Oscar Uppdate

Well, Oscar has visited the Kelmscott Senior High School farm. They have given us a lot of help, tips and a source of free milk. They also will take Oscar when he is weaned. That is nice because they are only five minutes from our house. Turns out Oscar had conjunctiveitis (pink eye) which can kill him if it goes untreated. They sprayed his eyes with an anti-biotic (which is blue) so now Oscar looks like a bandit. He has also had a bath (in Woolite...go figure)and looks a lot better. There is a problem though. My wife is allergic to him or something about him. Or she could just be sick. Anyway, I am thinking that we may give Oscar to the school farm early. It will be heartbreaking to my daughter, but my wife is more important to me. I have to say though that he is very cute, and is taking to domestic life very willingly. More to come.

Oscar the Foster

So we have gotten ourselves into more trouble. One of Australia's biggest exports is living livestock. Muslim countries have certain views on how sheep and cattle are to be slaughtered for food. It is called Halal. I won't go into details here, nor will I elaborate on the teachings of a false religion. It is what it is. I won't go into the rights or wrongs of the live sheep trade either. I look at it this way. They are going to import live animals from somewhere. Might as well be from here.

It never occurred to me until yesterday that lambs will be born on the trucks that take sheep from the stations (ranches) to the wharves for loading. It's really quite elementary though. Wherever you have a "B double" road train loaded with ewes, there are bound to be some that are with lamb. These can't be exported as there are rules concerning this on both ends. So what happens to these lambs? Think Canadian Harp Seals. Okay, they are just livestock. They are not endangered species. Still, seems a tad harsh.

Well, yesterday we found out about a guy who takes a truck down to the docks, and 'rescues' the lambs before they are clubbed. He has a network of carers, and yesterday we joined them. So now we have Oscar, a four day old male Merino lamb. He is as cute as a button. He has already commandeered my son's bean bag chair, and a scrap of...wait for it...sheepskin rug, that our cats commandeered from us. He appears to have imprinted on my daughter somewhat. Follows her around the house, bleats if she is out of the room. That sort of thing.

That is the trouble we got ourselves in. Hopefully, it will be all good, and Oscar can be sent to a farm in a couple of months. I am betting that by then we will be so in love with him that we will ask to keep him. It would save me on lawnmowing bills, fertiliser and weed pulling. It would also add a third vet bill to the annual budget. And who is going to shear the thing? So we shall see what happens. At any rate it will teach the children first hand about the responsibility of hand raising a baby animal. Take care. I will keep you posted.

Restitution VS Grace

Something I am trying teach my children about is restitution. That is, if you are using something that does not belong to you, and you break, damage, or lose it, you take responsibility for what has happened and make it good to the person who lent it to you.

Another thing I want to teach them is about Grace. That is, the favour that God shows to us in light of the fact that we are willing sinners, and do not deserve heaven, and the fact that Jesus made restitution for our sins on the Cross, and we are now free to choose Him or not. Of course the consequences for not choosing Him are somewhat more dire than the consequences of say, damaging you dad's laptop.

So today, as a special treat, I connected my laptop to our plasma TV screen so my son could play Lego Drome Racers on the BIG SCREEN. He was suffering a considerable onslaught (undeserved) from his younger sister, and coming out of the bedroom where I had been sleeping (I work an overnight shift)until awakened by her screaming at him, I de-fused the situation by offering this to him. So after hooking it up and making sure everything was working, I went back to bed. About 30 minutes later there is an almighty crash from the family room. My son had tried to move the wireless keyboard/mouse transmitter closer to him, and has pulled the laptop off of the stand and broken the AC adapter cord where it goes into the computer. The computer is working, and I didn't think to look at the battery light. About 45 minutes later the whole thing dies. I realise that, with 2 hours left before I have to be at work, where in order to stay sane I need my laptop, I have no ac power and the battery is dead. So I made a few calls, and went to a computer shop to see if the plug could be soldered. It might have been able to be, but I would be left with a dodgy plug, that might break again, much more easily this time. Did you know that a new AC Adapter for a laptop costs $100? I didn't. I do now.

So now I am faced with a dilemna. Clearly it is my son's fault that this was broken. I was never angry, but my son is characterised by this kind of carelessness. Do I make him pay the whole $100? Do I forgive him and not make him pay any? Well, when I was 12, $100 was...25 Mariners games...it was a fortune. What does it mean to him? So I get home from the computer store and I tell him, first off, that he is going to have to pay for this. I tell him half now and 5 dollars a fortnight for 24 weeks. He gets ten dollars a fortnight in pocket money. He is stunned, because he is saving for something. Then he starts negotiating. "What if," he says, "you pay half because you put the laptop on the speaker?" I said I would think about it. My wife says it is my call. Was the laptop unstable? Not if you don't pull on the CORD! (in my best Brian Regan voice). That is like the police saying, "If you didn't live here, the burglars wouldn't have robbed your house." (That actually happened to some missionaries I know who lived in Iran before the revolution).

So I am sitting here thinking. If God had made US pay full restitution for our sin, we would all be going to hell. But I want my son to learn about making things good. So I call a friend of mine, who has a 16 year old son, for a second opinion. Yep, make sure he gets both messages. Restitution tempered with Grace. I still feel bad making my son pay half, but I feel good in knowing that he is going to learn two things here. Well more. He is going to learn that I love him...I mean he already knows that, but I told him that I am cutting his debt in half because I love him so much, I can't stand to see him hurting.

Now if only the guy I loaned my CD player to in Bible College and got it stolen was reading this.....

Homeschooling. Autism. Fun.

In 2002 my wife and I made the decision to homeschool our two children, who are autistic. This was the main reason. The school we were in was dictating to us what they were going to do with the children, and we did not feel, as their parents that what the school was proposing would meet the needs of our children as we saw them. Of course the administration,as the school was a private Christian school, was not supportive of the decision, as it would take money out of their coffers. Frankly, we have spent far more on homeschooling than we ever did at the school.

So here we are, 7 years later. What have we accomplished? Well, instead of a daughter who sits and withdraws into herself when she can't cope with what is going on around her, we have an outgoing, gregarious, lively girl with a sparkling personality who participates in plays, debates, rides horses and fights with her brother. Which is normal behaviour, isn't it? What about my son? Well, he is a funny boy. He wants to know about a lot of things. He wants to know about Time Portals, wormholes, and stuff like that.... Questions like this often arise. "Dad, if time portals existed, what would it feel like to go through one?" You know how in cartoons, when someone gets rattled and shakes their head really fast and goes "i-e-e-e i-e-e-e i-e-e-e"? That is what I feel like when I get questions like that.

He wants to learn to program computers. I am working on getting a copy of the language that they make Xbox games with. Whether or not we will be able to use it is another story.

Is homeschooling rewarding? Well, I will be honest with you, my wife does 97% of the work. She is often worn to a frazzle. At those times she would more than likely say no. When he comes to me and tells me how rabbits have a bifurcated uterus, and can carry more than one litter at a time, I am in awe of the things he knows. At those times, homeschooling is way rewarding. Being autistic, he is fairly socially unaware, and often entirely socially innapropriate. If he was at school, he would be bullied mercilessly.(I know because I was the same way and I was - not physically beaten up, but often pushed to the fringes and frequently made fun of).

I often call my son the round mound of sound. He makes awesome sound effects. One time he was making all kinds of noise, and it was semi rhythmical and had drums, guitars and other instruments in it and I asked him what he was doing, and he said he was making his own background music. Talk about the soundtrack to our life.

The biggest question asked about homeschooling is Socialisation. Tell me, what does sitting in a desk for 6-7 hours a day listening to teachers drone on, and then having a 30 minute lunch period where you are free to talk have to do with socialisation? Then picture this. A network of people who can get together anytime, any season of the year to play together, study together, do art, science, sports, and other subjects together in a...wait for it....SOCIAL setting. One time my son and daughter and I were at our local hardware store on a Saturday where they have a weekly barbecue to raise funds for local clubs and organisations. (Each week a different one does the bbq and raises funds for themselves). My son said, "MMM dad, smell those sausages." So I asked him if he wanted one. He said he didn't know yet. (Huh?) So he went right up to this big bruiser of a tatooed man running the sausage sizzle, and said "Excuse me, do you have margarine to put on your rolls?" The man looked gobsmacked, and said to him "You know, I really don't like children who are so polite!" Of course he was joking, and complimenting my son at the same time. So who needs socialization? Of course the sad thing was was that the kids didn't understand why he said that. My daughter asked me on the way in why he didn't like polite kids. That was the autism speaking. I had to explain to them that he was actually complimenting the boy on how polite he was.

So tonight we implemented a new system for homeschooling. It is called the box system. Each child has a stack of six clear plastic boxes. Each night we put the workbooks they need to work in in each designated box - science, math, etc, and write the pages they need to do on a post-it on the cover of the work book. As they work, they can see the workload getting less. They put their completed books in an in-tray on the desk. My daughter actually asked for MORE work. (we just gave them a small sample in 4 of the 6 boxes.) My son actually stayed on task for more than 30 seconds and got quite a bit done too. They have an incentive. An Aurora AFX slot car track if they do the work for a month straight. Without (much) complaining.

So homeschooling. Autism. It's all good. It's fun. God has blessed us beyond measure with these children. If Jesus were on earth today, and healing like he did in His earthly ministry, I would not take my kids to him for healing. Exorcism perhaps....those of you with or who have worked with special needs kids will get that joke. The rest of you will just have to take my word for it.

Social Networking? or living in the past?

I have been on Facebook for a while now. On facebook I have made contact with scores of people with whom I went to High School, College, was in the Air Force with, went to camp with, etc.

I have meaningful "relationships" if it can be called that, with about 10 of them. I mean, there are dozens of people with whom I have attempted to start chat conversations, to no avail. I am sure there is always a reason that they don't respond...didn't see the chat window, or whatever. But it makes me wonder about this whole social networking thing. Is it really all that healthy? I mean, my wife looks at facebook as borderline voyeurism. I try to tell her that only people who have been selected as friends can see the content one puts on there, and that Facebook is only what you do with it. I mean, you can put as little or as much information as you wish on it. But that is not the healthy I am referring to here. I am referring to the skill of actually relating to people. Someone put on as their status the other day... So and So is getting ready to go to the annual general meeting at church... And we wanted to know this...why? Some people put things like So and So needs coffee.... Well who doesn't.

Are people who have 500 Facebook friends more social than someone who has 150? Do they even really know half their friends? I go through my list from time to time, and cull out people with whom I have had no contact with for an indeterminate amount of time. With some people, I won't ever cull them, because of the value I placed on their friendship when we were actually friends who saw one another, or whom I went to school with.

Am I living in the past, trying to keep in touch with people who have not been a part of my life for more than 20 years? Recently I became friends with a guy who was in our carpool probably something like 26 years ago or more. Being a Christian, I believe God brings people into our lives for a reason. Whatever the reason, there are no accidents.

Interestingly, as I have grown older, I have had fewer and fewer physical friends. Right now I can think of only two men that I hang out with. I am such good friends with my wife that I have found that the need for outside friendship has gotten less and less. I still need a couple of guys to do the guy things with, but even the guy things, like going to football games, and golfing, etc, are becoming less and less a priority as my children get older. Soon I will be able to do some of those things with my son, if I can drag him away from the computer. My daughter already loves going fishing with me...she won't bait her hook or touch a fish, but she loves going just the same, and those times out with her are amazing, even if we don't catch anything. So far she hasn't, and I have only caught one small herring that I threw back.

So will I continue on Facebook? I don't know. It is a tool. But it also wastes a lot of time. That is a good thing when I am at work, or late in the evening when the kids are quiet. But I find that a good book still gets my attention.

Just a few thoughts.

Jonathan

Slot Car Racing

Yesterday I took my kids to a local slot car track. It was a Scalextric track that was probably about 200 feet in circumference. So now they want their own scalextric cars...NOW. My daughter was asking me how much money was in her account because she wanted to buy her own car right then and there. I told her that we could look on ebay and in the Quokka, and in the Sunday Times Reader's Mart, because certainly we can find a car that would be, if not cheaper, at least better quality at a reasonable price. HAHA. Try explaining that to a ten year old. Anyway, we have set up our Tonka slot car set. This is a cheap and nasty one we bought for Christmas a couple of years ago that is the most fiddly thing to set up that was ever invented. And the cars want to fly off on every turn....But they are having a ball with it. Oh where oh where did my Aurora AFX and Tyco slotless car racing sets from yesteryear go? Anyway, looking for a good set to buy.

Audio Books

Recently, I started recording audio books for Librivox.org I have recorded two complete solo works, and done several chapters of a collaborative work. I am also working on a third solo. Librivox is a project that brings public domain books (which means it was written more than 70 years ago) onto audio in order that people can enjoy them. I record using Audacity - I think that most of the readers on Librivox use that, as it is free and easy.

You can find my finished works by clicking on the links below

Penrod By Booth Tarkington
Penrod and Sam By Booth Tarkington

When I have finished the other book, Which, ironically, is also by Booth Tarkington...I will post a link to it, and the collaborative work...also by Tarkington...will also get a link.

These two books were written in 1914 and 1916, less than slightly more than 50 years after abolition. Some of the views expressed by the author regarding people of colour in no way reflect my, the recorder's, views. I, however did not deviate from the text, so there are some words used, such as nigger, that I would never, ever use in day to day conversation. Other than that, there is nothing to offend in either book. You might wet yourself laughing though. I nearly did a few times.

Starting Out

I have been reading my friend Rick's Blog. He has a baseball Blog. I thought that I could have a blog about golf and other things that I do. Facebook is ok, but they change the format so often that it is hard to tell what is going on there. Plus...except for a few games I like to play, and people I like to chat with, I don't really get into it all that much. And no way am I going to be one of those people that update their status every five minutes by mobile phone (Jonathan is putting syrup on his pancakes...Jonathan is putting salt on his Egg McMuffin).

So I am going to blog. I don't know how this will turn out. It will have some spiritual content. It will have observations on parenting. It will point you to other things I might be doing elsewhere in cyber space. Or it might just have an interesting photo I have taken recently...or not.

I hope it is fun. I am looking forward to it.

Jonathan