As tradition demands, I must alert you all to the fact that my blog is now six...

Six, seven, and eight-year-olds build on the important developments of the first 6 years of life and seem to settle down to a steadier pace of growing and learning. Young school-age children are interested in real life tasks and activities, and pretend and fantasy lessen considerably [...] School-age children have longer attention spans. They are more likely to stick with things until the project is finished, the problem solved, or the argument resolved. Doing things together with friends, teamwork, and following rules become very important. This age group is fascinated by rules and can develop games with extensive rules and rituals.

Of course, I will leave it to you to decide whether you think this blog 'views things as black and white, right or wrong, wonderful or terrible, with very little middle ground'

(For the purposes of historical record, and since clever tweeters have just figured it out, I want to clarify that my previous post - which did strike some people as a tad odd! - was written not by me but by (tada!) Sanna. Her own post was, of course, penned by yours truly.

There were clues. I mean, above and beyond the fact that I'm unlikely to refer to the 'palace of my soul' any more than Sanna typically performs cheerleading chants for the Orthodox church. The titles were also cunningly interlinked, you see, and the very alert might also notice that my post appeared at 52 minutes past the hour.

So to those who thought I was drunk, or just posting "the weirdest thing I have read in a loooong time", or simply proving insufficiently skilful at imitation, a great big )

It's that time again!

Five-year-olds are cheerful, energetic, and enthusiastic. They enjoy planning, and spend a great deal of time discussing who will do what. They especially enjoy dramatic play [...] Five-year-olds are more sensitive to the needs and feelings of others around them. It is less difficult for them to wait for a turn or to share toys and material. "Best friends" become very important.

This also seems like an appropriate time to mourn the imminent demise of GeoCities, on which this site originated. I know GeoCities sites had a tendency to be incredibly (some might say universally) naff and poorly designed, but I'm also quite fond of the days when people actually tried to hand-build their own websites rather than merely populate Facebook or the ultra-simple Twitter. (I realise this makes me sound like a grumpy old man, but I'm allowed a little bit of fondness ) And now that we have services with the ease and flexibility of WordPress I'm not sure that I would have even bothered learning how to create my own site had I come along a couple of years later than I did. So thank you, GeoCities, for being alluring enough to start me up yet rubbish enough to move me on at the right time!

I just wanted to take a moment to talk about Building Partnerships, which was one of the key themes at the dominicself.co.uk AGM this year. What, you didn't make it? Well, luckily, the key slide is reproduced below. Essentially, in these difficult economic times, it's important that liquidity can be maintained. Specifically, tea liquidity. But that requires mugs - no no, not readers - of the tea-containing kind. And this is where you come in.



You can read more about the competition from Nic himself, but the important thing is to keep on clicking through

Those of you living in an RSS or Facebook world might never even notice. But tonight I have been spurred on to a small bout of online home improvement, motivated both by the release of IE8 and Nic's forward march. While Nic is busy adding features like 'comments' and 'gravatars', however, I'm already several steps ahead* So without further ado, I present the new version of feed mix!



*Nic's blog is wonderful really. Go read it.