The sit on your hands and bite you tongue approach

Well, it seems to be working. Over the last few days, Fran has suddenly started to write independently. She has written out cards for several of her friends, a sign for her door and some “words she knows” mostly without my help, although she has come and asked if she needs it. Her sounding out is coming on in leaps and bounds and the onset blocks we have are combining really well with the Bob books. So we pick an end sound each day and work on it plus reading the books. She has no trouble with the books but its a good starting place to explore a sound and realize there are families of sounds.

I really got the blocks for Moo, who seems to ingore letters so i thought that word shapes might work better. So i am sort of road testing on Fran ready – but obviously its working for them both so i am pleased.

Moo scared me half to death last night. She suddenly got very hot, went a mottled pink and started complaining of head and neck pain, while wincing at light :~0 Then she fell asleep and i sat with her. When she woke up she clearly couldn’t see for a good minute or two and was completely frantic. I’ve no idea WHAT was up but i panicked, which is reasonably unlike me as child illnesses i can normally take fairly calmly, and i rang our NHS centre. But apparently they had had 6 identical calls in an hour so i guess its a virus. She was poorly and frantic all evening, very hot, frightened, even more lethargic than normal and although she slept in with me, pertified of the dark. It was all a bit wearing. Its times like that that i really DO know things are a bit different with Moo – when her body feels wrong to her, shes not upset and poorly, she is FRANTIC. Even something like medicine became a massive issue – she screamed for 40 minutes after i had given her nurofen, even though she has had it all her life. It was just all too much. And as for the dark thing – she was in my bed, with me, in my arms, with the door open and the hall light on – but thats dark???? Sigh.

On the upside, we had our second muddlepuddle local group yesterday and got 18 children attending. We had a wax theme, with wax drawing, embossing, ironing crushed wax, and melting crayons in flames and rubbing them on a candle. It was good, really good. Then, because the venue is at our local country park, we were able to all trot down to the play area in the warm sunshine and spent another couple of hours gossiping while the kids played. They had a ball. Our area is FULL of kids who have never been to school and they are all so great- and it made us laugh – we nearly had a class!!!! I’m wondering about trying to encourage people to set up other groups locally – there are 2 now, Alisons and mine (funninly enough Alison, someone at mine had been talking by email to someone at yours!) and it might be fun to try and encourage a few more – might big up the camps eventually too perhaps – althoguh we do seem to have bigged that up this year already – LOADS of new people coming.

I have pics, I’ll put them up later.