Four And Up

If you have a Wordpress blog like me and you spend more than five seconds a week dealing with spam, can I recommend you activate the Akismet plugin that ships with Wordpress 2.0 and later? You need to create a Wordpress API key (which takes a minute or so) but after that it takes care of everything. I’m not allowed to see the spam on this site - I hear Dad grawlixing about how inappropriate and disgraceful it is that these grawalixes post their nastiness to my innocent little blog - but I’m told it’s caught more than 4000 spam comments since we moved to our current hosts in February. There haven’t been any false positives that we know of (well, if there have they’ve deluged in the torrent of filth) and few, if any, spam comments which have leaked through to the moderation queue.

Someone spilt - accidentally from the back of a van, or deliberately, we don’t know - a whole pot of white paint on the road in front of our house today. Oh, and James had to go to A&E, for the first time but maybe not the last. I’ve never been there, when I hurt my eye we went to Outpatients.

My hula-hooping has come along well, I can now keep the hoop up for numerous revolutions!

We’re off to funplex today as it’s raining.

To deal with the inevitable Summer Holiday Strops, I have a happy face / sad face chart for good vs bad behaviour. If I score more happy than sad then I will get a treat of some kind. Now, it seems to me, this is my chart and I make the rules. Not so! say Mum and Dad. Still, I’m in front so far - unlike Mario Kart Wii: I can more or less complete the race (unlike James who just goes round in circles) but the intricacies of steering have me confused, it’s not like steering my scooter at all, and I always come last (unless in 2 player mode against James, of course). I like to play as Peach, but maybe I should try Rosalina..

Another of my holiday projects is to learn to play cards: I can now play Snap and Pairs with real cards, and Mum and Dad are teaching me the, uh, doyen of card games - it has many names but no real one, and is known by it’s rules even though everyone has their own set of them: follow suit and numbers, 2 picks up 2, 3 picks up 3, 8 miss a turn, Ace changes suit - you know it, I’m sure. I like the game, but my attention is often distracted by the TV - especially if Super Why! is on. Me and James are big fans, but he gets frustrated sometimes as he can’t recognise letters.

I’ve taken to staying up late, and sometimes I even stay awake long enough to watch Big Brother with Mum. It has a Stuart in it! Apparently it had a Becky too, but she was evicted. I don’t really know why anyone watches it, nothing ever really happens..

I’ve been learning to skip: some of my school friends are better than me, so I’ve made it my first summer holiday project. Yesterday I managed sixteen skips!

Tomorrow is the last day of the school year. It’s odd to think that if I had been born four days later, I wouldn’t be starting school until September, and I would have gone to nursery today! Unsurprisingly, I am the youngest in my class. We’re doing face-painting and having a little tea-party tomorrow, then after the holidays it’s onwards and upwards I suppose, though I will miss Mr Johnson our teacher as he has set the teacher-bar very high.

Next year I will be a Year One. Our class is being kept together, so I’ll still be with my friends..

These are the CDs in our car:

• Amy Winehouse, Back To Black. Mum and Dad torment us with this on long journeys.
• Lily Allen - Alright Still. Me and Ben like “Friday Night”, and everyone likes “Alfie” and his friend THC.
• Mika - Life In Cartoon Motion. We never listen to this. A little Mika goes a long way, and we’re a long way past that..
• The Shrek Soundtrack. This is James’s favourite, in fact it’s the only CD he ever wants on, though he’s never bothered to let us know which ones he likes. I like Bad Reputation, Dad likes My Beloved Monster, and Mum likes Best Years Of Our Life. We all sing along to Hallelujah, and I’m On My Way was (I’m told) played extremely loudly when Dad and James went to pick Mum up from hospital (I can imagine poor James with his fingers in his ears saying “Noise! Noise!”)
• Now That’s What I Call Christmas. Not long till Christmas now!
• Daisy’s Various. This CD that Dad did for me has the Miffy theme tune, which is one of my favourites despite (or because?) I have neve seen the actual program, and other stuff I can take or leave.
• Jarvis. This languished in the central CD reservation for a while till I asked for the song “about the phone and the kids and the wife”, the fantabulous Fat Children. I ask lots of questions about this - “What’s an altercation? What does took-my-life mean?”. It doesn’t seem to have “a video” like songs used to (yes, even in my lifetime) but of course YouTube has it’s own versions - this perspective is quite like the one I get when we go shopping and I sit in the trolley.. here it is, if you haven’t heard it.

We’re off to Spain for our holidays - we’re going to stay in this villa with Auntie Margaret and Uncle Richard and Ed and Grandma. We’re not going to go birdwatching this time, though I expect next time we stay at Granny’s we will pop in.

Me and James are playing spies - I’m Pink Spy, and James is Blue Spy..