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

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

First thing this morning was Stage by Stage, meanwhile I took the younger two into town and picked up some black shoes for Joe, plus raffle tickets for the fundraising effort today.

After picking Anna up we went and met up with a friend from the Miscarriage Support Group and stood around for the next four hours collecting money, selling raffle tickets, etc.

To be honest (that was especially for Neil ), I don’t think it did much good in terms of raising awareness as no-one took any of our local leaflets or asked about the group – not even sure how much we raised but it was only about £50 I think. Felt like a bit of a waste of time, but there we go.

The children were complete pains for most of the time too, I’d taken loads of stuff for them to do in the van and they just wouldn’t settle down to do any of it, so it was all a bit stressful. Still, it’s done for this year, would be nice to be more organised about Babyloss Awareness day next year, which might make it all more worthwhile.

This evening we’ve had Junior Film Night Mark 1 (Anna’s), which has been pleasant enough, she really enjoyed it. It included four friends (should have been five, we missed Chelsea ), tea, a dvd, and then some playstation afterwards – all relatively grown up and civilised really

Only just getting round to watching Casualty on Teleport so no more clues, Joyce, please!

We’re already the proud owners of a fair few ‘trying to conceal my gap’ smile photos! Over the summer we did try and encourage her just to smile normally and not worry about it, but it didn’t really work. Instead we have either an evil grimace or a soppy look!

So anyway, we’re on full tooth alert here. Corn on the cobs, apples, and anything too crunchy are off the menu, in a vain attempt to keep as many teeth in her mouth as possible!

While we’re talking about the wedding (I think I’m more excited about this one than I was about my own!), I must get on with the tiaras I’m supposed to be making – might go and start while the kids are watching ET for a second time They loved it!

This morning has been great, we’ve done some music practice, Joe’s done some reading (level 6 of the Flying Boot box, relatively easy for him with only the odd word prompt needed, so that was encouraging), and the girls have both done some maths (geoboard activities) as well as painting and room tidying.

Later on Josiah has a music lesson – at the moment it’s chucking down with rain so if it’s still wet later the girls will end up doing some reading or workbooky stuff in the car with me while he’s there. Hopefully it will have dried up and they can race around the park instead.

edited to add: or some kind person will read my blog then offer to take them off my hands for a couple of hours! Home now cooking lentil curry (definitely not too crunchy!) for tea, wonder how well that will go down?

Hectic morning turned out okay. Kids all got up and ready in time to leave around 8.40am, getting us to Stage Studios just before 9am. We realised that Anna’s thing didn’t finish until 10.15am so decided to go to the park for 45 minutes, get to Joe’s thing on time at 10am then be a bit late picking Anna up.

Bit disappointed to find that no-one else turned up to the suzuki intro session; we thought there was another 4yo starting at the same time as Josiah, and they would have done some group stuff together. Anyway the teacher, Mr Featherstone, was lovely, and Joe responded well to him – we’ve come away with a sponge & ruler violin – to get used to how to stand/hold the instrument. Steve and I are apparently going to have lessons as well, which is quite scary, but I definitely see the point of it, as otherwise you as a parent must find it hard to support your child in learning. I’m actually just worried that Steve will be better than me

Got back to pick Anna up and it seemed she’d had a good time although she didn’t want to have to choose between this and Stagecoach. I am reserving judgement – we have to give Stagecoach half a term’s notice, so she might as well finish this term, and we’ll decide which one to go on with at half term. Now I just have ballet to sort out – we *might* be having dance lessons again at home ed group but it’s not definite yet.

Popped to Sainsbury’s on the way home for some shopping, had to buy Abbie a couple of pairs of trousers as she seems to have shot up, at least too far to fit into her jeans from last winter. Managed to get Joe some black trousers for Aunty Mimi’s wedding, too, but no luck on the white shirts, they only had polo shirts, what are schools coming to these days, honestly

Had corn on the cob for lunch and now we’re settling down to veg out in front of the original Superman … well, they’re vegging out, I’m doing that laundry I procrastinated over last night After that we’re planning tea, a chapter of The Magician’s Nephew, then more TV. Lazy day really, but hey, it is Saturday.

Have only had one phonecall from the office this morning, which was fielded successfully – thankfully my mobile tells me when it’s a forwarded call, so that’s handy. Hopefully we won’t have missed too many customers on the site, either.

(b) that Abbie lost another front top tooth yesterday – she pulled it out while we were at our friends’ BBQ. Lots of blood and plenty of attention by doing it like that. She is now in that ‘huge gap at the front’ phase, and very proud of it

Ruth came to pick up her girls around 4.30pm, a bit later than expected. Also unexpectedly, she then invited Anna & Abbie to go back to her house for a sleepover, which they were thrilled about.

Josiah was not so thrilled to be left behind In fact he was distraught. In the end I told him he could have whatever he wanted for tea, in the hopes that he’d cheer up … but then he asked for ice cream, and we don’t have any! Anyway, as it was just the two of us I decided to take the new car for a spin up to Pizza Hut. Joe was very happy (unsurprisingly, lol!), and behaved beautifully, in fact he charmed our waitress by confidently making his own orders all the way through our meal – it was lovely to be out with him, well worth a tenner. I’ve also promised him that we can do some baking in the morning before they get home, too.

I guess it’s just par for the course that the youngest child in a family has to learn to deal with being left behind/left out occasionally, or the older ones doing things that the last one isn’t old enough to join in with yet, but it does seem to be a bit of a raw deal sometimes, so as well as him learning to cope with it, I would like to make it up to him a little bit as well. The girls are really good at including him most of the time, and I’m sure he does far more interesting and exciting things than they did when they were 3, just because of the fact that they are around and we do more as part of home education than we ever did before.

Anna always moans that she’s the one who has to help with everything because she’s the eldest, and I guess that’s true too. As an eldest child myself I always felt a little bit of that resentment, and it was always absolutely true that our younger siblings got away with murder compared to my brother and I. Steve says that Josiah has a habit of wrapping me around his little finger with that ‘I’m the youngest’ routine, which is probably true too …

Anyway, I’m wittering, with no conclusions to draw … mainly because I’m procrastinating until Casualty starts … some things don’t change … and I’ve decided I like that (more) thing. Do you think it ‘hides’ the text that isn’t on the front page from search engine type things, or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

Anyway. We’re taking on a new salesman at work, hence the Big Think. It’s not something we really planned to do quite at this point in time, but an opportunity came up so we’re taking it. And it means that the garage has to do a fair bit better in order to pay for it, so Steve’s trying to work that through, with all its implications. I hope that it turns out to be a good step, and one that will set us up to do even better further down the line, but at the moment it feels like a big risk.

Steve had to leave early anyway this morning, so the rest of us are having a lazy morning … both girls turned their pcs on to play Crypt Raider after seeing the link on Alison’s blog and there has been much IMing between the three of us too – Anna’s typing has really improved, she’s getting quite quick!

Oh, and something I forgot from yesterday … Steve randomly gave out some pocket money, and when he gave Abbie hers, she realised that she’d hit the £5 mark, which she’s been aiming for for ages now. She was so excited she was nearly crying on the way out of the room, it was well worth the £1 Steve had given her just to see her face. Unfortunately we then realised that neither of us had a £5 note which is what she really wanted so I expect we’ll have to pop to the bank today so that she can change her money up. Other plans for the day include paperwork, wringing FF’s necks, and maybe going out to Crealy after lunch …

While the girls were working Josiah sat and looked through a DK History of the World book which I’d given him and challenged him to find the Ancient Greeks in it – which he did! He then went on to look at pictures all through the book, shouting loudly each time he spotted a soldier, armour, or weapons of any description – and in a History book there are plenty of those – it began to get a bit wearing after a while, but lovely to have him with us and excited about reading/looking at things in a book.

Then they went out to the garage and got the paints out, I’d said they could do whatever they wanted, and they proceeded to paint pages full of more key patterns and various greek-related things! I’m still working on the idea of a big papier mache Trojan horse … big enough to put playmobil people inside, perhaps, but that’s my art & craft project …

While the kids were painting Steve and I got through a whole load of filing that had been gathering dust for ages, then we gave the kids the job of shredding the unwanted paperwork for the recycling bin – which they thought was a fab job! It turned out rather well as we decided to cash in some rather crappy life policy things that we’d taken out after we had Anna but before we had a house and other responsibilities … so now that we’ve replaced those with much better provision it seemed a bit pointless to be paying out for them every month. They had minimal cash-in value but it will still be nice to have some unexpected money, should go a bit of a way to paying off the credit card! A loan that we took out three years ago has just finished, too, and rather than enjoying the belt-loosening, Steve has arranged to pay more off the mortgage each month – a goal we are keen to achieve before the due date, iyswim! We had a friend round for lunch which was nice, then Steve had to go back to work – weekend’s over

This afternoon was filled up with playing at home with Mollie, then in the park while Anna had her cello lesson. This evening we’ve read a bit more of Little House in the Big Woods (did I mention that I’d started that? My first real foray into reading aloud … I’m still not really enjoying the reading part but it is nice to sit and be with the children sharing something together) which Josiah is enjoying just as much as the girls are, if not more. He’s counting guns, and so far we’ve got Pa’s gun, Grandpa’s gun, and Uncle Peter’s gun … Pa making bullets and shooting bears makes for a damn fine story in Joe’s eyes

Plan for the evening is to watch TV and use the exercise bike for once (another thing gathering dust ) in the vain hope that I might be able to get relatively in shape before Centerparcs …

Oh, and before I forget, photos of The Gap, which, as predicted, appeared late yesterday afternoon … and the strange but very ‘Abigail’ photos that we took en route …