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).

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

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.

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.

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.)

A few days ago, Ruth was driving home from the shops and someone pulled her over and told her that there was a nut missing from 2 of the wheels. How did that happen?

We called up the garage where we had done the service and asked them if it was safe to drive with only 3 nuts on the wheels. They said to make sure that the remaining 3 were on tightly, but to bring the car down ASAP.

We took the car down and while we were there, they pointed out that the tyres had dried out and cracked a bit and they recommended that we replace them immediately. A bit annoying, but for safety, we went ahead and bought 4 new tyres, had them put on (and they ended up throwing in the new nuts for free).

This morning, driving to work, I got caught in a tailback on the motorway. I wondered what could have caused the traffic. Stuck in the fast lane was a car with the back right wheel missing. The car was not jacked up, so I can only assumed that it had fallen off while they were driving. The car looked to be in quite bad shape.

I’m glad now that we spent the money going straight to the garage to get the nut issue fixed and new tyres put on.

Now, it should also be noted that the time I get up is NOT the time that the children should be getting up.

This morning, I heard Shira getting up to go to the toilet just as my alarm was going off. Here I was faced with a couple of choices:

1. Get up and start getting dressed, ignoring Shira on the toilet.
2. Stay in bed a couple more minutes and hope that Shira would just go back to bed (but run the risk of being late for work).
3. Get up and try to hurry Shira back to bed.

I went for option 3. Unfortunately for me, Shira is quite clever. She immediately noticed that I was up and starting to get dressed AND that it was starting to get quite bright outside. I tried to hurry her back to bed, but she was not happy with this. After all, it was getting bright outside. It can’t be bright at night, night is when it’s dark. (The only exception is when it’s bedtime. It can be light outside at bedtime.)

After much convincing, I got Shira back into bed and was only a few minutes late getting myself ready.

Unfortunately, Shira was pretty much awake by this point and I don’t think she went back to sleep at all!

As the title says, they may not look as similar as my memory initially suggested.

Anyway, I’ll let you decide. Here are their headshots:

If you’re not sure who is who, here are links to their respective press pages:

Nicholas Witchell

Brad Smith

A couple of weeks ago, she got her 1st wobbly tooth. And then a couple of days later, she got another wobbly tooth. And then they both fell out within a couple of days of each other (when Grandma and Granddad were visiting, much to Grandma’s dismay [she’s squeamish about wobbly teeth]).

And now, in an effort to put all of the children into the same bedroom, we decided that we should make Esther’s and Shira’s beds into bunk beds. After much hard work and cursing (the beds only go one way round on top of the other and we had to make sure that Esther didn’t bang her head on the ceiling fan), we got the beds made up. Last night was Esther’s first night on the top bunk!

Soon enough she’ll be dating and getting married and we’ll be grandparents.