February

4th of February: Daniel learns to bicycle! I got fed up with being scorned by fathers whose six month old was bunny-jumping the kerb on their fairy cycle, so I spent about 500,000 years running around the square with my hand on Daniel’s neck, gradually letting go until… He took some convincing and did fall over a couple of times, but stuck with it: there are some advantages to Daniel’s legendary stubbornness. As you can see in the picture, when he succeeded the pride and joy came radiating off him like he was made of enriched uranium. Since then he goes out on his bike every chance he gets. Our special little guy.

The Wilgenhoek school continues to surprise and impress us. That same week there was a special disco party for all the juniors in the evening. They were all in fancy dress (lots of knights, pirates and fairy princesses) and the teachers were all witches and warlocks. There was music, crisps and juice so a good time was had by all. Once again a nice combination of fun with a basic lesson in social behaviour.

Matthijs did the CITO (Dutch standard school assessment) test for the end of group 3 (which he is in now) and did very well with everything except spelling, where he had a sufficient. We now need to think about what to do next. He has mastered everything they intended to teach him this year, but does not yet have the independence or work strategies he needs to carve out his own course.

The first Sunday of the month the chickens came home to roost. Both Matthijs and Daniel had filled their "good behaviour at school" sticker cards and claimed a reward. Daniel wanted to go to the swimming baths and Matthijs wanted to go to MacDonalds. So we did both. Matthijs can swim without floats and is utterly confident in the water (scarily so). He does not swim quite well enough for yet to stay out of trouble so you really have to keep an eye on him. Daniel cannot swim yet, but we just festooned him with floats and he motored around like a sort of aquatic Christmas tree. Falco ran everywhere and wanted to jump in the deep end, so that was hair raising. They had a fine time and we were utterly exhausted, but when we escaped to MacD’s and they were filled with Happy additives and we slumped in front of burgers all was right with the world. Both big boys were utterly satisfied with their day and dropped like flies when we sent them up to bed.

We went out that evening to a beautiful performance of Bach Cantatas at the Concertgebouw, so it was also a treat for us.

Marjolein took the boys to a new dentist this month. Our old one had stopped working because of back problems and she needed a kid-friendly one, close enough to fit into a school day. We got a good suggestion from friends and so she went and tried them out for a checkup. Matthijs now has some adult teeth, indeed the dentist discovered that he had snuck in some new molars without us noticing. Everything was fine, so nothing happend, but the next time she will probably seal the new molars. It would be nice if their teeth turned out better than mine…

Falco is now two and very terrible. He has reached the surreal stage of contrariness where he can violently object to something he greatly desires because we happened to propose it. Sigh. He is also growing at a great rate and learning rapidly. He is now making four-word sentences: Come ‘i mee appa and see DORA". Dora the explorer is his favourite DVD and it is gradually teaching him Spanish. He has learned to count to twelve now in three languages. Hmmm. As with the other two, we notice that you have to establish the highly abstract notion of a number as a property of a group (ducks, fingers etc.) and teach the mechanical process of counting things: start at one end of the group, work your way through to the end and then finish, without counting twice. Even though I would claim that he has the concept well established by now, the counting process sometimes goes awry and you get more ducks than you expect. Colours are also appearing now and have been included in Falco’s favourite game of "LOOK Papa, COOOUW/’OUSE/CARRR/BUURUD, MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO etc. So far he does not know what noise a house makes….

 

Daniël bikes on a real bike
3 Mb, .wmv file, 30 sec.

The first discoparty
3.3 Mb, .wmv file, 30 sec.