Alex is a very unlucky person. At least it seems that way at times. A couple of months ago he broke his arm while playing, and luckily his broken arm healed very well. A few weeks ago it was the turn of his other arm. Once again a broken arm, this time the left one, and once again a visit to the hospital, a cast, and lots on inconvenience.
Meanwhile that have already removed his cast, but because the bone was not set very well he now has a strong plastic cast around his arm. Just make provide a bit of extra security for the time being. This way his bones can mend a bit better.
Category Archives: Family and friends
English classes
Alex has some extra English classes twice a week. I bring him to the classes in the afternoon, and enjoy a one hour run (around 7.5 km) and then I pick him up again and we walk home. Today Alex exited the class with a very strange story. During his class the kids needed to think about some fictional person and apperently some girl thought of the fictional name ‘Alex Berg’. Very very strange because his sirname does not exist in Spain, and is even hard to pronounce. This can’t be a coincidence. Probably his name was mentioned at the beginning of the class and somehow kept lingering in the girls mind, and then the ‘random’ name was easily selected.
Monarch butterfly
It took quite a bit of preparation and quite a bit of time, but we did it! We ‘hatched’ a couple of Monarch butterflies at home! Months ago we started by getting seeds for the correct plant that is used by the butterflies. It is the only plant they will lay their eggs on and the only plant the catterpillers will eat.
Slowly the plants grew and they even got some flowers. Then suddenly we hit the jackpot. 5 little catterpillers were walking around the leafs. After a couple of days only two remained, but these were growing fast. In about a week the catterpillers were very fat and started to create their cocoon.
One year more
Uf, today it is my birthday! I’m getting old. 45 years already. An old fart.
This birthday is in the middle of lots of chaos. A pandemic with viri everywhere. Kids that have been grounded for months. Tickets to the main land that gets cancelled all the time. A strange year! My with for this birthday was simple. A nice family photo that represents the times in which we are living right now. Nice for later.
As an additional cherry on the cake we also received some other good news. Alex finished his school year very well, and today we received this notes. All his notes were 9s or 10s. We are very happy with that. Alan also has some good results. The can add and substract all by himself!
Schoolwork at home
It could have been so easy. It should have been easy, but it is not. I’m talking about the schoolwork our kids get to avoid getting far behind. It looked so logical. Use the internet and just do lots of things from home. It should work, but it has mostly been very frustrating. It is unbelievable that almost everything that could go wrong really does go wrong.
Our kids school uses an app to communicate with the parents. We managed to log in on the app, and then the problems started. The entire interface was customized. No menu, no normal buttons. It took me a couple of days to (by change) figure out how to change the active chapter of a digital book.
Then we have the errors. Of course you can have a typo somewhere, but tasks that need to be returned with incorrect answers required are truly demotivating. Some questions require a true or false, and only allow you to continue if you give the wrong answer.
English. The professor is not a native, but reading simple tests displays a lot of errors that can easily be picked up. It’s not tomato or tomato, but “Tomatoe”. Unbelievable. Out of every three pages with questions one page has one or more errors.
To finish it all off we get PDF’s with additional exercises. For some reason these have huge URLs in them that you need to copy. Manually.
It is clear that the current situation is new for everyone. The idea is to keep the kids occupied so they will not lose to many of the knowledge they have. Next period they will probably try to make it all up. For the parents it is a bit more frustrating. Work during the day and in the evenings solve problems so we can do the schoolwork together.
Alan – Quarantine
Alex – Quarantine
Arm
Oh no, Alex had music classes today. We are very happy with his progress. He is able to play a couple of songs perfectly on his keyboard. After music Alex went to play in a park nearby. Running around on a wooden boat suddenly made all our days a lot worse. He had some very bad luck and his leg got stuck behind something while running. He took a tumble towards the floor, around two meters lower. The result was a broken arm. We went to the hospital immediately and there they put his arm in a cast. It was not a very nice break, so we hope it will all turn out okay. In 10 days they will check the result. Fingers crossed.
Relationship improvement – Pizza
Lets go out to eat some times to have some time to get closer together.
That was the idea. Once a month we wanted to go out to get to know each other again. Leave the kids at home and enjoy life like we did before the hectic of family life took over. We were discussing this idea in the car one day, with the kids in the back semi-fighting. We thought that the kids were not paying any attention to us, but suddenly Alex claimed that he thought it a good idea to go out to dinner once in a while, and that he also preferred to go without Alan.
Finally the day came, but because of a heavy calima we decided to stay close to our home. The streets were literally covered with a fine layer of reddish sand, o for the lungs it did not look very healthy. We went to a pizza place very near by and had a nice dinner. Hopefully next month will be less eventful.
Los Olivos
It summer so the kids will be enjoying some well deserved time off. For Alex and Alan this will mean a lot of weeks without their daily routine. No school and lots more time for playing and fun. This year Alex surprised us by asking us if he could go to a summer camp. He wanted to go one week to a camp with kids he does not know at a place we only visited once. A mayor change in Alex’ personality because normally he would never initiate something like this as he prefers to stick to the things he knows and avoid risk and new situations.
Alex wants to go to the summer camp organised by ‘Los Olivos‘. We went here just once and the kids got to interact with goats, rabbits, chickens, plants, etc. Alex was very happy with our visit and now he wants to go without parents or brother for a week. He is very enthusiastic and we see this as a big step forwards in his behavior and we could not be happier.