asus eee pc

i want this baby:



hubby has been discouraging me about it, saying i'd go nuts with a keyboard of that size and he's probably right, considering that i'm used to a "real" keyboard and it takes me time to adjust to the keys of even a normal-sized laptop.

but it's cute. and portable. imagine, it just weighs about 2 pounds! and so small it can fit in your shoulder bag! i'm gonna have this, i tell you.

now let me see where i can tweak the housebudget....

jan's christmas gifts

we’ve already secured most of jan’s christmas gifts, mostly from amazon — books, videos and cds, all in german (otherwise we would have placed our orders in the US site).



if you speak german, you can tell that jan has an advanced german vocabulary, diction and sentence construction for his age. we knew, however, that with his strengthening english and introductory mandarin, he’s running the risk of slipping on his german, so we countered this with a rich exposure to german literature at home, particularly books and audiobooks. it seems like it does help; when my FIL was here just recently, he has been positively surprised that jan has kept this, using complex sentences with clauses and almost perfect grammar.

what would we be without amazon?

nikolaustag

yup, even though we've moved to singapore, we're keeping the german christmas traditions jan grew up with. like the nikolaus tag.

In Germany, Nikolaus is usually celebrated on a small scale. Many children put a boot, called Nikolaus-Stiefel, outside the front door on the night of December 5 to December 6. St. Nicholas fills the boot with gifts, and at the same time checks up on the children to see if they were good. If they were not, they will have a tree branch (rute) in their boots instead. Sometimes, a disguised Nikolaus also visits the children at school or in their homes and asks them if they "have been good" (sometimes ostensibly checking a book for their record), handing out presents on a per-behaviour basis. This has become more lenient in recent decades.

this year, jan got the usual fillers: apples, oranges, chocolates. and a laser sword.

obsessed with action heroes

for the longest time, we’ve tried to distract jan from superhero figures. we considered them to be inappropriate for his age and really, what good would he pick up from them? in germany, it was relatively easy, as there were lots of other options. there were a variety of well-made children shows that didn’t feature violence and fighting as its main plot.

now that we've moved to singapore, he’s obsessed with action heroes. it is so pervasive, not only on tv, we knew we were facing a losing battle when we implemented a restriction on them in our household.