just another morning here

And in case you thought that meant *you*, here’s a little picture to tell you what will happen if you don’t comply with instructions!

Had to giggle, the picture just tickled me. And it was so tempting just to have a quick lie down on the floor before I opened the box!!

Haven’t done much today, Steve had a half day off so we mooched around this morning and Anna took Steve’s wallet up to the shops – well, Steve had to go too … it’s quite nice now that she’s old enough to think about doing something for a birthday without someone having to give her the idea. Cards arrived in the post this morning and she feels all special because she scooped them up and is hiding them – also it gave them all the inspiration to come down and make birthday cards at some unearthly hour of the morning.

Anna also went to Mary’s today and worked on a watercolour that she’s intending to enter into an Arts Festival in the summer, she did really well with it – it’s quite big so I’ve just cropped it to put the main flower here.

Anyway, my achievement for the day is that I bought a shelf/drawer unit and put it together, and have tidied all our beads, crafts, and general cack that was on the dining room table into it. I’m exceedingly pleased. The unit’s not what I would have chosen really, but it fits in the silly little alcove that was getting filled up with junk on the floor, and it was cheap. We’ve got a bit of a damp problem along that wall, so whatever is there will probably end up damp, so we didn’t want anything too nice there anyway.

I posted my HesFes booking form and cheque today, (scary!) so I hope everyone else is going to do the same, before it gets booked up. I’m so nervous about it. Anyway. Got to go out and see a friend this evening so I’d better wrap it up here )

My camera’s batteries have run down, which is a shame, because I had a great moment earlier when all three children were in the kitchen, rolling and cutting gingerbread shapes. Josiah has fallen in love with the Big Cook Little Cook programme on Cbeebies, so we made some Gingerbread Robots (and ducks, and Bob the Builder, Scoop, butterflies, angels, a random reindeer, as well as some stars and circles). Anyway, I was supervising the general cooking activities, but Anna and Abbie did most of it by themselves. Josiah got bored during the dough making process and disappeared off into the lounge. I had to laugh, as 5 or 10 minutes later he was sitting on the sofa yelling “is my gingerbread ready yet?” to the girls. Takes after his father

Before that Steve had taken the girls swimming while I took Joe with me for a breakfast with friends from church … once home the kids did lots more spin painting (thank goodness I have a paper trimmer, I’ve had to cut so many more card squares to fit inside it) before we even got onto baking. So I feel like we’ve done a day’s worth of activities in a morning, phew!

Abbie is much better today – still a bit delicate and tired but generally fine, well enough to go swimming, anyway. So thanks everyone for the hugs/vibes.

We’ve had a bit of a mini theme going on here today, fuelled by a lady coming to our HE group to show and talk about reptiles. This morning after doing a few errands with Steve we came home and settled down to do some lizard paintings. I’d prepared outlines for the kids from the first Art Crazy magazine, which came with a couple of free watercolours and this template, so the idea was to do colour by number and shade mixing, but it turned out to be a bit more of a free for all!

The kids really enjoyed painting (I hate getting paints out so it doesn’t happen very often, terrible mother that I am), and while they were painting I read to them from an animal encyclopaedia all about reptiles in general.

note Joe in this picture is actually squeezing the watercolour from the tube onto his painting …!! off to HE group after lunch, which was completely chaotic as usual, although it was nice to catch up with a few people. The actual talk was really interesting, Anna particularly loves things like that and she’d been reading her book beforehand. She (and I – very proud mummy moment) was really chuffed to answer a question correctly that no-one else (out of the 30 or so kids up to age 15 there) answered – it was about this particular type of snake, and i think she’d just happened to see a picture of one in her book and remembered what it was called – she’s got a bit of a photographic memory for things like that! Anyway. The talk was slightly spoiled by a particularly badly behaved child of an incredibly libertarian and obviously didn’t believe in discipline or confrontation of any kind type of parent, who was downright rude to the lady doing the talk, most of the way through. The parent didn’t remove the child at all, and it was a major distraction. Ho hum. No further comment!

After the ‘talk to everyone’ bit, the kids were split down into groups of five to actually handle some of the animals, so they got to hold a snake themselves, and again they enjoyed that. I was cross that I forgot my camera, but here are some photos of the lizard paintings …

Anna’s, Abbie’s, and Joe’s, in that order.
I love Anna’s caption at the bottom of hers – it says ‘I love Reptiles’!! This is also the title she gave to her piece of writing this evening, I’d better watch out otherwise she’ll be wanting some weird and wonderful pets too – and hamsters are one thing but anything slithery is quite another!!me (via the library to change books) we played a bit, then after tea the girls worked on some reptile themedwordsearches and Anna did this Reptiles Quiz, and then a page of writing about her day, in beautiful joined up writing. It did take about an hour to extract said writing, but I sat and wrote a letter to a friend while she was doing it so that helped somewhat. She had wanted to write about the day, but when it came to it, the sentences she was saying that she wanted to write were way longer than she could actually manage to write, so I had to condense things for her, and she kept stopping and starting, so it was a hard work to help her to finish, but I think we were all pleased with the result, I’ve promised her she can laminate the things she’s done tomorrow to keep as a mini-project to add to if she wants to.

This evening we’ve had a lovely unexpected visit from an old friend, so have been catching up, chatting about all sorts – which is what I’m so looking forward to about Melrose next week too, don’t let me forget the wine ;o)

Yet another good day here. We started by going to Tesco’s (with Greasemania playing in the car). Anna bought herself a fantastic outfit in the sale with some birthday money – lovely jeans with sequins & sparkly embroidered butterflies, and a stripy knitted jumper with purples and blues, and the blue stripe has slightly glittery flecks in it. Really pretty. We got home around 11ish and once we’d packed the shopping away we made a start on our next Young Scientist kit. It’s on crystals this time, so we’ve now got jars and dishes of various solutions sitting around waiting for crystals to form! We’re waiting for Steve to come home with a hammer to break our geode (I learnt something today, I’d never heard of them before!).

Megamaths was followed by lunch … this afternoon we put our skeleton together (while listening to the Annie soundtrack) and hung him on the kitchen door. He’s a bit tall and his feet are dragging on the floor, but he looks cool and suitably scary. We’ve printed off some labels for some of the bones but Anna’s not showing much enthusiasm for finding out which labels go on which bones – tomorrow, maybe?!

Later we went to the park and met a friend – neither of us could remember whether music lessons were on or not but in the end it didn’t matter because the children got to play together. After that we headed up to St. Luke’s to take back all the resource boxes we’d been hoarding. We’ve come home with a few more body books, a maths cdrom and a maths activity challenge book, Abbie got a BIG story book (classroom reading size) … all things that we can pull out and look at when we are in need of something.

Now home Anna’s doing the second silk painting from her kit, while the littlies are playing (and we’re listening to the Sound of Music soundtrack). As a result of all these musicals my brain doesn’t quite know which song is stuck there, and I’m singing a mixture of ‘a Hard Knock life, You’re the one that I want, and How do you solve a problem like Maria’ … all extremely annoying but that’s what comes of indulging one’s daughter’s interests. I love them, really!

After tea (I’m making an effort to cook something relatively nice for our anniversary but it’s not exactly a romantic meal either!) we have our accountant coming round to do figures and tax returns. Ho hum, what excitement. Anna is incensed that we’re not celebrating more actually, she’s been trying to buy me presents (with her birthday money – I refused!) and make me cards all day. Maybe next year, it’ll be a relatively special one then.