2006 Noyce News

Falco is very into his computer at the moment, strangely enough. We have no idea where he gets that from. He is very fond of the ancient but fun “Jazz Jackrabbit” and is way better than I ever was already. Not bad, given that Daddy has been playing computer games since he got at Tandy TRS-80 for his twelth birthday.

He is fun to watch when he is playing, totally involved, squeaks of excitement and cheers of triumph. The film of his brothers shows similar moments of exultation and despair.

It was an exciting month at scouting. Daniel had a sleep-over weekend with the Beaver scouts: they stay in the clubhouse for a whole weekend to prepare them for camping out in the summer. They had a science weekend with a “Professor” who came and explained things to them and a visit to Nemo, the Amsterdam science museum. He had a great time but not a lot of sleep: just like Matthijs after his first night away with scouts.

Matthijs became a Cub and was initiated by running an obstacle race, solving a puzzle by cooperating with a group and taking a solemn vow (to always do his best and help others) with his hand on the Wolf-Head staff.

We had a meeting with his teachers and his play-therapist at school this month. He is doing much better socially and the playground problems are gone. He is still very twitchy and restless in class and spends a lot of time in his head playing fantasy games. The play-therapist will help him to strengthen his fantasy-reality border and we and the teacher will reinforce that. He also has difficulty persisting with and completing tasks.

In this meeting and others like it we have had great benefit from running the meeting from an “Issue List”. This is a list of all the “problems” that the teachers have with Matthijs and the concrete actions that we have agreed to take to solve them. We have also determined together that we cannot and should not pursue everything at once. The list allows the teachers to express their frustrations and get some acknowledgement for them while, making it explicit that we will to do nothing whatsoever about most of them.

Choosing the pursue the “persist and complete” problem and parking the others was so liberating that one of the teachers immediately came up with a highly creative solution: they will make a castle picture with a knight climbing the wall. Each time Matthijs completes a list of sums (longer each time) the knight goes up a step.

Daniel’s teacher is also concerned about him: he seems to forget things very easily (even where he sits) is a very slow worker and does not get on with things unless the teacher chases him up on them. That is not a big problem in group 2, but group 3 will be more demanding…

The end of the month saw us all getting a really nasty lurgi one after the other… you do not want the details. Fortunately Marjolein and I only had one day of overlap so the household did not go entirely to pot. We did manage to all get better in time to take the rest of the rabble to Nemo, they had of course wanted to go ever since Daniel told them about his visit with the scouts. They had a whale of a time, lots of buttons and moving interactive stuff: very much like my childhood fascination with the Science Museum in London.