The Kilners

Tehilla is becoming such a big girl lately. She’s quite the little comic and we find ourselves constantly laughing at her antics.

She’s learning lots of new things all the time (with the help of her big sisters).  She recognises some numbers and letters and she knows lots of colours.  When looking at a book, she’ll point out the colours on the page, “red, green, yellow, orange, turquoise.”  Yep, she doesn’t call things blue, they are nearly always turquoise.  To be blue, it has to be a really dark blue.  Ho hum.

It was her birthday a couple of days ago and now she’s a big 3 year old girl! Unfortunately she has also been unwell for the last week and we decided not to celebrate her birthday just yet.  We’ll do something for her soon.

But today is also her birthday party in kindergarten.  Not sure quite what she’ll do, but we’ll go along and see if she joins in.  Experience has shown us that our kids don’t often join in at their birthday party, but maybe Tehilla will be different.

We’ll see (maybe there will be photos).

Today’s a big day for our biggest girly and our littlest girly. Esther has gone for her 1st day at school and Tehilla has gone for her 1st day in kindergarten.  Let’s hope that they both enjoy it.

Don’t worry. We put shoes on Tehillla before we went out.

This morning, people in India and other parts of Asia have been experiencing the longest solar eclipse of the century.

For some though, this is not the celestial spectacular that you might think it is, but instead is an omen of doom.

In an age where most people have gone beyond superstitions about natural events, in Nepal, the authorities closed all schools for the day to avoid exposing the students to any ill-effects.

On the other extreme, in India and Nepal, many people gathered to immerse themselves in holy water to watch the eclipse because this is considered auspicious!

For more details, see the BBC article.

For the people concerned about the ill-effects of solar eclipses, fear no longer. The moon is moving away from the earth at the speed of 4cm/year, which means that it will soon be too small to completely block out the sun and cause an eclipse. I say soon, but I’m pretty sure that I, my children, my grandchildren, and several more generations will be well dead and buried before we stop seeing solar eclipses.

As an avid fan of shiny things, I decided that I just *had* to get my grubby hands on a copy of Windows 7. I really like it. It’s very shiny and has lots of shiny new shiny things to keep the shiny loving people all shiny and happy.

One of the new (well, I guess updated really) shiny things in Windows 7 is the shiny calculator, which now lets you do lots of clever calculations, such as:

• Calculating your mortgage payments
• Calculating your fuel economy
• Lots of different unit conversions
• And many more shiny things

(Obviously, you could do these calculations before, but now, you don’t have to try to remember the formula, or do lots of interim calculations.)

Anyway, one of the shiny things in the calculator is the ability to calculate the difference between 2 dates. As a shiny thing lover, I had to try this out to find out how many days old I was.

Turns out that I’ve already gone through the 10000 day barrier and didn’t even notice.

Not sure how useful this really is in the grand scheme of things, but I liked it.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Children grow up sooooooo quickly.

Tehilla is the latest example in our family of children getting big and being really clever.

First of all, some examples of being clever:

• She can sing the whole of Do-Re-Mi (from The Sound of Music)
• She can sing some of So Long, Farewell while climbing up the stairs backwards

But now she’s getting big as well. Yesterday while waiting to get in the bath, Ruth sat Tehilla on the potty to see if she would do anything. Tehilla did a poo, but then got quite upset to see the ‘snail’ in the potty. Ruth managed to convince Tehilla that it was very exciting that she had done a poo (and that there was no snail in the potty) and got Shira and Esther to congratulate Tehilla for being such a big girl.

(I’m sure if she reads this post when she’s older, she will be mortified that I wrote it. Maybe I’ll have to promise not to dance at her wedding, since that is the most embarrassing thing that a dad can do.)