Photo a Day. Week Two.

Continuing on with this photo a day prompt this week. I'm posting them daily on Facebook, but thought a weekly summary here would be fun too because the photos do reflect something of my daily life.

November 4: Table. 

The physical centre of our home, the one place we all gather together most frequently. If this table could talk it could tell you some really embarrassing things about us, and some fun things too. It was given to us by friends. After we received it we discovered it also opens out to fit 8-10 people around it. A hospitable table too! I love this well-worn piece of furniture.

November 5: I collect . . . nothing actually. But my eldest son collects dice. 

After I posted this on Facebook my husband called me on it and suggested that I collect stories. A friend also suggested that I collect green things, hence what I posted on Nov. 7. 

Another thing I could have posted was my collection of rulers, especially ones with photos in the  middle. That is a static thing, I haven't added to it in about 20 years, however the collection is in Australia and I don't have a photo!

November 6: Music. 

I've been surrounded by music and musical instruments for as long as I can remember (especially pianos). This photo is of an inscription by my childhood piano teacher in a music book that she gave me. I owe a lot to her and my parents for putting up with me in my early years and giving me a solid musical foundation. That's not to say it was an easily gained foundation (she was very strict), but I'm grateful for it.

November 7: Yes! 

I love green, it always pops out at me saying "Yes! Look at me!" My friend April pointed out I could have put this as something I collect. It fits here too. I have many green things, from my precious emerald engagement ring to everyday cups and mugs.

November 8: Someone I miss.

Now this is a big ask for someone who's lived away from their home country for 11 of the past 13 years! And it isn't just people we've left in Australia that I miss, we've met many people overseas who we're no longer near-by who I miss too. I am very thankful, though, that in my 40 years, no one really close to me has died.

But when pushed for a photo on this topic, I'll include a photo of these friends. I miss the times we had together when we were "carefree" singles and childless couples. We've seen them rarely in the last 13 years, but even when we do, it's crowded and crazy. We've now got nine boisterous children between us (seven are boys) and it isn't quite what it used to be.

November 9: Mine.

My eldest son brought me this packet of Australian liquorice back from his recent trip to Guam. I was stoked that he remembered I love liquorice!

November 10: Book. 

This is a book I finished on Friday.  Most of the week it kept me up later than I should have been up. A crime thriller right up my alley. And bought cheaply at CAJ's Thrift Shop to boot!

Today's Creative Burst

We're getting ready for our annual end of November camping trip. Not much to do, except ponder which of our favourite camping recipes we want to eat (we have a collection now), and make some bags. Yes, all the camping over the summer has done-in a couple of our bags, namely one of sleeping bag bags, and the bag that the tent lives in. Important bags! 

It's been on my to do list since August, but, frankly, I haven't had time. I've been working hard on editing ever since we got back from our Hokkaido Camping Trip and then once school started we jumped into cross-country every Saturday. My creative free-time was tied up in making sure we had snacks for lunch-boxes and afternoon teas.

On Thursday I passed a significant point in editing for our Winter issue, so I decided to take some time to go shopping at my favourite craft shop for material on Friday afternoon. Unfortunately I came down with a nasty headache (that included chills and a bit of nausea). So instead, I lay on the bed from one o-clock till the boys came home.

Thankfully today my head was fine again and I squeezed in a visit to the shop. Found some suitable material quickly (thankfully colour and pattern doesn't really matter in this case, I'm dreadful at picking material to make clothes).

Nope, these aren't pencils. They are chopsticks. You
use the other end to eat with. We now have one blue
pair and one green pair.

I also enjoyed browsing quietly. It is a visually appealing shop, a combination of crafting materials and cute homeware products. I found a pair of charming chopsticks for our middle son. Now each boy has their own pair (again). They'd outgrown the cutesy chopsticks that Japan abounds in and new ones were desired.

Here are some other things I found . . . but didn't buy.

I can't figure out if these are to be worn
inside or outside of your trousers. Or perhaps
they are "room clothes" as Japanese
people tend to call them: clothes
that are suitable for "inside the house",
but not to be worn outside.

Um, yes. The "shorts" version of the above.
Confusingly titled "Over pants".

Almond Bars

I got home at two and have been baking ever since. I baked this new recipe and it's turned out fabulously! German Almond Bar. Very easy, tasty, and has the thumbs up from our most picky sweets-eater. Ticks all the boxes for me.

German Almond Bars
Knead together:
300g flour
150g chopped almonds
100g sugar
200g margarine
1 egg
vanilla
Roll out 0.5-1cm thick.
Cut into longish pieces.
Bake at 190⁰C until firm (recipe says 12-15 minutes, but I had it in there about twice that amount of time, admittedly in a slow oven).

At the request of the boys I also made some Chocolate Biscuits that require biscuit cutters. Mostly they specified that they wanted the Lego shaped biscuits (see here). I sighed, these take a long time to make, mostly because of the rolling out and cutting process. Cute, when you have little ones, but tiresome when you're making enough to feed hungry teen/pre-teen boys.

In the foreground is the "adult's" pizza.
It had homemade tomato sauce, with
chicken, capsicum, pineapple,
and mushrooms.
Delicious!

Then I moved straight on to making Pizza Dough. Commercial delivery pizzas are just too expensive here, so we never order them at home. Instead we make our own pizzas. We used to use our bread maker for the dough, but appetites have outstripped the bread makers' capacity and so I've been trying to make it myself. I'm still not totally happy with the result, so I'll keep trying. It's a team effort, saved for a Saturday night after a quiet day. I make the dough and David does the rest. Here's tonight's effort. It didn't rise enough, though. Either it needs to rest longer or it needs more yeast, or perhaps it needs both?

I wanted to get started on cutting out the material for the bags this afternoon, and maybe I would have if I'd been able to buy them yesterday. However I plainly ran out of time. Perhaps tonight, if David decides to continue working on his 3,000 word assignment for his Masters.

I'm feeling relaxed, but weary after this creative day. While I type this, my boys are wrestling in the next room, prior to going to bed. I think I'd better pull the plug on it before it gets out of control, and send them upstairs for devotion time.

Pencil grip: not as important as we thought?

I don't often write about my Occupational Therapy "hat" here, but I came across a study on pencil grip and this stunning conclusion that challenges popular opinion:

There was no difference in the quality or speed scores among the different pencil grasps before and after the copy task. The dynamic tripod pencil grasp did not offer any advantage over the lateral tripod or the dynamic or lateral quadrupod pencil grasps in terms of quality of handwriting after a 10-minute copy task. These four pencil grasp patterns performed equivalently. Our findings question the practice of having students adopt the dynamic tripod pencil grasp. 

This was published in the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, June 2012.You can read the abstract here. 

Pencil grip is one of the most common problems people talk to paediatric OTs about within mainstream education. This is quite a finding because it's been assumed for a long time that dynamic tripod*, is the only valid grip. Much anxiety and pain has resulted from children not wanting to use this grip.

This illustration of mature pencil grips comes from here.

The article ends with a recommendation that the dynamic tripod rasp be recommended for children when they commence writing. But if difficulties occur and one of the above four grasps are being used, then remediation should look beyond correcting the pencil grasp to other factors impacting writing. In fact, it has been proven that it is intensely difficult to change a child's pencil grip beyond the beginning of second grade (though I've heard of it being done, but only when the child has high motivation).


*Fingers involved include the thumb opposed to the index and middle fingers, with all three fingers positioned in a tripod. The ring and little finger stabilise against the writing surface.

Japan Photo #42

Can you tell me where I found these leaves for sale? Bonus points if you can tell my why I might spend 250 yen (AU$2.50) on them.

Life in the Digital Age*

What is "the digital age" and when did it start? 
That is the question that I first wanted to know before writing about this. This is an extract

from Wikipedia (Digital Revolution page):

1980[edit]

• Cell phone subscribers: 11.2 million ^[2]
• Internet users: All Internet users at this time were indexed in a phone book sized directory.

1990[edit]

• Cell phone subscribers: 12.4 million (0.25% of world population in 1990)^[3]
• Internet users: 2.8 million (0.05% of world population in 1990)^[4]

2002[edit]

• Cell phone subscribers: 1,174,000,000 (19% of world population in 2002)^[4]
• Internet users: 631 million (11% of world population in 2002)^[4]

2010[edit]

• Cell phone subscribers: 4 billion (67% of world population in 2010)^[5]
• Internet users: 1.8 billion (26.6% of world population in 2010)^[6

My entry into the digital age
Which makes me rather a late-comer to the digital age. I went to university in the early 1990s. The only reason I used a computer then was as a word processor. There were few computers in our residential college of something like 300 women. So I rarely used the computer, because it was stressful, scheduling-wise.

In my first job, starting 1995, I shared a computer with a colleague from another department. Again, we used the computer for writing reports, and recording work statistics. We had car-phones at work. My electrician dad had a 2-way radio for a long time so that my mum (who worked at the home office) could contact him about jobs while he was out.

The first computer I owned was my new husband's, when we married in 1997. At that time the only email access we had was at his work, so I'd type emails and save them to a disc that he took to work. The first time I saw the internet was in my new job that same year.

Sometime between then and 1999 we got dial-up internet access at home (a slow affair), and a computer that could manage it.

I didn't own a mobile phone until about 2006/7. In 2008 we bought our first iPod. When did we join Facebook? Was that also 2008? And the list goes on: our first digital camera, video camera, DVD player, iPhone, multiple lap-tops at home, etc.

My life now
Now I spend a lot of time on the internet. My job depends on it. I produce a quarterly magazine from my dining room. Email access is compulsory for missionaries. Almost all the communications without the mission are done via email or the internet.

Now we ponder such questions as, "What did we do before Google or YouTube or Skype?" and "How did we find someone in a crowded public space before we had mobiles?"

Just yesterday I wrote here about recruiting editing staff for Japan Harvest, using Facebook. In a Facebook-less world that would never have happened.

Despite having a mobile phone, I don't talk on the phone much anymore. I'd rather email, or text someone. (But I've never been confident with phones, now I'm even more out of practice.)

Pluses and minuses
The digital age has been a definite plus for those of us living overseas, we can keep in touch with those at home much more easily (and cheaply). But it does bring with it the temptation to not live fully where you are. To spend your time engaging in the virtual world of your home country, rather than immersing yourself in your surroundings.

It's brought convenience to our sons in being able to access the same documents at school and work, to be able to submit completed work digitally. But it has also brought many temptations for young ones with it. Temptations they aren't equipped to deal with: prioritising of time (in the face of the very addictive internet), the ease of access to unsuitable material, and the lack of privacy that can come with too much sharing of information.

One of the things I was really looking forward to in our camping trip up north was the absence of internet. I'm rather tied to it in my work. Just keeping up with email is quite a large daily job for me. It was refreshing to be away from it for the most part of a month, and it was hard to get back into it when we returned. But it did mean that I wasn't able to do my job, which was the point of a holiday. So yeah, I'm rather dependent on it now.

*This is in response to a writing prompt from here.

Awesomely Answered Prayer!

I wrote this on Oct 28, two years ago on this blog:

The fourth exciting thing is an answer to prayer. Back a couple
of weeks ago while we (the editorial team of Japan Harvest) were rushing to put together the latest edition, God impressed upon me to pray for a new team member to join our team. This seemed an unusual thing at the time, these sorts of impressions don't happen to me very often. However I did, and, hey presto, on Sunday I had a somewhat random in-the-pews conversation with someone after church. It almost accidentally (of course, no accident, but it wasn't directed by me) turned to editing. To cut a long and detailed story short — we had a meeting yesterday and we have a new team member, at least for a trial run on the Spring Edition next year. I'm excited, I'm very excited. (See the whole post here.)

The designer who's just stepping down has done an
awesome job on the magazine. I'm sad to see her
leave as I depended on her for many things. Here's one spread
in our latest magazine. Love the creativity, and the professional way
that she approached her work (despite severe limitations
on her available time to work on the magazine). Plus, she's
become a good friend. Thankfully she's not moving away, but
I'll miss the regular interaction we had about the magazine.

Another exciting thing happened this past week. The amazing thing is that it is almost the same story.

Last Monday I wrote here about how our magazine designer (yes, the one I recruited above) had told me she needed to step down. I've been asking God daily for someone to quickly fill in this important role and wondering how much to advertise this need vs whether to just leave it in prayer and see what God does.

Well, in the end I felt very restless about the whole thing, and last Thursday and put this up on Facebook:

I'm praying daily for a new designer for Japan Harvest. Our designer has too much on her plate and needs to step down. Do you know anyone (particularly an English speaker in Japan) who has these skills?

That night I received a message from a friend from our church here in Japan who has both the skills and the (expensive) program to do the job. After talking with him at church on Sunday, he's agreed to take on the role from next month.

How awesome is that? You've gotta love Facebook when things like this happen (I also recruited our Associate Editor from my Facebook friend list). I didn't know that he had this hidden skill. But it seems as though he is God's very timely provision. An answer to our prayers.

Today I'm so thankful.

I'm also recommitted to praying for other big needs that we have coming up, for example:

• Someone to manage the magazine while we're on home assignment from June next year.
• A couple more associate editors to share the editing load.
• Some people to take over the lease on our house here for the year we're in Australia, so that we're able to come back to live in this convenient house.
• A house and car in Australia from July next year.
• A teacher/teachers to cover my husband's jobs while we're away.

If you like, you can join me in prayer!

Mixed feelings about parent-teacher interviews

We're coming to the end of this year's 2 1/2 days of parent-teacher "conferences" (we used to call them "interviews" when I was growing up). I just went back and read my post from last year's 2 1/2 days and not too much has changed.

Our eldest son's maths classroom last year.

Today I spent nearly three hours hearing from teachers (about a dozen of them) about my three boys. I come away with mixed feelings.

Great things
I heard lots of great things (all boys have well above average marks in almost everything) including, what was becoming a family-theme "he makes great connections between things". A school "in phrase" that means something like this:

"You're learning about how birds fly and you make the connection to how aeroplanes fly."

or

"You're reading a story in class set in ancient Romans and you discover they had a Senate. You make the connection between that and the Senate you've heard about in Australian politics."

It is the key to good conversations. For an example: Someone bemoans that they're having a bad hair day and you followup with a story about Japanese hairdressers. And the trail moves onto weddings and the hairstyles, ending up with challenges that you've faced in your marriage. That's an awesome conversation!

Not so great things
I also heard some not-so-great things, which is inevitable. But almost none of it was a surprise. It was interesting to have our first high school interviews. We discovered that while our high schooler had appeared to be coping very well with the change, there has been a little bit of disorganisation and last-minute assignment completion going on. That's not really surprising either.

Then the challenge is, what do you do with all this "newly" acquired information about how your kids could perform/behave better at school? I'm an invested observer, but not always with the power to "fix" the problems.

Challenges
The other challenging thing about having interviews at school is that my husband is also seeing parents. So, while we worked pretty hard to get clear time for him to be present at interviews with me, inevitably he was popping off here and there to see other parents. Thankfully I'm not a teacher too, or it could have gotten seriously messy. (Read here for parts 1 and 2 posts about other challenges/joys in being a staff wife.

One teacher we saw teaches all three of our boys, and is also a wrestling coach. Before we sat down we clarified which hat he was to wear while we talked to him!

I did get a bit of a jolt when the physical science teacher (a subject that combines physics and chemistry that all year 9 students do) asked about what sciences our son would like to do next year. Then realised that we wouldn't be around and we all wondered how this was going to work. It is a slippery subject that we've been trying to get our heads around: not just going to Australia and switching education systems, but coming back and how CAJ will deal with whatever subjects he's done in Australia. It is a bit of a mystery to us, even with the CAJ Head of Science in our house. I'll keep you posted!

So then, after a crazy morning of interviews, I've had a crazy afternoon of boys at home on a wet day. For some reason they've been "more boy" than usual. More noisy, more reckless, more disrespectful, more sudden, more . . . MORE. (And if you feel like I'm yelling, I am. It hasn't been that fun, and I'm pretty tolerant of boys most days.) I'm looking forward to my husband coming home tonight!