A stab at fine arts today...

Above we discovered the Colour Wheel! Some colours may not be perfect but we tried our best. After we discussed primary, secondary and tertiary colours and tried them out, next came the art work! Firstly is Labyrinth's Stars in The Sky

Dante's Bird, Rainbow and Sun

Kai's Rainbow and Bird in the Sky and last but not least is Raven's Boat



And Dante has drawn Pterasaur and Raptor for fun. Well, painting was fun to but the objective here was a little more formalised - to keep it to primary and secondary colours as much as possible. They tried really hard and did really well so I'm totally swayed to do more formal art lessons with them so they can comprehend it all. Besides, they love getting into the paint on a regular basis and so they should be at their age!

Trouble on the media centre front, the problem being we are only getting grief from Vista and the USB drive is sooo slow under XP we are not sure yet what we need to do.

Other than that very little. Monika has been very demanding today and I'm exhausted from her. Didn't even get any reading lessons done, and the weather has been pretty bad. Not that I don't enjoy the thought that snow is 300 m above sea level, the rain is great for the garden (and for farming in general), and winter has us by the short and curlies. Also one of my aunties has died of a massive heart attack, but since we've been waiting more or less for several years and I didn't know her very well it becomes less real to me somehow. But my mother is going to the funeral, its upstate. I felt more the death of an online friend's father than I did for Aunty Dot. I've never met him, but I feel for her.

I didn't get to go to my friends house to discuss our possible collaboration on a children's book, so that was rather disappointing.

Other than that frustrating because we can't do/get everything I feel we need at the moment. Yeah, I know we just brought a TV, but hey, why can't we have some good things? Just because we're poor doesn't mean we have to completely go without!

Anyways... I'm going to endeavour to be more blog active and make sure I do it pretty much every day. I've been a bit strange emotionally lately, feeling a bit defeated, so I hope I can drag myself out of this and get better.

NB. I watched QandA on ABC tonight. The first question came from a woman in the audience about the baby bonus being an incentive to kill and abuse/neglect babies... Hey, whose living in the 50's here? It is a great step forward, things like neglect and abuse happen with or without the bonus. I would take the line of what support was that woman lacking to allow her family and herself to get into such a predicament. Obviously her mental health needs were not addressed and a tradegy was allowed to occur. We need more support and recognition for mentally ill people and their families. We also need to help families with new babies with not just money!

So my stance is this: it is important to give a baby bonus to those who are having babies, tis a tough time and it helps ease the burden of being poor. People who have children by and large are good parents (or are trying to be) despite their annual income, this won't change with a baby bonus. We make our own lives what they are. We may have 5 children, but its not for a cash bonus it's because we love the little tikes so much we couldn't imagine life without them. The cash bonus certainly helps ease the burden of poverty a bit, and we will be spending some of the bonus family tax benefit directly on the children's education. This would not sit well with the Questioners world POV.

So tonight, I'd like to leave with you a thought. Love well while you can and regret nothing, as life is too short for any other course. Love, Q.