Not-a-day!

Well the plan for today was that Max was going to take all the girls out so i could spend some time working on Beadmerrily. I really need to get it on a more professional footing (never mind frankly just a bitm ore organised!) and i have a lot to do and lots of things i would LIKE to do with it! However, Moo woke up in the night with a dreadful headache (which has been the first sign of this bug in all of us) and we generally played musical beds most of the night. By this morning she was in awful pain and lying on her bed, roling about and clutching her head, sobbing. So clearly she couldn’t really go out :~( She stayed with me, slept for 3 hours, threw up twice, sobbed lots more and then suddenly sat up, demanded orange juice and potato with cheese and butter and has been fine ever since!!!

Moo is not a partcularly high impact child when home alone so i got plenty done – i need another day to get the rest of my paperwork done and my tax sorted but i feel more on top of it now and i have had time for a few ideas to filter into my brain too. I’m hopelessly disorganised about soe things lol!

Max took the other two out into the fens to a couple of nature reserves/bird sanctuaries. They seem to have had a nice time and saw dragonflies, kestrels and rather a lot of wasps although Fran did have another enormous nosebleed while they were out. Max is making a big effort to get more involved in the HE side of things, i really appreciate it.

We finished off with bedtime stories for Ammi and then an extra one for the big girls from me – finally got round to reading the Tanabata story from The Barefoot Calender of Festivals. Lovely story which i could have made more of really!

Baby is sat on a nerve and i have a dead right leg – funny how “dead” does not mean “painlessly numb!” Hmmm….

Blogger is annoying me because i don’t seem to be able to edit any past posts; most irritating. its not even a browser thing, IE won’t either.

As for the July review – well we have had lots of social contact and now need to quiet down for a bit i think!!! I want to get back to doing more reading and writing again with Fran AND Maddy so that is my goal for this week really, plus continuing to read our way through the AO thing. Everyone is enjoying that and its giving me a sense of real release to know that i have done something meaningful with them each day. Now i have my Sonlight books i really want to put a little thought into how i might use them and that means planning ahead a bit so we make the most of them over the winter when i will presumably be feeding a baby a lot! I have a fair urge to plan some “unit study” type things around them for “sofa ed” :~D

Feel most upset that The book People no longer seem to have The Story of Painting that i got to see at Jan’s – and it was SO lovely!!!!

I am living the wrong life

And i am not quite sure what to do about it. As a girl who hankered over Austrian/Swiss mountains via books her entire childhood, adored a long summer in the North Yorkshire and married a man from the middle of Dartmoor, i think the centre of Peterborough probably counts as a location mistake, a fact made rather more obvious by getting to spend a few days in a house with the kind of views and ambience i only normally get on holiday. I appreciate my life choices and lack of application (and more latterly balls to take a risk) have contributed to this, but i do feel things perhaps need to change. We do have a plan and it can’t happen for 18 months but i need to start being a bit more proactive about it!

Anyway, arrived quite literally “off the path” at J&J’s after an extremely uneventful journey with perfect directions. People, you have to visit, its the funniest journey; you start on big roads, they get smaller, then smaller and more winding and eventually the road surface runs out – its truly a “journeys end” or slightly like playing a role play computer game where you know you have nearly reached the monster because its all got a bit deserted looking. Heaven anyway. I wasn’t even late which was startlingly impressive.

All the girls played beautifully all day and my lot did remarkably well given the lack of Nick Jnr!!! Fran was a bit disgruntled at the real gravy as opposed to Bisto (fortunately she redeemed herself later by complimenting further cookery and was in fact very grown up and lovely the whole time we were away.) Ammi had a bad night, par for the course with her while away really but we managed.

Thursday was somewhat more fraught to start with. Maddy woke up in a very wobbly state, quite literally really and was lying on the sofa and pretty much non-verbal for a good while. She did have breakfast then went back – and showed off her complete mis-interpretation of life in general fairly impressively too She asked for milk and i asked her to find her milk bottle; she stood at the bottom of the stairs and said she couldn’t climb them because she was “too wobbly” – i looked up, realized she really was in a state and said, rather too sharply “Come and sit down on the sofa” because i was quite shocked by how bad she looked. Only she didn’t compute the words and only the tone of voice and started to climb the stairs on all fours, weeping. Poor little soul, i felt terrible. And shortly after that she went green, threw up (but fortunately i had seen the signs and we were in the bathroom) and then was fine, instantly demanding huge quantities of food. Which i wouldn’t give her and so she went back to bed for three hours. While i was wiping vomit up Ammi ripped a toenail off, apparently on nothing given she was doing a jigsaw on the carpet with Jan at the time and just as we wiped her up Fran fell headfirst off the monkey loop things and bashed her nose very hard. And there was blood EVERYWHERE!!!!!! I’m amazed she didn’t break it really, given she actually achieved a grass stain on the bridge of her nose. Luckily it was just that and not teeth, plastic surgery or anything else that had been damaged!!!!

All that would have been quite enough really but Ammi, who was in a foul temper all day anyway, annoyed a bee (due to standing on him in no shoes – how many times do we have to say it!!!!) and got stung. Blood i can do but bee stings panic me a bit as with the eczema and asthma i could just see her being allergic, but she didn’t seem to be and bicarb and an icecube worked like a dream. It seems virtually incidental to all that that we spent a really nice day with lots of friends!!!! Thank you all for coming everyone!

It was a blinking good job i had lots more nice books to look at that evening and i had a lovely time – thank you again J&J.

And i have just got home to a big load of Amazon and Craftbits parcels, plus a bead order i needed so its parcel time then lots of reading!

Another pleasant day

We have a certain amount of non-violent lurgy (i give you fair warning Northerners – turn us away now if you don’t want us!) which has had me and a couple of girlies on calpol but it doesn’t seem to be having any other effect really. It didn’t spoil the day anyway.

You guessed it, we did more Hama towards our Africa display. Maddy stuck with a theme she liked (flowers!!!) Fran was “in charge of ostrichs” and also did a couple of bees which were probably her first ever effort at a square board you-have-to-count-and-concentrate pattern. She did them all on her own too. I was instructed to do trees but diversified and made a few (African???) dragonflies! lol! They look lovely done with glittery beads….

Here is Maddy’s house from last night.

I loved the stairs (and all the people in a row!)

And here is our avocado I’ve done it so you can see the root and stem length better than the leaves, but its lovely and healthy!

We shall have to do the other stones we have.

Max has just taken the girls out for a bit so i am pottering and houseworking. In a bit, when they get back i am going to read a couple of AO stories to them and then get them to do a bit of reading if they will. Fran did do a wordsearch today but Hama has definitely taken over from workbooks!!!! lol!

Oh yes, worth a mention for sheer loveliness was that when i woke up properly this morning they were all sat by my bed playing pop up dragon together – bless! And Fran helped Ammi do a set of 9 piece life cycle jigsaws and was really patient with her.

Edit: Ended the day with a chunk of Beauty and the Beast in story form from the Blue Fairy Book (lovely although Fran made me laugh by asking “Is this the Disney one or the cheap one?”) and then The Brave Three Hundred and How Caligula Conquered Britain. Now that was a weird story… i shall have to read it again and try and make sense of it!!!! lol!!! I’ve been vaguely writing up the sort of things we are getting through in a week and what else we have in the house that it ties in with. Maddy listened in to everything we read tonight but i thought a record of what had worked once might be useful in case its ground she would enjoy going over again in a year or two.

Shameless Propaganda!!!!

Beadmerrily hosts its first ever design competition!!!!

Question from Max for the techies.

Is it possible to rotate an image object in steps of 15 degrees???? Ah yes, should have said, “coding it in Visual Basic”

*swoosh as it goes over my head*

Catching up on a few photos then!

The delicious book haul!!! (Oh i am so sad!)

Under a Sculpture at Burghley – it was only after i got there i realised they were all in pink/purple dresses with sunglasses and floppy hats and i looked like a mad, control freak stepford mother! They dressed themselves, i promise!

Happy…

For some reason a photo of this conker collection was extremely important!

My bee picture. I like bee pictures, i have a collection! (nutter!)

Don’t mess!!! (Who would????)

Beautiful girl! Ooops, sorry Maddy, yes, yes Beautiful PRINCESS!!!!

Taken by Fran.

Another by Fran. She’s quite good isn’t she!!!!

A K’nex Monster!!!!!

A K’nex Tilda and Alison… don’t ask me… yes Alison, that IS you with the floppy purple ears!!!

Hmmmm… i like Fireworks i can make the photos all the same size if i want! Should have tried it a year ago… now for its 872 other functions…