Veritably Voluptious!

I suppose i should be grateful that “Varicose Veins” isn’t a title i can reasonably claim today.. managed 4 pregnancies without one of those anyway! I could probably have had “Oddly Oedemic” a few days back and certainly today… but i digress.

Today has been pleasant anyway. Fran spent all morning on the 4-6 Reader Rabbit Reading game and did very well, all her accuracy totals were above 80% anyway. She also seemed to really enjoy it and get a lot of satisfaction from concentrating – she did the whole game anyway and really wants to do the 6-8 year one tomorrow. While she was doing that i was working with Maddy on some letter recognition and some writing and reading.

Now, i’m not exactly worrying here, because i rather feel as if i have seen it all with reading and stuff (!) either with Fran or on lists etc but i am baffled by Maddy. Puzzled… sort of wondering how her mind is working without feeling a massive need to correct it or anything. But still baffled. She can read her Bob books okay and likes to do it, she doesn’t appear to be memorizing them and can spot pick out words just fine. She can do wordsearches and asks for them and remembers words in random lists from each time. But.. she doesn’t recognise letters and she doesn’t recognise a word if its either not in comic sans or Bob book print. So “cat” in a Bob book is fine, can spot it in any of the books even if she hasn’t seen that particular one before and can’t see the picture, CAT in capitals on a wordsearch, fine… but if *I* write out cat in my print, using a slightly different “t” to the simple cross version in Bob (ie mine has a tail and the Bob one is just acrossed lines) its a completely mystical word to her. Now, if she hated the actual process of reading i would just leave it, i’m not fussed, but she likes doing it and she loves to write, copy, pattern trace, look at workbooks etc etc so, in order to get a bit of one on one with her, its the ideal sit-down activity at times. But i swear i spent half an hour with her today with 6 cards, a-f playing matching, spot the letter, say the letter type stuff and she was no wiser at the end than when she started. She is 4 1/2, Fran learned the whole alphabet at 2! How can it be that she can spot words and will happily write things but the building blocks of the words are a mystery to her????

Anyway, it was one of the things i talked to the nursery teacher about – its technically beyond their curriculum anyway but she has taught up to Yr 2 and said she would spend a bit of time playing with Moo and seeing if she could either help or spot anything to worry about, or indeed just reassure me a bit…

We still had a nice time though, she loved the attention, it was just.. well.. baffling!

Anyway, Max had created a treasure hunt for them – 5 clues in verse and each clue led to an activity like a wordsearch, a worksheet, a drawing to do or biscuits to bake – they were just about readable by Fran and it took them a couple of hours all in all – what fun it was!!!! Since then its been water play in the garden, bead patterns, reading and this and that generally.

Alert! Anti-orgo-planners look away now… and advance to next italics!

I’ve been planning out some Science stuff for the next 3 months or so – with reading, writing and maths feeling very up to speed really and the fact that its now easy and stress free to practise them, my other anxiety is science. Its not a love of mine at all and its really important to me that my children get the chance to explore everything and be interested in whatever, not just either have my interests or be the complete antithesis of me. I fret about the science side of thngs a bit, if i’m honest.

I am planning on doing the Science Kits next year but i think i will take the general advice and wait til lFran is a) reading well and b) about 7 to get decent use from them. Got plenty i can do till then.

So today i went through a (previously discussed elsewhere) KS1 workbook testy thingy (which in itself is a bit boring i know but did give me a nice guide to some ideas) and found a load of typical topics. I’ve planned out, but not yet done the detail of, a 12 week “Saturday Science” thing that covers them all and found some books, unit studies, experiments etc that would suit Fran and Maddy and i’m going to put them together as something that either Max or I can easily pick up and just “do” on a boring Saturday, not in massive depth but just as a standalone “bit of fun” – thing is Max loves doing stuff with them and is great at it but he doesn’t really know what we have in the house and i could do myself and the girls a bit favour by making it more accessible to him. It will give him an active part in their education, make weekends more interesting and over the next little while while i am very tired or feeding a baby, will take the psychological pressure off me a bit. The last couple of days conversation about Melrose has reminded me just how hard keeping up with servicing a bunch of tinies can be and i am feeling a little more anxious than i was about having 4 – not much, but a little! I’ve got very used to how helpful and self reliant Fran is these days and the sudden realization that i’ve got another 2 years of semi-helpless, shrieky small coming up is a bit of a shocker!!! I’ve only just got Ammi relatively likeable! ;~)

I also downloaded and filed in an organised fashion all the School Express Units so i can have them forever when my sub runs out.

You can look back now.

Ammi is in fact so lovely and interesting now, although she is a bit screamy at times – particularly because of my repeated failure in the ability to stick broken bananas, apples or biscuits together. She’s almost napless now but her sleeping hasn’t settled down and we are getting a lot of broken nights because of it – she is a bit out of sync. She talks loads “my pretty dress” “where Daddy gone” “Frances upstairs” “Amelie go play with Maddy”type stuff although i could do with her ironing out “milky” (milk) versus “milky pur-jue” (purple juice) just for ease of conversation! I STILL can’t get used to having a talking 2 year old! lol! Plus she did 2 wees on the potty today, its almost a daily thing now to manage 1 and loves jigsaws, she is currently doing a 100 piece chunky one with Max (which has on the front the hilarious selling point “Fully interlocking pieces” WTF???)

Okay and now for 2 mini rants.

Apparently we have yet another new EWO, the old one having lasted less than a year and the new one is some unpronounceable bloke who i believe is also the local truancy officer. Great. I think i shall be going for the Ed Report approach again. No consistancy in personnel and not exactly a promising combination of roles IMHO.

Second rant, i noticed our old house had been moved into and having rung the old landlord last week and asked for him to let me have some stray ebay post as it had cheques in it but not heard, i stopped. To be greeted by a large family, who knew what i was after because the old owner had asked them to pass it on. The grandad type person, started to list the amounts of the cheques i was after and when my post came out, it had all been opened *outraged open mouth* and in fact some of the cheques had got lost. In sorry, is this me or was that TOTALLY unreasonable??? It was addressed to me, they knew what was in it and they knew i was aware of the contents and where i lived, a few doors down… what possible excuse was there for opening my post????? Admittedly they brought one lost set of postal orders down to me later, but one cheque for a couple of quid is still missing. REALLY pissed me off.

Anyway, enough.