That rule.

This week has been one of the hardest weeks of ordinary mothering-grind that i have done in a long time. It was definitely comparable to being heavily pregnant and reminded me most of the unremitting toughness of being at home with 2 small and relatively boring small people. I never really did enjoy the bit where i had just a 3 year old Fran and a 1 year old Maddy; it was too much like being in service, all order-taking and not much coming back to enthrall me.

So this week has been characterised by tonsilitis, post-Melrose fatigue, the odd bits of upset tummy and a busy bead week while i was away following a busy bead week this week and back orders to send out when my stock delivery arrived (70 parcels have been sent out this week since Monday). Max was away for 2 evenings, i had no appetite due to a sore throat and then a cold which was great for the diet but i think has meant i’ve been way too low on calories to function properly and then keeping myself up one night coughing, Josie keeping me up the next night and Amelie having an attack of croup on Wednesday night that meant i had to sit her on my lap, surrounded by pillows and sleeping bags to prop us up and try and sleep like that. To add insult to injury, when Amelie finally stopped coughing at 4am, Josie woke up and howled for England. Some tough conversations got had on that night too, which left me feeling terribly flat.

Thursday was never going to be a good day. Looking back on the preceeding week in bald fact like that though, i might cut myself some slack 🙂

Anyway, we’ll gloss over Thursday because it was just unremiting weeping, wailing and shouting (And that was just me). This has just been such a long winter, hasn’t it? Long, cold and dark. I’m desperate for it to be over now. Roll on the camping season. I can’t even remember the details of it now, except that i was pathetically glad to get everyone to bed and then, thank goodness, everyone slept all night.

Friday though, following the rule of home educating life, was much better. I hauled willpower up from somewhere and everyone was doing something by 9am or so. In fact, my table looked like this

Fran thrilled herself by finishing her first ever bit of knitting, a scarf for her doll Olivia and she was just so proud of herself.

She has done ever so well, she’s had fairly limited help, aside from sorting out a few pickles and i’m delighted with her. She is getting so much better at working on projects to the end. She’s also been working incredibly hard on her joined up writing, something she has totally identified as wanting to do for herself. She decided it would be easier to control and she has worked every day on making it neater and more legible. She’s used Jolly Phonics books for guidance and then worked on freehand stuff of her own choice after that.

Maddy did some further reading with me; she is nearly past the first platform of readers in Rogerr Red-Hat now and doing very well. Then she sat down and worked through some pages of a maths book, her choice, and seemed very quick at sussing out what type of sum she needed to do to answer the word problems.

I’m trying to mutate our “normals” into a set of things they can choose to work on in the morning (reading, writing, maths, a craft that requires concentration) – they are both expected to do 2 things, their choice but they have to concentrate and do a reasonable amount. Seems to work quite well and it leaves our afternoons free. So anyay, we’d discharged that responsibility by then so they got to choose a new hama kit each and open it and then both of them worked at the new designs and boards from those. I’ll post pictures later when i’ve ironed them.

Amelie meanwhile had asked to do some magic maize (something i’m about to start stocking so i wanted to try out the sample) so she did that. After a few random splodges, i sugested she tried pictures and she did really well with those. I’ll do pictures of those later too.

After that we had lunch, went to Activity World and then came home so i could work and they did more beading. Stories have gone by the wayside lately, which i am really missing, so we need to get them started again. Otherwise though, it was a much better day. Thank goodness!