It's raining again.

But yesterday I put some shirts out before I went out, and mother brought it in again, so at least Tim has clothes for next week. The second load just got raining on, so I don’t think any of the rest of us have 🙁

Big made a treasure hunt for Grandma and Small yesterday, and that was good, apparently. She also found another of her many bags that had some more of her money in it (although I have a sneaking suspicion that some of what she found was actually Small’s, he has no concept of money or responsibility and just abandons it wherever it happens to be when something else distracts him) so she’s reached her target of £4.50 and booked another trip to the build-a-bear workshop.

Tim stopped by citylink and picked up a parcel for me – a Canon PowerShot A430 Blue Digital Camera [4MP 4 X Optical]. It’s really rather nice, so I’ve enjoyed playing with that this morning. And we’ve talked some more about houses – I need to locate us a solicitor and we need to locate a mortgage (preferably one lasting longer than 14 years!) You never know, we might be able to move this year.

My boss was back at work – she’s very pleased with how I handled things in her absence, and I am very pleased to have her back! This might mean that I can do some of my own work now 🙂

Slightly depressed myself yesterday attempting to explain that children writing letters that they don’t understand is a normal part of learning the montessori way and that it all sorts itself out and works rather well in the end. Small is writing letters all over the place, and usually doesn’t know what it says by the time he’s finished, and I’m really quite chuffed with it. Big’s writing is coming along well, plus she actually wants to do it. That seems to me to be even more important, but maybe I should be behaving like this instead. I just can’t bear the thought of out of school hours cramming – it doesn’t seem to me that that is learning at all. And all of this hype, stress and prep for SATs just doesn’t make sense at all, it’s got nothing to do with the individual children, it’s all to do with making sure the schools (and therefore the teachers) are seen to be doing well. Couldn’t we focus on the children? We did talk about SATs at montessori a while back. We considered ordering the papers so we could see what they looked like, and we decided even that was a bad idea.

Did find some other good links on the bbc site this morning though. Considering resurrecting an approach to programming with Big, might have to reinstall kpl somewhere though. Or we could go for HacketyHack which appeals to me, I’d quite like to learn Ruby myself. Or maybe Scratch would suit Small – looks more like a game than programming to me, but what do I know?

Oh, and the other thing I’ve got to do this weekend is sort out for Small’s birthday. Given that we’ve another party tomorrow, guess I’m in for a hectic weekend.