NotSheep

Sorta

What we did today:

I helped George tidy his room. When I say “helped”, I mean I sat on one of the beds and fed Toby and kept George “on task” and occasionally tossed a piece of K’nex in the general direction of the K’nex box. Well, mostly when I tossed something towards the K’nex box, George became suddenly energetic and leapt across the room to catch it before it landed in the K’nex box because it was actually a piece of Bionicle. But the floor was eventually visible clear.

We all went downstairs and I had one of my “why does nobody ever put stuff away?” rants for a bit - some of which wasn’t really audible because of the vacuum cleaner (also called Henry - causing some confusion some mirth the same tired old jokes to be repeated at regular intervals). Actually Freddy was on helper duty today and he’d done a better job in the kitchen this morning than any of the rest of them ever do, but the rest of the house made up for it, so I feel justified

Barney and Henry did some more digging for miniscule dinosaur bones in the kitchen. I got Freddy and George started on some maths, then Henry gave up on digging and came into the dining-room and I worked through some of his English book with him. I’m not sure if there’s a point to this or not. I expect that by the time he’s been here for six months, there won’t be much English vocabulary for him to learn. On the other hand it highlights the things he needs to work on, like when there should be a “h” sound and when there shouldn’t (which seems fairly logical to me: there’s a “h” sound when there’s a letter “h”… but then lots of things seem logical to me that don’t seem that way to other people, so :shrug:) and where the verb goes in the sentence. His first language is as much German as it is French, so he tends to put the verb at the end of the sentence or question - for example, “I will more have” and “after breakfast, can I shower have?” (though I also have difficulty understanding that question because it’s not typical of any of the other 11-year-old boys I’ve lived with ;-)) His English is really improving though, and I’m not at all worried about this, so why are we using his English book? Mostly because it’s there and he expects to use it, I think

He did some maths from his French maths book, and we pulled out the Cuisenaire rods to work on the idea of equivalent fractions. It would have been more fun with a huge chocolate bar though

By this time Barney had also had enough of digging for bones, so I gave him his literacy book and he did a page of that (which doesn’t sound like a lot, but given the speed at which he writes… *sigh*)

Toby sat in the dining-room and threw the colouring pencils all over the room, then made a start on some of the toys on the bottom shelf.

Somewhere in there I started making bread.

Lunch consisted of a variety of leftovers, supplemented with sandwiches for those who still weren’t satisfied. I vacuumed again (this is why Henry lives behind the dining-room door, always plugged-in… that’s the vacuum cleaner, not the child) and the children who still had work to do completed it. Some of them drew pictures too; I got a great picture of a flower from Jack, who’d drawn it just for me

Since they’d all done so much yesterday and this morning, and since it was a rainy day, I suggested a DVD in the afternoon. They chose Back to the Future.

Freddy fed the fish and searched for our latest fry, as part of his Animal Friend badge for Beavers - though he also spilled half the food on the floor, so the kitchen got vacuumed for the third time in one day.

When Scratchy arrived, the house was tidy, the boys were all peacefully engaged in productive tasks, there was fresh-baked bread sitting on the counter and the rest of dinner was just about ready to come out of the oven and be served. All of which makes the dinner conversation kind of amusing:
Freddy: I don’t think any other mother could cope with this many children.
Me: You think I cope?
George: Well, most of the time.
Freddy: No.

After dinner the kids requested another movie, and watched The Princess Bride Retro? Ah, they don’t make ‘em like they used to

Of course if I was really domestic, I’d have all those Cubs badges sewn on already. I’ll probably be going at them with fabric glue at twenty past six next Wednesday though. And we won’t even start on the badges that Barney brought home from Scouts, because although as a Scout he’s supposed to sew them on himself, somehow that takes three times as long as me doing it myself (which itself takes ten times as long as it would take anyone else).

Remember our six-legged visitors? I have to put in a plug here for the Nitty Gritty comb, which was recommended by Gill in my comments. I won’t go into details because you can read them on the website and I don’t want to make you itch - but it’s excellent. The people who make it are fantastic too - I left a note on the order-form on Sunday asking if it could be sent quickly since we’d five infested heads, and got an email on Monday saying it had already been sent first-class and offering me a second comb so that we could get through them in half the time - free of charge! I think they were hoping I’d tell the school and the GP etc… but since we don’t have any of those things, I’m singing their praises here

Oh, and Scratchy laughed when I told Toby he couldn’t have my laptop mouse because he’d deleted my last entire blog post last time he grabbed it. Scratchy isn’t taking this blogging business seriously…