A hectic day

as we headed out this morning to softplay with Sarah and Kirsty and their respective children. Softplay turned out to be big enough that the children can bounce around without being too horrid to each other, and the babes enjoyed their area – Small found a climbing frame he could manage, which even had a little slide. Reasonable cost as well – £2.50 for two hours play for the older ones, with a free drink too. We adults didn’t get much chance to chat, but it was nice to catch up in the odd minute inbetween dramas.

We all retired back here for lunch, which was remarkably disaster free considering that we had 4 adults and 6 children in this not too big room (the heavens opened again as we arrived home, so there was no chance to kick them out in the garden). Then everyone departed about 2ish, leaving me with a rather hyper young lady.

I came to a conclusion yesterday, and it was that you are all right. There are areas in my parenting that I still need to work on, and there always will be. But overall, I’m not doing too badly. When dd came out of her exam yesterday, I asked her to put her shoes on, while I wrestled with Small. She couldn’t see them instantly, and just lost it, yelling at me, trying to hit me and being downright rude. There wasn’t a lot that I could have done differently there – I didn’t make an unreasonable request, and I remained calm while sorting her out. So if something as little as that is going to cause her to fly off the handle, OK, I’m going to have to work with her to learn to control it, but it’s not something I need to beat myself up about. So thank you all for your support (which I’m sure I’ll need again!) while I worked that out.

Anyway, so here we were, with her a bit hyper and Small bumbling around the floor as usual. I’d printed out a worksheet from one of Merry‘s links the other night, and I decided sitting her down with that could well be a good idea. So I produced it, we talked about it, and she sat down very happily to have a go.

She’s a bit of a perfectionist, my daughter. Can’t think where she gets it from. Any numbers that weren’t up to her standard were scribbled out. I was quite pleased to discover that she’s got the whole concept of numbers from 0 – 9 sussed, backwards and forwards, and as I rather think it was the first time she’d written some of them out, I thought they were formed pretty well as well. But it took ages, with loads of encouragement throughout – not to figure out the answers, but to get her to accept her penmanship! Small sat in his high chair and scribbled while we were working – he doesn’t like to be left out 😉

After that, we read some more of Thursday’s Child, which is going down very well. Turned out she could remember quite well what had been happening yesterday in it, word for word in some parts, which surprised me rather!

After tea we went and investigated the potato buckets again, and look what we found!I thoroughly enjoyed them, and tomorrow we’ll see if we can find a few more and dd can help cook them too.

Right, I’ve spent most of the evening on this blog post and its associated piccies (although we’ve also had another long chat about giving birth, as you do, thanks for the inspiration, Barbara!) so I think it’s time for a hot chocolate and off to bed. Night all.