Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

When John started school this year he only went to noon which wasn’t too bad as it gave us a sensible break before needing to go back for James at 2.30pm.

However, they changed that to a 1.30pm finish for John the week before the holidays which was a major pain for everyone with more than one child at the school. That hour just doesn’t give you enough time to really do anything yet it’s a bit pointless hanging around the school too.

Still, they’re now onto a 2.15pm finish so at least we can pick them both up at the same time now. That’s also given us a lot more time to do our own thing in the mornings so, all being well, I’ll be able to get caught up with everything that just didn’t seem to fit into what turned out to be a very limited period in the mornings.

Also on another schedule is James’ Kumon. Thanks to something of a buildup of kids going to it, they’ve had to give us broad timeslots for the two days as it was getting just too crowded at times. In practice, we’re going to our regular Tuesday slot at 4pm which seems to work fairly well but I’m not so sure about the 10am Saturday morning slot. The snag is that on Saturdays sometimes we have a bit of a lie-in but other times we want to get out early to go somewhere. With a fixed timeslot for James the lie-ins won’t be possible though aiming for a later slot would mean we couldn’t get out anywhere which isn’t good either.

Not that it looks like it’ll matter much. With the arrival of James’ glasses it seems clear that it was his eyesight that was causing the reading difficulties so he may be shooting ahead with that over the next month or two.

I’d been planning on writing up the notes on gender identity and running up another chunk of the answer for the seen question but in the end very little of either got done. The gender identity stuff should get written tomorrow and looks like a fairly easy one to do though there’s quite a heap of other things needing done tomorrow as well.

James woke up feeling a bit the worse for wear and with quite a temperature. That knocked the normal Sunday morning routine out somewhat but at least he was feeling reasonably OK by around noon so ’twas off to the “adventurous playground” in the Cave Hill Country Park. We’d been aiming to go there for a couple of weeks as we’d spotted it on our way to the zoo a few weeks back. It looks quite impressive from outside but isn’t really all that large as parks go these days mainly because almost all the local authorities seem to have decided to up the ante in terms of what equipment a playground has over recent years. Playgrounds that were pretty naff just a few years ago now seem to sport an enormous number of climbing frames and all kinds of other things for the kids nowadays. Anyway, it’s made the £2 per child entry fee seem fairly steep.

Anyway, once they’d worked their way round all the gear there (aside from the castle construction it’s nothing spectacular) it was going to be off for lunch but we happened to pass the public playground at Jordanstown on the way. Boy has it had a major upgrade over the last couple of years! Gone are the couple of swings and the largely broken down boat and in their place is quite a spectacular array of stuff for children from preschool through to young teenagers which, as you would expect, was being very well used.

And finally it was off to Papa Brown’s Grill at Carrickfergus where we’d a very enjoyable meal before heading home.

Sniffling, coughing and sneezing have been working their way through all of us over the past week or so thanks to to James & John bringing these home from school.

Yesterday it was James’ turn to feel a bit off but now that he’s back to school ’tis the turn of John and me to feel dreadful.

Oh well, I guess another week or two and they’ll have worked their way through the range of minor colds and whatnot that their friends have…

We were on the go from our afternoon departure from our place in France right through to 4am on Sunday morning which was as tiring as it sounds. Worse actually as thanks to the pretty stormy weather during the crossing I was the only one that wasn’t feeling a bit off.

That wouldn’t have been sooo bad but then James caught his usual Belfast asthma as midnight on Sunday approached so it was off to the hospital with him for another 3am bedtime on Monday morning. As if that wasn’t enough school was starting on Tuesday so we’d heaps to do on Monday.

It was John’s first day in school today which went really well. We’d been expecting awful things from him as he’s been with us every day his entire life up to today. The really big problem was getting him out of bed as school started at 9.30 and he usually doesn’t wake up ’til well after 10. That did show though: he conked out in the car on the way home and had a couple of hours of sleep when we got home.

Surprisingly we managed to get James to his Kumon class. Two months of that over the summer has really brought on his reading and it looks like he’ll be where he should have been by Christmas or so.

Tomorrow should be a relatively normal day though we’ve a heap of things to catch up with and it looks like it’ll be a week or more before we’re back to normal.

My Dad died a year ago today so I thought it would be appropriate to write a little about him a year on from then.

People still ask me if I miss him. The funny thing is that I don’t. I’ve thought about why that is off and on over the last year and it’s down to a whole lot of reasons. I suppose that the most important is that we basically did everything together and thus hadn’t any un-ticked boxes remaining. We’d been on holiday many times and I’ve loads of videos as reminders of those times. We’d had the chance to have proper talks much more in the last few years which many people don’t get the chance to do. In what turned out to be his final year we managed to check off just about all of the little things that one could wish for: we’d the perfect final photo of him and my little guys, the three of us had a chance to say goodbye properly and James even got to thank him yet again for buying his bike.

However, I do miss him on behalf of the children. He had the chance to see James starting school but missed John’s first day by a year. He’ll miss hearing their tales from school over the years to come and he’ll not be there at their graduations. That last is probably his greatest loss because one of the highlights of his life was the days on which I graduated.

James misses him a LOT for sure and can’t understand why he’s not around to take him walks and do all the little things that seemed trivial at the time but which mattered so much to both of them. Of course, that’s the peculiar thing about the stuff which you remember: sometimes it’s the most trivial of things that turn out to be the most important when you look back on it.

John misses him too but didn’t get the chance to be with him so much so I guess that over time the memories of his granda will fade from his memory as the years pass by. My own grandfather died when I was about the same age as John was and I really only remember three incidents from my encounters with him so I guess that John’s memories will be pretty similar in detail.

As we all know one of the strange things about funerals is that you can find out a whole bunch of stuff about the person that you didn’t know beforehand or which trigger thoughts about them in you. For instance, I’d not thought about why my parents had bought the house that Dad finished his days in. It turns out that the reason was quite simple. Dad wanted a house with a garden for me to play in so they saved up and bought one. In fact an awful lot of things that they did subsequently date from the year that I was born. Wendy thinks that the silliest of those is the Christmas tree bought for my very first Christmas. Sure, the silver leaves and general appearance are very dated now but it’s been put up in the house every Christmas since then.

I think that one of the easiest ways of describing the birthday and Christmas presents that he bought over the years was “too dear” as my Aunt would call them. That’s not he’d have described them though as he didn’t seem to understand how anything could possibly be described as “too dear” if it was for me. Those are the kind of presents that he bought for James and John too, of course. Thus, they’ve each got an Aspire One when obviously they’re a) too young for them and b) they’re clearly “too dear”. And yet they both use their little computers just as much as the PSPs which he bought them the year before.

There was a simple reason why those things were never too expensive: he took on extra overtime and part-time jobs so that they never would be. Thus, whilst many people buy books for their university courses selectively and second-hand, Dad and me just went to the bookshop and bought everything on the list. As far as he was concerned he’d been working hard for 18 years just to make sure there was enough money to do exactly that.

As far as that education goes, to him doing my best wasn’t merely good enough for him but seemed to be much better in his eyes than that. Whilst the arrival of the letter saying that I’d been accepted into university was a relief to me, for him it was simply fantastic and over the years that followed he was always telling people that his son was going to university. Although James was merely starting on his education when Dad left us, he’d the chance to see the school videos from his first year and the award winning movie produced during his second year which, of course, he thought were just brilliant.

It turns out that he worked so much to ensure that nothing for me was ever “too dear” that there’s enough money left over to help James & John on their way too. At the moment, it’s looking like I’ll be able to continue to get those “too dear” birthday and Christmas presents for them on his behalf for quite some time to come. And, though he’ll not be there in person at their graduation days, there’s a good chance that they’ll have had a lot of help from him along the way to it.

Anyway, thanks Dad for all those memories and I hope that between the three of us we’ll create a whole bunch more times in the future that you’d have been just as proud of as that day when that letter arrived from Queens so many years ago.