Category Archives: Family and friends

One year more

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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

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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.

http://xx!$^&*()yy_+`-={zz}|[]:OHNEE-TREKT-HAAR-UIT-HOOFD;JohnnyBoy@www.leiden365.nl/blog/?p=8767&whatallemaalnogmeer&EenHelERieDelTexts/Lekker/Lange/URL

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.

Arm

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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

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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

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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.

Everything included

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What is more relaxing than a weekend that had everything included. Food, drinks, and happy children running and playing around. The problem is that you do need time, but this month the kids have a full week off due to Easter, so that works out just fine. A great time to go down south and have some quality relaxing times near the pool.

Happy in the pool!

Sioux City

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Sioux City in Gran Canaria is a nice park to have a look at the wild west. With a bank robbery, gunfights, stampedes, running horses and cowboys and indians everywhere it is a really fun place to discover. We even had a BBQ included with our entry ticket.

The saloon was also in typical Cowboy like fashion. There was even a piano where Alex tried some of his songs. To bad the rough cowboys had already disables a couple of keys.

Chimbroek, Espinita and two shrimp

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Alan takes care of Chimbroek, a black and blue fish. Alex has Espinitas, a purple and blue fish and I got tho shrimp. We all got some pets. Alex and Alan’s fish need three grains of fish-food twice a day every other day. A good way to start developing a bit of responsibility.

Both fish have already been upgraded to version 2.0. The first versions were not a good buy and were floating up side down after two days already. They were changed without problem for better versions. Alex understood perfectly that the new Espinitas was a different fish. Alan had his doubts and noticed something had happened. He now keeps asking if his fish is dead again (even when its just sleeping) and he has figured out that sometimes dead fish revive with a bit more blueish color.

My shrimp are (for now) the easiest. I just put them in a big pot with a little plant and they do all the cleaning. I don’t think I even need to feed them.