MWNews 77

This is Maeghan and her teacher, Mrs. Redmain. Mrs. Redmain is retiring this year. Not that it really matters but Maeghan thought Mrs. Redmain will always be her teacher. She did not understand that she will get a different teacher next year. I was looking for a better picture of Maeghan that related to her school, as this post will mostly be about Maeghan and school, but this was the latest one I have. I have not uploaded the latest pictures I have, but I will be sure to do it on the next post.

My Internet connection is still well under par as I have been trying to post this message for about a week and have been unable to upload any pictures. It is something I am just resigning myself to until we next move. There does not seem to be any solution to getting a more reliable or faster connection. Telstra will not give you any information on what the real problem is or how long it will be before they upgrade. I live with dial up for work and this unreliable wireless connection for everything else.

Ok, I am going to get right into the reason for this post. It may take a while to get through because just thinking about it makes me cry and it is hard to type when I cannot see the screen or the keyboard. And before anyone starts reading ahead looking for the bad news, it is good news and there is nothing wrong. And I have already started crying because I am so proud.

Maeghan had her end of year program last week. It is the end of the year when they give out awards and certificates to all the kids. Maeghan got her certificate for completing her first year of school. I probably have to explain a little about what the school years are like in AU.

All kids start in what they call Kindy. You would think it was like kindergarten in the US but it is really more like first grade, although most of the kids are kindergarten age. Primary school consists of Kindy through 6th grade. Then they have secondary education which is 7th through 10th grade. I think I have mentioned that 10th grade is all you are required to complete in the school system over here. 11th and 12th grade are for those school kids who want to stay in school and who show some sort of aptitude for learning. As many of the teachers tell the students, if you do not want to be in class in the 11th or 12th grade, then don't come in. The teachers do not have to time or the discipline to try to manage kids who do not want to be there and are not going to try to learn anything.

I kind of think it is sort of a good plan but then I really think they should be required to go through 12th grade. This way, they only get students who are going to try and participate in class, so the kids get a better experience, but it does leave a lot of kids on the street who have no business being out of school or out of any kind of structured environment. With the government giving them money when they turn 16, I think it causes more problems with people staying on the dole and not doing anything to make their situations better. But that is a whole other discussion and not one I want to talk about now.

Along with Maeghan receiving her completion certificate, she got her name in this special paper that lists all the kids in New South Wales (think of it like a state in the US) who have completed the Premier's reading program. They have to read so many books a year to be able to get their name in the paper and Maeghan read about 4 time as many as was required.

On another side note, Maeghan got her report card a couple of weeks ago. She did really well with several outstanding marks and no marks below satisfactory. I think the lowest mark she got was in something they call drama. I have no idea what that is but Maeghans mark was 'sometimes participates'. Most of the other things in this grading category, she got either 'usually participates' or 'always participates'. You have to remember that this is Kindy, so grading students on their academic achievements is not really something that is practical. She did well in Math and of course reading. They do not give the usually grades of A, B, C or things like that but a more generic method of things like completed grade level requirements or exceeded grade level requirements and even a category or outstanding achievement. Maeghan got mostly exceeded grade level and I think one outstanding achievement. Nothing below completed grade level, so it was a good report card.

So, back to the awards ceremony. I have to mention that we did not know this ceremony was going to take place. Apparently, they sent a letter out to us telling us about it, but we never received it. So, not knowing it was happening, I went to work and Juanita dropped Maeghan off at school. It was just happenstance that someone mentioned to Juanita that there was an awards ceremony that day. She had William with her and Natalie but they decided to stay for it anyway, although I am told they considered leaving several times and William is William and not easy to handle in the school environment. She did not have the camera or anything with her besides her mobile phone. Both Natalie and Juanita took pictures with their phones and I have not loaded them to the computer yet, so I will have to wait to post them to the site.

Having said that, most of what I have to say now is hearsay from what they have told me went on during the awards. I was not there, so I did not see any of this. And just so it is clear, I am really upset that I did not get to go. Not that it was any one's fault and I cannot blame anyone, it is upsetting that I missed all of these awards and will never get those moments back. But I suppose it is ok. Having not been there, I am sure I can embellish the story in years to come without the limitation of knowing the exacts facts.

Near the end of the program, the principal got up and said she had an announcement to make. With all this buildup, I am sure you can imagine what was coming, but I want to tell it anyway.

The principal said she was giving out the Principal's Special Award this year, apparently not something they do every year. I may not have the facts straight on this, but I believe she said this is the first time she had been able to give the award to a Kindy student. In the past, it has always been one of the upper grades, year 4 or 5, but this year they were giving the award to Maeghan. My understanding is, the award is for outstanding student in the school. All grades, all classes. It is not necessarily for the best grades or leadership or participation but it is an overall award for all these things and more. The outstanding student in the school.

It was apparently kept secret and no one knew the award was being given nor that it was being given to Maeghan. Not having been there, I cannot say what kind of reaction Maeghan, Juanita, or the crowd had to this announcement, but I am sure if I had been there, I would have been embarrassing myself as much as possible.

I think they had called Maeghan to the stage and she had to stand there while the principal made the announcement and read the award. Juanita said Maeghan was really embarrassed to be up there. I can imagine her smiling at me in the crowd and holding on to her dress and being bashful. I wish I had been there.

I am going to take a photo of the award and post it soon. It is just a certificate and we had it framed, but I will type out the words on the award so you can know what it says.

It says

Principal's Special Award

2008

Awarded to

Maeghan Jernigan

for

Her indomitable will to succeed despite the physical challenges she faces. Maeghan provides an inspiration to us all through the courage, determination and persistence she demonstrates in every aspect of school life. Maeghan was an absolute star in the K-2 concert held earlier this year. She out-danced everybody on the stage.

Helen McDonald
10th December, 2008
Well, that is what it says. Hard to type that and not start crying. I will take a picture of it and post it, along with some of the pictures they took with the phones. Hopefully, they will come out and be able to be read in the blog.

I am not sure what all this means to Maeghan. Probably not a lot, but as you can tell, it meant a lot to me. I am so proud of her and the award really came out of the blue for us. I have always mentioned that everyone in the school seems to know who Maeghan is. We still do not know why that is, but it still occurs everyday, people coming up to her and saying hi. I think Maeghan has grown tired of it and all the attention but there must be something she is doing as everyone keeps coming back to acknowledge her.

I suppose I should mention a few other things. Maeghan just had her ballet concert a couple of weeks ago. I have most of it on tape and DVD. I will pull out some of the parts with Maeghan in them to post them on my YouTube channel. I don't know if I can make them short enough to be accepted but I will try.

One thing to note from the concert, when they were giving out the awards at the end of the concert, when they announced Maeghan's name, she got a standing ovation. The only one who did. Ok, maybe it was just me standing, but she did get the loudest and longest clap. Even Miss Jilly, her teacher, commented on it. I ran out of battery power in the middle of the awards, but I got a lot of it on my camera video, including Maeghan getting her award and the comment the teacher made.

Maeghan had one big part in the show but the part with her class, she was in the back and you could not see her. I have it on film but you cannot really see Maeghan in that one skit. In the other, most of it is a closeup of Maeghan, so you do not really get a sense of what everyone else was doing during that part. You get the gist of it, but Maeghan is the focus in my video. There was another guy they 'hired' to film the whole show. I am not sure what he got or if it is available to everyone. He was by no means a professional photographer but he seemed to have better equipment that I did. A few times during my filming, the camera, or actually the tripod, was acting up and the movement of the camera is jerky. But for the most part, it is just fine. I did have the issue of being too close to the stage so that my camera could not take in the entire stage. I might have missed some things at the edges, but again, overall it is a good video.

I have to go now. I have been asked repeatedly during my typing of this to do different things around the house and I probably should do some of them. I had planned on putting together Juanita and mine's new bikes we are getting for Christmas but it appears I will not get the chance. We are putting them together now because we need to ride them a little before Christmas so we can get used to them. We are planning on taking them with us camping so I don't want the first time to be back on a bike in two years to be while we are camping and trying to pull the kids behind us.

Explaining that, we got the kids a trailer sort of thing that attaches to the back of the bike that allows the kids to sit in it and be towed. I have been told that it is not that difficult but I was told that by someone who rides their bike everyday. So, for me, it will near impossible to pull them around for very long, hence the need to start getting used to it now.

William has a couple of stories but they will have to wait. I am writing down reminders right now, so I will not forget later, but you never know if I will remember where I wrote it down.

Anyway, I need to go.

So, until next time

Talk to you later

MWNews 76

It was Juanita's birthday yesterday. We did not do a lot. Opened some presents, went to the club, went shopping and then came home. I did not even make a cake but I have not been feeling well for a few days, so we stayed at home and ordered pizza for dinner. William wanted to know where his presents were, he thought it was his birthday again. I gave him a present to take to Juanita and he was happy to do that but then turned to me and asked where is my present. We had a hard time convincing him he was not getting any presents.

Juanita got a lot of clothes and a game for the Xbox. She has the Pinata game and plays it all the time. I rarely get a chance to play any of my games. Only if I get up really early or she is out taking the kids somewhere. She plays this Pinata game all the time and I think she is a level 57 gardener or something. Not that means anything to me, I have never played it. She might be even higher than that but she lets Maeghan play her game and Maeghan likes to buy and see things she is not suppossed to. She looks for things that look funny and buys them. Since everything looks funny, she buys a lot and uses up all of Juanita's money. So then she sells the same things she has just bought and I think that is probably not good for the game. But as I say, I don't know anything about the game.

They came out with a new version of the game. Pinata's in trouble or something like that. I bought it for her for her birthday. She has been playing that ever since we gave it to her. About 16 hours straight now. I think she came to bed last night, but I am not all that sure.

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Not that we will be doing anything, but it is thanksgiving day here, not in the US, that is Friday, but I am not going to celebrate it on Friday just to be like the US. No one in AU celebrates thanksgiving and for some reason, when I bring it up, they want me to explain what thanksgiving is. I say, 'its Thanksgiving', but that does not seem to suffice. They seem to think it should have some special meaning or something. I get tired of trying to expain it.

For the first few years, I tried to have Thanksgiving over here. I even invited a few people a couple of years, but it was never the same and, of course, there was no football on TV and I had to all the cooking. And I mean all the cooking. They wanted things like pork roast and prawns and other strange things. And it is not really cold or even chilly over here, not that it was that way in Texas either, but when it is really hot and you are trying to have roast turkey and mashed potatoes and dressing, they just are not as good when you are really hot.

And don't get me started on the dressing. They have no idea what it is or what you do with it and I am of the tradition that you make enough to last to almost christmas day but when I did that, I was the only one to eat it and there was a lot to eat. They have no concept of cornbread over here, so making cornbread first and then turning it into dressing was just really strange to everyone who saw me do it.

So Thanksgiving is out. It is just too much trouble to go to just for myself. And I always thought of thanksgiving as the best holiday. I suppose I could try to get the kids into it, but they will probably be made fun of at school and with the anit-american spirit that permeats the world, they might get more than just being made fun of. Not that there is a lot of anti-american sentiment in the schools or in AU for that matter, but you do run into it more than you could imagine. I hear american jokes all the time at work and then I hear them mentioning that I am from america, so the jokes get a little quieter then. I don't mind, but bringing thanksgiving into the picture and having the kids have to explain it to their friends is probably not something I should put them through. So, no more thanskgivings for me, or at least no more unless I am in america.

William is in the other room hassling Juanita. She is trying to play her game and he is jumping on her. He just wants someone to play with all the time. He has his new cars and his new car track, but since the batteries do not last long, he doesn't get to play with that a lot. We spotted his favorite car today when we were cleaning his room. It is a red Cars car, from the movie and it is the one he carries around the most, or whenever he can remember where he put it down. We are going through potty training with him right now and his room has to be cleaned several times a day so he does not have an 'accident' on any of his clothes or toys. We had him mostly trained last year but Juanita had to go away to Tasmania for a couple of weeks and he wore diapers that whole time, so he forgot about potty training. Now, we are going through it again. He is good most of the time, but sometimes, he just forgets what he is suppossed to do and does wherever he might be standing at the time. A lot of times, he does actually go to the bathroom, but he doesn't manage to get his pants down in time and goes all over the floor. I guess we should be thankful he actually makes it to the tiles in the bathroom instead of on the carpet, but we now keep a mop in the bathroom just in case.

Maeghan has her ballet program next week, I think. She has been having extra practices on Saturday and after her normal class. She apparently has been choosen to do something special for the show but I have not been told what nor do I know if she is doing it alone or in a group. She is learning some Rockin Christmas song or something, the name of which escapes me at the moment, but I have it on a christmas cd that I have been playing in the car and whenever that song comes on, we repeat it several times so she can sing along and learn it. I am not sure she will learn it in time. Which is strange, because she sometimes comes home from school and she is singing a new song we have never heard of, so she does not seem to have trouble remembering new songs. I think it is the hand actions and other things she has to remember to do during the song that is confusing her. At some point, I know she pretends to be playing a guitar, but other than that, I know nothing about it.

The show this year is expensive. I have some idea why but as this is Juanita's church, I will just say the price of the tickets tripled this year. Last year, they had it at a school. This year, it is at the church, which the teachers parents own and are pastors of. You would think it would be free, but I suspect they are trying to make money off of this show while the school only charged a nominal rental fee for the hall. But I am sure there are other ligitimate reasons for the increase in price. It will be the first time I have been in the new church building. They only recently opened it and it is not quite finished yet, so I am sure they are looking for money to pay off the debt.

Maeghan has started being a little shy at school lately. She does not want to attend morning assembly. She will stay with whomever has dropped her off until the classes start to go to their rooms. I don't know why this has occurred but I have also noticed that more and more of the kids are grabbing her and trying to pick her up and do things to her or with her. Maeghan can be running and playing all the time but there are a few kids that as soon as they see her, they try to grab her and hold her and Maeghan will immediately come back over to one of us and hold onto or hide behind us. I suspect it is only a few kids that do this, but the ones that do are so persistant, they have even tried to pull her out of my hands while I am carrying her. I would like to say something to them or their parents, but then they will probably take it out on Maeghan while I am not there. Some of these kids are really annoying with what they try to do to Maeghan. These days, she does not even try to play with her regular friends unless the teacher or one of us is around to keep the annoying kids off of her.

If you look at the youtube movies, you can see her standing with her class and see how much smaller she is than everyone else. We have always had the problem of everyone coming up to Maeghan and ooohing and ahhhhing over her. I think it is finally starting to get to Maeghan and she just wants to be left alone. I am hoping either she gets over it or something happens that allows us or the teachers to tell the other kids to leave her alone without alienating her from the rest of her class.

Next year, she gets a new teacher as her teacher is retiring. I have not me the new teacher yet, and I don't think we actually know who it will be yet, but I hope she will be okay and maybe even get away from the kids that treat her like a little doll or something that they can play with all the time.

Anyway, she still seems happy and does not say anything about any problems even if you ask her about it. So we will just have to wait and see what developes. School ends for the summer in about two weeks, so she will have a lot of time to be away from her friends and she will be in first grade after the holidays. Maybe things will be different then.

There were some other things I was going to write about, but I seem to have forgotten once again. I am thinking of putting a little pad next to the computer where I can write down ideas I have to talk about so I can look at it when I have the time and am in the mood to write. I haven't done it yet but I might at some point so I do not forget.

It has gotten quiet in the other room and I here the door opening and closing. I am not sure what is going on but I should probably go check it out.

So, until next time,

Talk to you later

MWNews 75

I am back for another post. With only a day between. Must be because I am not feeling well. The weather changed to cold from very hot and I seem to have a headache and a cold. But I will trooper on. I am forgetting what it was I was going to write about, but maybe it will come back to me as I type.

The last two pictures are from the Hunter Valley Gardens. We went to their Christmas lights show and went early to see the gardens. We have been to the area many times but we have never actually gone into the gardens. That costs money and there are enough things to do outside the gardens to keep us busy for a while. Actually, there are only a bunch of shops and a playground and some picnic areas, but the shops are interesting and the kids like to play, so we never actually make it into the garden. Plus, we usually go there when we do not have money to spend and want to go for a drive, so this is a good spot most of the time.

Inside the gardens, then have a lot of themed areas. The area where the pictures are from are the storybook gardens. Lots of nursery rhyme displays and things like that. I took a lot of pictures. Not very many of the gardens, but a lot of the kids and the displays. I tried to take pictures of the lights, but most of them did not come out very well. I do have some movies taken with my camera of the kids dancing. I put them up on You Tube. The first time I have put anything on YouTube. I am not sure it is a good idea but they are there if anyone wants to see the kids doing some silly dancing. The quality is not great but it is ok. I would paste the link here but I do not remember what it was. Just look for things posted by Catf1sh39. I have not used You Tube a lot, so I cannot tell you how to search for thing, but maybe, if anyone is really iterested, you can try to find them. I think I posted three. As soon as Juanita sends the link to some of her family and they are able to watch them, I might start posting some more videos to You Tube. But maybe not.

Lets try to remember some of the other things I was going to write about. William has started saying he is the baby. Most of the time, it is just after he did something wrong or he has gotten into trouble. He will say 'but I am the baby' to try use that as an excuse for whatever he did wrong. I think he gets it from things Juanita has said. She tells Maeghan that it is not right for her to do something and she says William was doing it to, so Juanita says he is the baby and he does not know any better. So William has started using that as an excuse. When he has done something wrong, like throwing his cars at someone or running off in the shops, when you yell at him for it, he will say, 'but I am the baby', and give his sad eyes routine.

That is another thing he has gotten really good at. The sad eyes, dropping the lip and if that doesn't work, he walks over to a corner or goes and hides in his bed to show that he is upset about getting yelled at. If all that fails, he will start to cry and try to make you feel guilty. We usually just laugh at him. He is really good at the sad eyes and droopy mouth. Is is just so cute to watch, you have to laugh at him. That normally makes it worse but sometimes he will start to laugh to. He has been putting himself to bed for a while now, when he gets into trouble. I think it is because that was the main punishment for a while so now he just walks off and goes to bed without being told. I might have mentioned that in an earlier blog, but you never know, or I never know. So it is much more fun to repeat myself.

Maeghan has started doing some more grown up things. She has developed this look that she gives me that seems to indicate that I am the stupidest person in the world. Usually when I am doing something silly, she will give me this look until I stop. I don't think I am doing anything differently than I have always done, but now she seems to think I am being silly or stupid or something. I don't know where she gets that idea. Maybe some of the kids at school have said something to her. They seem to think me playing hopscotch and running around the school is not something a grown up should be doing. Or when I am walking away from the entire school during morning assembly and I am waving and hopping and skipping in from of the whole class, behind the teachers backs who are trying to get the kids settled in. I don't see a lot of the other parents doing that, but I always assume they do it on the days when I am not there. Maybe that is why she has started giving me that look. It just seems strange to me that now she thinks I am silly when before I was just being funny.

For those who do not know who Michael is or that he has a new girlfriend for the last three months or that he now lives back here in Sydney, then the fact that his girlfriend has just had a baby will mean nothing to you. Just so I don't have to do a lot of explaining, she has a boy, Michael is not working, and I think they are going to move in with me. But enough said about that.

A little bit of news about this computer. I have downloaded a lot of things that are helpers with me dealing with this new operating system. So, it makes a it a little easier to do some of the things I have been having trouble doing. Some of them are really neat and some of them are just things that seem interesting but I will probably never use. But, the gist of it is, I can use the computer a little better than I was. Not that I am starting to like it, I still think it was a mistake to get it, but I might over time not hate it as much. I will never get used to the keyboard and may decide to get a new one, but Juanita has started downloading stuff and that is how her old computer got so cluttered that it barely ran, so I may have to just turn this one over to her and wait until I get a real computer to work on. I still do not know how to delete things that I have installed. I can make them disappear but I am never really sure they have been deleted from the computer. There are a lot of little things that I am still not sure how to do or if there might be a better way of doing it but I am slowing getting it to the point where I can accomplish most of what I want to do.

My internet situation is still not any better although the speed of this wireless connection suddenly got really really fast for no apparent reason. I am not sure how long it will last, but for now, the speed is fine and I have no need to dial into work anymore. I think the cause might be that I went over my limit last month and my speed was slowed. Since this is a new month, the speed has gone back up and I will be slowed again when I go over sometime in the middle of the month. I can find no evidence this is why is was so slow for so long, but that seems to be the most likely cause.

Tuesday is Juanita's birthday. Right now, I have no plans for it since we had the last party for William this week. We might go out to dinner but with the kids, that is normally not a pleasant experience. I thought about taking them to the club and playing puttputt or something, we have never played before and the club has a brand new course, but that doesn't seem like a thing to do for Juanita's birthday. We went bowling one year and might go again this year, but that was a combined party for several people including Juanita and it was a good place for a group of people to go. Juanita wants to go into town and go to the big casino there, we did that last year, but I have not made any arrangements for the kids to stay with anyone and that is more money than I want to spend, especially on a weeknight where I have to go to work the next day. It is a two hour trip if we take the train and it is about $50 to park if we take the car, so going into town for any reason is not something we do often. I work in town but not in the city itself. I work in one of the outskirts of the town, about 20 minutes from the city, so when I say I work in the city, it is not really what you would normally call the city. I suppose none of that makes since, but for anyone who knows Sydney, they might know what I mean.

William just came in and interupted what I was going to write, so I am now confused and disoriented but maybe if I sit here for a while, it will come back to me.

This weekend, we have done nothing. Say on the couch and played video games all weekend, except when work called and I had to fix some things. As a quick side note, it has always puzzled me when people say they have trouble with IPL'ing the wrong system. I know that will mean nothing to most people, but it is apparently a common problem faced by an operations staff. Well, I got called today about a system that would not shut down. I signed on and had a look at it and decided there was not really a problem and shut the system down myself. It turns out, I was looking at the wrong system and the one I shut down was not the system they were having problems with. So, forever more, I will have first hand knowledge of how they can have problems IPL'ing the wrong system. Now we can go back to the regular channel.

Maeghan, and the rest of us but Maeghan was the only one who was invited, went to a Christmas party last week. It was in Newcastle, about an hour from here. She was invited because of her association with the spina-bifida clinic although we all know she does not have spina-bifida. (I thought about spelling that several different ways in the hopes that one of them would be right but I decided I didn't really care if it was spelled right.) We had no idea what this party was all about but the invitation mentioned that only one child was provided for and if we brought anyone else, including ourselves, we would need to bring a picnic lunch or something. We decided that was just silly and we went with William and both of us.

The party was held in an arean or showground type building. It had a big empty floor with seats all around it. The seats were blocked off and the floor was mostly a big empty space. We noticed that most of the people there were carrying chairs and baskets of food. We started to think we should have heeded the invitation and brought something. It turns out that there was a stage at one end of the arena and the whole open floor was were all the people would sit and listen to the music and other things on the stage. A chair would have been nice to have.

Along the walls were different tables with food and drinks. All of it was donated by various food places and outlets. When we came in, we had no idea what we were suppossed to do, so we just followed the lines. They had sausage sandwiches at the first table, and then sack lunches at the second. Teh sack lunch consisted of a single sandwich with ham, cheese and butter on it. I think it was more to hand out the bags with the adverstiments on them than the actual sandwich. At the next table, they had donuts. Australian donuts, which are good if you have never had them before and are great if you can get them hot and fresh. These were not hot, not fresh but were free and they had lots, so it was not that bad.

On the other wall, they had ice cream bars, little cans of drinks and some fruit juices and milk. We had a little bit of each. And I have to say, the sausage sandwiches were about the worts piece of sausage I have ever had in my life. They were just horrible and were over priced at free. They should have been giving us money to take them off their hands. I cannot describe the mushy, tastless, undercooked mess that they sausages were. It was just horrible. It made the donuts taste great.

It turns out the whole point of this evening was the presents they were handing out to the kids. We are talkng about big bags of expensive presents that were handed out to all the kids who had invites. Yes, the bands were nice and there was a funny magician at one point, but for the most part, people were waiting for thier number to be called so they could line up and recieve these presents. And then leave as soon as they got them.

The numbering system they used to not overwhelm the people handing out the presents was based on some unknown criteria we never figured out. Maeghan was in group five. About an hour into the program, they called for group one. That group appeared to be about half of the people there. The line for it went all the way around the room, and it was a big room. It took about an hour and a half for that group to go through line. And the presents tbere were getting were hugh. I am not sure what all was given out, but there were little learning computers like what Maeghan has and those cost at least $70 each. There were big doll houses and lots and lots of other things. I did not see it all and I did not realise what most of it was until we were leaving and we saw some of the things the kids had received.

Group two apparently had only about ten people in it. It went through in less than 5 minutes at which point, they called group three and four at about the same time. That took about 20 minutes to go through and then they called group five. It appeared to be the rest of the room, which was about half empty by this time. We were near the entrance to the line when they called for group five but there was a whole group of people who had lined up in anticipation of being called that had formed just before the entry. That did not really matter to Juanita as she took Maeghan and walked into the line without stopping for all those other people. It only took about 5 minutes for her to get to the place where the bags of presents were being given out. Apparently, if I had had William in the line, we had stepped to one side when they called for Maeghan, he might have been able to recieve a bag of presents also. He did get a large stuffed animal for just being there, but he missed out on the other presents.

Maeghan recieved a remote controlled Barbie car and a portable dollhouse. It was a big box that had all sorts of things in it and you put it together and then folded it up so you could carry it all with you. The car was a real remote controlled car for a Barbie doll. The doll that came with it was not Barbie, but the car says Barbie on the side of it, so the doll must be some friend of Barbie's, or so I assume. It even came with batteries. She loved it, although I have not seen her play with the dollhouse yet, but she played with the car until the batteries ran out. I think she is in the other room playing with it now.

My question is, where did the money come from to give all these kids these expensive toys. I am sure some of the kids deserve the toys and it might be the best thing they get all year. But there were a few thousand kids there and these were expensive toys. I am sure they were all donated but it they had to go out and spend money buying any of these toys, I am sure there are better ways that money could have been spent. But, I am sure the kids loved it and there were a lot of kids there, including Maeghan and William, who just wanted to dance and sing with the bands. They did not know anything about the toys that were coming later, but even if they did, I am sure they would have been happy just dancing up front. Juanita had to take them to the front as the speakers were very loud up there and I could not stay in that area for very long.

All in all, it was a good night, even if the food was bad. The kids liked it and they are happy with the gifts they received. If we go again, I know to bring chairs and probably something decent to eat. It lasted for four hours and that was a long time to stand up with nothing to do except listen to loud music and watch kids run around all over the place.

It is getting time to cook dinner and I am still not feeling well. Plus this keyboard is starting to annoy me again. It seems the space key is not big enough for me to type with any speed as I keep missing it and having to go back and add spaces. If you see words that have not been separated, that is the reason why. And, as I do not plan on going back and spell checking this, you will just have to live with them. For now, it is time to go cook spagetti and meatballs, and take some more medicine, so I guess I will be going.

Until next time,

Talk to you later

MWNews 74

William is three now. Last Tuesday. He seems to have not taken any notice of it. If you asked him before hand what Tuesday was, he would tell you it is the day he gets presents.

We had a party for him. None of his friends were there, but then again, I am not so sure he has any friends. He goes to daycare, but he never mentions any of the names of the people there and we do not know anyone who has kids his age. So the party was mostly adults and a couple of older kids and one of Maeghan's friends. Since I am not having a party for Juanita's birthday, maybe we can call it a joint birthday party. IN any case, it went well.

William got a lot of presents. We got him a Cars doona (blanket for the US) and some Cars pictures for his walls. He got at least four Cars cars, mostly Lightning McQueen. In case you did not realize it, he loves Cars. Everything he owns has something to do with the movie or has some cars theme. You will rarely see him when he does not have some kind of car in his hand. One of the ones he got for his birthday is rather large. It is too big to carry in his hand so he carries it under his arm. Everywhere. When we have to get out of the car at the shops or for anything, you have to tell him to leave his car in the car and the first thing he says when he gets back is where is my car. You have to give it to him before he will get in just so he knows it is still in there. Otherwise, he is going to go look for it until he finds it.

He has lots and lots of cars. Not just from the movie, but about a hundred hotwheels, faux hotwheels and any other type of car that exist. As I said, he carries them everywhere and we find them everywhere. The other day, someone borrowed our trailer for something. It is normally kept in the garage and the kids play in the garage all the time. When the friend drove off with the trailor, a trail of cars fell out all the way up the street. William had put them in the gaps behind the lights and handles and anywhere he could stuff or hide them. We collected about twelve of them up the rode and are not sure if there were more lost further along the path of the trailer.

Anytime anyone passes one of these big bins that have all the hotwheel type cars in them, they get one for William. They are usually only two dollars or less, so you can just pick them up as you leave the store or checkout. We have tried to stop doing it but when they are less than two dollars, it is hard to pass them up and not get one. It is a simple gift and he really loves it. Maeghan gets a little jealous sometimes but we try to get her a present whenever we can. Lots of little dolls or other stuff she likes. She likes makeup and there are usually bins of these things in the same place that have the cars so we sometimes, not often, get her something she can use. She has a lot of those now that have never been used so we have basically stopped doing that, but she still gets the urge to put it on occasionally.

The party was nice. Of course, I did all the cooking for it. Sausages, honey-soy wings, onion dip and hot sauce, and lots of other things. No one actually ate the hot sauce but I mostly made that for me anyway. Woolworths, the big grocery store chain here, along with Coles, had all their jalapenos at a special price. Normally, they are $12 a kilo, but they had them for $1.98 the other day, so I bought all they had. Woolworths is normally the only place I can find them and they are usually very poor quality. I expected them to be old and useless but there were perfectly ok. Now I have to figure out how to use them all before they go bad. I made the hot sauce but I still have a lot of them left. Probably need to make something soon. I think I have a way to make jalapeno poppers and then freeze them, but I have never done that, so I am not sure if that will work out.

But back to the party. We had, I think, fifteen people over, plus kids. I was cooking, so I did not get any of the good sausages or the chicken wings. I didn't have a lot to begin with but they were gone as soon as I set them out. Two kilos of wings and two kilos of sausages. They were the small chicken wings they have on sale sometimes so they did not have lot of meet on them anyway. But the sausages were really, really good ones. Something called a Kranski over here. I am not sure what they would relate to in the US but they are good and I got them from an actual butcher, or actually a vegetable shop that now has a deli. They had these sausages on sale for $4.95 a kilo for about two weeks. I bought at least ten kilos during that time and they are all gone now. They have gone back up to the normal price which is $12.95 a kilo. I think they were old or something but they were really good. I might still have one in the fridge that I can have for breakfast, now that I am thinking about it. Good sausage. Or maybe it is so good because the normal everyday sausages you get over here are just so bad. Mushy, meatless things that are not really worth cooking. I cook them for the kids but rarely eat them myself. Even the kids are tired of them and they request a cabanossi sausage these days. They are kind of like smoked sausage but not really. They are ok and are the cheapest of the real sausages we get. Anything after that, and you are paying at least $8 a kilo.

So how did this turn into a food and cooking entry again. Seems I do that a lot. Back to the kids and Williams birthday. He got lots of presents. In addition to all the cars stuff, we got him his second favorite cars themed toy. There is a new cartoon on called Roary. I am not sure where it is made or if it is anywhere else in the world. The shows have just been starting over here. He got hooked on it when one of Juanita's friend gave him a DVD that he downloaded from the UK. We had never heard of the show but it is about a little racing car called Roary and there are other cars and people and things that all talk and have adventures. I went and looked for it on the internet and downloaded a complete version of all the shows, but as far as I know, there has only been one season of the show and it is just now coming to AU.

Anyway, William loves this show, mainly because it has something to do with cars. They have started selling some of the toys in the stores, although very few stores have them. As far as I can tell, they sell out as soon as they get them, so the show must be really popular. Maybe there will be a big push for Christmas but we never see advertisement or anything about the show or the toys. We found them by accident when we were in Kmart one day. They had a car that talked but there was an add that said there were a lot of other toys that were coming. So far, we have not seen any of them in Kmart but we did find a racing track in Big W. Big W is sort of a mini version of Walmart, same advertising logos, same themes and I am not totally sure it is not owned by the same people. But, a lot of people are against having Walmart over here, so maybe they just changed the name and did this in secret. There are rumors all the time about Walmart opening a store somewhere in AU, but it has not happened yet.

The race track we saw is a very short track with very big cars, which is perfect for a 3 year old. Everyone loved it. Not only William, but the kids that were here and most of the adults. All it does is have the cars race around the track. You have no control of them and they do not do anything except run around the track. There is a speaker box that gives random comments on the cars, it is very loud, and I am not sure how it gets triggered but it will say about ten or so phrases in any random order. You have no control over that either. So, basically, you start the cars, by pressing down on the helmets of the drivers, and then set them on the track and they race around. You sit back and watch the go around and around the track with some voice making strange commets on the action. Things like 'it looks like a win for Roary', or 'the race has started' and other things like that.

There is one major flaw with these cars and track. They use batteries. And when I say they use batteries, they use a lot of batteries. Each car has two AAA batteries in it. They last about 20 minutes. I have no idea why they only last that long, but we have used three different brands and the longest was about 25 minutes before the cars just stopped moving. During the party, we went through a package of twelve that I had bought, thinking that was a lot of batteries and William would be able to play with the toy for a long time. Now we have bought batteries everyday since his birthday and they continue to run out after 20 minutes or so. I am planning on getting rechargable ones, but they will have to be constantly in the charger and they will probably wear out pretty fast also. I am not sure if they were designed this way, or it is just a bad design that uses a lot of power, but it makes the cars almost no fun to play with.

William loves playing with them when they are working and will immediately run them until the batteries run out as soon as we get new ones, but I am not sure how long he will keep that up. I think he will get frustrated with it after a while. In fact, he just came in here asking for new batteries for his cars. He brought me some AA batteries and said to put them in there. I had to tell him we will get some more today.

I did have a lot of things to say today and was going to type a lot, but it seems I am being called away to make breakfast and play with the kids. So I will have to cut this off at this point. I was going to talk about the picture and where it was taken and some things that Maeghan and William have started doing, but it will just have to wait. Something to look forward to I suppose.

So, until next time

Talk to you later

Ok, one more note. I just ran spellchecker on this and it did not report one single problem. So if there are a lot of mispelled words or incorrect usage of things, it is not my fault. I tried to check it and nothing was found. I must be getting used to this keyboard or I am just and exceptional speller today.

Talk to you later

MWNews 73

It is the middle of the night and I am working on something else, but I thought I would give this another try.

Seems I am finally able to upload pictures to the blog. As many of you know, or maybe none of you know, or maybe there is no one here to actually know, I lost my computer recently. It blew up or lost the ability to actually start. I think the problem is the power supply or the video card but as the computer is three years old and this is the second time this has happened, I opted to buy another computer instead of keeping the old one alive. It still sits on the desk as a sort of monument to to all the fun I have had in the past, but it no longer houses a hard drive and therefor, even if I wanted to fix it, it would not start.

For some unknown reason, I went and bought a Mac. Maybe it was the seductive curves or the clean lines and pretty pictures. Maybe I was seduced by the large screen and no actual computer box. Maybe it was because Juanita wanted one because it was pretty. There was no real good reason to buy it but I know how a 25 inch or 23 inch or whatever the biggest one they make is, sitting on my desk and I am typing on it now. Even the keyboard it different, very thin and the keys are very small and thin. I make typing harder, I think, but I have no proof of that.

Having no experience with or having never even signed on to a Mac, I can tell you that it is different. I have yet to find the part that is better, but it is different. Things are not where they would seem to be and I have no idea how or why they work the way they do. I can't say they are better, I cannot even say they are worse. I suppose I will get used to it but I keep trying to do things that would be normal for a PC but have no meaning or no equivalent action on the Mac. The simple act of closing a file does not seem to work as it puts it in the task bar and never really closes it. Maybe I am just doing it wrong.

I do like the way it installs it products. It tells you what to do once you run the appropriate install file. Most of them are .dmg files but that has only been my latest experience. Having installed thousands of applications on a PC, there appears to be the one method for doing it so far on the Mac. I suppose I will learn more about it as I go.

I seem to keep saying that a lot. I will learn more about it as I go. To be honest, I am almost to the point of installing Windows on the system and dual booting. Maybe later but I cannot even figure out how to uninstall an application. It appears to be just drag it to the trash can but I have no idea if that works or if I am just getting rid of icons. I bought a new external drive so I could store things on it, but when I told the Mac to backup the files to there, it uses the entire disk just for the backups. It says I can copy files to there also, but this supposed to be a bad idea, so now I think I have to buy another external drive just to keep for storage.

And just so I can continue the complaint thread, as we know, I do not have broadband connection yet for the house. Only this lousy Mobile phone network that varies in speed from non-existent to very, very slow. That has been the real problem with getting back into the blog in that all my pictures are on the new Mac and when I try to upload them via Safari, the Mac equivalent of IE, it times out before it actually sends the pictures. I finally had to download Firefox, something else I have never used, in order for it to stay active long enough to actually send a single picture. But one finally made it. Maybe it is because it is the middle of the night and there is no one to compete with, but it took all day to finally get the file sent.

Bottom line is, updates may not be as often as I would like. The amount of trouble it takes to try to get an new entry in place just may not be worth the hassle. We will just wait and see. I think I will have to take all my pictures to work and do it from there. One thing in Firefox's favor, it does seem to load a lot faster that Safari and it is a whole lot easier to use. After I learn more about it, maybe it will be a preferred browser. Maybe not.

So, this is supposed to be about the kids. Maeghan seems to thing she can use the computer so it is vaguely applicable that this is about her, but not really. She is not allowed to touch the new computer or she can only do it if she is sitting in my lap while she enter things. All she really knows how to do is click on things but she does know which ones to click on to make things work.

Speaking of working, I am about to have to do something over there so I will have to make this really short. And as I type, I am beginning to really hate this keyboard. But anyway, so quick news about the kids.

William spent a couple of days in the hospital due to some virus or something. He was running a pretty constant temperature for two days and they doctors never did figure out why. The sent him home and said if it did not clear up, to bring him back. He finally got over it after about a week but we have never found out what it might have been caused by. Maeghan or any of us never got sick so we are hoping it is over. There were a lot of sick kids at the hospital but most of them just have the flu or colds, William never had any symptoms other than the fever.

Maeghan had her school fete the other day. More like a garage sale than anything entertaining but we went and it was OK. Too hot and humid to really enjoy anything but the kids seemed to have fun.

She has been selected to something special in her ballet play. I am not sure what it is yet, but she has to go to extra practices each week to learn the routine. This is in addition to her extra practices for the normal class. We have film of last years but the battery on my camera only lasts for an hour and last years went for almost two hours. I only filmed the parts that had Maeghan in them but I think she will be involved in a lot more this year so I am going to have to find a way to plug the camera in while it is filming. Maybe I will do a better job than last year but the camera we have is not all that sophisticated so it does not do that great a job anyway.

I have to go now. Not only do I have to work, but typing on this keyboard really hurts. It is too flat to the desk and is not raised like a normal keyboard should be. How do all these Mac people do this and like it. Guess I will get used to it.

Until next time

Talk to you later

MWNews 72

I don't know if I mentioned that Juanita is back in the last post. I might have, but I cannot be bothered to go back and look so lets just say she is back and we are happy to have her. She tried to sneak into the house when she came home but when she went into where the kids were, William jumped up and said Mommy! and came running over.

After giving her hugs, he said 'my name is William', as if Juanita might have forgotten. Maeghan got hugs and kisses and was carried around. William spent the next several days asking where mommy was anytime she was not in direct site. I think he was going to make sure she did not leave again.

It was touch and go for a while about whether Juanita's mother would come back with her or not. In the end, she decided to stay in Tasmania, but we were a little worried for a while. I asked her if she was going to be ok staying with the kids. She said she could be our live in baby sitter. I didn't mention that I meant staying with the other kids, at their house. Since she decided to not come over, we didn't have to cross that bridge.

Not that we do not enjoy having her over, and Juanita's father for that matter. We really like having them around but I think they are wary of upsetting me all the time and tend to not be themselves or are not comfortable living in our house. I know I do all the cooking and Juanita's mother is to comfortable with that and tries to make up for it by cleaning all the time. It is not really a problem, but she tries to clean up as I am cooking and most of the time ends up being in the way. But really, we don't mind having them here and will probably end up taking care of one or the other of them at some point in the future. Hopefully, we will have a big enough house before that happens.

Juanita has been back for a week now and we have not been to the park once since she has come back. We went almost every day while she was away but I guess we have had other things to do since then and have not had a chance to walk anywhere. Maybe today, if Juanita decides to get dressed. She is cleaning the house and this might be a day when she does not go out anywhere all day. The kids are getting restless wanting something to do, so I think we will be going out soon.

It has been raining over the weekend. We just finished a long weekend for labor day or memorial day or something. I can't remember any of the Australian holidays. It rained the whole time so we did not do much. We went for a drive yesterday but other than seeing this really sophisticated electronic dog, not a lot happened. Juanita and I enjoy seeing the houses and seeing which ones are for sale or rent, but the kids get bored real quick and generally just go to sleep when we go for these types of drives.

We drove to Woy Woy and stopped to have coffee there. That is where we saw this dog. It is a life sized border collie and looks just like a real dog. It reacts to things you say or do with it. For example, if you scratch its ear, it will raise its neck up towards you and then start scratching with its leg. When you stop, it makes little whimpering noises and tries to get closer to you. If you hold something in front of it, it will take it in its mouth and pretend to be chewing on it. Mostly, it drops whatever you have given it, but it tries to roll it around in its mouth like it is playing with it. If you ask it to shake hands, it will raise it paw. When you stop talking to it or petting it, it will lie down and occasionally, raise its head and bark. It was a really sophisticated dog.

Other than that, there was not much to tell about the drive. We did see where a tree branch had fallen across some power lines and was starting to catch fire. Several people had stopped and they were calling the fire department. I didn't realise what it was until I was already driving under it so I gunned the engine to get out of the way before we stopped and looked. I didn't see anything on the news about it, so I assume it did not cause any major problems anywhere.

We found a couple of places we had never seen before, which is really the whole point of these little trips. We used to do it all the time, but with the price of petrol and the fact that we have been almost everywhere locally now, we don't get out for these drives as much as I would like to anymore. And, there is the kids, who are just plain bored by the whole thing unless I find places to stop all the time and then it is a chore to get them out of the car and then get them back in to drive some more.

We found a little beach area that we did not know about and it was even patrolled by lifesavers when we drove passed. There were lots of people there and we wondered how they could stand it as it had just rained and it was not very warm and the water I think is at 17 degrees this time of year, so it must have been a really desperate experience for all those people who were in the water. We will probably not go back to there as the water seemed to have a cliff type thing right at the edge where, if you went more than ten feet into the waves, you dropped off to water that was four or five feet deep, instead of gradually rolling out and getting deeper. The location was nice, if maybe a little hard to find, but I would not want the kids getting in the water at that beach. But, there are plenty of other beaches that are closers and better suited to having kids play in them, so it is no great lose not going back to this one.

Of course, the kids wanted to get out and play. We told them it was raining, but since it was not raining when we actually said this, they immediately pointed this out. I said look at the water running along the side of the rode but Meaghan pointed out that they were not going to play on the road, they wanted to play in the sand. Hard to argue with that logic, so I just had to be the bad guy and say no. She went to sleep shortly after that. William had already been asleep and was wide awake but he did not say anything from that point on. I could not see him, but I could imagine him sitting in the back sulking.

Sometimes, on these drives, we try to keep the kids entertained. William is learning a lot of new songs but he does not sing them correctly and kind of repeats himself a lot. Maeghan knows all these songs and she sings them correctly and loudly to try to drown out William, and to show off that she knows the songs. This gets William upset and before long, we are telling both of them to be quiet and not more singing. So, then we have to keep them entertained in other ways.

One of our favorite games is to spot the animals in the fields. Both of them like this game and they look for horses and cows and anything else they can find. By the way, my keyboard seems to have stopped working correctly and I am spending a lot of time retyping things. If this goes on much longer, I am going to have to stop typing.

Anyway, they like looking for the horses and cows. One time, a few weeks ago, we were looking at the cows and passing a field that did not seem to have anything in it. William said cows and pointed at the empty field. We said we don't see any cows but he said cows again and pointed at the field. We said we do not see any cows and asked him where he saw them. He said 'the cows are in the trees'. I almost had to stop at the side of the road. Just another one of those things that kids that age say that are just so funny and truly amazing when they come up with them. Even Maeghan started laughing at that one.

The kids are really starting to play up now and this keyboard thing is starting to really bug me, so I am going to have to cut this story short. I am not sure what else I had to say, but I am sure there was a lot of it. Guess it will have to wait as I think Maeghan if plotting Williams demise even as I type.

So, until next time

Talk to you later

MWNews 71

Juanita comes back today. Its been about two weeks, or maybe more. As Maeghan said a couple of days after she left, 'its a good thing we have all these pictures of mommy 'cause I was forgetting what she looked like'. I debated whether to tell Juanita about that or not but finally broke down and told her yesterday. I knew it would make her cry but I told her anyway just to let her know how much the kids missed her. And me, of course. But she gets back sometime today and we are busy cleaning the house so it is not a total mess mess when she gets here. The problem with that theory is that she does not see what it looks like now, so she cannot tell how much work we are putting into cleaning it up. Might take us all day, but she probably will not be here until late tonight anyway. I am going to try to keep the kids awake for it, but I think the real problem will be keeping me awake until she gets here. I am ready to go to sleep now and it is only 10 am.
On another note, did anyone notice how bad my typing was in the last post. Not that it is really good at any time, but it seems the last one was particularly bad. I gave up trying to use the spell checker on this a long time ago, but I think it is time to re investigate how to do it. I have the MSWord tool to write blogs from there, but I have never tried it. Maybe that will be a better option. At least it might make it readable. Of course, this one might be just as bad and I can't tell until I post it. Seems to me there must be a better way to do it. I know if I find a way, I will come to rely on it and then it will stop working. But lets hope I get better sometime soon.
Maeghan is on school holidays this week and next. She thought the weekend was her holiday and told me I forgot to take her to school on Monday. I tried to explain it was two weeks and not two days but I don't really think she understands the concept yet. She only knows that things are sometime later and since we always tell her to wait a minute before we do something, and those minutes can sometimes last hours, her sense of time has been totally screwed up by us. But, she can read a clock, which is more than most of her brothers and sisters could do even when they were still in school. I assume they can read an analogue clock now, but I can never be sure since everything is mostly digital these days. Maeghan will go into her room, where she has an analogue clock, and come out and tell us what time it is. Or mostly, what time it is. She has trouble with anything after thirty past the hour since we normally say that is something like 20 till 2 or something like that. I think that confuses her. She knows 25 after, but not 25 till. As I write that, I cannot really blame her as it is confusing me right now. But we will get over it together, I suppose.
William will still go to day care on Thursday. They do not close for the school holidays like Maeghan's old day care did. At least, I think he will be going. I am not all that pleased with them at the moment and since we are a week behind in payments, they might take this opportunity to not be pleased with me and we will come to the agreement to not send him anymore.
I wasn't all that in favor of sending him anyway. He is only two and will start going to school soon enough. I thought he could stay home with mommy until he starts preschool at 4, but after spending the last two weeks with him, I can understand the need to have someone else take care of him at least one day a week. Not that I got to do anything on the one day I was without kids, but I was looking forward to it when it came. William is OK most of the time while he sits and watches TV, but I start to feel guilty about having a TV as a baby sitter, so I get him going on something else and that is when he starts to get rowdy and naughty and you end up yelling at him for no apparent reason other than he has just thrown a bucket of popcorn all over the room or he jumped off the lounge and knocked the bird cage over. Or he has thrown his cars into the window or just little things like that. Anything he can do to cause you to not let him out of your site for any amount of time, he will find a way to do. Makes it hard to work, but what can you do.
Yesterday, I found that the HD channels on the TV has one that is kids programs all day long. We don't have cable and the kids programs normally end around 10 and start up again at 3, but I found on ABC2 that they show all the programs all day long. Some of them are repeats of what they showed in the morning, but not all. Maeghan and William sat and watched the entire day and I finally got several hours work done. They are in there right now watching it again but as you can tell, I am not working, just writing this entry. Which, by the way, I started several hours ago, but have uploaded photos, photo shopped them (is photo shopped a word for adjusting the pictures?), and finally begun to write this. You can see it was well worth your wait.
By the way, the picture I have used is from the Arakoon camping trip (the last one we took). This sign is about three feet from the front our tent. We had our own exclusive beach access. I am sure if the park had been crowded, we would have had a constant stream of people through our camp site going to the beach, but I am certain we will not stay that close to the beach anytime soon. I told you about the wind we had while we were there. Well, the next week, they had an actual gail on the coast. I am not sure if it hit where we were, but it was in the area. I am not certain we would have survived. The wind we had was bad enough.
I have lots of other pictures from the trip, over a hundred, so I can post some of them in future posts. I makes it kind of hard only posting one at a time as I take more pictures all the time and I want to post them also. So I never really get all the pictures I want into the blog. I have considered putting them up on some web site, but I have over 4000 pictures on my computer and to upload all of them and catalogue them and do all the things you need to do to put them up would take some amount of time I do not want to consider. And if I choose to only post a few of them, how do I decide which ones to post and then how do I remember what I have already posted and where I put it. As you can see, it is a real delima. Guess, some day, I will figure it all out. Not today.
I took the kids for a walk last Sunday, just for something different to do. We have been going to the park about every other day, and if not to the park, then to McDonald's so they can play in the playground and I can have a coffee in peace. Well, since I have run out of money for McDonald's and don't have enough petrol in the car to continue to waste it, I decided we could go for a walk to the servo. Now, there are several australianisms in that last couple of sentences and normally, I would take the time to point them out and explain them. But, as a token of how much I have settled into to everyday life here in Australia, I will let them go and not bother to type out an explanation. Either that, or my back is hurting from sitting up and typing all this and I just cannot be bothered to explain them.
The walk was not a long walk, only about 2k. That's two kilometers for those who don't speak metric. Don't ask me how long 2k is as I don't really know. It just seemed like something I would call 2k. Might have been longer, probably was shorter, but we walked to the new group of shops at the other end of the road. I took the pram, (see, always thinking ahead) and the kids rode most of the way. Maeghan walked a fair bit of the way there, but we were next to a major road and I could not trust William to stay with me, so I put him in the pram. He tried to walk back, but only lasted about a hundred yards before he wanted to get back in the pram.
There is a KFC at the shops, and a Pizza Hut, chicken place and Subway, but no McDonald's. So the kids had chicken nuggets or whatever it is they call them at KFC. While we were there, a family of about 30 people came in and filled the dining room. I am not sure how they got there as there were only three cars in the parking lot and they did not look like they had walked from anywhere. They ordered lots of food and were there to have a good time. I am not sure going to KFC is a real destination for a good time but they all seemed to think it was a real treat. Then again, with the prices of KFC, it might have been the families once a year outing for all I know.
We were just about finished when they came in but we had stayed around a while to listen to the music and rest up for the trip back. From previous posts, you might know that Maeghan is quite a dancer. Not so much lately, but she can still dance when she feels like it. William, it turns out, also likes to dance. And he thinks it is hilarious when I dance with him. I am not sure why. Maybe he just enjoys watching me or maybe I just look ridiculous, I am not sure which. They were playing some VH1 or something on their big screen TV, all the fast food shops over here are putting in big screen TVs and showing either music videos or sports programs all the time, and we were dancing to some of the music. Not all of it as some things they play are really bad, but William seems to like the head banger stuff and Maeghan will dance to anything with a beat. So we danced, and the family that came in laughed and then kept pointing at William, I am still not sure why, until we decided to leave.
It only takes about half an hour to walk back, but on the way, we go by the park where the kids like to play. So, we spent another hour there while they played. I think it was an hour but I do not really know. I fell asleep on the bench and was only awakened when William told me he had hurt his head. Maeghan said he had fallen on something, but I never found out what it was. We decided to go home from that point. All in all, it was a good walk and we might have to do it again someday. I am not too keen on the walking beside the major road, but there is nothing else around to walk to, so it would seem this is our only choice. We could walk the other way to the grocery store, but that is further and only had the grocery store there when you arrive. And it is a small grocery store at that, so not a lot of excitement in walking there. The only other choice is the coffee shop, but they are closed on weekends as it is in the middle of an industrial area and only caters to the workers in there. I am not sure how they will make money in that location, but they have just opened and maybe they know something I don't. We went there once, driving, and it was OK, but nothing to write home about. Then again, maybe it was as I am writing about it here.
I am going to have close this now. My back hurts and I am typing worse and worse as I go. Not sure if you can tell. It might look all the same to you as you read it, but I keep having to go back and over type things all the time. And besides, I can hear William and Maeghan starting to get each other into trouble, so the cartoons must have worn off for now. I will have to find something for them to do while I finish cleaning the house.
So, until next time
Talk to you later

MWNews 70

This is our previous camping trip to Wombeyan Caves. This is the exit to the cave tour. I am not sure how to spell Wombeyan, but since you are never likely to visit there, it is a safe bet that any way I spell it, you will never know the difference.
I was going to put some pictures from the recent camping trip, but apparently, I have not downloaded them off the camera yet. I was trying to find a picture that has a recent image of Maeghan and William. I could not find one that has them close enough together so you can compare the size. Then again, they are never close together for very long. One of them will always do something to the other so that they have to be seperated. I would say they fight like brother and sister but Maeghan does not really fight, or so she will tell you. It is always something that William is doing and she is totally innocent. I haven't actually caught her at it, but I am fairly certain that she baits William into doing things that will get him into trouble. Being, older, smarter and yet still smaller than William, she can usually maneuver him into doing something that will get him yelled at. Then she can be seen as the sweet princess that she is. It works out well for her.
I don't think I mentioned the Wombeyan cave camping trip. Must have been during the dark times when I was incapacitated and not allowed to enter ner entries into the blog. We made that trip around Easter this year. I have lots of photos from the trip. I really need to put up some web albums, but then again, who would be interested except me and I already have all the photos.
The Wombeyan caves are about 4 hours from here. It was a nice place and we think we will go back sometime. Of course, they had caves. None of which you could explore for free, but we sent on one of the tours and it was nice. Juanita and William stayed at the camp as she was not feelikng well and I didn't think I could manage William and Maeghan at the same time. We camped with Natalie and Adam and Angela and three of the grandkids. In the picture is Anna. She stayed the last two days with us after all the others had left. We spent the first two days yelling at all the kids and trying to keep them from running off. When we first arrived, we were the only ones there. We got there on the Wednesday before Easter and everyone did not start showing up until Friday and Saturday. By Sunday, the place was completely packed. We had spread out a little to save room for the others that came on Friday, but even then, we were packed in so we could barely get out of our camp site between everyone else's tents.
We had a good time and learned a lot about out new tent we had just bought. It took almost two hours to put it up as the instructions that came with it were in some engineering code we could not decifer. We ended up looking at the picture of the tent and trying to make it look like that. After we had it up, and had all the poles and connections made, the instructions finally made a lottle sense, but there are a few places where it says to connect two poles and those poles do not exist. Now, after doing it twice, I think we can manage it on the next trip.
But I was going to talk about Maeghan and her doctor this time. Seems I have wandered off the beaten path again and got into another camping story. I suppose that is not so bad. William has just come into the room and grapped my arm, yes I am doing this from home, another long story. I think he wants something to eat. Means I will probably forget everthing that I was going to type, but I have to go and feed him now. Actually, I am hungry but I am sure he is too, so I will take a break and find something interesting in the kitchen. Not that you will notice anything. Be back soon.
Ok, I am back. Now where was I. And for all of you who live for the culinary parts of these messages, I am only having leftovers. Some sausage, some rice and some potatoes. Threw them all into a pan, stir fried them for a bit and added some hot peppers, after I had taken out a token portion for William. And no, I am not going to go into another tirade about the quality and quantity of hot peppers here in Australia. For some reason, Australians seem to think that people who eat hot peppers, and they call them all chilis over here, just do so to get the heat. So none of them have flavour and non of them are really hot so it really becomes a waste of time to even buy them and cook with them, but I keep trying.
Ok, a little tirade. Anyway, I was going to talk about Maeghan and her trip to the doctor. It was not all good news this time but not really bad news either. A lot of doctors saw her, or so I am told, and some of them seemed to have concerns. They were not pleased with the way she is walking. They indicated that if she was bigger, this could cause a lot of problems but she has avoided the problems because of her small size. They are not sure what is causing it, but they are scheduling an MRI sometime in the future. At this writing, we have not received anything yet, but they said it would be a couple of months. They scheduled a new appointment for her in six months, in Februrary. We do not know if it is something to worry about or if it something she will get over. Actually, I don't think the doctors know either. We are still mostly wait and see with Maeghan as no one has been able to predict what will or will not happen with her from the beginning.
She did get a wheel chair this time. They seemed suprised that she had not already received her customized version and gave them one of thiers until it actually arrives. Not that she really needs a wheel chair. They gave it too her because she gets tired easily but I think she just takes advantage of the situation and tries to get someone to pick her up just for the cuddles. She can walk with no problems and does not get that tired that often. Part of it might be that her parents are old and overweight and can't carry even her little weight for very long. But maybe she does need it.
I am told that when she got it, she immediately could maneuver it around the halls and rooms in the hospitol. She does wheelies and spins and donuts and enything else she can think of that might be fun. Since we brought it home, she terrorizes people at the malls, running up and down the isles and running over peoples feet and just generally getting in the way. And everyone appologises to her for getting in her way. She can push past people and run over their feet and they will turn to us and say how sorry they are and they will try to do better and not get in her way. Nothing is ever her fault, but I think we established that back in the beginning of this blog.
So, we wait for the MRI to see if it tells us anything or if they can come up with a new plan for her. I don't recall what the specific things are that they are worried about but she seems to favour her right side and she rols her feet from side to side when she walks, almost to the point of walking on her ankles. She has never had strong ankles, or legs or feet or anything else for that matter, but I think that is what keeps her from running normally as she cannot land and push off from her feet flatfooted, if that makes any sense. I am not that worried but I have had all her life to prepare for anything that might come up, so maybe that is why I don't get worked up about it. Of course, that is just the front I put forward for her and everyone else, but my personnel feelings go beyond what I can express to others.
Juanita is not here right now. And when I say not here, I mean not even in the same state or even on the same land mass. She is in Tasmania. Now, if you think about it, I have mentioned that William has come in and pulled on my arm and I might have given other hints that Maeghan is at school or doing things around the house and at home. You could correctly infer from that, that I am here alone with the kids while Juanita is in Tasmania. Which is precisely the situation I am in at the moment.
Before we go jumping to conclusions and wondering what has gone wrong between Juanita and myself, I have to say that nothing is wrong. Juanita's aunt died this week and she went over to be with her mother. It was going to be way too costly to send the kids over with her, they have to pay full fair these days, so I said they could stay here with me and I would work from home.
Well, the stay here with me part is happening but the work from home seems to be taking a back seat. I do not get a lot of work done having to watch William all the time and both of them at night. It has only been a week but I am so far behind with my work that I am just going to ignore it for a while. Maybe it will all go away. My only backup support goes on vacation at the end of this week, for three weeks, so if Juanita does not come back soon, I will be alone in supporting everything at work and alone with the kids all the time. One would think I should be looking for a new job soon. Hopefully not. I have told them I can do my work at night, but after taking care of William all day, I am too tired by the time I put them to bed. Which, by the way, is suppossed to be 7:30 each night but I am fairly certain they have not gone to bed before 8:30 on any given night. I tell them 7:30 but they somehow manage to put it off for as long as possible. Maybe I should try to actually put them in the beds at night. Who knows, but I do know their mother has a lot to answer for when she gets back.
Just kidding honey, in case you are reading these from over there and I am not nearby to explain. And if you are not reading these, then I am telling everybody else it is all your fault the kids do not go to bed on time. And, that they do not take baths or clean up after themselves or get to school on time.
Again, kidding. She may not come back now just to spite me.
Ok, it is time to go pick up Maeghan from school, or almost time. I am sure William has gone to sleep in the other room, I haven't heard anything break in a while, so I will have to bundle him up and put him in the car. It is raining here now and has gotten a little cold. I forgot Maeghan's rain coat this morning but she has a jumper in her bag if she remembers it is there. Hopefully, she is not too cold and wet. They were having a teddy bear picnic today and I am not sure what they have done since it is raining. There is no lunch room or large assembly hall at this school. Just a small stage and room that only holds about a third of the students at a time. They probably have gone in there.
Maybe next time, I will update everyone on how I have realy coped with being alone with the kids for weeks at a time. That is assuming I have survived.
So, until next time
Talk to you later