The Cutest Knickers....

I was shopping with Jaime and Xander at BigW yesterday and I went in search of PJ's for Jade.. and that was a lost cause... because she wears a size 4 t'shirt and only size 1-2 pants - it's hard to get a decent pair of pj's... so basically I think most of her pj's are going to be with midriff tops...

Anyway, back to the real reason for the post... I found these RIO undies "Monkey Bar Knickers"... the idea is that they wear them under dresses... so that they aren't exposing all when they're playing tom-boys in the girly clothes... eheh

Greg's first training for Rugby League....

Greg decided to start playing Rugby League - all of his friends at school play...

We signed him up with a local club on Saturday and he headed off for training this afternoon... he should be finishing right about now - so I'm half expecting an extremely muddy grot to come home in a few minutes.... (yes - it's still raining here!!!)

Unfortunately with the Rugby it appears that they will be playing in all different towns - so there's probably going to be a fair bit of travelling - although - he'll be able to travel with friends some weeks and some weeks we'll be playing Taxi...

Lets just hope he enjoys it as much as he's hoping to :)

First day in "BIG ROOM"!

Jade had her first day in the "Big Room" today... she chucked her usual tanty as I left her at school - but - all of the kids in her section were in her old room - so she got all confused because she'd been told she was in the big room...

When I picked her up in the afternoon, we got into the car and drove out the driveway and she said "we go back to school now???" and I said "no - we've got to go home...." "WE GO BACK TO SCHOOL!!!" hehe - I think she enjoyed being in the big room! :)

(probably helps that she's back with kids that she was with last year that all got moved up to that room when they got too old for the room she was in...)

Yes, I DID steal the camera.

I admit total responsibility for that. I didn't really get any decent photos (so far, anyway) - Rocky hasn't really flooded, and all I managed to get was a photo of an overflowing weir that I drive past, that's usually empty, and a double rainbow that I haven't uploaded. Unfortunately, it's nowhere near as GOOD as the GIS for 'double rainbow', so I'm not so sure I should be boasting about it.

Jade's been a right bitch for Tharyn. This will be the last time I go away for a month or so, so I'll be home for a bit. Hopefully that'll help. I've got to start contacting the remains of the CardXpress customers around Australia and getting them upgraded to a new PC. That'll have me away from home for about a month (seriously), so I'll probably do that over a couple of trips. Everything seems to go pear shaped when I go away... Not that it's terribly wonderful NOW. Jade's really trying to push her boundaries, and discover where the lines are drawn, and it's not much fun for Tharyn. Me being away so much doesn't help either.

I spent an enjoyable evening talking geek with one of the top geeks from Radiant, aka Breeze. These guys wrote the POS (that's POINT OF SALE, not the other usual meaning of POS 8) software that most Mobil servo's use. We talked much, and drank much beer. I am a bit inebriated at the moment, but please try not to hold that against me 8)

I'm going to have a quick rant, if I may. It's geek, so feel free to ignore it. Greg's doing an IT class at school. They're teaching him Access. Microsoft Access. OK. Yes. I understand that knowing Databases is a good thing, but wouldn't it be better teaching him IMPORTANT stuff? Like 'Filesystems' and 'Locking' and 'CPU Utilization' and, gosh, performance tuning?

The teacher is asking them do to basic Access stuff, but not (it seems to me) explaining WHY they're doing it, or HOW. Yes, I understand that understanding WHY SQL works the way it does is complex, and you need to have a basic idea of SQL to start breaking down the queries into sections, but wouldn't it be better to build from the ground up, rather than from the top down?

How did 'set this field to be an index' become better than 'this is the "most common" field in the table. You're going to want to query this the most. So this needs to be an index. It's called an index because that's what it is. If you're looking for the word "heffalump" in a book, isn't it easier to go to the index and find that "heffalump" is mentioned on pages 38, 299 and 10,293, rather than reading every page in the book to find it'? It's annoying. If you're learning IT stuff, which is basically all maths (and maths is one of the few things that is 'provably true') there shouldn't be any 'I don't know why we do this'.

Another thing that annoyed me is that Greg didn't understand square roots. He's in Year 10. He should by know understand what a square root is. I'm mildly annoyed that his old school let him get this far without knowing what a square root is. I sat down with him and said that it's 'basically the opposite of a "squared"' and drew some diagrams and I hope he grasped it. His homework was doing stuff like (3⁹ x 4³)⁶. That results in an insanely large number. So large that his calculator went into scientific notation, which he didn't understand either (3.996019499 x 10⁴⁸ - I did it quickly here 8).. so I had to explain how that works too. That I DON'T think he understood. Sigh.

When I come back I'm going to spend some time doing some basic maths with him to get him up to speed. There's nothing actually hard here. We're not doing trigonometry or calculus (yet 8) so it's all pretty basic stuff. He's probably not going to enjoy it, but once he gets the basics, all the stuff that he thinks is hard now will become easy.

I'm going to finish this beer and go to bed. G'night.

--Rog

Smart Cookie!!!

Much to Miss Melissa's dislike, Jade has been moved out of her room at school and up into pre-kindy 2.

I had to sign a form to say that I am ok with her being put up into the room as she's not old enough to be in that room yet... she'd have to be 2.5yrs old (the room is kids aged 2.5 to 3.5)... but I think they're planning on moving her out of that room once she's 2yrs9months up into the Kindy room which is 3-4yrs...

I don't understand the reasoning - as I think she's still got a fair amount of growing up - but her intelligence is apparently up there... here's hoping the maturity catches up soon! :)

(The little monster is currently running around in her Dorothy the Dinosaur hooded towel - I'd take a photo - but Rob stole the camera to take photos of the flood waters up north!!)

The fun of children.....

I now remember why it was so easy to get Jade down last Wednesday.... because she started her day at just after 5am when she came into our room requesting Dora.... she didn't get it and was told to just go back to sleep... she didn't go back to sleep - rather lay there looking like a doped up monster.....

Anyway, we went around to Damian and Jaime's yesterday for an indoors picnic, we had planned on going to the beach with the kids - but - it rained... (how unusual... it's pretty much been raining since Christmas... at least Gladstone isn't going to flood....)


Anyway, I decided in the morning that I'd try again to get Jade's hair into a head band rather than putting in the piggy tails - because it would be less painful removing the headband.... she managed to keep it on for most of the car ride....but it didn't last.....

and it was just so cute!!!

When we got to Jaime's - I told her of my efforts and she went and got out some head bands taht didn't fit her - and we tried again... it took getting one to stay on Xander's head for Jade to keep it on - again - it didn't last long..... It's amazing how different Jade looks depending on if her hair is back in a head band, back in piggy tails - or just down and flopping all over her face.... It'll be good once it's long enough that it can just be left down without anything keeping it out of her eyes... but that's probably still a little while away now.....

Looking pretty.....

Looking Cool!! (we got in trouble for saying "pretty" to Xander!)

Oh, would you just go away with that Camera, the headband is in - now leave me!

The posing pair! :)

A week at home....

Well, five days anyway...

After our trip to Sydney I knew that we were going to have a few problems with Jade due to lack of sleep....

Luckily there were no swimming lessons this week, we managed to get her down for her lunch sleep around 1pm - so that was looking good... she slept til nearly 4pm - so back to the 3hr sleeps... unfortunately that night she didn't really want to go to sleep... so we had the arguments back and forth to her room until she finally gave up....

Tuesday morning, I managed to get Jade dressed and off to school... as we were driving there Jade said "Yay.. Swimming...." and I said "no, you're going to school" "NO! Swimming!!!" - she was determined to go swimming.. that's how her week starts... swimming - then school... hard to explain to a two year old that she didn't have swimming because of a public holiday....

That night we had another battle trying to get her to sleep...

Rob left for Toowoomba on Wednesday.... I managed to get Jade to sleep after about 5mins of trying - so I was happy with that effort...

So I started thinking that maybe the key is to not have Rob around... (eheh - poor Rob) - but no... I had another battle Thursday night - although only took about 10mins...

Last night I had a problem getting Jade down... plus the phone kept ringing everytime I was trying to get Jade down.. (and don't say that I should turn my phone off - because if I did that every time - I'd always forget to turn it back on - and people would be annoyed because they couldn't contact me..)

She finally went down about 8:30 - an hour after we'd usually like to have her to sleep by (unfortunately - she's pretty much been going to bed around 8pm lately...) - Anyway, Rob arrived home at 10:30pm - and at 1:30am Jade was awake screaming.... (very unusual for her to be up in the middle of the night...) - apparently there was a "Lizard or maybe Gecko in my bed Mommy!!!!" - we attempted to get her to sleep in our room - then attempted in her room - then Rob tried getting her to sleep on the floor if the bed was the problem.... at around 4am she finally crashed our in our bed....

She must be really buggered now - Rob's snoring away and it's not waking her!