So you had a nice day….

Well we did 🙂 And so much better than having a bad one. Amelie shows no signs of tiring of that particular song, but it always makes me grin that as soon as we get in the car she says “Can i have A Bad Day?” Dear girl 🙂

Started off with some lovely parent-daughters time. It’s so easy to get caught up in making everything educationally valuable and forget that i’m doing this to spend more time with my children than i would if they were in school. So this morning, while the big two were off doing something, me, Josie and Amelie were cuddled up in bed playing silly games and enjoying some dolly play with breakfast bowls to feed them. None of Amelie’s babies can drink milk, which is interesting to hear. Interesting to watch is how she is coaching Josie into being a playmate, getting her toys and showing her games (like feeding dolly breakfast) that she can mimic. It is quite breathtaking to see her so adeptly socialising her smaller sister. I particularly liked that only Amelie had spotted that Josie had mastered the word “baby” (“bibby”) and so Amelie calls Josie’s doll that. They play some very cute mummy games together.

Increasingly i see myself as having a big two and a little two, something i didn’t think would work due to the age splits, but it is beginning to. In fact, i was considering wiping their names from the blog the other day and thinking i could call them, BigBig, LittleBig, BigLittle and LittleLittle… what do you think? Catchy? 😉 😆

When we got up, maddy and i spent quite a bit of time working with geomags; i helped her to construct a cube and we discussed why it wasn’t sturdy and how panels would help it. So she did that and then opened a museum, with labels and tickets and we all came to visit. Then she did a load more handwriting stuff and finished off with pages and pages of sums. I didn’t mean her to do anything like what she did; recently i ripped a few test pages out of the back of a CGP book and i just gave them to her, thinking in “Fran-time” and imagining she’d do half a dozen. Came back to find she was on her third A4 side of them!!! ROFL! Anyway, i think we can safely say she can do basic addition and subtraction with 2 or 3 numbers up to 10. I think it has helped her confidence loads though; she is actually way beyond that but often says “I can’t” and then is surprised when she can so seeing a huge page of ticks was good for her. I’ll have to get something more taxing out for her for tomorrow.

Obviously proves Max’s point, when i once said that i was never going to use workbooks with my children; he said that he’d loved doing pages of sums and shouldn’t i give them the opportunity to enjoy that kind of stuff. Clearly i should!

Fran meanwhile had run herself a bath and was wallowing, but got out and did some fantastic work on her spelling book; today her writing was great and her thought processes were too – she came up with huge lists of words using certain sounds all on her own. Well done that girl. Her writing looked about like i would say a 7 year olds should too, which is not bad for just a few weeks effort. She wants to do the touch typing course that jan linked to next; i should do it too. I think it was Sarah who said i was the fastest two fingered typist she’d ever seen! Don’t know what my dad was thinking of not teaching me; as a journalist he is a fantastic typist.

And then it was off to the bank and then off to see Kath and M and L at a big play place near us.

We had a really great time; we barely saw Fran, Maddy and M and they seemed to really get on. Kath and i got a great gossip and it is really fab to have them near. Looking forward to much more playing 🙂

Home to more parcels, i’ve nearly caught up (£250 on postage this week!) and now flop to The Apprentice. 😆