Back to previous page
Early March we invited friends from Piet's old class over for a barbecue. This was mostly the group we had gone camping with in January. It was a Dutch barbecue - no cancellation despite rain - but we had a good time inside the house. The day before, Piet asked how many fathers were coming. "Six," mum replied, and she started to detail which fathers were coming. Halfway through, she stopped, as she realised that Piet, on his belly on the carpet, was counting the beer bottles under the buffet:
That's not enough! Clearly he is growing up to be a real Aussie bloke.
Fortunately, he also has an artistic side. He painted with water colours a beach scene with a rock, crab, towel and parasol. Emma got her log-in to a mathletics internet site and loves playing songs of cool bands singing multiplication tables with her brother.
Some new videos have been uploaded on www.bickbos.nl/video.
Juliana was happy sitting propped up, watching mum sort out some cloths.
Opa and oma arrived for a visit to Sydney on the fourth Sunday in March. Piet and Emma were both keen to read stories with them (sometimes, Piet and Emma do the reading), play football and do craft. Opa met his second granddaughter and brought Piet and Emma to school. Grannybunts did a reading group in Piet's class; Piet thought she did that well. Juliana sat on opa's lap and in her bouncy chair. She is still placid most of the day and still gets grizly in the evenings. We have started to top her up with milk before we go to bed in order to make her sleep past four o'clock.
Art
In their spare time, Piet and Emma are
amazingly creative, at least by dad's standards. In a
joint production, Emma drew the picture, dictated to Piet a sentence and wrote the last word herself with help from Piet for the spelling. Emma
masters a recognisable house, girl, bee, butterfly and tree. Piet put a lot of effort in writing his
first book. This is just a first step, as he want to become an author (and also an illustrator, an artist, a builder and a zoo keeper). Recently in the run-up to harmony day, school had a lesson on the aboriginal art of telling a story by painting and he
drew his own story. It is a long story about a kangaroo coming to a waterhole to drink and wandering off to the top of the page, a river (top left) with fish (dashes), tracks of dingos and other Australian animals, five frill-necked lizards and a snake (mid bottom), among others.
Emma can work very seriously on her Dutch homework, here about animals that lay eggs or give live birth. Piet gets a small book to read every week and does not always find it inspiring.
