I want my mummy.

Today i was suppose to get a nice long day at work, taking proper control of all the things that got out of control in the last 3 weeks while i couldn’t give it all the attention it needed. My plan was to start at one end of the office and work soldily round until all the new stuff was in place and everything that needed a place to go, or needed listing for sale, was done.

Unfortunately i only managed 2/24 bays of shelves 🙁

While i was on a call to a customer, Max rang to summon me home. Maddy had been blending the soup they had cooked and had taken the blender out of the saucepan without taking her finger off the button. Boiling soup splashed everywhere (cleaners came fortunately and did a sort of “The Assasin” style ‘cleaners’ job on the kitchen later.) Max wanted me to pick up some dressings and come home; i was dubious about the detour but he assured me it was fine. Told him to stop using flannels and put the worst bits back under running water and headed home.

Poor Maddy. She had 4 largish raw spots on her face, top layer of skin, like a blister that had lost it’s top, 10 or so down her arm and a patch about 2 inches square on her upper arm that had skin hanging off it. I saw that underwater and thought “hmmm… casualty” and then decided that getting a panicking Maddy to casualty on my own, with no easy parking and no spare adult was not going to be much fun. So decided i would call an ambulance instead. It wasn’t that i thoguht she was in any danger but i didn’t think we could manage to get her anywhere without much more distress and she was grey and shaking with shock (and cold!) too. All the scalds were in places that were going to be hard to dress myself, or clothe her around and it seemed the simplest answer.

Ambulance blokes were lovely and patched her up, agreed to avoid casualty and told us to get her calm and then take her off for proper dressings later. The patch that had freaked me turned out to be more blister skin filled with the running water than anything else ( i confess to taking one look and then retching and deciding not to investigate further). Took a long time to stop shaking but after some trifle and Nanny MacPhee she began to warm to sickness like a man…. “i think i feel too sore to hold the Wii controller…..” 🙄

Took Fran to cello. Her teacher (am i the kind of person to go on about my kids like they are geniuses? I try not to but i may be about to do it now!) is very pleased with her and is giving her sets of 8-10 tunes per week to do. She’s bowing really nicely, hearing the notes nicely, reading the music well and already able to find notes without looking down. Today the teacher spent quite a while doing theory with her and played a duet with her that apparently lots of 11 year old starters find very difficult. She got Fran to sing a tune and congratulated her on how accurate her ‘ear’ is. I’d say she’s got quite a natural aptitude for it, which is great and i can kind of tell from the way the teacher is reacting to her and pushing her to try new things that Fran is proving able. There is something about the way Fran holds the cello and her assurance with it; for someone who has only been learning for 3 weeks she quite stuns me. She is certainly much more able than i was at that stage.

This week she has got to learn to use her first finger on every string, learn to find the octave up for each note and get her written note recognition as perfect as possible. Her timing is good, i think it is the dancing (and probably the decent grip on maths) that helps there; 4 years of dancing is bound to have given her a good start on listening to rhythm and so on. She is so excited by it; i can see her finding it such a challenge.

Her lessons happen to be in the maths department; we’ve been looking at some of the optical illusions on the walls (that was ART in my day!) and today we happened to be waiting in the “Levels” area… aside from factoring (not done yet as i don’t know what it means so i’m evading it till i get that far in my course!) she appeared to be able to do all the examples on the board.

She’s never seen an equation until today…

“Fran, what do you think the answer to k -20 = 40 is?”

“60. Duh.”

I’ll shut up then. Just the sight of a letter in a sum was still throwing me at 16!!!! 😆

On the way home we got talking about the Elizabeth Chadwick novels i have just read my way through. As we were leaving Huntingdon i started talking to her about Waltheof of Huntingdon, a Saxon Earl in the days immediately after the Norman Conquest. Was very interesting. We talked about some of the Chroniclers of the time, historians/storytellers who made records of the events of the age and how their accounts of the era have to be viewed in a circumspect manner. Interesting to be able to discuss the validity of source material with her now and particularly good when our area has so many of them. Crowland and Thorney Abbey both have chronicles attributed to them and much of the source material of the time is very um… questionable. It depended very much on the who, how and why’s of the writer; how much time they spent at court, how devout they were, what their agenda was (how lacking in sanity they were) and how much they liked a good yarn. Some of them were known to pad out a dull area of a characters real life with a bit of dragon fighting, just to liven it up!

Waltheof was buried at Crowland and became a place of pilgrimage where miracles were said to occur; i’m not sure if his tomb was destroyed during the reformation, but apparently there is no mention of it there now. Must take a visit. Have been meaning to for 10 years!

We also chatted about how language and understanding would change over the years, how old Saxon/English mutated, through Norman French, into our current language. Trying to explain a gradual alteration, i’ve found, is tricky with children; i suppose they just find long spaces of time difficult to comprehend. We settled on using Opal Fruits as an explanation; I used to call them Opal Fruits and so did Daddy, they haven’t been called Opal Fruits for a long time, but if i ask Daddy to buy me Opal Fruits he will know what i mean and come home with Starbursts. Likewise there is every chance that Fran will always know them by both names, even though they haven’t been Opal Fruits in her life time. We talked a bit out inches and cms and old money denominations being the same, how it takes a long time for an inherited but “defunct” knoweldge to die out from our collective memory.

Interesting stuff.