Name

I thought I had already posted this. Here is the first rendering of his name. Spontaneous and uninstructed.

Name!

First ear infection

May it be the last! Sleeping like a baby. Lucky him. He wasn't last night, nor was I. Three out of four of us have had an awful flu. Both children finished it off with a painful middle ear infection. M got off lightly and hers was over quickly, just leaving her frustrated with "glue ear". Ola was in pain for close to 24 hours. Fingers crossed that it has passed now.

People

 Yes, terrible photos but one has to document the first drawing of a person however one can. In this case with my phone since it was drawn on a train window. Aleifr proclaimed these as people and if you look carefully you can actually see a body and four limbs. The head on the other hand...I find the head a little disturbing. Perhaps that is how he actually sees people?

 Of course once I started taking photos M had to join in too...

 Who is Billy Booksie? We don't know either but apparently he is an integral part of a local literacy promotion. The main drawcard of this event to M was that some of the teens she knows from homeschooling groups would be reading. of course, being homeschoolers ourselves we didn't end up leaving the house early enough to catch them. In our defense it seemed ridiculous to force her to stop what she was doing to go and listen to someone read aloud when what she was doing was in fact reading aloud...

 Anyway, we managed to catch the very end which was at the fire station much to A's delight. Our friendly fire fellow demonstrated some of the equipment. I must say I'm quite reassured we are in good hands should we need them. As the blurry pictures attest; this guy is fast!

 Captivation.

 Of course the obligatory sitting in the truck photo. We actually got to look inside a bushfire truck as well and he was happy to answer M's questions about the differences. After looking in every nook and cranny of both fire trucks we headed back to the local bookshop to add to our collection...

 What is an outing on a freezing wet day without hot chocolates?

Super construction

A castle as tall as himself. He looks quite pleased about it too.
Aleifr has begun to show quite an interest in writing. Mostly O's at this stage. O's and numbers. He has enough phonemic awareness to recognise that his name starts with a sound associated with o. Despite being able to pick out his name from a list of family names, he isn't convinced when we tell him it starts with A. This boy is turning out to be even more of a self-directed learner than his sister. I didn't know that was possible.

Preschool in the park

Inspired, this boy is. Ola asked what we were doing today and I answered that is was a school day as on Mondays we are usually home all day and M does some workbooks or online learning as well as her violin practice. In response he announced that he wanted to do preschool in the park, and that apparently this involved painting. In particular the paints he was given by a friend for his birthday.
Ok. So we packed some "preschool" and "school" activities and here we are. Eight degrees and windy but they are having a blast!

United Kingdom

The mushroom compost and manure piles are often Islands to Aleifr. Apparently this day the less verdant was the United Kingdom.

Alphabetics

Proud boy traced half the alphabet (and later the rest). The dry erase aspect of this weird plastic thing really seems to motivate my perfectionist children to try things they wouldn't otherwise.

Here he is

I've been putting off starting Aleifr's blog for so long (almost three years in fact) mostly because I wanted to make it a word press blog. So apparently I have given in and just added a third blogger blog. Why today in particular? Well lately Aleifr's determined disruption of M's academic efforts have changed from "look at me, look at me, PLAY with me" to more of an "it's MY turn, I want to do it" kind of vibe. So today I told him that if he would just let her finish the page she was working on then I would get him his own maths book. Boy, was that exciting! He polished off 8 pages of Singapore Earlybird Mathematics 1B in less than 10 minutes. Yes, that's right. Eight pages. I'm quite sure he would have done more if it weren't for his current handicaps making holding the pencil difficult. One hand is still tender from the juicer incident and the other got a splinter in it from the park yesterday. He's been favouring his right hand so much since hurting the left in the juicer that it was quite gratifying, if amusing, to see him holding the pencil in a left handed pincer grip. Poor lad. I hope both his hands are better soon.