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We went to Keelung because Ahji was participating in this:
An open swim for 4 km in jellyfish infested waters with this as his destination:
The kids and I were supposed to cheer him on, but as there was absolutely no shade anywhere, we just lounged around in the hotel room.
As we were driving by we noticed it was open house day on the military warships. Of course we checked it out. Ahji was quite excited.
Here’s some visual clues…
It totally wasn’t planned, but we saw this opportunity for an adventure near our hotel on Saturday.
Can you find all of us in the picture below? Bonus points if you see me!
There’s a fun style of photography that uses a digital camera to shoot through the lens of an older camera. I don’t have any old cameras lying around, so I resorted to using a digital TVF frame. This is what I got:
If you want to read a tutorial about it or snag your own frame, or share a frame, check out this Flickr group: ttvdust
We recently went to Taiwan National Universtity of the Arts (TNUA) in Kuandu. They have a lovely park area and lots of funky installation art. They often show posters that say:
TN
UA
and I’ll forever associate this university with the name TUNA. Anyway, we enjoyed a few games, including Twister, which Jaylene is a pro at.
The kids also enjoyed climbing around on Keanu’s old fashioned trike, even though it didn’t move very well on the grass.
One remarkable feature of this school’s park is that they use cows to keep their grass at a reasonable length.
Well, everyone translates them as “cows” but they look more like water buffalo to me. What do you think?
Whatever they are, it’s a great way to cut the grass.
This week’s Unplug your kids challenge was “old“. We thought of all the songs we knew that had the word “old” in them, and came up with three. Two in English and one in Chinese. We sang along to “Old MacDonald” and “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly”. Then we played along with our farm animals while we sang. Then we decided we should make a 3D Old Woman who could really swallow our animal toys.
Here she is all hungry before the song starts…
And here she is swallowing a cow, in case you wondered how…
And a close up of her insides. She’s quite the fashion queen, Jaylene has plans to reuse her dress as skirts for her (girl) stuffed puppy Triton once she’s finished serving her entertainment purpose.
Made with a kit by Heather Taylor
Jaylene is gearing up for graduation from Kindergarten to Grade One. She’s been choosing to make a lot of books at school. Some are just copies of her favorite story books, and others are more journalish. At home she’s been eagerly learning how to type the homerow. She has another loose tooth too.
Jayden can say “Hao” (pronounced How) which means good, okay, sure, or very, depending on the situation. He can wave goodbye and the above pose is what he’ll do if someone calls out his name. He can throw away his diaper, put his bottle in the sink and put his shoes away. Sometimes he’ll even clean up his toys. The thing that amuses us the most these days is saying “Break the pickle” and he’ll put his two index fingers together. Then we “break” them and tickle him. Then he giggles, runs away and does the whole thing by *himself*.
Ahji is getting ready for the 4km swim in the ocean event at the end of the month. He’s also entertaining the idea of joining the ironman later on in the year so he’s been doing a lot of running and biking along with swimming.
I’m counting down the days until summer vacation!
This week’s unplugged theme was plastic. Jaylene did her brainstorming drawing and we thought of all the projects we could do with plastic. I thought perhaps shrink plastic or beaded necklaces, but Jaylene played with Perler (Fuse) beads all week. Even though she worked on several projects all week, none of them made it to the ironing phase. I made a cute little mushroom design, and discovered some surprising facts about the fairy tale red with white spot mushroom. I’ll leave you to your own research on that. It involved reindeer… Here’s a link to some of our previous perler creations here. Jaylene had a great time creating even though she didn’t complete anything. And I think that’s fine!
Anyway, seeing as how we didn’t have any “nice” finished pictures I thought I’d share pictures of an “old” plastic project we did recently… making a fort out of our plastic puzzle shaped floormats.
Jaylene did this mostly by herself, with a bit of help on the roof. She created it after Jayden went to bed.
She had some concerns about letting Jayden play, but they had good fun together in the morning, still in their pjs. That is, until Jayden tried to fix a few foundational problems he’d discovered.
Jaylene gasped for a second, and then quickly joined in the demolition. What goes up must come down, after all.
