For Jenny V – warts and all.

7.00am – Max brings me a cup of tea, i spent 20 minutes on my AC town waking up, a sleeping Maddy on one side of me.

7.30am – go and make a start on the parcels from the weekend (printed off last night), stop occasionally to look at blogs, list stuff on ebay, do banking, mark up my order sheet for the next stock order. No one wakes up till gone 8am, and then it is only Fran, who AC’s while we chat about Victorians.

9am – Chivvy everyone downstairs. Maddy makes everyone breakfast, while i keep packing; Fran reads a couple of chapters about Florence, i finish parcels. Fran teaches Josie “wind the bobbin up.”

10am – girls start some strange baby making game where they are all different garden bugs. Decide this is botany and commence protracted and slightly bewidering conversation with bead supplier, ending in eventual customer delight and excitement! Feed Josie biscuits and juice while doing so, then quickly weigh and stamp parcels with Amelie’s help as porter.

10.30am – Amelie carries on helping me, Josie poddles and Fran and maddy work at the table. Fran is doing some Singapore on 3 and 4 times tables, Maddy is working from Getty Dubay Book 3. Spending quality time with Amelie just doing jobs still works really well and she loves helping me. her current job is sticking return address labels on to parcels for me. 🙂

11.45am – Parcelling turned out to be huge fun, with Josie and Amelie being a production line of moving stamped parcels to the postal bag; collaborative effort gets the two large postal sacks full downstairs ready to be collected. It’s been a weekend of steady, medium sized orders and it’s good to get them out of the house. Set Maddy up on EC, using a set of games i prepared for her on Friday night. Spend a few minutes with Fran, drawing plates of cakes in 4s to remind her of the connection between multiply and divide and how to count back from 10x’s for larger numbers. Leave her finishing them and with another chapter to read on Florence. Listen in on Maddy doing EC, watch Jo and Amelie playing Barbies, get dressed 😳 find some towels, sort out two loads of washing and put the first on and explain the term “hell on earth” to Fran, with suitable Biblical concepts thrown in for good measure. 😆

12.15pm – Parcels have been collected, Fran has done 4 quick english (7-8) tests, Maddy has pronounced her EC “all done and easy.” I’ve done a quick sort of clean washing, put mine and Max’s away, taken the kids stuff up to Josie’s room to do later, tidied up rubbish in our room and got Maddy to do a quick dustbust in there. Resisted temptation to go mental at Fran’s short cut to avoid writing in one of the tests, agreed to Josie’s demand for nappiless knickers and regretted it 2 minutes later as a puddle lands from little Puddle at The Puddle. 🙄 Stick “Springwatch” on for the girls while i make lunch, having sent them up to do a 10 minute room tidy.

12.45pm – girls are eating tuna and cheese (delete as appropriate!) sandwiches out on the patio and i’m wolfing tuna and nut roast upstairs to finish off leftovers. Off to unpack/repack dishwasher now, then the afternoon should just involve playing, reading and swapping over laundry.

1.30pm – Load dishwasher; inexplicably start to reload it before fully emptying bottom half, thus tipping hot chocolate all over my clean mixing bowls and stuff 🙄 Also tip hot chocolate on floor, legs etc etc. Changed Josie (again), spoken to friend on phone, looked nerrvously at number of orders that have appeared since sending out parcels, spent a bit of time trading fruit with Fran and exchanging messages on screen. Impressed by what she can in fact write, when she doesn’t realise she is writing! “let’s go and fly a kite!” being a notable one this session. Set Maddy up with some drawing, given Ams a cuddle, made Josie some milk. Time to swap washing over.

1.45pm – T and her dad arrive to spend the afternoon (it’s half term here so T isn’t in school) – this is pretty much the last i see of the children, who spend the afternoon on bikes, in the garden, consuming apples, playing on the multiple DS network (T brings one too) and doing kid stuff while T’s dad and i chat and drink tea.

5pm – near as dammit; carry on swapping over loads of washing (3rd of the day now) clear the decks in the kitchen ready to make dinner and receive the load of shopping Max will be bring home now work is finished. There isn’t any dancing tonight, so he’s taken the car and can go on his way home, which will lighten the evening rushing about by quite a lot. Looks like i could be spending the evening in my office. Roll on good business 🙂

6.30pm – the kids got freezer food, i’m no saint. Actually, better evening meals are on my to do list, now evenings are better organised. T is still here, giggling has persisted all day really. Max is home and putting away the shopping, i’ve put away a few more bits, looked at some customer emails and now i’m taking 10 and ACing. I really ought to sort out Joey’s room and do something meaningful, but i’m pooped!
To be continued….