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Thursday, 8 July 2004
Family day
Well, as I expected, today has faded into evening extremely quickly. We've had a lovely day, from the walk up the hill to Christopher's pre-school, through watching Ella stumble around the lounge as she practices being a toddler, to a lunchtime 'picnic' at Beth's parents' house; the weather wasn't quite conducive to sitting in a field - in fact, it's been fairly tempestuous round here, with thunder and lightning earlier (but fortunately no power cuts).
As a result, we've been indoors for much of the rest of the day. Christopher and I have been playing with Lego - we tend to build Robot Wars-style models, although we don't limit ourselves to smashing-and-bashing machines! With Ella's rapid development, and new 'features' appearing day by day (she can say "hello" and "bye bye" now) it's all too easy to forget about how quickly Christopher's growing up, but the time I spent with him this afternoon was an epiphany. Over the time he's been playing with Lego in his bedroom (the safest place for everyone, as it's well away from Eleanor, and he gets ten or fifteen minutes 'quiet play' before bedtime) he has become very adept not only at putting the bricks together, but actually creating representations of what he has in mind.
This afternoon, then, he build a robot entirely autonomously (save for a little advice from me about interleaving bricks), which is the first time I think he's done this. Once we'd finished it, I asked if he'd like to write about it in his new blog; he said 'yes' but also wanted to take photographs of the robots to put in a 'gallery.' The rest of the afternoon was spent taking pictures of the models in various places, and preparing a gallery to display them - we were both pleased with the results.
(In case you were wondering, Christopher's robot was Lifter, although he also developed the rather ingenious start/stop system for Psycho's actually rather hazardous clockwork spinning blade. He was responsible for the names, too.)
Another day nearly over, then. Here are today's little web-oddities...
- Amusing explanations for 'terrorism' signs - thanks to my sister, Cath!
- Appalling 70s interiors - this has been emailed to me a couple of times - I'm sure I can remember the days of orange and brown, although maybe the faded photos just made things appear that way...
Oh.. and before I go - you can now access this blog using: http://blog.mus-ic.co.uk, and the gallery by typing: http://gallery.mus-ic.co.uk.
I would add that the people who look after my domain forwarding (http://www.virtualnames.co.uk) played no small part in helping me get this sorted, and I'd recommend them to anyone who's thinking of registering a domain, as they're very helpful and patient (considering my ability to ask dim questions!)
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Posted by james at July 8, 2004 8:30 PM
