Bits of August – The Power of Friendship, Milkshakes, and Hypothetical Rifts In The Space-Time Continuum

We did it. We registered P for primary school.

Our final choice was made on Wednesday night, just after the Ministry of Education published the list of schools available for Phase Three on their website – or rather, what happened was the other foreign Mum from our kindy caught me at the school gate and said, “Have you seen? MOE just published the list!” and I said, “Great! Let’s go down together!” because out of the remaining schools the biggest differentiating factor I could see was that one would be attended by a friend of P’s from kindergarten, and the others would not be.

The good news is P’s currently happy with this choice of primary school, despite the fact that it is not an international school. This is either because a) the main thing that was getting to him was not the teacher’s accent but the atmosphere of tense uncertainty surrounding the registration process; or b) his foreign kindy friend spent most of registration day babbling enthusiastically about the fact that his mum and I were off registering together; or c) we ended up choosing a school within 200m of a place P once had an oreo milkshake at about two years ago and the boy doesn’t forget these things.

The bad news is they might not both get in. I tried to explain this to P, but somewhere between the in-depth analysis of my sampling methodology and my fourth line of probability calculations he piped up and told me not to worry – if the school is oversubscribed (as I suspect) and one or both of them end up being assigned elsewhere, he’ll just invent a gun that makes wormholes in the space-time continuum and send the extraneous students through to some more convenient location. So I guess that’s all sorted.

Prototype.

Prototype.

Me, Elsewhere

  • As if it’s not enough that I’ve been registering for primary school, I’ve also been Freshly Pressed! Who knew you could gain such accolades for experimenting on minors without ethics-board approval.
  • And thanks to Mel for featuring my money-saving post in her five hundred and ninth (!) roundup.
  • I’ve also been clearing out my house and starting a course of study. There’s no link associated with this, but it does explain the lack of #randomlimerick. Feel free to make up for that in the comments.

You, And Other Awesome Things

  • Bohemian On A Budget had a baby! And gave us a three–part series on how a life of travel prepared her for the wonder of childbirth.
  • At the other end of life’s spectrum, Chandra showed us how to mummify a barbie.
  • And on a sort of middle note, if you’re suffering (like me) from too much incessant singing of the theme song from Transformers, allow me to present this compromise solution:

Announcement: After a rather disproportionate amount of handwringing (thanks for listening, Vanilla Housewife) followed by this article about likes on facebook, I’ve removed the “like” button from beneath my posts.

Edit just to clarify: the Facebook article isn’t really related, as it’s a different platform (though it is interesting). I decided to remove the like button because with some extra time pressures I was having trouble getting around to reading your blog, and one of the things that was wasting time was clearing my inbox of wordpress notifications. So I decided to turn off notifications for likes and (now) follows because the proportion of spam in those categories was too high, and then I thought well in that case I might as well turn off likes altogether, so as not to give the false impression of listening with the expectation of a response.

But this does come at a cost to those who were using it for its proper purpose and hopefully having the like function in the comments will fill that gap – in fact some people had already switched over to liking comments instead of using the like button on the bottom of the post. I still get notifications for comment likes, so I am listening to that. I’ll review it when time opens up again.

I wouldn’t ordinarily bore you by detailing every little tweak to my blog, but I wanted to make sure you know I still completely understand that sometimes it’s difficult to comment. You’re busy, you’re reading on your phone – I don’t want to force you to become invisible or anything, but now I have the “like” function in the comments it just makes more sense to me this way. And I also wanted an excuse to show you a thought-provoking (if only marginally-relevant) article about likes on facebook.

Now it’s your turn! (Although as I said I totally understand if it’s just not going to happen for us today.) Tell us what you read in August and absolutely must share. Or if you prefer, blather at random as I often do. 

Category : Bits Of The Month, Expattery, Primary School
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