Wii, pirates, Mom and Cheryn

We have a pirate telling us which flag to raise in this semaphore game.  It's loads of fun, but check out the level of concentration on my face!

Family Home Evening at Angela's

Patrick took Roxanne, Vincent, Cheryn and Zeek to a Halloween attraction on the main land last night, so Angela had the idea to combine Family Home Evening.  We ate Pizza (and salad to make it healthy) and Rachel and Corbin gave the lesson to Samuel.  It was a lovely evening.

I gave the camera to Rachel and asked her to take pictures for the family far away.  Enjoy:

Corbin and Samuel had a blast riding their vehicles in the lounge.

 We were trying to capture his lovely smiles, this is as good as we could get, his happy cooing noises are so lovely!

Thanks Ange for having us over.  xxx

ECDL Extra

I have now finished my month long course at the College.  It was such a good course and well taught.  I really enjoyed learning all those new things, I passed all four of my exams - I even got 100% for two of them!

I have booked to go onto the Excel Advanced course in November, half of the same class will be on that, so it will be good to see them again.

I love education, I love learning new things, I love meeting new people and I love living here in the UK where it is all made so much more accessible to me!

Onwards and upwards! (as my mother would say)

PS. Photos of my new baby nephew Isaac are coming I promise...

Education...

I have been fortunate enough to get onto a funded course at the local College: ECDL Extra (European Computer Driving Licence).  It runs every week day for three hours, and will be a month long course.  I can use a computer, I can do most of the basic stuff required for every day things, and I am grateful for all the things I have learned over the years.

But here are some new things I have learned in the first week of my course;
Word 2010:

• You can place items onto the clip board and use them over and over again, this is especially useful when you have a number of different things you need to copy and paste.
• I have learned a few more keyboard short cuts and that makes what I already knew how to do using the mouse even quicker!
• Pasting text after having removed all formatting - a great thing when someone sends you a document that has been poorly formatted and you need to redo it.
• Changing line spacing (I hate it when I copy something off the internet onto a document and then the spacing between the lines is different to what ever I had been typing, now I know how to make all the line spacing the same!)
• Some important rules to follow when using find and replace, for example, if you want to replace man with woman, remember to put a space after man before clicking the find and replace button, otherwise words like 'manual' become 'womanual'
• I now know how tabs work!
• How do set a hard page break.
• I can edit and use the page headers and footers, I even learned how to put the file path in!
• I learned that if you want to add a new row onto a table at the end you don't have to right click and then go to row, add new after.  You can just click into the last section of your table and hit tab!  Much quicker!
• I have learned how to wrap text!
• I can Mail Merge!  What an incredibly useful tool!  I'm definitely using this one in the future.  You probably knew this, but you can mail merge labels too, and even tell the printer what size labels you have.
• I have learned how to customise my tool bar.

And a few more things!  And that was week one.  Next week is Power Point, which I have never used before, so everything will be new to me.  I love learning, I love knowing how to use the tools I have more effectively, I love living in a country where these opportunities are made available to me.  I feel so blessed.

Happy Birthday Zeek!

The usual pile in bed morning presents and singing routine...

 We went to Pete's house for cake and singing in the evening, he forgot to get candles for the cake, so he make a plan and use this one.  Very clever...

 Still get to blow something out after the singing :)

15 Already!  I can't believe it.

Happy 13th Birthday Rachel!

This time we had three added girls, Chloe, Roxanne and Amy, so not everyone fitted in the bed...

Rachel wanted a desk that opened up for her birthday so she was super excited when she actually got one!  And there were more prezzies inside the desk. 

For her dinner she invited two of her friends over, so they got their own table, it was a lovely evening with a very happy 13 year old. 

Zeek the star athlete

Zeek was awarded 5 medals from the school's athletics competition.
Gold for discus
two Silver for 200m and 400m
and  two Bronze for javlin and 800m
He gave one of his Silver medals to his friend who participated but didn't get any medals, so I think he should have gotten another gold for kindness!

Rachel the star of the show

Rachel was cast as Baby Face in the school's rendition of Bugsy Malone.  She was also cast as 5 other characters!  She had a ball and was really good.  It was so lovely watching her shine on stage, she is a good little actress!

She needed her hair to look short (as she was playing the part of a boy) and she also needed a moustache, so here is the finished product of Baby Face Bowen:

Picnic at the Castle

Pete took the kids to Carisbrooke castle for a picnic, and Cheryn took her camera along.  It was a lovely sunny day and the food was good.  Thanks Pete, they had a good time!