Tim decided against sleeping on the floor at old house and came back in the middle of the night, meaning that I didn’t need to roust the children out and catch a bus to the hospital, but could instead drive, on my own. I was very grateful for both these points 🙂 And then when I got there, someone gave me their parking ticket, so it didn’t even cost me anything to park, bonus!
Given that my appt was for investigation into recurrent miscarriages I was in two minds whether to keep it in this pregnant state – I know that I’m already past the previous miscarriage stage. But I thought it didn’t really waste that much of anyone’s time, and friends agreed, so I’d gone. The nurse who did height/ weight/ blood pressure thought it was reasonable as well, though the consultant seemed slightly taken aback. His instant reaction was to want to scan me – exact words “I’ll be a lot happier if I see a heart trace” so he scanned and we did. Although first of all we got to see an embryo cartwheeling, which was another good way of proving some form of life.
Walked out of the hospital with a huge grin on my face – consultant’s advice was to just wait and see now, and came home very happy. It’s incredibly reassuring to see the babe, I know that the hormones are what are making me feel so terrible, but it’s not much reassurance. Little flickery heart thing on screen is great though. And I’ve got nuchal screening/ dating scan in another two weeks, so I’ll get to see it then too.
Got home pretty much wiped out, so by 3 o’clock, retired to bed. Tim amused the children with remote control cars, and he also recovered my Power House kit from whichever garage it was in, so we spent a bit of time looking through the extensive manual of experiments that comes with it. I think we can safely say we can cover science for the next year or so using that as inspiration – we’ve got a trip to the Ecotech centre at Swaffham coming up next week as well which will tie in nicely.
Tim popped out for a swift one (or 4 😉 ) with his brother later on, and I put the children to bed, without Harry Potter again. They were somewhat disappointed, but coped.
Today I reverted to staying in bed later – I don’t feel sick while I’m curled up warm and sleepy in bed, so there’s not much incentive for getting up given that as soon as I do, I start to feel ill and the day goes downhill from there. Did make it up before lunchtime, and as we now have a printer in the house, printed off some free Bond verbal reasoning papers. Small romped his way through the 6-7 paper, only needing a little help to understand the questions. He got one thing wrong on alphabetical ordering, which tbh, didn’t worry me that much. I think I’ll keep him on that level for a little while though, not least because he’ll get very stressed if I present him with things labelled 7-8 – he can cope with doing things for age 6 as he is nearly 6, but it would be stretching to go any higher.
Big struggled a bit more with her paper. For some reason, I’d got the 9-10, when really I should have gone for 8-9 for her, I keep forgetting that she was only 9 this year. Her real problem though is that if she doesn’t get something instantly (and that means before I’ve even finished reading the question out!) she stresses and wails, so the whole thing was an extended exercise in patience and calmness for me. Her spelling is very weak, especially given how strong she is on reading, but the specific problems she had with the questions today began to give me a handle on what it is about spelling that she struggles with. It’s vowel sounds – she doesn’t seem to know which vowels should make which sounds, so to make the word CAREFUL from EFUL she wanted to add KER rather than CAR. Like I say, gives me some ideas of what the problems are, and how we can go about approaching it. She’s fine on meanings, strong with vocabulary generally, and was improving on the logical approach to questions, so all in all, I think it was a good session. I did point out to her that I should have printed off the paper before, so I will do that with the other areas when we get around to that.
And then we had lunch 🙂
After lunch I dragged the children off down town to buy a cat torturing device aka catflap (I love teaching cats to use catflaps, 😈 ) and we also popped into the Remnant shop, as I’d been advised by Em that it was well worth a visit.
Remnant shop indeed. It is the most complete fabric and craft shop I’ve encountered in quite some time. The knitting is limited to Sirdar, but has pretty much the full range of Sirdar yarns – we bought some yarn and a pattern for Big to make a hat for the baby. They have a special theatrical annex for sparkly and otherwise wonderful costume making materials, as well as all kinds of haberdashery type knick knacks. An absolutely incredible place, we were there nearly an hour, and I was very restrained as I only came out with a 0.60 crochet hook and some machine embroidery thread so that I can try my hand at some miniature crochet for dolls houses.
And finally we stopped at the library and Big redeemed herself for refusal to ask where the toilet was by finding the fantasy shelves. Bizarrely, they have separate SF and fantasy sections, and for example Voice of the Gods
is in one and Last of the Wilds
is in the other. I did query this with a librarian, but apparently there’s nothing they can do about it as the books are categorised when bought and they can’t put the two sections next to each other as they are logically laid out in alphabetical order. Right. Still think it’s very odd.
And now I’d better go and make their tea.
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