hanging over me got sorted today.
I finally got that bloody HSShoeBoxSwap thing done and posted. Phew 🙂
Davies and I worked together to make a couple of posters, one telling our swapees – who live in Florida – all about us, how old Davies and Scarlett are, where we live and what our nearest towns and cities are, how far we are from London, which part of the UK we live in etc. We drew a Union Jack and a St George’s cross flag and Davies coloured them in. Then he drew a picture of him doing something he loves (that’d be playing Wallace and Gromit x box then), a picture of our house (which had remarkable levels of detail which he explained to me but will obviously go right over the heads of our swapees) and a picture of London including the London Eye, Big Ben, the hotel we stayed in last time we went to London and lots of pigeons 🙂
We then had a long and protracted working out how to spell ‘London’ so he could label it which lead to me asking him how to spell ‘Nic’ which appears to me to be a nice easy phonetic word. It took a while though 🙄 but we got there. He did make me laugh when I tried to say ‘Lon don’ to make it sound phonetic and he said ‘oh that’s how you’d say London with a Scottish accent!’ 😆
Then Davies and I went into town. Ady was working from home so Tarly was able to stay with him which averted another row and as the plea bargain to allow that was that she got dressed before I went we managed to get past that too. Davies brought a penny he’d found in the garden and was asking me what he could spend it on. We went to the library to return several books and gather armfuls of leaflets about local attractions to send to the swapees, then we posted some letters and then we went to the newsagents where I got them to dig me out a couple of sticks of rock, we got a postcard and I showed Davies the penny sweets. He, predictably chose one and then selected another one for Tarly so I agreed to buy them both (hey even our budget this month stretches to that 😉 ) and he got to keep his penny. Then we went next door to the small supermarket to buy some potatoes, onions and carrots. While we were queuing he noted that the potatoes had the same union jack flag on them as he’d coloured in this morning and asked if that meant they were from England. So we double backed into the shop again after paying and spent about ten minutes going round the whole fruit and veg section spotting flags and talking about which countries the various produce had come from and why perhaps it would be from there – we talked about things like oranges coming from Spain where it is sunny and the more exotic fruits coming from hotter countries – and some pink lady apples which had come all the way from Australia 😯 I know we had various other conversations all of which have since left my mind, but as Davies amazed me earlier today by recalling details of something I don’t even remember telling him but he insists I did I guess he probably does so it doesn’t matter. 🙂
We came home and I completed the box, Ady had dug out some photos of us and various touristy places around the UK so I wrote on the back of all of them, stuck some teabags in the parcel and nipped back out to the post office to send it on it’s way. Hurrah! I think it’s a great idea and I’m sure the children will love getting the parcel back from Amercia but I think the idea of it would be far better if the children were a bit older and were doing more of it themselves – or we’d been matched with closer aged swapees – which is no criticism of the poor woman who runs the list which suddenly imploded a month or so ago as a result of lots of ‘publicity’ about the project on various lists. We won’t do it again for a while but I think we may well come back to it when time, money and possibly interest and inclination from the children is more available.
Not entirely sure where this afternoon went. I did lots of washing, Tarly helped. She now knows how to load and unload the machine, which programme to turn it to, where the powder goes etc. It does sometimes concern me that she is so very stereotypical in her choices and interests and that the childrens’ strongest role models are a stay at home mother and an out to work father, but Ady does loads of housework and cooking and they are aware that I once worked, that I sometimes have work to do from home and that I will be working again soon, so hopefully we don’t have the balance tipped too much in one direction. They played with geomags and the wooden blocks, I finally listed some stuff which has been cluttering the playroom on ebay and Davies did more XBoxing.
Oh and Davies and I had a very interesting conversation today about Heaven and Hell. I was explaining that to believe in good you have to also believe in evil otherwise there can be no good. And trying to further explain it that for something to exist it must have an opposite otherwise the state is simply the norm rather than a state. As in if there is no night then there can be no day, if there is no cold then there can be no hot – one requires the other simply to validate it’s being. I think I explained it so he got it – it was a rather complicated issue (which could not exist without the existance of simple issues 😉 ) and I’ve a feeling I started to veer into territory which was way over and above what he was asking about anyway, but hey, it’s all good brain exercise ;-).
Hmmmm. I would contend you can believe in goodness and not evil, and day can exist without night….no wonder it was a struggle to explain.
Comment by Chris — 08 November 2006 @ 7:05 am
I knew it would be you who came and picked me up on that one 😉
What I was trying to get across was that if there is no darkness then how would you describe light? Do you really think there can be goodness without evil?
Comment by Nic — 08 November 2006 @ 8:23 am
Was it just about how to describe something rather than the existence of the actual thing itself? It’s harder to describe things without their opposite but that doesn’t mean they can’t exist separately! I’m with Chris on this one, although it would be a rather moot point to argue as I do believe in both, as most people would do I imagine, whether or not faith/religious beliefs have anything to do with it …
Comment by Sarah — 08 November 2006 @ 8:33 am
Yeah, it started as a question to do with Hell and therefore Heaven and I was saying that people don’t believe in one without the other. If they believe in the existance of God and Heaven then they also believe in the existance of the devil and Hell. (Go on someone correct me and make me feel really silly there – but that was how we were ‘taught’ it in school :oops:) and then it possibly did turn into more of a discussion about describing things. But really, without day how could we have night – surely it would just be what we have all the time? Which I agree doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist but does mean it is not possible to define?
Totally open to comment and argument on this one – I struggled with it yesterday and am still struggling to articulate it now but I *think* I know what I mean 😉
I was saying to Ady the other day that it is relatively recently that I have *got* that whole ‘if a tree fell down in the forest and there was no one there would it still make a noise?’ thing. Scientifically of course it would make a noise but does it still qualify as a noise if no one ever hears it? As a child I used to think that it was a simple how can you believe something without proof question, now I see it as a question of needing to maybe have something defined and validated in order for it to exist. Again, very open to others’ interpretations on this one.:-)
Comment by Nic — 08 November 2006 @ 9:49 am
If a man says something in the forest and there’s no woman around – is he still wrong? 🙂
I think there are some things that only exist relative to other things: an image needs an object, light and an _observer_ for example.
Day / night – what about dawn and twilight? What about in Norway (or wherever it is) where there’s no sun for weeks on end – is that night for weeks on end, how do you define day and night other than by time in that case?
Hot / cold – coldest is easy as absolute 0 means the molecules are completely still. I would imagine that you could define a particular temperature fairly easily by counting how much/quickly the molecules move, but whether -200 C is cold or hot is another matter.
Oh gibber! I think that this is something that could go on for ages in an after 1 a.m. kind of discussion!
Bringing it back to some kind of coherence and relevance – I too sometimes think things like “Mmmm… maybe special relativity isn’t something I could expect a 6 year old to understand. How did we get on to that?”
Comment by Bob — 08 November 2006 @ 10:44 pm
Lol, thanks Bob 🙂
Yeah, let’s plan an after 1am chat sometime for all the people who fancy debating whether light would exist without dark, these are things that matter people! 😆
Comment by Nic — 08 November 2006 @ 10:51 pm
I’ve just remembered something from Terry Pratchett. He says that there is something that travels faster than light: dark. No matter how fast light travels to a place, the darkness is already there! Don’t think you should draw anything [meta]physical from that, just his usual footnotes stuff.
Comment by Bob — 08 November 2006 @ 11:37 pm
I know what you mean Nic ‘cos I’ve used your ‘opposites’ argument before too. Although in Iceland they spend the winter in darkness and summer is light all the time, something I can’t wait to see. As for the role model thing, once on a conversation about money Rebecca asked what she would do if she was the Mummy and there wasn’t a Daddy and I told her she’d have to go out to work, at which she laughed and laughed and eventually said “But ladies don’t work”
Comment by Lucy — 10 November 2006 @ 7:15 pm