October 2016

I’m fairly certain (at least 20% anyway) that most parents are like me and think that kids get to many holidays from school. So you can imagine how I felt when a couple of weeks ago his school decided that they would only have classes for one day that week and the kids would have a mid term holiday. But it wasn’t just his school, all the primary schools did it. And no, it wasn’t an official mid term school holiday.

So why did they close the schools down for 4 days in one week? Because of the PSLE marking. What’s that, I pretend to hear you ask? It’s the Primary School Leaving Examination, which all grade 6 students do to determine which High School they can get into. Now, I don’t know about most people reading this, and I don’t know if the system has changed in Australia since I went through it. But when I finished primary school, we didn’t have nationwide (or even statewide) exams to get into high school. Although I think there were some private high schools that had their own entrance exams. read more

Have you ever wondered how much studying your child should be doing? How many hours should we expect from them after school? What about weekends? Holidays? Do they have time for sports or other activities? Do they even have a childhood of fun and play anymore?

Let me set the scene. My family and I live in Singapore, and if you missed it I’m Australian and my wife and son are Indonesian. The school that Jay, my son, attends has classes on Monday from 8am to 3pm (with 2 breaks for a snack and lunch), and from Tuesday to Friday from 8am to 1.30pm (with 1 break for a snack). After school he used to have 1 tuition session on Thursday afternoons, however the tutor was unable to continue the class and we haven’t replaced it with anything else. read more

When I was growing up we always had dinner as a family. Well, okay, there were times when one or both of our parents were out. But the majority of the time we sat down and ate together. And whilst the TV was quite often on, we did talk to each other while we ate. It wasn’t just a case of sitting at the table eating and watching TV at the same time.

Since Jay came into our lives, we’ve tried to eat together as a family as much as possible. We don’t even have the TV on while we’re eating. And even if it is on, we can’t see it from the table anyway, so it’s not important. read more

Have you ever wondered how common it is for children to get foreign objects stuck in their ear? Well, last Friday we found out, after Jay, our son, decided to put a Tic Tac in his ear. Apparently it’s very common, even for 7 year olds who should know better.

Let’s go back a moment to Friday morning before it happened. My wife, SO, and I had taken the day off. SO was at home because her Mother and Sister were her for a couple of days so her Mother could see her Doctor. I, on the other hand, had an appointment to get injections for my Torticollis, which I’ve talked about here. read more

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I installed Pokemon Go on my phone to help get my son out and more active. This post, I guess, is an update on how that has been working. Or not. See, the thing is, after the initial jump in activity, we’ve fallen back a bit. He’s not as eager to get out and about to catch them.

On the other hand, I’m more active now. I walk further when I’m out during the day, stopping at pokestops to collect items, and walking around to help catch pokemon and hatch eggs for him. I’m doing this, not just for my health, but also because he is still excited about the game. He’s just not as excited to go out and catch as he was the first couple of weeks. And when I get home in the evening, he wants to see what pokemon I’ve caught or hatched. read more