Suffer the little children...

Best audience ever

On Wednesday I went to Ethan's school to tell them what I do for a living.  One of the moms had come the week before.  She's a florist and sent the kids home with flowers.  Pretty tough to top.  Not that it's a competition or anything...

Anyway I thought about just telling then that I'm a chocolatier:  instant popularity for Ethan.  He doesn't seem to be having any trouble in that area though.  So, thanks to Taco, I took the OSA optics discovery kit.  It has a hologram and diffraction grating, a bunch of lenses and color filters and two polarizers.  

I told them that I teach just like their teacher, Pia, does, only to older kids, and that I study light.  They liked adding the color filters together and wanted to know how to make a hologram.  We played around with the diffraction grating and my laser pointer.  

I decided that I could explain polarization to kindergarteners. Anyone who has been through one of my late-semester lectures knows that I can sometimes overreach.   I told them that light is a wave and I got a big rope (you can see it on the ground in one of the photos) from the facilities guy, Hari.  We held it out and made waves on it, oscillating in one plane then another.  I showed then how to block one kind of wave but not the other.  They mostly just liked playing with the rope.  Then I passed the polarizers around.  They seemed to like the magic of going from transparent to black by rotating one of the plates.  I'm not sure they really got the connection to the rope, but maybe.  Ethan seems to get it.

Anyway, I pulled it all off in Dutch, so I have now given a lecture in Dutch.

Here Pia gets the kids  ready for recess

Here is Ethan out at recess in the sandbox.

The entourage I always wanted


I am now apparently ``in.'' The next day, all the kids whose parents couldn't stay to read to them (this is what they do at the start of school here) came to me and Ethan for me to read to all of them. Cool. I have an entourage.

Word of the day
veiligheid safety. De laserveiligheid is voor gerechtelijke landen.

A city on the sill

Milk carton architecture

Ethan does a lot of building. We found these prints on cardboard.  They have to be cut out and glued to milk cartons.  They come with descriptions of the buildings and historical background.  

Community toys

There is in Leiden a toy rental center.  Toys rent for 0.15 Euros per week.  Ethan got a big box of Kapla Blocks like he got for Christmas back home.

I am a good soldier

My wife thinks this photo should be on the blog.

Gotchaday

Adoption bonus

Gotchaday is the extra holiday you get when you have an adopted child.

One year ago today we got Leif. Here are the boys on 24 January 2008. It seems like we've always had him. Ethan claims he can't remember not having a brother.

To celebrate we had chinese food from Eethuis Li, our new favorite local dive, and cake.

Tired boy

We drove Leif to exhaustion at the market today.

Big old church

Here's a big old church because you're supposed to take pictures of big old churches in Europe. It's Hooglandse Kerk here in Leiden. To tell you the truth, I get more excited about small old houses. It changes one's perspective to walk into a 16th century house that is not an historical landmark but just in use. You can be born live a full life and die on time scales that are short in the consciousness of the local people.

Word of the day

Eergisteren.  The day before yesterday.  

Vandaag morgen gisteren en overmorgen vandaag eergisteren zal geweest worden.  Tomorrow today will be yesterday and the day after tomorrow today will be the day before yesterday.

See the word from a couple of posts back.