It has been a month and still no new posts. I still do not have my computer fixed, or it is fixed I just haven't paid for it yet. So, I am having to type this from Juanita's computer. If there are a lot of mis-spellings, ok, I mean more than the usual amount, then you can blame it on the keyboard and mouse, both of which I have trouble using.
I don't expect my computer to be back until after Christmas. We have Juanita's party and then Christmas to deal with, so I will not be able to get it until then. Hopefully, I will survive until then without my computer to play with. I have my new xbox and I am getting some new games for Christmas, so far I only have one, so when that happens, I will probably be playing that for a while and will not miss my computer so much.
Fortunately, I had just made a backup of all the photos on my computer before it went down, so I was able to restore them to Juanita's computer. I didn't copy any of our music files because we own most of the CD's they came from, but it is going to present a problem for Juanita's party as the only CD I have made for her has some songs the people at the party may not like. I was in the process of making a new one that did not have any objectionable lirics on it but never got around to burning it before the crash.
So, speaking of Juanita's party, that is in a few days, Nov. 25. She is having a party for he 40th birthday. She says it is because she never had a 21st birthday party, or an 18th, but I think the real reason is that it will be the first year she will be older than me. (I turn 39 next year in case you forgot.) Over here, it is apparently a big deal to have a 21st birthday party, so everyone can get drunk and make a fool of themselves, or something like that. She didn't have one and she is going to make up for it this year. She invited everyone from all over the country. She even included Laura and Penny, I think, but apparently they have declined.
So far, there are about 20 people coming, maybe more, maybe less, I have no idea. I do know that I have to cook for them all and at this point, three days before the event, I have no idea what I am going to cook. My BBQ is not big enough to cook on for that many people and my smoker has still never been used so I have no idea how long or how hot it will get when I cook with it. For the next couple of days, there is a total fire ban here in NSW (that is New South Wales for all those who read this in a foriegn language). A total fire ban means you cannot start any kind of fire, anywhere, which includes home BBQ's. You can get away with using a gas BBQ, if you do not get caught, so if there is still a fire ban when the party rolls around, I will be using that to cook anything I decide to cook. I don't remember if we had anything like a fire ban in Texas. Not a lot of trees to burn down, or not as many as they have over here. They do it when they expect hot temperatures and high winds, which is pretty much the whole time during summer. I think you can all remember the fires they had when we first moved to Sydney. Those were as bad as I have ever seen anything. All of Sydney and most of the country around Sydney were covered in smoke for about a month. I am not sure realise what that means, but I literally mean covered in smoke. You could not see more than a couple of hundred yards on most days and it went on for hundreds of miles, all the way from west of where we lived down to the ocean. Back then, we lived about a two hour drive from the water, so that was a long ways to go and the fires got as close as just across the river from us, about half a mile away. Some fires crossed the river and burned some of the houses near there, but for the most part, they were able to contain any fire that came across.
I remember going to one of our friends house, who lived in the middle of the fire zone and were forced to leave a day or so after we had been there, and we drove by some of the forest fires. You could see them about a half mile away as we drove back home and we had to detour around them to get to where we lived.
I have no idea why I have gone on about that and brought it up here on the Maeghan/William page, other than it is getting smokey here near us today and we have not heard of any large fires near us. I was talking about Juanita's party and the effect the fire ban might have on it, but that has little to do with the kids. It is just and interesting hilite of our lives we have to go through each year.
As far as I can tell, the series of events we get each year are the floods in September and October, and the fires in November and December. Then it doesn't rain for about six months and gets really hot around February. When I say hot, I don't mean the sustained heat we get in Texas, but it does get hot on the occasional day or two.
We just went through a few days where the temperature dropped to around freezing. They said it was the coldest it has been since they started recording temperatures. They had lots of snow in the moutains and to the west of here, in the Blue mountains, which are not really mountains but they will have to do for this part of the country. In some places, they had thirty inches of snow. We were just cold and it was very windy for a few days. Now, the next week, it is back to being hot.
I just had to go away for a few minutes. Maeghan had an 'accident'. We are starting to get a little worried about her. She seems to be doing 'bubbles' in her pants for about four or five months now. I have heard that this might be normal for kids who are potty trained to revert back when a new baby arrives, but it has been going on for a while now and we are worrying whether this might be indicating something is wrong with her bowels. I am really praying that it is just a phase she is going through. She goes back to the doctor next week. She was suppossed to go last week, but the doctor rang up and said she was going to be on vacation and wanted us to see a secratary or something while she was gone. We told them we were concerned about a problem she was having and really needed to see the doctor, so they rescheduled it for next week, Dec. 1. We will get to see here regular doctor at the spina-biffida clinic then, so maybe she can tell us something. Maeghan does do normal toilet sometimes, but it is not the norm lately. She always says she has to do bubbles, but when we take her to the toilet, she had either already done it in her pants or she says she can't do it once she gets there. As I have said, I am hoping it is just a phase and does not indicate anything is wrong.
Can you actually believe she is going to school next year. She will be four in February and we will send her to pre-school starting whenever the semester starts after that. (I have no idea when school is on and when it is off over here. I guess I will eventually figure it out but for now, I just follow along with what everyone tells me.) We are really not sure she will be able to attend. They expect everyone to be potty trained and ready to attend school before they go, but with Maeghan's current problem and the fact that she is still not big enough to get on the toilet herself, we might not be able to send her to 'normal' school until she can do these things by herself.
We are almost set on sending her to private school anyway. There are a couple around her that she can go to, including one just around the corner that she tells everyone is her school. She says that all the kids are waiting for her to go there so they can play with her and chase her. It is not that expensive to send kids to private school over here. The uniforms and things are almost as expensive as the schools and they are required to have all the pieces of the uniform, which includes skirts, and shorts and tops and jackets and hats and who knows what else. We were told just for one complete set of uniforms, it is around $300 and you need more than one every year. The tuition itself is just a little more than that.
The school I would like her to attend is over by where we used to live. It is a little more expensive but they are constantly adding on to it and it is suppossed to go from pre-school all the way through 12th grade. They have just recently added a whole new wing to it for high school, I think, and when I went in to get the brochures and stuff, it seemed really nice. The one near us is nice also, but it is only for primary grades and there seem to be a lot of kids that go there. More than I would think would fit at the school, from looking at the size of it. When we go by and see all the kids out playing, it seems to me there is very little organization to it, it must be freeplay time, and the kids seem to hang around in packs. Maeghan, being as small as she is and will be when she is attending school, might have problems with the older kids picking on her. I know that is something that we probably will have to live with and all parents learn to deal with, but it just seems to me that there is more of the bullying attitude these days and for some reason, it appears to more tollerated that it was in the past. Not that I have anything to compare it to, but from watchin Michael go through school and all the trouble he seemed to have, I get a little worried that Maeghan will get more of it than normal, because of her size. I guess we will just have to wait and see.
That is one of the reasons we want the kids to go to private school, although with William's current size and attitude, I don't really think he will ever have a problem with bullys. The other main reason is the lack of teaching that seems to go on in public schools. Not that I need to go into it a lot, but there is a lot of discussion over here about the number of kids who are graduating from 12th grade, and most of them do not even go all the way to 12th grade, and these graduating kids cannot read or do simple math or do anything that you would think the schools would be teaching them. Not a majority of kids, but enough that the numbers are rather alarming. And even the kids that do go on to take the HSC tests (don't ask, I do not understand it) do not get the grades that were seen even ten years ago.
Recently, they gave a group of kids a test. From public schools and private schools. The test had questions on it that were asked in the normal HSC tests given to tenth graders 20 years ago. Out of the ten questions they asked all the kids, the highest grade received was 3 on the math test and 1 on the english test. Most of the kids did not get any questions right. To me, that was really something to worry about, but the teachers association claimed that the questions were unfair and they did not teach those things anymore in the schools. I have no idea what they teach and I am really concerned about it, so I am guessing we will have to be really involved with the kids when they go to school. They did not break it down between private and public schools as to who did better but either way, that would seem to me to be a real problem.
I am being called away now to make dinner. We have a house full of people that I have to cook for and I have not started yet. I have a whole lot more to tell you. I did not even mention that it was William's birthday this past Saturday. He is now one and I need to talk about all the things he is doing and getting into now. I will try to get back on tomorrow to go through some of that but for now, I have to go. And, you know how I am about updating this blog, so it might not be tommorow, but I will get to it soon. In the meantime, wish everyone a happy Thanksgiving and I hope it is cooler there than it is here, No way to make a turkey in this heat but I will be thinking of all the good things you are doing over the holidays.
Talk to you soon
