real when I was a kid, I started to respect what my Mum bought me. She was a single parent on a low income and providing for two children. At Christmas time this was a hard feat, and looking back upon it, I wonder why she did not tell me sooner.
At any other time of the year, when you might buy a present for someone, would you like to say that the present that you have possibly spent a couple of hundred of pounds on is not from you but from someone else? I certainly wouldn’t, why is this the case for Christmas?
We have told Ryan about Santa as we have with everything else in life, and we have let him make his own decision. The problem that I face today is that we have had a complaint, of sorts, from his school. He has been going around and telling the other children that Santa is not real. This may be the truth, but obviously each parent is entitled raise their kids how they want, but should be discipline Ryan for speaking the truth, if the other parents / teachers do not agree? I certainly will not! I will how ever inform him that he needs to respect other people’s beliefs and he should be careful what he says around others as it may upset them. Should it really be done this way though? Am I alone in thinking this way? I am at a loss.
How would you deal with the issues I have raised here?
I have never really done black and white photos before, but today I thought I would have a go. One I took today with the help from my awesome son Ryan who graciously posed for me, and the others were taken a while back.
They aren’t the best of photos as I am still an amateur photographer, but I like them so I thought I would share!
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