Started the day

with a family row. 🙁

Not our little family here – it appears my decision not to trek up the road to meet up today didn’t go down well. Oh well – I felt the decision was justified when Big went into meltdown this afternoon *despite* (or maybe because??) me not turning on the computer at all this morning, and spending pretty much all my time playing with them. Apart from the bit of housework I did in and amongst.

We did more sewing with the toy machine (which is incredibly fiddly to get to actually sew, and then even worse to get the tension right, but sews fairly well once you get past all of that). We’ve had Small’s train track out and set up his two new bridges, both rather swish lifting affairs from Grandma. We need more track though – we’ve now got more bridges than we can fit in a circuit, and we’ve only two straights, so we can’t really do anything particularly adventurous.

We got the meccano out, but that was the cause of the meltdown, as Big wanted me to build the ferris wheel and trying to do that with lack of assistance from her and Small throwing meccano around the room pushed me past my calm quiet limit. So the meccano went away again – not quite sure how I’m going to manage this sort of thing now as Small is very non cooperative, and I do want to spend time with both of them. Hm.

Anyway, after we’d all had chance to calm down, Big did some more decorating on her mosaic box. Then I cleared off and spent some quality time with a novel in the bath, wonderful. Came back down to discover that Small had contrived to open the meccano bucket and spread it all over the floor – not so good. I *think* I’ve found all the pieces though.

Bit more of a mathematical breakthrough this morning. Putting Big’s new crayons away, I pointed out that I thought there was one missing – there were 23 and things are usually sold in dozens, which would mean 24 in the pack. Somehow this took us on to counting in tens, amazed to discover that she can happily do this up to 100 (although requires some assistance to actually say 100 😉 ) Very impressed by this – not quite sure where it’s come from though. We also went and chatted to Tim about why dozens are used – ask jeeves was of the opinion that it was to do with there being roughly 12 lunar cycles in a solar cycle, while Tim thought it might be because a dozen can be shared out more ways than 10 can, which led to some demonstrations with coins. So fairly convinced that we’ve covered maths for the day, and we’ve wrapped up some practical skills there too.

Oh, and there’s a new blog at the end of the ring – do drop in and say hello to Claire!