I’m relieved that I … ok, file scavenger (great file recovery tool, BTW) was able to recover the last month of pictures we’ve been taking which includes quarter pipe ramp construction and christmas tree farm fun. They were mysteriously missing from the compact flash card. We’ll get them posted soon!
Major respect to file scavenger as it has saved my bacon twice now. The key abillity of this tool is scan the entire drive for files (vs. the easier undelete by unsetting the deleted flag). The first time the root of the file system of a failing hard drive got corrupted and over a 100GB of data appeared to be lost. A full scan recovered over 95% of the data. This time, it scanned the compact flash card and found over 1800 photos — luckily including the ones we couldn’t find before. I don’t buy much software as I am generally happy with open source software but this is one case where the money was well spent.
Posted by bruce as (un)happy consumer, computing, kids at 11:19 AM UTC
Comments Off
| Exciting night! Zeke’s second front tooth came out tonight. After several days of wiggling and talk of pliers and strings and door knobs, he finally gave it a little yank.
His tooth is under his pillow waiting for the tooth fairy to come. Then he’ll have to wait 3 years to find out the real scoop on the Tooth Fairy in our (DreamWorks’) movie The Guardians of Childhood.
|
|
Posted by bruce as kids at 10:21 PM UTC
Comments Off
Zeke surprised me tonight at bed-time by choosing Go, Dog, Go! as the book to read, volunteering to read “the first few pages” and then reading the almost half the book! (Up to “The sun is up. The sun is yellow.” for those intimately familiar with it.)
Now, I did read this to him several times a day for several months (literally!) when he was two and the pictures help cue his memory (“the blue dog is on the red tree”) but I could tell (or at least he did an excellent job pretending that) he was reading the words. Sounding out “around”, for example.
I was surprised because although he’s been interested in reading, he hasn’t focussed too much effort on it, preferring puzzle games, math, science experiments, animals, art and sports. Cool!
Posted by bruce as kids at 1:08 AM UTC
Comments Off
We are homeschooling Zeke who would have started Kindergarten this year. Miles as well 
Mondays, we participate in the homeschool group of the Attachment
Parenting group of the Peninsula (APP). We meet in the meadow of a local preserve. We play in the meadow and someone brings an activity – play dough, painting or blocks. We are moving into our cold, wet season so we will be meeting in our homes and using the local library’s community room.
Tuesdays and Fridays, we participate in Sweet Peas the parent run cooperative of the APP group. Six families participate and we meet in each other’s homes. We pay a care giver whose native language is Spanish. We do fields trips and provide enriching activities like arts and crafts, gardening and cooking. I am happy that one famiy is native German speaking and another Spanish. The boys are learning a little Spanish.
Wednesdays, we participate in one of the WelcomeHomeSchoolers Waldroff groups. Eight to ten children ages 3 to 7 years-old meet with a Waldroff teacher in training for 3 hours at one of the families home. They bake bread, play and have songs and stories in circle.
Thursday is our day off Nothing scheduled. We often go to Junior Gym where they have open gym time and the boys climb, balance and hang on the equipment. Zeke has TaeKwonDo classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. And he and Bruce practice their ice skating once a week. They both want to be Hockey Players when they growup
At home, we are playing games, making art, watching beans seeds sprout, watching all the heavy equipment on the court (they are putting in an emgerency exit out of the senior residence next door). We inherited an aquarium of California tree frogs and a betta fish so we have "pets" now. We get to the local library weekly and read a lot. I ask Sarahi, the sitter and a native Spanish speaker, to read in Spanish to them.
We are all happy and learning lots.
Posted by ryl as homeschooling, kids at 7:50 PM UTC
Comments Off
Apple gathering at Edgewood back. Driving there Zeke asked name of streets. I started reading signs and he said I was saying them wrong and repeated what I said with a different pronunciation.
Feels great to be back with this group. We played soccer and baseball, connect four. Boys rode bikes down the big hill. After lunch we went for a hike. Zeke said he wanted to. Put things away in car and hiked for a few minutes. Noticing poison oak and roots of trees sticking out on the path, resurrection pink lilies, stopped to smell a bay tree leave. Zeke feel on the way down, back to the car so we were bandaging a knee before heading home.
Afternoon, we made koolaid playdough and then they played with it.
Sarahi read library books to them.
Gathering bottles from Anna and Wilk’s. Learning which ones are returnable.
Rode bikes to Safeway to see if the recycling center was open.
Miles and I painted around 6pm. And we started filling up the blow-up pool.
Between the Lions, TV show about "Stolen Smells" story around 7pm.
More books at bedtime.
Posted by ryl as homeschooling at 6:57 AM UTC
Comments Off
Tuesday
- hockey with Daddy, we noticed that there were leaves all in the circle to be swept up
- Taekwondo lesson for Zeke 3 – 3:30
- reading books with Sarahi and park time
Posted by ryl as homeschooling at 9:10 PM UTC
Comments Off
I installed ResilientWare’s MouseTutor on the kids’ computer so I could disable the right button. While
playing the Curious George flash games at pbskids.org, Miles was
frequently hitting the right button which would popup the flash player
menu which he didn’t know what to do with and would click randomly on a
menu item. Sometimes it would reload the game, other ones essentially
kill it by backing up. The only trick is the software remembers it’s
running and whether the mouse is in one or two button mode. So don’t
change the registry or add it to your Start menu -> Programs ->
Startup folder or you’ll get two copies running the next time you log
in.
This wasn’t a problem with the KidzMouse we had which did the same thing in the driver but that was a mechanical mouse with a wire which ended up being more of an issue for them than I expected. Mostly the wire, actually so the wireless KidzMice weren’t the answer. I replaced it with a boring logitech laptop mouse — small for little hands, wireless and optical.
Posted by Administrator as computing, kids at 11:26 PM UTC
Comments Off
No Ruby’s but Rudi today!
Posted by bruce as kids at 4:38 PM UTC
Comments Off
Unfortunately, Zeke didn’t go to preschool today because we think he has the stomach bug I had last week. He said "I have a bad guy bug inside me." He tossed it twice yesterday and didn’t want ice cream so you know something is really wrong.
Fortunately it didn’t make me miserable, just nauseous for a few days and I was able to get back to work in a few days.
When I left, he was watching Spirit which has, I think, a very beautiful opening sequence. The flying camera work is superb — it’s dynamic but doesn’t feel like a rollercoaster — a common pitfall of many 3D CG camera moves. It interesting to see how they accomplish this, too. At one point, for example, the camera zooms in a little so we only see the bird and the river. This gives us a visual break from a big swoop that preceded it since the water is relatively simple background.
Posted by bruce as animation, kids at 10:54 AM UTC
Comments Off
Miles found a Sharpie and "expressed himself" on the table before I noticed. Being a permanent marker, I thought I was going to catch some grief about the table so I tried cleaning it off. Water? Of course not. Soap? Nope. WD40? A little and it was a lot of work. Then I remembered my triathlon days and tried a "gel" sports sunscreen (original is Bullfrog but Coppertone has one easily found in most drugstores). My number marked on my legs and arms would come right off if I put sunscreen on after. Worked like a charm!
Sorry Miles. I should’ve at least taken a picture of your artwork.
Posted by bruce as kids, vitality at 3:45 PM UTC
Comments Off
