20 east

I’ve just hung the washing up to dry and it reminded me to say a big thank you to all you folk who are any size smaller than giant. I’m a largish chap, extra-large if Marks & Spencer are to be believed and therefore the clothes I buy contain many more square km of material than those of someone who is, for example, size medium. And yet, I pay the same price! Ha! Carrying around more weight does have it’s disadvantages but it does feel good to know that all you normal folk are contributing to my clothing costs. Must amount to a tidy sum over 40+ years! So, thanks again & keep up the good work. I just hope it’s not pity. I’d hate to pitied for being large AND for smoking.

My wife takes a size “tiny”, so in recent years I’ve been giving back.

For anyone wanting an update on the earlier post about compact versus SLR and the Canon G9.

Sorry! The weather’s awful, the light is 100% grey and we’ve been busy so I’ve not been doing much photography at all with any camera. I can confirm that the battery is awful. The Fuji battery lasted forever in use and you could also leave it lying around for months and come back to the same charge as when you left it. The Canon is pants in use and dies when left. A spare battery should be shipped with the camera. I’m getting the hang of the controls and they are very good. Easy to use and more than enough of them. It has two custom modes in which you can record your favourite settings. I’m certainly going to use these when I’ve got used to the camera. Results so far I have to say are mixed. It has a habit of keeping quality in some parts of the photo at the expense of blowing away other areas that I find annoying. At other times it produces the kind of results I was looking for. The bottom line is that it is still too early to pass judgement.

Here are a few I took recently. Not as examples of great pictures, just examples of pictures with the G9.

As part of a home with two languages, this is a topic of some interest to us. I’ve read a few of the more scientific books on the subject which were helpful but what is fascinating is to see how Zosia’s language skills develop.

We decided from the beginning that I would speak to Zosia in English and Marta in Polish. The rest of her family and environment is 100% Polish aside from infrequent trips to the UK. For roughly the first 3 – 3.5 years she thought that there was just one big messed-up language and she would use whatever words from either language she liked best. I would speak to her in English, she would most often answer me in Polish and so it was that we communicated. There then came a moment of revelation when she seemed to realise that this was two languages, one that daddy liked and one that mummy liked. From this point she started being much more selective in her use of words, although grammar remains a bit mixed up. She now makes every effort to speak to me entirely in English and even gets annoyed if she has to resort to Polish, she answers me also in English. There’s no question that her Polish is far far better than her English and that Polish is her “mother tongue” but that’s exactly what we wanted, she does after all live in Poland and attend a Polish, not international, school. Her English though is coming on tremendously and her capacity to soak it up is just amazing.

One tip that is worth passing on. We have known other two-language homes where the kids start to resent the second language, are reluctant to use it and often get embarrassed about the parent using this language. In every case where this happens (in our experience), the language the parents use at home between them is the child’s mother tongue, in our case that would be Polish. We however, have always used English in the home between Marta & I and it does seem that this is a big help with the child’s development of the second language. It seems that having one parent only using the second language is just not enough to make this language important to the child. If you add home use between the parents, the child can see that this language might be more important and therefore try harder to use it and is not embarrassed about using it themselves in everyday life.

Having just typed that I can think of an example where the kids English is very good but they use Polish at home. In this case though, the family is extended with some brothers and sisters in the UK from a previous marriage and there has been a great deal of integration between them and many trips to England. In this case, I think this has helped to offset the fact that English is not the home language. That and dedicated teaching from the parents.

I’ll write more about this later perhaps.

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat
Please put a penny in the old man’s hat
If you haven’t got a penny, a ha’penny will do
If you haven’t got a ha’penny, a farthing will do
If you haven’t got a farthing, then God bless you!

The nearest we got to geese and charity yesterday was someone shaking a collection tin for animal welfare in the midst of our hunt for Christmas gifts. The commercial hurricane that is modern Christmas has well an truly arrived in the shopping centres of Warsaw and with mama babysitting for a while we took the opportunity to get out amongst it.

We first visited “Blue City”, or at it used to be known “That Turkish thing”. Many many years ago someone, apparently the Turks were involved, built a monstrously humungous edifice at the busy junction between Trasa Torunska and Jerozolimskie. It took an age to build, in fits and spurts, but was badly planned and eventually stood as an empty concrete cathedral for years with nobody sure what to do with it or interested in taking it on. Eventually somebody plucked up the courage, finished the place off and opened it as the Blue City shopping centre. Truth is that it’s a pretty smelly place compared to the main two centres in Warsaw, Arkadia and Galleria Mokotow. Like Promenada on the other side of the river, the centre gives the impression of having been planned by amateurs and only manages to stay in business by dint of it’s location which makes it the easiest place to get to for a significant chunk of the population.

Our Blue City visit was before we dropped Zosia with her babcia and so she had a chance to show us the sort of things she’s interested in Santa bringing:

My Little Pony (as if 200 of them aren’t enough!)

Ponyville (the madness continues in smaller form!)

A fairy on a pigeon (what can I say)

Working out what Zosia would like for Christmas is impossible. On one hand, some time earlier, we asked Zosia to write a letter to Santa telling him what she would like for Christmas (assuming she was going to remain a good girl). She drew a very nice picture of a doll’s house and explained this is what she wanted, with some dolls and other accessories. On the other hand, she is completely in love with about 30% of what is shown on TV adverts and on the third hand (??) take her to any toy shop and she’ll pick out a whole different collection as her favourites (as above pictures). So, don’t tell her, but this is what she’s got along with the Dale (sheep) family + twins and some furniture and stuff. It will be very interesting to see how she plays with it. She is very much into “role playing” and family life so this should go down well, but who knows?

Being a certified idiot, I also bought a few of those “It’s Christmas so why not waste some money on ridiculous things” things. This year, they include a battery operated gopher that sings (very loudly) “I like to move it move it!” while engaging in a little robotic dancing. Also a typical Christmas game where you pour marbles into a holder full of spikes at the the top of a plastic tower and then remove the spikes. You withdraw the spikes and gravity might send some marbles down the slide to the bottom. The player with the least marbles dislodged is the winner. I think. Best played when drunk as a skunk. Last year was that silly elephant that blows butterflies into the air and you catch them with a net. That lasted all of 12 plays. Soon it will be in the piwniczka, and then the maintenance man’s kids will be playing with it!

Again, this Christmas, I’m underwhelmed by the quality of the toys on offer for kids of Zosia’s age. I think for younger kids, 0-3, the choice and quality is actually pretty good but since then the options to buy something that is not purely commercial trash become far more limited. I’m not sure exactly what I would consider to be a good toy, I think what we have bought comes close, but there is little doubt that at this age the manufacturers appear to move away from genuine attempts at education and more into anything pink or furry in a TV advert = big bucks.

Anyway, we’ve ticked a lot off the list without having to fight the peak of the crowds and we shall no doubt fill the gaps in the coming week or so.

Best of luck to all of you who haven’t started yet!

(footnote for camera folk – the above were with the G9)