Countdown begins.

We move one week tomorrow. Maddy is marking the days off on the calender 🙂 This is really quite an achievement for her as change can be such an issue but she seems genuinely excited. No doubt i’ll find her under a bunk bed in a day or two though.

Anyway, the removals are booked and i’ve spent the day clearing shelves and packing boxes in desultory fashion, in between taking painkillers and wishing Max was still off work. I hate being ill. Still, i’ve managed to move random crud from half of one room, so that is a start. Hoping that tomorrow i’ll feel slightly more inspired to do a bit more. Am wondering where everything will go in the new house as i’m not really sure we’ve thought it through well enough to actually have homes for a lot of our books and educational things. Still, we are planning on using our garage as a sort of extra room/playroom type place, so i hope that will solve the issue. The girls are going to like having a computer upstairs anyway as they’ve been asking for one for ages.

What was good today was that both big girls were really motivated workwise, which pleased me lots as i wasn’t feeling hugely like pushing them. Fran has completely got the hang of division (did i blog that my explanation largely consisted of “divide cakes on to plates, the answer is always smaller than the first number”?) This appears to have been enough and she did 6 pages of them without any trouble. Oh i am pleased. Then after that i asked her to read 3 double pages in any of the little Usborne Mini Encyclopedias and she picked on on oceans, read about waves, currents and coasts, decided to do a project, drew and wrote up a page on waves and narrated all the most interesting things back to me. She was really excited to be able to execute all that for herself. 🙂 I think she read a book about an island too, having scoured what was left of the shelves for relevant stuff.

Maddy meanwhile was working on some JP handwriting and spent ages on that. She wrote her name in writing that wouldn’t have disgraced a 10 year old 😯 I can’t actually think what else she did, i know she has been drawing lots of dolphins and mermaids lately. Amelie was moping and playing on a Tweenies cd-rom, having been up half the night and Josie (who had also been up) was doing similar.

Everyone played in the garden a good bit, managing to avoid nettles this time. yesterday Fran fell in some and was stung horribly; i think she must have had 30-40 bumps 🙁 I got treated to another rendition of Maddy’s mermaid song performance 🙂 Oh she is so gorgeous.

Kate came over and we planned our new garden, which her dh is going to do for us. It’ll be nice, a stagger patio down one side and a lawn that curves to mirror the curved wall too, with some screens for shade on 2 spots. It’s south facing, so needs breaking up a bit or it will be boiling. I’m going to plant a Schumacher tree against the back; it’s mine and Max’s tree, as by a strange co-incidence, there has been one in the garden of all the houses we have ever felt were really home. And the rabbits get a new home too; we’ve been entertaining ourselves with online window shopping for rabbit mansions. 😀 Well, fresh start for everyone 🙂

Really must do something meaningful business-wise soon, BM is still busy, though obligingly slightly fewer customers have been buying but buying lots since the end of the easter holidays. Got some new products arriving tomorrow, so must get those on.

Girls started their swimming lessons tonight. Don’t think Level 1 will stretch them really, but they were so excited. Bless.