The Weekend.

If i could bottle a time and then bring it out for a quick pick-me-up every so often, i’d do now. It’s great 🙂 I feel like we’ve reached a high as a family and i like it. The big girls are biggish, the little ones are pleasantly little and life is busy but ultimately do-able. If we could only be settled in our own home, somewhere we wanted to live, life would be perfect. Oh well, you can’t have everything and renting has its perks i guess. 🙄

I’m trying to think what we’ve done this weekend and the answer is really “nothing much”. We’ve had to put a stair gate up, for the first time since Fran was a baby as Josie is just an unstoppable climber. Maddy completely refused to climb stairs as a baby and Amelie’s only fall that i can remember was a particularly acrobatic one i don’t really mind her climbing, though the stairs are long and steepish and have a hard basket and radiator at the bottom, but i do mind losing her and finding her choked to death upstairs at some point. It’s a bit of a pain really, but there you go. She’s cut 2 new teeth this weekend, top and bottom on the right and she’s also learned to say “hiya,” play giving and taking games, nod her head and wave. Clever girl then 🙂

Fran has been reading lots; the Usborne “How Babies are Made” book and an Usborne Encyclopedia of Animals. It’s great to see her enjoying accessing information for herself now, takes the pressure off me hugely for one thing and i just find it an unrelenting joy to see her gaining the skill all by herself now. I don’t suppose i’ll ever quite fathom out how we got here; certainly none of it seems to apply to Maddy. So that’s useful then!

Having sat and talked to Kate the other day, i have a new game plan for me and Amelie – which is to give her so much attention that she becomes completely sick and tired of me 😉 So yesterday she and i had an afternoon shopping; which was lots of fun actually. We got presents for her party this morning (best nursery friend Georgia) and the gate etc – she was quite keen on buying a playpen for Josie (“we could put it upside down and she could be like in a zoo mummy”) 🙄

Maddy has been doing loads more DWN, including some rather fab monkeys, brought on by watching Tarzan. i adore her drawing, it is the only time i see her completely at ease with herself and albe to move on/try again/ relax about her skills. Granted, no one else sees her quite in the same light as i do (well, except Max) but i know when she is stressed and stretched. it’s lovely when she isn’t. Actually DWN is a challenge forh er as she finds any imperfections in her own copies hard to cope with, even things like drawing the steps right, but out of order mean she has to start again. But she does and oh, her persistance…. 🙂

Fran has spent lots of today playing Masters of Olympus – a town building game based in Ancient Greece. She has picked it up really well and frankly, i think my work here is done. There is so much to be learned from games like this that i’d be happy enough if she used them for a year solidly and did nothing else i think! Reading, maths, cause and effect (!), forward thinking, history, IT – blah blah blah – today we did the tutorials together and then let her loose on a town – after a while she came and said she was stuck so together we worked out what had gone worng (too much too fast) and wrote up a list of the basic necessities of life for settlers in the order they need it – home, water, food, health, law, entertainment, luxury goods… and then she tried again with great improvement. You can’t beat it – how better to learn about life 😉

Finished off with swimming, joined by friends which was lovely. I need to merge my daughters i think – Maddy is all strength and no buoyancy and Fran is the opposite! They had fun though and Fran was doggy paddling half a width by the end.

Wonder if Josie will sleep tonight? She fell asleep face down in her roast earlier, so there is hope 🙂

And now i MUST go and pack parcels – snowed under again 🙂