Ought to blog the day really

As we seem to have fitted an awful lot in.

Think Big was doing her maths workbook before I’d finished breakfast. Turns out that the first couple of easy pages were breaking you in gently, by page 4 it’s onto series with missing bits, but she got the hang of it fairly well. Tim produced a couple more sheets for her to practise numbers on but she didn’t want to do that. And to keep Small out of the way, I loaded up teletubbies on CBeebies for him – he likes that a lot. And I think he’s trying to say hello. His IT breakthrough of the morning was working out how to hibernate my laptop 🙁

We should have been going to Shirebrook today, but Big really wanted to do some Christmassy stuff, so I offered her the choice. She turned down the outing in favour of sewing (!?) and more maths, so we continued as was really. Got the washing sorted out, sorted the kitchen (again) and invited both Barbara and Sarah round in the afternoon.

And suddenly it was afternoon. I’d turned the machine off after teletubbies, but was just having a quick blogfix (Hi, my name is Jax, I’m a blog addict….hello Jax….) as Sarah pulled into the drive. Sent Big upstairs fairly rapidly when she swung at Dino, and she was still up there when Barbara arrived. E went straight up to join her, and the boys stayed downstairs. Small’s big achievement of the day is that he seems to have worked out actually playing with ppl – there was definitely some cooperation occurring. Very impressed, just a couple of weeks ago it was almost as if he couldn’t even *see* other children. He spent a bit more time worshipping baby R as well – he really likes babies. Tries ever so hard to be gentle with them too.

Sarah had to leave just after 4 to pick up the rest of the family, so, very aware that Big *still* hadn’t done any sewing I invited Barbara’s brood to tea, and brought the girls downstairs to sew hearts together.

I never knew that sewing could be competitive before…Big was unbelieveably so! I kept having to say “it’s not a race” and trying desperately hard to find encouraging things to say to E that she couldn’t interpret as criticisms of herself. So odd. She finished first (E ended up taking her heart home with her) and I learnt lots – use contrasting thread for starters. And probably the felt would have been easier. And maybe that blanket stitch is actually easier than running stitch – a definite tendency to turn the piece of sewing over meant that I spent a lot of time unpicking bits. Hohum. But Big is very pleased with her heart, and I think it only took about 45 minutes…

Tea went pretty well – was amazed at how much Small ate. Then Barbara loaded up and I carted mine upstairs to bath. Small hung on for a while afterwards, so I was late coming to blog, and now I’m just pondering going to sleep on the pull out bed, as we’ve had a couple of really bad nights, and I’m about to fall asleep on my keyboard again…