watching Mary Poppins

Yesterday I worked from home. The break from driving was much appreciated!

Kirsty came by and dropped A off while she took M to the dentist, and despite the fact it was ages since my two had seen A they all disappeared off upstairs, and were neither seen nor heard until about 5.45, when they came down and asked to watch Mary Poppins.

Well, I didn’t have any problem with that, put it on and sat down to watch it. Really listening to the lyrics to the first time made me blink slightly though – particularly the song Sister Suffragettes, which the wonderful “though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid”. Hm. I foresee much interesting discussion of these concepts in the future.

Kirsty and M got back from the dentist, and Tim popped out and fetched fish and chips for us all. Very pleasant evening, though quite a late one – it’s a long film. Good to catch up with Kirsty, I think for one reason or another that’s the first time they’ve been round since they moved back down. Small wants to know when he can go to their house, and I think he’s in for rather a surprise when he discovers how near it is now 🙂

Then after they’d gone, I started to feel incredibly tired. A bit of an ache started up again, and by 9.30 I was sagging, so I gave up and went to bed. Slept the clock round – Tim brought me breakfast in bed about 10 and I then loafed around for several more hours, although I also had several in depth conversations with Big about various things.

She was in and out all morning. It appears that there are one or two things that she isn’t too happy about at school right at the moment, and we’re going to work together to sort them out. Part of the problem appears to be that it takes her a very long time to do any work that involves writing, so she doesn’t get time to do any of the other things that she wants to do. I’m going to take two ways forward with this. First of all, I’m about to print out a load of sentences for her to do similar sort of copy work with at home, to practise her writing in a less distracting environment. Secondly, Tim and I will make time to go up to school to talk about a plan for her education overall. As she’s only at school 3 days a week, I’d particularly like her to be enjoying the type of thing that we just can’t provide for her, like all the montessori materials that we don’t have about. They also do lots of baking and craft that I don’t have the kit for, so that’s good too.

The second thing she was upset about is that she took in a reading book from home and no one will read it with her. I did point out at the time that she took it I wasn’t sure they would want to read it, as it’s Fairy Treasure, probably not the most educational book on the planet. We talked about this again today, and I tried out an analogy of food types. Basically, some books are like sweets, not very filling, but very tempting, while others are more like fruit, good for you and nice to eat. She came up with Farmer Fred (Little Workmates) and we decided that that was like baby food 🙂

Haven’t got as far as sprouts, I suspect that’s Dickens. 😀

I know it’s a rather tenuous analogy, and right at the moment, the thing I want to encourage is reading. Requiring 30 minutes a day though is really working – Tim said that today she’d almost given up reading out loud, and was basically subvocalising – which would explain why she’s nearly read Amber the Orange Fairy (Rainbow Magic) in just two sittings. She also asked if it was alright if she kept on reading after the 30 minutes. I said that yes, I thought that was fine. 🙄

Later on, she started preparing a party for her baby. She made invitations, then burst into tears when I pointed out she needed to put on when and where 🙁 We solved that one, and she did a lovely job of preparation, and even coped when we had to push back the starting time because Tim was having a lie down. She’d got a pile of prizes for various party games, had wrapped up a parcel for pass the parcel, and Tim took pictures so that she can blog about it properly herself tomorrow. 🙂

And now they are having tea – although Small is ignoring it in favour of finishing his picture. Hoping to get them into bed at a more reasonable time tonight, as I assume tiredness is contributing to ongoing tearfulness. Big just managed somehow to trap the inside of her knee in her barbie lunch box and cut herself! Still, she’s got an Ouch plaster on now (even if that means she can’t straighten her leg, oops) and that appears to have solved the problem.

So, all in all, a pleasant couple of days. And I’ve even managed to sign the new petition for Home ed rights along with 131 other ppl. It’s not doing too badly on there – do spread the news if you hadn’t already heard about it 🙂