Investigating Shadows

Stringbean went to her gym session today. Enjoyed it as ever. I hope we can find something decent for her once we move. There is some sort of gymnastics centre in Huntingdon, so ought to be able to.

Anyway, after the class, we were on the way back to the car in Adsa’s car park. sun was shining, and she started talking about her shadow (it’s a topic that comes up pretty often lately). She started off wondering how big it was – she seems quite interested in measuremnts etc. often asking how big she is, crouching down etc. – not that she understands it when you tell her 106 cm or whatever. We went on to comparing her shadow with mine, then she started crouching down, and looking at what happened to the shadow – ending up with her lying flat on the ground. We marked out the height at different points with bits of twig, of course then daddy had to do the same so we could compare. The woman putting her son into her car by us loooked very bemused by this We talked about what happend to the length of the shadows, and I mentioned the related idea of the sun changing position in the sky through the year.

when this sort of thing comes up I try to present her with information that is probably just abit beyond her understanding – sort of planting little seed that we will come back to as she makes sense of more things. We had another discussion the other day about the mooon the sun and the earth. It was early evening the sun was still up, and the moon was in the sky. she still thinks this is a bit wrong as the moon comes out at night So we had a little chat about the Earth going round the sun, about days, about the moon going round the earth.

What i like is the way that a few weeks or months later bits of info will come back out again, as she has finally made a bit of sense of them.

afternoon was Tots club with Helen and Butterbean, I whizzed about posting DVD’s of the Fanatsy Education program from the other day, buying some more DVD discs due to demand and reorganizing SB’s party.

It’s her 4th birthday on 25 Feb (day after mine), with all that was goign on we were abit disorganised and late and so had had to arrnage her party for a bit later in March. We’d arrnaged it at a local soft play type place. But with our slowness, then waiting for their invites to get to us, then Melrose, we came back to find that one of her best friends at nursey had organsised her party at the sametime – arrgh!

It’s really joint birthday/leaving party We wanted as many of her friends from nursey to come as she has been quite upset few times about leavingthem all behind so we had to reorganise. I’d have liked to have had the party at home really, but with her nursey friends, other friends from Helen’s ‘new mum’s’ group her ante-natal group, many of who have been getting together all this time, plus other friends it wasn’t an option number wise. In a normal situation we’d just said we have to only invite fewer friends.

Of course the normal venue couldn’t accomadate a different date in our timescale, and in the end we have had to resort to
Wacky Warehouse. Now as a place I don’t mind these, ok on quiet weekday afternoon anyway (a Saturday afternoon is some version of hell…). but the food at the parties is dire and there is not that sense of shared experince becuase there are other kids there and there is not much shared party experince except the eating. However, SB does enjoy them, and will probably be very happy with it, so that is really the point I guess . She did say of the original venue the other week that she thought she was getting a bit big for it – probably becuase it doesn’t have such a big high slide.

We feel a bit bad at times taking her away from all her little friends, not that it can be helped. But in reality she would lose touch with lots of them anyway come September when lots will start school I imagine. And she will get new friends in her new home – probably easier than her parents. and she’ll see alot more of her grandparents, which will be nice.

OH ******* moment – the desktop has refused to boot up properly all evening – it just presents a variety of BSOD’s. We almost bought a new one before Xmas (it threw a major wobbly around BB birth), but then it started behaving better so we put it off. And now of course we are up to our eyes in house buying. It’s apain because we use the desktop as the server, though most stuff is backed up.