A trip down memory lane!

I have been looking through all of our discs looking for something that I just cant find! But I did however find these images! There are from the scrapbook that my mum gave me for my 30th birthday. I love these all so dearly i wanted to share them with everyone....

 These are my siblings. Jackie in orange, Noddy in green, me in pink with the running mascara and Jodie in red. People who know me now would never know that as a teenager I never went anywhere without a full face of makeup! And what are we doing fully clothed in that bath? Well it was a regular occasion at our house. I think it was mum who used to push us in! We have photos with random friends in there too!

 This is me and my favourite cousin Karen. She is closest in age to me. Here we are at her house in Scott St Mandurah, WA.

 This is at a lake in Perth WA looking for black swans. One year my parents promised me that if I got an A on my report card I could go with Nan and Grandad on their annual trip to Western Australia. So when I was in year 6 I got an A for class participation so I got to go!!!!! I am fairly certain it wasn't usual for teachers to award A's for things other than subjects but who was I to argue, I got the A didn't I!

 My Dad was the handler for his Calvary's mascot. A wedged tailed eagle. His name was Courage. I remember this day because I put my finger in the mouse cage that held Courages' food and the mouse bit me! Was happy that one ended up as dinner!

 This is my sister Jackie and I performing at the Holsworthy Primary talent show to Ghost busters. We choreographed it ourselves.  Jackie is the booger ghost and I am the ghost buster. We didn't win!

 Grandad worked at Hurlstone Agricultural high school and on the school holidays we would go and hang out with him and milk the cows! Fun!

 Once upon a time before we were teenagers Jackie and I were best friends. We were always playing together. That is my little brother Noddy stacking it in the background!

 This was taken at my great Aunt's farm in Southern WA. We used to go fishing for marrow and floating in tyre tubes. Noddy is having a crack at paddling the boat. This photo is a huge reminder of how unhealthy I was as a teenager! (And once again notice the full face of makeup!)

 Bubbles! That was my nickname as a bubba! I wonder why!

 This is the reason my boys got a blue peddle car for Christmas years ago. I will have to dig out a photo of them in theirs!

Before I got really skinny I was really fat! But just as cute!

 My big sister Jodie and I holding hands. Before she decided she didn't like me! Growing up Jodes and I didn't get along. We are very different! Having children gave us something in common and we get along now. (We do live thousands of kms away and that helps too!) My Mum thought I was at my best looking at this stage of life. It had a lot to do with my chubbiness!

 More chubs!

 Me on my first day of year 10 at Kwinana High! In the next shot I was joined by my friends who lived next door and down the road. This was the time of my life but I really home my boys don't turn out like me! Notice the fringe, It was teased and hair sprayed within an inch of its life! Ahhh fashion you are so fickle!

 Bridesmaid for my big sister Jodie.

 Nathan's first Christmas with my family. When we first met my parents were in the process of moving interstate and he only met the once very briefly before the moved. This was a proper introduction for him!

 Another photo from one of the best times in my life. We lived in Kwinana and we had family live an hour away so every Friday was family dinner and poker. Great Nanna Green used to always win but that was because she was the best cheater, Granddad was the next best cheater! This picture is from Granddad's 60th. Up the back is Uncle Phil, then Jodie and Julianne then me, Karen and Amy, next row is Glen, Grandad, Jackie and Noddy. All the Reymer's and the Sheean's together. This photo is when Grandad was still rolling his own smokes. He gave it up a few years later. Didn't stop him from dying on us far too soon.

 This is Grandad tipping me out of a canoe! It didn't matter if it was a boat, surf ski, tyre tube or canoe, if grandad was near you knew your were going to get wet! He got the most enjoyment out of doing it to me because he knew I didn't want to get my hair wet or smudge my makeup!

 My year 12 formal! Nice bow!

 Netball rep team.

 A sleep over party with my friends when I was in year 6! Lisa Smith (as she will always be to me) is still a friend on facebook!

 A Christmas just after Mum and Dad got back from Bali. They are genuine knockoff Oakleys around my neck! That make you look away from my gorgeous outfit didn't it! And it is rather sad that you cant see the blue sequined shoes that accompanied this outfit!

 Nathan and I at the Engineering Ball just after we got engaged.

 Jackie and I at the start of the WA City to Surf.

 WA district swimming carnival.

 This is what I remember most about WA. First of all family second of all crowded around scoffing fresh crabs that we all just caught! This is when Nathan first realised he loved me because I peeled his crab even though I don't eat them!

 Some random wedding!

 Another photo from Granddad's 60th. Mum loves this one for my crossed eyes! And I cant remember if this was before or after the stripper mum got Grandad as his present! She was so good she even stayed after she performed to play poker!

 I cant remember where this is but it must be in WA somewhere and that is my Great Grandmother on the right. Nana Green. My grandmother is on the other side, with Grandad and Mum up the back.

 This Santa was super familiar. It was Grandad. My Mum has a thing about having photos with Santa every year. The year Grandad was Santa made it super easy and less embarrassing to get it done!

 This may just be my favourite photo ever. Even more treasured than my wedding photo! This is my Grandad and I dancing at my sisters wedding. He only danced with me, no one else. (It was probably because I was the only one who asked and wouldn't take no for an answer!) He died before I got married. However, my male wedding bear was a Hawthorne football team bear to represent his presence at my wedding. I miss this man every day. I struggle that he missed out on meeting my children. I see so much of him in them. I see so much of them that he would have treasured. But such is life.

Once again on the farm, I think it was Auntie Nancy's farm near Bunbury. I found out on this day that Grandad had a lot to do with horses when he was young. I remember thinking how strange it was to find something new about someone I had known for so long.

So there you have it. 30 years of Jennifer Leslie Sheean/Rickard in pictures!

A day off

Nathan has had yesterday and today off work. After a very busy couple of weeks with which part of that he was away and working 12 hour days, it was surprisingly easy to convince him to take some time off. The workaholic never takes time off so I was thrilled. I was even more thrilled when i realised that this was the first time I have had him all to myself in 8 years and 9 months! Since Matthew came along we have had very little time to ourselves and now that all three are at school I didn't have to share! We pottered around the house, we had lunch together we chatted or not chatted as the case usually was!
Do you know what the biggest discovery of the two days was? Even after all this time I love spending time with my husband! In a tiny little way I can't wait til the kids move out and I can have him to myself again!

I thought it was supposed to get easier!

Nathan is away again. I really shouldn't whinge because he hasn't had much travel this year and usually I cope really well. But this time he is away for longer and it is winter which means caged animals in our house! It ends up being a vicious circle here because they have plenty of sporting activities. Tuesday and Thursdays are tae kwon do, Wednesdays are footy training and Saturday brings two game of football. But when Nathan is away it is really hard to get them to everything and still make healthy meals. It ends up being one or the other so last week we had tae kwon do on Tuesday and Maccas and no tae kwon do on Thursday and 8 different types of veggies (including brussel sprouts which they love!) And whilst this sounds like an awesome compromise to me the boys don't agree! In fact Matthew believes Maccas is a well rounded meal, Mondays should be for hip hop dance lessons and Fridays for swimming lessons but he sticks to rest on the sabbath!
Even still its not our cracking schedule that gets on top of me when Nathan is away and its not even the boys fighting because the very rarely do! It is the stupidity! Those boys are seriously like speak no evil, see no evil and hear no evil! They are all in cahoots together and when Nathan is away it is three against one! And it's no surprise that the ring leader is Ben and boy can he whip his brothers into a stupidity frenzy!
After years of trying to protect them and telling them a bazillion gazillion times "if you do that someone will get hurt!' and the someone getting hurt anyway. I now have changed tact to "If you all get hurt doing stupid stuff don't come crying to me!" It still doesn't work because sure enough before too long some one is crying (usually Ryan!) and some one is apologising or running away (it is always one of the two and dependant on the severity of the injury!)
So whilst i have moved on from whinging about how hard it is to bath a baby, feed a toddler and contain a slightly bigger toddler while Nathan is away I am still whinging! The challenges have changed but they are still challenging! What gets me through is thinking about those who have it harder than I do. I have a friend who's husband is a pilot and he is always away, my sister survived her husband being away overseas and as my Mum and Nan say they both did it and survived! So I will just crawl back into my box and put the hospital on speed dial for the next stupid accident that occurs during a game of pillow wrestling! Only one more day to go until my amazing partner in all this insanity returns!

Growing Up.

My baby is having his first sleep over at a friends house tonight! I cannot believe that he is old enough to sleep at someone else house! He is staying at his best friend Dylan's house. I am very thankful that Dylan's Mum is one of my best friends. So I know that if Matthew wakes up in the middle of the night she will cuddle him and look after him just as I would. On one hand I am so excited for him. I loved sleepovers as a kid. Everybody else house seemed so exciting when my own felt boring. But on the other hand, I miss him!

I don't know where they get it from?

I think we all might have the same hair dresser!

School Photos 2012

 Matthew Rickard Year 3

 Ryan Rickard Year 2

 Ben Rickard Kindy

Our Big School Boys

The Kindy Crunch

I read an article in Sunday’s paper (I wish I could find a link to but so far have had no success!) which was about how parents are sending their four years old to private tutors so they can get the jump on school, in particular literacy and numeracy programs. The parents claimed they were doing it to alleviate the stress of kindy. They felt it is no longer the ‘done’ thing to show up at school with no experience in reading, writing and counting. Having had three kids through kindy very recently I can certainly substantiate that kindy is getting competitive! This is really not a good thing for our kids! Will someone please think of the children! I didn't feel any pressure when Matthew went to kindy four years ago. It could have been because he was my first I wasn't familiar with how things are done around here or it could just be a recent phenomenon. But geez the competitiveness of kindy in 2012 is huge! The kicker is it is not coming from the school! Yes, our school prides itself on its academic achievements, yes, it uses an intensive phonics program in the first half of the year but it is fun and orchestrated by a very talented bunch of teachers who never place any pressure on the kids to learn and they actively assist the kids to learn properly using a variety of decoding methods to learn to read. The article stressed the value in the Steiner method of schooling which is play based. The only argument I have with Steiner is not learning to read until 7 because research now says that children until the age of 8 are learning to read but once they hit 8ish there is a switch in the brain and reading becomes reading to learn. In my experience it takes longer than a year to fully learn to read with full comprehension as well as fully memorise the 100 sight words we use at our school. However, I fully support play based learning before formal school age as I have witness with my own children their expanded knowledge gained from this model via preschool play based programs.  I fully credit the boy’s curiosity and enthusiasm to learn to the play based preschool programs they attended before reaching school age. I will also stress that both programs the boys did had not one iota of formal literacy or numeracy integrated into their programs.
So if you do have your child in private tutoring here is my advice to you….
Take all that money you are spending on that tutor drive to the book shop and spend it on books and colouring pencils and books!
I pride myself on having children that love to read. (A love of swimming and a love of reading have always been my main goals for my boys!) And whilst they aren’t fully grown up so I haven’t given myself the congratulatory pat on the back for being such an awesome mummy yet I can safely say we have laid a solid foundation. You have no idea how much it warms my heart to see my boys tucked up in their beds reading their books before bed or when it is too cold to be anywhere else but in bed!  Matthew is a voracious reader; I cannot buy enough books to satisfy him! He is now collecting a wide variety of books. We started with Tashi books, moved onto Zack Power and currently he is reading some star wars novel.  Ryan is well on his way, his comprehension is still developing but he is more than capable of reading Zac Power but is going through Phineas & Ferb stage (which he enjoys because they are famous, they’re on tv!)  As a family we have done most of Roald Dahls book and are graduating to Harry Potter. Benny is a funny one, being so close in age to his brothers and tacking along for the ride of his brothers reading journey meant he turned up at kindy with quite a few sight words and a beginning understanding of reading. He had no decoding methods and patchy understanding of phonics but a rather good memory but a great enjoyment of reading (even if he was just making up a story to the pictures in the book) and being read too.
So what did we do to get the boys to where they are now? We read to them, every day, from when Matthew was 3 months old. (We won’t count in-utero because we thought Matthew was going to be a girl so we read him the Paper bag princess every night, at least he should grow up knowing how not to treat a princess!) We started with Happy Helicopters (a first Christmas present from Nanna Bev and Grumpy) and now we do three readers and a chapter from a book. But it is more than just reading! We talk about what we have read, we play with it, we have been on a bear hunt up Mt. Rogers, we have done experiments that we have read about, we have googled information that has been piqued by books we have read, we have read the book and then hired the movie. Instead of sending the boys to a tutor to teach them the alphabet we sang it, at the top of our voices, we talked about all the things that start with “B” and gasped with amazement when Ben realised his name starts with “B”! And then went on to find out Bunnings starts with “B” also. The fun really began with the discussion about how the 60 inside the red circle is the speed limit and how when the yellow pointer goes above the 60 means Mummy is speeding and the police man could book her. (If he catches her!) Dinners are for making up quizzes, last night it was the time (if half an hour is 30 minutes how many minutes is an hour and a half? The person who catches Mummy out is the winner!) For a while we could not miss Sesame Street just so we could find out what the letter and number of the day was so we could spend the day finding them. 
Talk to your children! I have no teaching experience. In fact I teach my children all the wrong things, they think the sky is blue because that was God’s favourite crayon that day, thunder is God moving his furniture and it is not a myth that leprechauns have a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow but is an actual fact, I know this because I saw one once but he was too fast to catch! So I am by no means the perfect educator for my children and in a lot of aspect they have outgrown me academically already. But I know how to love them and I know how to make them love too and what I know for sure is that they love to read and learn. Those two things right there make them invincible. No matter what, they now have the capacity to learn and with that they can go anywhere and do anything.
The final thing I would say to the parents paying for tutoring is it makes absolutely no difference if you win kindy. Kindy is for learning. The whole of primary school and most of high school is for learning and making mistakes and figuring things out. Things are supposed to NOT be perfect in primary school. It is though supposed to be the most fun. Ever. You don’t get to be declared the winner if your child is the first to learn his sight words in kindy or the first to move to level 13 readers. The winner is not declared until high school graduation or university graduation or maybe not even until their first full time job, or maybe their first promotion or first million, or perhaps it is the delivery of your first grandchild! Kindy is absolutely not the time for winning, it’s the time for supporting and nourishing and building network capabilities and most importantly loving, no matter what!
Your kids might grow up and say you never gave me everything I needed to be the best at school (my Mum will tell you they definitely will) but at least then you will be able to say “I tried my best” not “The tutor tried their best.”