Yesterday Small looked mournfully at my pile of post and asked why no one sends him letters. I pointed out that he never sends letters, and that maybe if he did, he would get replies. He was rather taken with this idea, and instantly decided to write to his cousin L, so trotted off downstairs to get started. A couple of minutes later Big appeared to let me know that he was ready and waiting for me, which was a surprise as I’d no idea I was supposed to be involved, but given my remote connection had kicked me out and it was lunchtime, seemed like a reasonable idea anyway.
So we spent a bit of time with some magnetic letters, helping him to sound out the words he wanted to write so that he could copy them down. He is getting much better at hearing the sounds to identify the letters to put them out – think it really isn’t going to be too long before he takes a leap or two further on. (But I’ve been thinking that for a while so it could easily be a year or two yet!) He wrote his letter, and then I helped him to ring Grandma to ask for the address. He loved doing that (with hindsight, it could have been a mistake teaching him to use the phone 😉 ) although Big refused to talk to Grandma on the phone. She didn’t want to be left out of letter writing though, so she wrote to C & M.
After all that and envelopes and stamps, it was somehow too dark and cold to take the letters to the post last night, so they had to wait for this morning.
Up and down the stairs sorting out their tea and finishing off working, I was amused to walk into the living room at one point to find them watching Floella Benjamin reading Rattletrap Car
. It’s one of our family favourites for reading aloud at bedtime, and I had to say that she did it really rather well as well. Slightly spooky in that she doesn’t seem to have aged nearly as much as I would have expected – the kids were amazed that I knew who she was 😆
Small had ketchup privileges withdrawn for the foreseeable future after pouring himself a plateful (and I really do mean that, should have taken a picture I suppose) and so went to bed a little sad. He doesn’t like being told off. I don’t like telling him off – I hate making him cry, which is pretty much what happens when you disapprove. Does make him an easy child to deal with though.
Today both Tim and I started out feeling rough -don’t know whether we’re just exhausted by the start to the year or whether we’ve got a bit of a bug, but it took us hours to drag ourselves out of bed. The kids were up and down like yoyos to tell us all about various things, and Big conquered the new kettle to fetch hot drinks 🙂 Bit later on she moved on to doing some more writing – inspired by the events of Dear Max
(knew that was a good book to buy, I can’t recommend it highly enough) she decided she was going to write a play. I was slightly taken aback by how much she knew about how they work, must get round to reading the Max books myself I think. So that took us into the early afternoon, and then I walked them round to the postbox to post their letters.
Slight hitch when we got there – Small didn’t want to let go of his letter. We pointed out that if he didn’t send it in the post he could hardly expect to get one sent back, but this didn’t stop him from sniffling his way home. Copious exposure to the batman website (probably lego batman) seemed to help him recover.
And that’s about it for today. I’ve promised to take them out tomorrow to buy Small new socks, his current ones appear to be somewhat smaller than his feet. Given that he’s just got new shoes it does seem possible that his feet have grown. Other than that I shall be frantically washing and sorting to prepare for another week without Tim – working from home again Monday and then doing an evening shift on Friday, but they’d better remember to pay me the uplift this time, I’m not doing it out of the goodness of my heart any more!
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