just another morning here

Started the day with presents, as you do on a birthday. Josiah was up early but the girls kept him waiting by staying in bed until 7am, meanies!

We were sad last night to hear that the orchestra conductor was ill, but rather relieved that it meant that the planned concert was cancelled, it was really nice to have a relaxed morning. We headed into town and on the way stopped at the garage to visit Grandpa – Josiah very pleased with the gift of Ticket to Ride from Grandma & Grandpa, and equally pleased with birthday money from Great-Grandad, to add to some from my parents.

In town we successfully found new sandals for Joe (last year’s fell apart), trainers for Anna (hers 2 sizes too small) and school shoes for Abbie (hers 1.5 sizes too small). Abbie will have to make do with hand-me-down sandals and Anna will have to buy some cheap ones! I got some trainer-style walking boots as my choices for walking are old DMs that leak, or wellies, neither of which are that great for walks really. We ended up in the toymaster shop where Josiah spent a bit of his money on a Dr Who Sonic Screwdriver, and he’s had great fun with it all day.

Home for lunch, and then Steve went with the kids over to the field where they played frisbee and boomerang (another birthday money acquisition), while I cleaned out the guinea pigs and made a rather nice looking (even if I do say so myself) chocolate cake for Joe’s party tomorrow. Anna looked at it as I took it out of the oven and said, in surprised tones, “wow, it worked!”. I’ve obviously baked too many cakes that haven’t worked recently

After that we all went out together to Josiah’s group violin lesson so that we could go on from there to do a walk/cache hunt. The group lesson was good, it’s so lovely to see Josiah with so much more confidence than he had in the same situation not that long ago! Found the cache easily afterwards and then mucked around with self timer shots but we are rubbish at them!

Home for dinner which was a Pizza Hut style tea at Josiah’s request – pizza, dough balls, and then Ice Cream Factory for dessert. Terribly unhealthy but we did drink fruit juice to try and compensate

Am not popular at the moment for calling quiet time in bed after Dr Who, but we have a long day of partying to get through tomorrow so I needed some! Can’t quite believe this is the third 7th birthday recorded on this blog (here’s the first and here’s the second), are they growing up too fast or have I been blogging for too long?

His tooth has been wobbly for ages, and fell out today on an ice lolly!

Nothing to say really. We went Christmas shopping yesterday with the children in tow, which was quite fun in a sadistic sort of a way – thankfully we have a babysitter booked in order to finish it off in a couple of weeks. Actually it was nice that they were with us; means that the pressies from our family are really from all of us – and in a couple of weeks we only have to shop for their stockings. Abbie had a wobbly tooth and spent the day pulling it out which caused some amusement for us all, too

Have done loads today, or it felt like it at least – two days’ worth of stories for the Jesse tree (Abram – obedient to being sent on his travels, and Sarah having Isaac as an answer to prayer).

Washed the sofas, hoovered the whole house, did the ironing that I’ve been putting off for days, made and wrote some more Christmas cards, wrapped the pressies from yesterday, did a violin lesson run, music practice all round, and some maths workbooks with the children.

We bought the girls a new CGP maths book each yesterday which Anna moaned and moaned about (no pretty pictures) but I insisted on, as even without the home educators’ discount they were still better value (and less likely to have mistakes in them) than any of Letts’ offerings. Anna was pleased because she ‘didn’t think it would be so easy’ today, so I’m on to a winner there.

Joe started a new Wizard Whimstaff maths book which he was really pleased with, because the girls have been doing them, so it felt grown up to him – the first page in it was counting and he amused me by not counting the groups of things, instead adding them up according to colour (ie, rather than just counting to 7, he looked at the spiders, counted 3 red and 4 blue and then said ‘so there must be 7′). All a bit easy for him but I’m finding that if he wants to do workbooks when the girls do, it has to be relatively easy in order for it not to require too much reading or writing, but there we go.

I have generally had a lovely day just being with them – gotta love the kids on days like these

Very smelly cheesy Cabbage, Bacon & Pasta bake for dinner, and the kids didn’t make it to Friday Fish because we couldn’t bring ourselves to drive them there and back, it was easier to buy them off with a tuck shop equivalent, which they completely didn’t mind. How terrible is that?

Have enjoyed an evening with friends, poker, Whitney Houston, Simon & Garfunkel, and Robbie Williams, plus some wine and whisky – a winning combination. Chris P, you really must come down for a pokerfest one of these days …

Promise to try and be more educational soon – in my dreams