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This weekend might be the last of the warmer days before the autumn sets in for good. It was 23 degrees, which is unusual for the first day of September where it is more likely to be rainy and overcast, than blue skies and T-shirt weather. 

https://i.imgur.com/Xmulyjr.jpg

We tried to make the most of it and headed out to a very local kids event in the morning for a walk where there was a fire engine and a jumping castle, and then to a city park in the afternoon. @smallsteps is getting much more confident on th equipment and surprised us at how agile she actually has become in the last few weeks. She seems to be going through one of those skill development phases and this time, it is jumping and hanging like a monkey. 

Speaking of monkeys..

https://i.imgur.com/CaZpjnT.jpg

I ordered her a learning aid online and it arrived Friday. It is a scale balance with numbers from 1 to 10 of increasing weight and little monkeys. It is an addition and subtraction game and the idea is to balance the scale. She enjoys these kinds of games as well as anything that helps her get closer to reading and while she has been reading the alphabet for a long time, she walks around the house saying words and breaking them up into the syllables. She is doing this in both English and Finnish, Finnish being the stronger of her languages. 

Finnish is easier to learn to read in because it is a phonetic language which means, words are said as they are written with very little exception - there is nothing like *taught, taut, torte, tort.* It also makes spelling in Finnish insanely easy. One trouble for a Finn learning English though, is that there are sounds missing like TH, SH, CH, Z, W, B and several other letters, and variations. @smallsteps shouldn't have too much difficulty however, as I am pretty well qualified to correct her pronunciation if there are problems, but it won't really be necessary as children learn first and foremost their spoken style from their parents.

My father is a non-native English speaker but was a gifted language learner and could speak 4-8 depending on the time of his life as he grew up in a contested war zone in World War 2. While his parents didn't speak English at all, his English is unaccented in any way and over the phone very few would pick him as non-native. However, occasionally he would slip as there were words he had only ever read, not heard. 

While language errors were an extremely rare slip, I remember that when I was young he said "Copper knickers" in a sentence and no body knew what he was really talking about until with a bit of blur interpretation and small explanation, what he meant was *Copernicus.* As said, his language slips were rare.

Other than when he swore. 

Not that this has anything to do with his pronunciation, but swear words were delivered so uncomfortably by his mouth it was off-putting to hear them spoken. Luckily, none of his children have failed to learn how to swear properly and do so with impunity. 

Well, tomorrow my wife starts her new job after 3 years on maternity and then finishing her studies and while I am looking forward to her working, it is going to rearrange our lives once again. It seems to be such a common process these days though that whatever comes is taken in stride and, life could be much worse than having a new job in a comfortable office. 

When she used to work in Helsinki, it used to be 430am wake-ups for us both as I would drive her to the train station and I am glad that that is not necessary this time around as she will work in the city. However, because of schedules it does mean that we have to leave at different times as one has to take @smallsteps to the daycare, the other has to pick her up in the afternoon. 

I am guessing that what this will mean is that we have less time and I have less time to get my "extracurricular" activities (Steem) achieved as I will likely not be able to spend as many late nights awake. I have put heaps of midnight hours into Steem over the last years but with so many IRL conditions to be met, it is getting difficult to keep up. I still don't plan on missing a day, but the further we go, the closer that day gets. 

But, that also is the same for Steem going to the sun, so perhaps if Steem makes its run first, it will give me the space before I have to miss that day. Besides family, creating and writing for Steem is one of the best things in my life. 

There are worse vices to have than Steem.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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