Interesting Conversations.

We’ve had a lovely day today with Em and her 2 girls who kindly popped over to visit us. Seemed to go very well, with Amelie and R getting on particularly well but general happy play/gossip/cake eating for much of the day. Was a good reward for my girls who had had to spend from 8-11 at work with me; they took work and toys and got on very well, so i got to catch up a bit. Busy this week though, with issues for both MF and i which made normal working hours tricky; i try to avoid taking them in at all but it is good to know i can and certainly our little side room makes that much easier to do. Need a BIG tidy up tomorrow though.

Favourite new things of the week are the Anamalz though… (not done big image or descriptions yet though!)

Totally gorgeous, i’ve had the whole range on the desk this week and the chap who works opposite came in for a gossip (as you do!) and bought the whole lot!

We also played Settlers of Catan with Fran and E (till the lure of the garden game became too much) and Em played duets with Fran and showed me how to alter a base part to a treble one so i can play along on the flute. Seems like it would be a good way to start, making it something that can be a group activity without any parents taking over a child’s instrument 😆 I have no ability to read the base clef, i might as well be looking at the word bonjour and suddenly be told i have to say guten tag so i thought i better learn. I’m looking for some printable flashcards to pin up round the house but in the meantime we came across this little music game which is rather nifty.

Fran and i spent some time talking about flooding the other day as it was the part of her rivers book that interested her the most. I got her to draw and annotate a ‘dora’ style  backpack of what she would pack if she suddenly had to evacuate because the waters were coming; she did a really good job, very old-style ‘be prepared’ Guide-like! So then she had a go at imagining trying to move our most important stuff to the top floor of the house if we had some warning and then talked through what it would be like when we came back, if the floods had made it to our middle floor. It was really interesting to just walk ourselves through the immediate needs (cleaning, food, warmth, washing, drinking) and see what we’d forgotten. So then we chatted about moving our electricals upstairs, at which point it occurred to us that the house would be shorted out anyway. So we decided to go to Granny’s…. they live on a hill!!!

Fran did remember to move the rabbits in though, which is more than i did! :blush:

On the way home from music yesterday we discussed the concept of money and how what we have in our hands is more of a counter than an actual thing of worth. We talked about the wealth of a country, how money is valued and created and discussed why just printing more money doesn’t work. We talked about the early medieval notion of clipping coins (which made them worthless effectively) the times when coinage had precious metals in them and how they were sometimes collected in, melted down and bulked out with more base metals to “raise more money” and why that was really not an effective way of doing so. Interesting stuff. She’s always been great to have that sort of conversation with, but these days she has her own life experience to bring to it too. Love it. Love car ed 🙂