Last week we moved Fran in with Josie, aiming to give her a bit more space from the noisy melee. It worked, but we didn’t bargain on quite how much Maddy was going to be hacked off about being left with Amelie 😕 So this weekend we embarked on another great hoick about and the result is that Fran and Maddy now have single beds in one room, with a desk and book corner and their own clothes and Amelie and Josie have the other room, Amelie on the top bunk and Josie in her cot on the other side of the room, till she is ready to go into the bed. Tonight is the first night they’ve all been put to bed at once and i’ve just realised i haven’t seen anyone since. They are all fast asleep!
Joey and Amelie have most of the toys so they’ve all taken to calling that room “the nursery” now. 🙄 😆
Thursday we spent the early part of the day with the HEMUKs doing maths, Gamecubing and lolling about in an exhausted manner drinking tea. I threatened Fran quietly in her ear a fair bit while she pretended not to be able to subtract anymore, which worked, and i counted my blessing that that was as hard as it got 😉 Maddy did a fair bit, Amelie did loads over the two days of MPH1A1 and it was all quite nice to be getting back into the swing of it. Then we kinda all conked out!
Otherwise i think the only thing of note on that day (aside from Amelie begging to leave with the HEMUKs) was the the bite under my eye swelling up enough so that i could see the under eye bit myself. After i went out for a ride that evening, the one on my chin swelled up so much i looked like i’d been punched. Such odd things, they didn’t itch much at all, but the felt REALLY bruised. Pah.
Friday Hustled the girls through some maths again in the morning, which witrh the benefit of an early night was greatly improved. Fran recovered her brain, Maddy stormed through and Amelie switched to a reception workbook i’ve had since Fran was 3 and did loads of it. It appears she LIKES the brightly coloured zingy format. FINE. 🙄 We also fitted in a trip to town where i spent £36 on kids socks and £66 on new shoes for Amelie and Josie. Everyone had grown, Fran now a 1 1/2 but the big two didn’t want school shoes. Fran also got a lovely pair of “on sale in John Lewis” canvas 34/4 length trousers. I came home wishing i hadn’t bothered to go out to pay in some cheques!
That afternoon Aisha came over with L and A and they (and i) all Animal Crossed together. Lucy did her first cleaning stint, so it was good to have Aisha here as i didn’t feel i was watching or bothering Lucy while she worked. So lovely to have downstairs all gleaming. We’ve settled on 4 hours a week here and 2 that she does papeerwork or jobs from home for me, to start with, so hopefully that will go well.
Saturday Maddy and i went to IKEA; we had a lovely time together and she was great company and a big help. I gave her a pack of word flashcards and she learned 30 words on the way over and we did lots of sentence construction around them. We had lunch together and shopped for a mixture of essential storage solutions and random but useful bits and bobs (best buy could be the weird pop-up, zip-up drawer tidy boxes). I had a long list of code numbers from Max for the office racking i needed so she and i spent ages getting those and manhandling two trolleys 🙂 She steered the furnituree one all the way through the checkout on her own and got a round of applause! 😆
As we were leaving we happened to here on the travel news that power cables had come down in fields by the A1, setting them alight, and it was shut both ways just below the roundabout we had to get back to. We’d smelt burning on the way over and as the news said the area was chaos, we decided to go the long way home. Gave us an opportunity for some fascinating conversations the best of which was about laws, where they come from, who makes them, who makes us keep them, what types there are etc etc We covered the Ten Commandments right up to current government and then tried to think of all the laws we’d been governed by since we left home. The list was amazing really, from car ownership, to safe driving and seat belts, to paying for goods and using cards that belonged to us.
She also asked me if a caterpillar was an insect. And i don’t know 😕 It doesn’t have 6 legs, so it can’t be, but it turn into one, so it ought to be. So what is it?
We got home, had a drink and then Max set off to IKEA to get the RIGHT bits for the office racking 😳 he took Amelie and the rest of us set about a mass room change. Nearly everything is somewhere else on the top floor now!
Today Max put my office (including fetching and very cute step to climb up to top shelves) together and the transformation is incredible. I’ve got two huge corner shelf units, with 5 shelves each, plus two flat ones which are a similar size and i’ve got all but one bit of the racking i did have still in there. Considering it is all still quite full, if spacious enough to add more and not crammed, i am starting to understand why it has felt like such hard work lately! I needed more shelves 🙂
In an effort to stop the girls bickering, i sat the big 3 down to maths/english and they worked for about 90 minutes with very little help. Fran did lots of mixed addition/subtraction word problems really well, maddy made up sentences and illustrated them and Amelie did endless “match and sort” stel maths. Then the played for hours on the patio, then the had tea and sorted out the rooms some more and then they read/fell asleep flawlessly. So all in all a good, if hectic, weekend.
Next week is also busy and i’m about to inflict a timetable of sorts on us all… so um… more later 🙂 (oh and Jax, i haven’t forgotten, i’m still hunting!)
Blimey – you have been busy!! Looking forward to seeing the new organised office – inspection time! 🙂
Crickey! How do you manage to fit so much in,lol. I am thinking I need to get a helper in too. The office sounds great.
Office does sound good, as does the room re-arrangement – hope it continues to work as well at bedtime every night!
Sounds like a very busy week.
A caterpillar is an insect in its larval stage so yes it’s still an insect as it ‘hatches’ out to be an adult insect, just as an egg grows into a baby mammal or bird.
Mmm, hope that wasn’t a rhetorical question, lol!
Yes, to the the caterpilar/insect conundrum – but it’s not right to think of them separate – it’s just that it’s only the adult stage that has 6 legs. The way to look at it is that Swallowtail Butterflies (or whatever) are insects – the caterpillars are just one particular stage of the life cycle. In their own way they are as much a Swalloowtail BF as the Pupae or adult stages.
A caterpillar has 6 true legs and the others are ‘prolegs’. Not all butterflies have 6 legs actually: the prolegs always disappear during the metamorphosis, and in some species, a pair of true legs disappears too.
Good grief… where on earth did you pick that up? 😆 or have you already been asked that particular question by a mini HEMUK? 😉
Re 4 legged BF’s. Do you know if they actually disaapear on some species alison? I know that some species of BF appear to have only 2 pairs of legs as one pair is small and be hidden, or held up close to the body of the BF
Well, I knew the first bit, probably way back from O Level Biology. And you can see that there are two sets of different kinds of legs.
And then I was googling about it to see if there was anything else interesting, and whether they always had the same number of prolegs (they don’t), and saw the bit about 4-legged butterflies. I read it here – http://www.usyd.edu.au/macleay/larvae/faqs/legs.html – but now I can’t find anything further to confirm that, only stuff about the Brush-Footed BFs (63 species) who are the ones who have teeny tiny front legs.
The whole thing led to a very random discussion yesterday as to whether this in fact holds up when you try to decide if an egg is a bird (See it fly!!!!!! Crack!) ;):lol:
I’ve found that more shelving is often the answer to house problems. Maybe you could apply it to the girls’ sleeping arrangements if the current set-up doesn’t work. Does IKEA do a flat-pack of shelves for sleeping in? I expect you could fit all four girls into one unit.
Giggle… any excuse for a trip to Ikea is good for me 😉