Ice skating

A year after we all kind of learned to ice skate, Callum and Declan and Evan decided that a rainy Sydney week was a good time to see if they could still do it. Sadly most of Sydney had the same idea, but they managed to get back into it, not too shakily, and enjoyed it.

New year measurement

As is traditional, we measured the boys on our first day back (not quite New Year, but close). Callum has grown 9 cm this year, and is now 168cm (which is taller than me, which has been since Declan's birthday. Percentile wise, that puts him at 61st percentile for height, which is about the highest percentile he has been in his life.

Declan has seen Callum grow more away from him this year than ever before - there is now 13cm between them, and he is at a slightly lower height percentile (56th). I suspect next year will be the year of Declan shooting up, since he always seems to grow slightly earlier than Callum.

Callum and Maths

I haven't got around to describe Callum's fascination with maths this year. If anything it has increased.  His Beyond Visible course had a segment where they had to do the maths enrichment prep for maths olympiad - Gauss section. They weren't allowed to get any help from anyone, so Callum spent a lot of time staring at whiteboards and moving things around as he got the right answers.

He was able to share his solutions with people, so he also spent a fair bit of time with me and with his grandparents taking us through the various problems.

In our stopover in Bangkok airport on the way to our holiday, Callum also grabbed the serviette and tried to write out his equation for the time it takes for something to fall from a height, depending on its horizontal velocity, as well as the gravitational force on whatever planet you happen to be at the time.

And in quiet moments in the bus on our holiday, Callum spent some time musing on relativity, trying his various equations out on me, to see whether I thought they were correct. It seems we have less time than we thought before he overtakes us  - the combination of Grandma and Grandpa (with multiple maths and physics degrees between them, albeit more than 50 years ago) is being stretched to its limit.