Statistics

As is traditional on a birthday, we measured both boys. Callum has shot up 5cm since Declan's birthday, and is now 150cm, and 46kg. Declan hasn't grown quite as much (although his feet are nearly as big as mine now) and is 142cm, and 37kg. Interestingly, Callum is now just over the 50th percentile (54th) for height, which must be about the first time in his life.

Happy birthday to Callum

It was Callum's 12th birthday on Friday. Doesn't time fly! He had a lovely Friday evening pizza with grandparents and available uncles, in which he got all manner of geeky presents (telescope, leap motion sensor and Spheros were highlights).

And on Saturday he had a laser tag party with his Mosman high friends. There were two groups - his bus group (ex Cammeray kids Jacob and Luis) and 7 Yellow group (Sam, Ben and another Jacob, with Freddy unavailable) - both very happy to shoot each other repeatedly.

At 12, Callum is very much enjoying being at high school, and having a bunch of friends who are enjoying it with him. While they do like to whinge about the teachers and the amount of homework, they are having a great time soaking up everything they can learn.

His favourite subject is science, with maths close behind.

Callum is still reading obsessively - both fiction and non fiction - with popular economics book his current favourite non fiction, and various fantasy/SF authors on the fiction side (Brendan Sanderson at the moment). He has been programming python, and will still play minecraft whenever it is available (with more creation and less shooting than a year ago).

Election news

This was our first election since our trip away, and the boys were MUCH more interested in it. Partly because they are older, but also because we saw a few elections while we were away so talked a lot about how things work.

They watched several debates, paid close attention to the policies on refugees and schools, and really quite enjoyed the drama of it all.

Declan and Callum took one of us each to assist us with the ballot paper (helping us count in the below the line senate vote). And then they insisted we pick up a Liberal how to vote card as we went out, to check it against the Labor and Green ones we already had to understand how the preference deals in the lower house might have worked.

At our election party last night, Callum did the survey of all guests as they arrived, asking them to pick the margin, and also helped me put up the traditional pre party pendulum, and move all the seats around to their new position at the end of the night.

New Bikes

Last weekend we went and got new bikes for Callum and Declan. They are both just big enough now for the smallest adult bike. Callum already was, but we upgraded him, and Declan could make it once the seatpost was cut off a bit.

We rode home from the Chatswood bike shop, and on Sunday rode into town. It was quite noticeable how well Declan was now keeping up with us; he really has been working harder with his smaller wheels. Of course that could have been because we got him a bike computer at the same time, and he was quite focused on breaking speed records whenever possible.

Assignments

Callum has been feeling sorry for himself as he has five different school assignments due between now and the end of term. I'm struggling to feel for him too much, as two of them are done in school time, and one of them involves creating and cooking a menu for a new cafe (a far more exciting assignment than I ever had at my school).

To that end, he made us all banana and pear muffins at school for dessert on Friday night.

Father's Day Walk

We walked about 14km from here to Chowder Bay this morning, by doing the Harbour Hike, which raises money for the Sydney Institute of Marine Science.

We all realised we were a bit out of practice. While we were all fine, we found it harder than we had two years ago when we were walking constantly.