Archive for December, 2003

Answers on a Squawkbox please
Dear candidates,

Please read the following scenario and choose the appropriate response from the multiple choice answers below. Marks will be deducted for any males who attempt to stand up for the male in question.

** Child 1 goes to bed in (what for the sake of argument we shall call the) marital bed due to raging earache that causes her to sob most of the evening. Parent A choses to sleep in said bed with small girl due to having to go to work the next day while Parent B retires to Child 1’s bed (apologies to the Portico here) as she wishes to read for longer. Child 3 wakes around 2.30am, is inconsolable with snot, cold, itchy skin and ends up sleeping in Parent B’s arms in single bed, somewhat fretfully. Sometime later Parent B awakes again to hear wailing from (sic) marital bed and calls quietly for Child 1 to come in - earache has struck and she is instructed to wake daddy to get her medicine as Child 3 still in arms. Grunts ensue from said parent. Eventually Parent B is forced to get up, disentangling Child 3 to discover the matter. Parent A complains that he is a) cuddling Child 2 who has sleepwaked into his bed, slept next to a large patch of wee, Child 1 needs to wait for painkillers till morning and Parent B should (ahem) “Get Lost”

Please suggest an appropriate course of action for Parent A. Should he
a) Continue to lie next to large wet patch, cuddling deeply asleep inert child who could easily be moved while listening to wailing child for next 2 1/2 hours

or

b) Get up, sling cunningly-placed-near-bed quilted, plastic backed pad on wet patch, stick small child back in bed, take bigger child downstairs for medicine and then snuggle back up for her.

c) Leave wife to do all of above (b) so that in the intervening time fretful Child 3 wakes up, falls out of bed and wails for next 90 minutes while he sulks strops and wonder of wonders, manages to take himself to toilet without assistance of wife without whom all night time movement is apparently impossible.

Chris/Steve - i warn you - DO NOT attempt to stand up for him……

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Time to blog i think!

So, this is whati have been doing with my evenings the last few nights - hence being a bit quiet!

I always do the craft kits type things after the girls have gone to bed, its not fair otherwise - but Pud has been taking a real interest in my “work” recently - so she helped me stick some stickers on last night. At her age i used to help my nana a posh carboot/hall sales, selling plates and jewelry - i think its what gave me my urge to sell! i don’t suppose its a bad thing for them to have a concept of what mummy does to bring in pennies - i’m not running a sweat shop yet anyway!

Everyone has been really poorly and consequently grouchy and sleepy over the weekend. Scruff has an ear and chest infection, one saturday i finshed the kits at 1.30am, she woke up immediately and didn’t go back to sleep till 6am! *rolls eyes*

The big girls have been making muddlepuddle cards over the weekend, Pud and i also printed out a load of christmas poems, stories and bible bits and have been reading Longfellow, Twas the Night before Xmas, Lukes Gospel, Shakespeare and Dr Suess - she loves doing this and asked for the Longfellow one over and over! (Blooming long it is!)

Yesterday she sat down to watch the Little Princess and almost immediately burst into real gut wrenching sobs - something about it upset her terribly (it may have been the motherless girl against her own motherless daddy i suppose although she couldn’t seem to articulate anything particular). She was desperately upset by it (so was i by the americanising of it actually!) but we watched it together and had a cuddle so she could see the happy ending - we both had a good cry. This is the second time recently she has been really distressed and not been able to tell me why - its sort of upsetting :~( I suppose she is becoming much more emotionally aware and doesn’t really have the words/ or feels silly/or something - but its sort of weird to suddenly have a child with thoughts i can’t read on her face.

They have been playing the DK Wizard of Oz lots - Pud has finished all three levels, Moo is still working at it. Moo and i worked on a SATS Tuition game for Key Stage 1 yesterday - she really had the counting down, well into the teens and typing the numbers very ably (11 made her cross for some reason!) Today they all played with the Winnie the Pooh mag figures a fair bit. Apparently Moo has been very busy and happy at nursery too.

Pud Scruff and i all went out today for a bit of socialising - Pud has been drawing people this evening.

I have just finished pressing out the bits to the Usborne card nativity scene so Pud and i can make it tomorrow.

Finally - another in the “Moo’s asleep” collection

and a poorly girls cuddle on the sofa

Oh yes - Scruff can now do “biscuit” “flower” and “shoes”

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Found this HUGELY amusing last night…

Things my girlfriend and I have argued about

Oh- and we booked our holiday too - 2 holidays by the second week of Feb is going to be a record for us i think!

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Something like the new cough mixture advert…

… what it sounds like round here - all three girls are coughing, spluttering and snotty and in Scruffs case also being sick regularly. Dh is sighing gustily over a bunged up nose and no doubt as soon as they all recover i will be hit by a life threatening chest infection/septic throat/gawd knows what! Happy days!

So what have we been up to? Well the lack of blogging is due to several very late nights doing the craft kits which are now all making their way to the enveloping and addressing department(A different department!! rofl! I WISH!) One company kindly let me wait an extra week for my box (ggrrrrr) which has delayed me a few days but its all sorted now. During the day the girls have played a lot, had lots of stories and watched tv, no one has been up to much really. They all look a bit poorly :~( Moo has been going to nursery, she swam with them one day and has been doing christmas stuff too. Seems happy again now thank goodness. Pud has been playing on a wizard of oz cd a lot and really enjoys it, although its perhaps a bit easy for her but Moo is really working hard at it. Scruff has mastered “banana” (a-nanana) and “down” today along with lengthing “milk” to an intelligible “i want milk” - neither of the other two did this at all - its really lovely to finally experience the normal “talking learning curve.” Speaking of speech, Pud worked SO hard at speech therapy this week, is really relaxed about it and enjoys it. We agreed tentatively that i would work on building a sound card library at home to mirror work done there. This will be fine as we do a lot of learning by making our own cards anyway and she enjoys it. If i put words and clip art on it might build some reading skills too.

Suggestions for 4-5 letter words using a variety of two letter starts starting with “f” this week please readers… frog, fish, feet, fence… um…

Moo startled me considerably today by pointing to the back of a coach and saying “thats got the number 100 on it” - i have no idea HOW she knows that cos they certainly wouldn’t be teaching her that at nursery and i don’t think i have - Pud said she did and as she has spent ages working on counting to 100 this last little while, it could be. This week she spotted that she can in fact now count to 999 and also finally sussed saying “eightY” rather than “eighTEEN” and all the other equivalents - she knew them written down fine but struggled on pronouncing them. As year one would only expect her minimum requirement to be counting to 20, i think she has done okay there :~)

Puds definitely gone into consolidation mode now (self imposed revision for 5 year olds!) which is a major gear shift. Lots of questions coming out about things we have covered but less new enquiry, lots of drawing and writing, looking at familiar books etc. I think now is probably the time to move into a bit of gentle xmassy stuff and give sealife a break! Today she drew me Jesus on the cross (she seems to have an extraordinary interest in Jesus considering how little family time is allotted to Christianity *like none basically*) We discussed where Jesus was buried and i gave her a brief explanation of the resurrection and why this meant he didn’t have a grave as such. Later i heard her telling it all back to Daddy and as is so often the fascinating case, more was coming out than i had put in; a case of small brains being very capable of assimilating and gathering what has gone in over time without the need for adult intervention i would say!

Last night Pud also made her promise at Rainbows and was very proud of herself. I was really pleased to see her right in there with all the kids, playing, clearly with friends and being very much “friended” by one other girl. She seemed really happy. I was quite intrigued by one thing. It was really noticeable that when they all were asked to sit in a circle, all the other kids wriggled and fidgetted frantically the whole time, whispered giggled and got repeatedly asked for their attention. Whereas Pud who NO-ONE could regard as a still child (rofl!) and who was certainly not overawed by the occasion, was sat perfectly still and waiting to be told what came next. What happens to make small girls like that be so extraordinarily fidgetty? Is a day in classrooms and under authority just so much of a strain that at the age of 5-7 they already can’t cope with that anywhere else? Maybe it was just co-incidence - but it did seem odd.

Today we went off to our HE group and had a great time. Pud took her poi and shared them really well, they all played loads, Moo had a BALL painting her salt dough from last week, they did a paper pulp craft and iced the christmas cake. I really do like our HE local groups - its a big buzz. What is deeply weird though is that i signed up a list of the under 6’s in the group for something and in just 10 kids, both our eldest two had a name double on the list - that does NOT happen often! Its not often the “aka Puds” outweigh the *insert fairly well used girls name of choice* of this world! ;~) I was also highly amused by my kids individualising a craft for the second week running - one mum had organised two friezes to be made on stripes of paper - last week was hand print angels, all virtually identical apart from Puds who did her wings the other way up to EVERYONE elses! and this week Moo who decided in a row of identical snowmen that she was going to do a baby snowman - and did!!!! I suspect we may have added a *patience personified* line to Kaths face :~) Apologies Kath!

Oh yes.. yesterday we took our first ever trip to a scrap store… words fail me - free junk! Weyhey! Girls were really good and well behaved and chose a bag full each of quite good stuff really - as we left Pud whispered “You didn’t pay mummy” Bless!

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Just a shortie

Ooh.. what did we do today? Hm.. well a fair bit of housework as we had a visitor coming and i can handle mess but crunchy underfoot always seems a bit much! Girls made plastic food picnics and we all indulged - rofl! Read a load of stories - Moo having a library book has been good for us and we do it a lot more now than we used to.

After Moo went out an HE friend the same age as Pud came around. They seemed to get on very well doing hama and poi and ponies and general giggling - they have met slightly but they were extremely natural together and hopefully it will develop. Was nice for Pud to get time just with one to one with a friend i think.

Got Moo and then cme home and had a go with some artstraws, Moo was desperate to construct a bridge with i think is a bit adventurous for me to start with! lol! Pud made a good skeleton and Scruff chewed them and poked people.

Tonight we had more stories and Pud played chess with daddy. Not a bad day really.

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Yawn…..

Scruff is doing a stretch of wakey night times for no obvious reason… she was whimpering and unhappy till 4am this morning but would not be cuddled. Every time i brought her to my bed for a snuggle, she climbed out and stormed back to her cot. By 7am i was telling Moo it was still night time and got her in a right pickle.

Not surprisingly today was a bit bleary. Luckily everyone seemed to feel the same although Moo went off very happily to nursery. Pud was distracted by a set of new software that arrived courtesy of recent amazon voucher and read the wizard of oz dk story book, played science explorer and watched videos on the Eyewitness Nature cd. We put the stick-on whales on hold. We also made up a scrapbook of her recent work that has been on walls for a while.

Managed to get the advent calender up but feeling progressively more bah humbugish about being commercially urged into Xmas before 20th December! (Must be getting old!) Both big girls got into trouble today for eating the chocolate spread out of the jar by dipping carrots into it… (??????) and Moo wangled a trip to the sorting office staff loos only to arrive there, give me a conspiratorial grin and say “Theres no wee in my bottom really!!!” She is becoming a prize monkey that child!!!!

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