Phut.

What a day! Started off by trying and failing to get up properly, due to an early waking Josie who got out the wrong side of bed. “Milk mummy… please… milk… why????” she pleaded… *mute eye rolling* Eventually shook her off with a goodly helping of sugar puffs and belted through parcels as quick as i could. Had a LOAD of foreign orders, which require extra thought and the site has got busy with the weather breaking (it was 15 degrees today!) so i was busyish. However, i was ready in time to get everyone swimming and wasn’t late which makes 3 days running and is really quite impressive!

Amelie did fine and i booked her in for another level 1 (as she won’t pass this time i don’t think) the week after next and the bigger two for a level 2 splash course which will hopefully give them a boost as i doubt they’ll get through level 2 in one sitting either, which is fine really as i’d be happy to have them all in one group in many ways, but they are keen to get on. It will certainly make my life easier to have everyone swimming as a swimming Fran would be out of my headcount of kids i can take into a pool, now she is 8 and Maddy will be 7 and looks the same age as Fran and would probably be fine too.

So anyway.

Unfortunately Josie had kindly left a bowl of Sugar Puffs in the middle of the hall, which i tripped over as we hurried out and so i had to leave that soaking nicely into the carpet for when i got back. But before that, i thought i would just pop to Tesco for a few things we needed. What a mistake 🙁

A week ago i tried to use a card for £7 and they had to call for authorisation. Turned out, when i opened my post, that something had got returned to them when we moved before our post swapped and so they limited my account when they couldn’t ring up. I called and did this and that with them and it appeared to be sorted, in so much as you can ever tell when you are talking to someone who has never worked in a bank and speaks English as a second language with a 5 second time delay on the line 👿 I paid something last night, so assumed it was fine again, but today Tesco had to call for authorisation for £50. So we pootled off to Customer Service with me muttering and thinking nothing of it besides the flea in the ear my bank were going to get. The authorisation failed and they kept my card!

I promptly exploded (this is not a good thing to happen with 4 hungry children in tow) and demanded to be allowed to phone my bank, who rather sheepishly owned up to the fact that as they couldn’t find our address on their Indian Datadase, they had decided i was a fraudster and marked all my cards for instant retention. :x: The customers of Tesco then got treated to the full force of my “trained how to complain by working in banks and retail” fury being hurled down a phone line and the bank kindly called up their mastercard division who have the power to unblock a card and so i was able to use that instead. :rant:

Fran helped this process enormously by weeping about it because she was frightened. 🙄

Nevermind. While there we did get to see some rather lovely pictures that appear to move and so look slightly like a window out into a tropical beach scene and some bonsai trees which provoked LOTS of interesting conversation and i may go back and get one as i used to have one and did rather love it. 🙂

Came back singing lustily to Hotel California, of which more later perhaps 😉 but laughed lots at Maddy who said “Did they just say ‘but they just can’t kill the Beast’? Oh, this must be a song about GOOD people then.” 😆

Also had a rather good feel-good moment while trying to explain the concept of Paradise to the big two; everything i said in an effort to explain a Utopia of sorts, they replied with something along the lines of “a bit like our house and all being together then.” 🙂

Well anyway. Then we had lunch.

The afternoon included being able to get Josie off for a nap; Amelie played on Clifford Phonics and the big two and i curled up on our bed (i love having my bedroom on the living room floor, it becomes such a comfy, usable space) and read more Charles Darwin. Today was mainly about Butterflies and South America and included an explanation of why Latin names are used for naming species. So we talked about that, got a sheet out we bought at the butterfly famr the other week and went through that, finding the places butterflies come from, spotting the Animal Crossing ones 😆 and reading the Latin names and me trying to dredge up enough words to show them that the Latin has very logical descriptive parts to the words. Now they want to learn Latin 🙄

Went downstairs and Fran did a SchoolExpress Unit on Butterflies and Moths, with some really nice handwriting on it. Maddy did loads of pages of her Part B 1B (argh) Singapore book but it is too easy. Roll on her new books. She liked it anyway.

Fran did some keyboard practise, learned F and G, learned to play merrily We Roll Along and tried HappyNote (thanks Jenny).

Then it was time to go out to swimming AGAIN. Mystifyingly they had managed to dig up both sides of the road between this morning and this afteroon and the traffic was awful and it was added to by an accident that got on to Sally Traffic’s traffic news on Radio 2; we got there with a minute to spare, by which time Amelie was deeply asleep. She slept on me for the whole lesson, while Josie sat beside me quite charmingly and ate grapes. She is SO cute. She has more new words – “sorry”, “I’m finished” and “It’s raining”. 😆 Fran and Maddy both did a width of backstroke and after a Post Office PO Box trip and a diesel trip, we finally made it back home.

Am currently wondering how it is that having campers out the back of us automatically brings on torrential rain. Poor souls, it must be deeply annoying to come to a Christian Camp and for the heatwave to instantly turn into a monsoon. 🙁 You’d perhaps wonder if God WANTED you to camp out and SING THE SAME FLIPPIN’ SONG for 7 days 😆 Oh well, they are mostly very inoffensive (“We’re gonna buiiiiild this thing together….”) and they have a site curfew, so they don’t keep us awake. AND they have Home Ed camp size tents and gazebos! (Maybe you should go Nic, i can see you on a curfewed camp!)

And that is it. Oh, i registered my 1600th customer today. That is pretty good, is it not? 🙂