The life and times of Oscar Marcos Perez-Cytron. Born Thanksgiving Day 11/22/01.
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
If you want to add something to Oscar's baby-blog, send an email to megan@alpha60.com and we can set it up so you can post...
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Saturday, November 24, 2007
3:27 AM posted by Oscar
A quick report on Oscar's sixth birthday. We've been scrambling all week, because Christian has to go back to the US next week to apply for a work visa. After two years, his work permit finally got approved and he had to go back immediately. So we decided not to do a big birthday party like last year. Oscar wasn't as gung-ho about it, anyway. I think the whole ludoteca thing is a bit played out, we can't really do anything outside because this is the cold and rainy season, and our place isn't really big enough to have his whole class over.
Oscar didn't ask for much for his birthday. These days all he really cares about is having a pencil and paper, so he can draw. He mainly asked for: some books about science, the world and the universe, some kind of science experiment, and most of all a lava lamp. Which is pretty much what we got him. I bought this cool Rube Goldberg kind of machine that you can put together in various ways and have marbles go down tracks and then come back up (and convinced him it was a gravity and kinetic energy experiment). It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to put it together but it is really cool. I bought him a couple of books from the Mi Mundo series that he likes so much about the earth and the universe and another book about art as a way of understanding the world. And a big heavy duty plastic mammoth and some other weird giant armadillo from the Pleistocene period (more on this).
And then, finally, we ordered a lava lamp from France, because we couldn't find a single one in Madrid. The store where we saw one last year had closed or moved... He literally jumped for joy when we told him we got it for him (it still hasn't arrived yet). He's obsessed with volcanoes and feels that he will understand them better if he can peer for hours into a lava lamp...
Oh and the last present was a trip to the circus. Last year, they renovated an old, historic circus that was right in the middle of the city (in a big brink storefront). The circus here tends to be more like theater and less creepy (kind of like the cool Circus Flora that we saw in St. Louis). This circus was a pirate, kung-fu affair put on by the National Circus of China. It was really impressive. There were no animals or flaming anything, just amazingly trained zen circus people dressed up like kung-fu pirates. Sounds crazy, but it worked. Oscar was blown away by their physical feats. Let's hope he doesn't try anything that he saw them do.
He's reading now like crazy (in Spanish only so far). He's just taking off intellectually with math and science, too. He really studies things all on this own and knows so much that I can hardly keep up. The other night we were playing with his plastic dinosaurs and he insisted that we classify them all according to the time period that they lived in before proceeding to play. He told me when he thought they lived (Jurassic, Triassic or Cretaceous or the other one before these, whose name is escaping me) and then I looked them up in the field guide that Harry gave him. It took over an hour to look them all up and out of dozens he got them all right except for one or two. When I bought his new plastic animals, I knew they had to be from the same period or they would never get to interact.
His friends at school now are Romaniya, Gabriel, Camilo, etc.
Lots more to tell about the trip to Asturias with the Perez familia, school and life in general, but it's just too late. Maybe I'll have him write something here tomorrow.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
