One of the massive benefits of the laptop (one that makes it worth stealing £700 of the childrens money ;)) is that when i use it, i tend to sit at the dining room table. I still do spend early morning on the computer but i’m often joined at the table by a child or two and its become a companiable time. I like that.
This morning that time was filled by Fran and i doing her workbooky stuff together, still self initiated, and again i felt vindicated by the fact that ExTC concentrated on syllables. Now frankly i’ve never noticed that many syllables are a vowel/consonant//consonant/vowel split but spending some time looking at that together seemed again to unlock something for Fran. She really enjoyed her maths again too, whatever it was. Data stuff again actually, she likes extracting data from graphs. Wonder if i can find a book full of them from somewhere?
I needed to go into town, so we all booted up and headed out. They really did pretty well; £44 on film developing later (shriek) we headed for the camera fixing shop where my camera refused to prove it was ill. Hm. Then we went into Colemans, i wanted some scrapbooking stuff to make a holiday scrapbook and the girls all impressed me by spending their pocket money on little kits of things to do. Had lunch out, me having reached a cold sweat from lack of calories for some reason, went into Waterstones to get Book the Eleventh and Fran begged for 3 workbooks. Okaaaaay.
We’ve spent the afternoon doing stamping and Xyroning, Fran made a couple of mythical creatures from foamy packs, she also made a card from tiny stamped and coloured items, stuck on with sticky pads. Somewhat to my astonishment she then wrote a ‘poem’ to go in it, asking only for help with a few words and rewriting it 4 times till she was happy with it.
“Fairy, Fairy, Fairy
Oh i’d love to be a fairy
With Fairy wings
And a Fairy crown
And a Fairy wand to wave.”
Respect.
Maddy was busy making some cards too. Such a massive difference between her and Fran at 5, i can still hardly believe it really. She asked me to write “I love you” out for her and when i next looked she had then managed to make “To Granny, love from Maddy” all on her own on the inside. Now Fran wasn’t writing, recognising words or even able to sit down for 10 seconds at that age, if utterly pushed to it she would never have thought to find “love” in one place and use it somewhere else on her own. It really is incredibly fascinating and so reassuring too because i suppose in my heart of hearts i really worried that i was just totally failing in some way for a lot of the last two years. I couldn’t quite believe that it wasn’t “my fault” that Fran was not that type of child. But now i see and understand that fault had nothing to do with it, it was just timing.
I think the thing currently amusing me the most is that Fran never appears to be the right way up – she has now sussed headstand to forward roll and very nearly handstand into crab and back up to her feet. She just seems to be able to make her body do whatever she wants it to. Currently she is watching brother Bear while doing a headstand that she has held for about 5 minutes. And she’s taught herself to skip this week too. Excellent.
