Auditions and parties and cello, oh my!

Yesterday i cleaned out our current room of doom, what used to be the stockroom which became the office, which we attempted to turn into a study but actually became a hell hole of junk. It was virtually at the “can’t get in” stage, so when something fell on Kirsty’s head in there, i thought i should do something. So i did. I unpiled all the junk from up against the cupboard that is built into a corner of it, tidied said cupboard, threw out 4 bags of rubbish, rationalised and resolved to USE some stuff and then ruthlessly sorted the rest of it out. The blanket box (filled with shortly to accidentally disappear cuddlies) was covered in books, so i’ve rehomed them and aside from sorting the dvds and tidying the book shelves up a bit, it now looks like a room again. Today Max has moved the pc in there so it can become a worknig room, either for the kids or for me. I’m tending to work from home again and we’ve got stock all over the living room – and that needs to change before it become habit. It does also mean we now have a lovely free desk in the living room which can a) hold whichever laptop is currently most useful and b) become an art station for the drawers of the family. I suspect Josie will enjoy playing at it too.

Quite why i imagine you’d be interested in such mundane rubbish, i have no idea. While i was doing it, i forced the children into domestic servitude and made them tidy their rooms. I’d like to say that was successful, it wasn’t, but they may have done enough to stop me totally losing my temper up there.

Saturday is always punctuated by ballet; Fran is doing very well and Miss D glowed about her. While she and Maddy were there, i took Ams to Auntie Kate’s to see Madison and Summer and get Kate to slow down some music for Maddy. Miss N kindly did her a recording of an instrumental of “Tomorrow” but it was a bit fast. Luckily Kate has the skills and technology to slow it down a fraction, which fixed an impending meltdown nicely. After that we went off to Tesco to find costumes. Fran flatly refused to have anything that was school uniform (are you seeing why i’m struggling here?) which was annoying as it might well have killed two birds cheaply with one stone but she and Ams ended up  with matching tops, skirts and tights. They looked lovely.

Today i took Josie out for a hasty bit of Mum and Daughter time at Office World (as you do!) and then i ferried the big three to their audition. Fran and Amelie contrived to make their teachers cry with “Maybe” (i’m assuming this is good!) and Maddy was very pleased with hers. They were up against big girls singing and dancing for 10 places, so i have no idea if they have a chance but from outside they sounded great (we might do video tomorrow) and hopefully even if they don’t make the finals, they’ll have done enough to be noticed as deserving to get a snippet of a part in something sometime i hope. Was very proud of them as they’ve rehearsed it all themselves and sounded lovely. F and A in particular had choreographed a very sweet little dance that suited them both.

That done we nipped to the unit for presents (ahem!) then dashed home to collect Max’s catering (ahem!) and dashed off to the Fishes Party where we had a very lovely time and thoroughly enjoyed the company. Thank you very much for having us 🙂

Home again to admire Max’s sorting and tidying (printer still doesn’t connect though, dammit!), sort a few more bits, make Fran cry over cello (i barely even spoke, she’s just lost her sense of humour over it completely!) and then very early beds for very tired children. Although, Fran has been goaded into restarting OotP by Big, so may still be reading that. 🙄 Maddy is reading something Jeremy Strong, which she also really likes, so who knows. I’m not looking. Josie dreamt last night that she went shopping with Max and he forgot her (Fran had to tell me this as Josie confided in her but wouldn’t tell me) and Max has confirmed that Josie is indeed lovely with him and only horrid with me. So that’s nice.

Did forget to mention that all of them had a major splurge not only on reading (loving those lists, Maddy loving Usborne Beginners books atm) but also on EC. Fran finished Yr 5 maths, is bombing through Yr 5 Literacy (she was held up on both by lack of application and lack of thinking to tell me she was struggling with a couple of games) and is now well into Yr 6 on both and on Yr 7 Science. I do love it for simple, easy to measure successes and stars 😉 She has got really good at spelling suddenly too, all those “cions” and “tions” and so on have suddenly sunk in and i can see that her Latin has helped lots with word types too. At just the right moment i do at least know that, academically, she’ll be just fine at school.

Maddy and i had a marvellous moment of time telling, (imagine a mirror down the middle, so if it is 5 past on one side it is 5 to on the other, quickly followed by short hand only deals with hours and there are only 12, long hand deals with minutes and there are 60 of them, quickly followed by something else with digital time). She declared me to be a wonderful mummy who completely understands her (and i do, sometimes, when i remember that she needs visual ideas and sequences to follow) and signed off Yr 3 maths, Yr 2 French, Yr 3 Literacy and Yr 4 Science all in one day. Result. So that puts them firmly and with confident good understanding of all the main points into their own years.

Just to explain that, in case Mr Badman is watching, we don’t use EC as a teaching tool. They use it to explore, consolidate and amuse and as such it gets used a lot for a while, ignored for ages and they tend to use it either slightly ahead of “Yr” or a bit behind so i can be sure they’ve really grasped anything else we’ve done on paper, in books, in real life. It seems to work quite well like that.

And so – that’s that. I’ve blogged up to date.