Where's Kevin gone????

Aargh, they changed everything on CBeebies, and for the first time in ages we’ve got Nick Jr on at bedtime – where’s Kevin and the bedtime song? What’s a Jimmer Jammer when it’s at home? Although it has to be said that Small seemed to rather enjoy it, he was bopping away with the best of them.

Right, to wrap up the day. Didn’t get any better news from the other agency, in fact didn’t get any news at all, and given that the company stressed on Saturday that they’d let everyone know on Monday, I think we can safely say this isn’t good news. I’ll call tomorrow and see if I can get some feedback, but I know it’s just going to be “too rusty”. When I spoke to the one agency woman this morning I asked her to go back to the interviewer and ask if he’d reconsider me in a month if I got Sun Java certification in the mean time – she seemed a bit taken aback that I would suggest that, and said that they usually have a six month reapplication scheme, but she could understand that my position is a little different to the norm with me being self employed (??? nope, didn’t understand either) and she would ask and ring me back. She didn’t ring me back. 🙁

I quite surprised myself with my strength of reaction to all of this today – I am quite stressed about our current (well, more our future) financial situation, but given that I’m pretty ambivalent about having to go out to work, it seems odd that I should be so depressed to not get the job. Oh I dunno. Anyway, I looked into Sun Certification, and I can get an online course that is self paced and theoretically takes 27 hours, and I can sit the test locally any of three dates in March, so I think I might do that before I go back to the agencies and rattle their cages.

Anyway, education. We did a fair bit today. Big has been having a bad couple of weeks with behaviour and temper, and so I focussed on that rather a lot today, encouraging her to breathe deeply rather than screaming and asking her to decide if she needed to go upstairs to calm down rather than being dragged kicking and screaming. It worked for most of the day, and I also refused to have kids tv on – so we had schools tv as noted already this morning, and she watched some time team this afternoon, which she really enjoys. She wanted to do some knitting or sewing, but I was desperately searching for documentation to do the car tax (d’oh – new month resolution, I am now more organised) so I couldn’t sit with her.

We also did some reading activities, didn’t get very far through the actual reading lesson as apparently it was more fun to leap around the room, but she did find her home made twist and phonic game and I was completely floored to find that this time, she sounded out the words. It’s the first time she’s ever really tried to do that, and she pretty much got there with it all. Well impressed. Guess something that we are doing is hitting home then. She also made some birthday cards, and another first – trying to work out how to spell a name without my assistance. I think we might be getting somewhere here.

Did a bit more work on telling the time – Big is displeased that non of her multitude of watches work and wants me to get her another one, and I’ve declined until she can actually use one and will look after it. Good incentive there, huh? 😉

And so to Small. Oh is he a barrel of laughs at the moment. We’ve got a recall on his hearing test in the morning – he keeps on failing them. I’m reasonably sure that he isn’t any more deaf than I am, but I do worry that he could be deaf at my level, and I’d hate to go down the same route as I went down as a child, with ppl insisting I could hear, and not finding out the truth til very much later in the proceedings.

He is so full of mischief at the moment, I can’t turn my back for a second. He loves to draw, but unfortunately doesn’t limit this to paper – I found the box for Big’s sewing machine with additional graffiti today. The table not having stuff on it is just one big invite for a toddler climbing fest. And he loves long hair – you can swing on it. He also adores classical music – there was a particular piece on today that was a piano and a cello, and that was very good. Must see if I’ve got anything on cd that he likes. He loves to play the piano too, must make time to play with him.

And now to work, as I’ve completely lost the thread here. Might try to fit in some tea first though 😉