NotSheep

The boys did masses of work today - I don’t really know why, but I’m not complaining! They all did stuff on the various topics we’ve been covering: the weather, the body, art… and they drew pictures for Illustration Friday (must remember to get them posted this time!) Barney wrote a story, George planned a script for a play, and Freddy did some Latin. Three of them blogged, they all spent time on Roman History courtesy of the Usborne Links website, and the three older ones read more of the book about various world religions. Freddy practiced his handwriting; both he and George did French, and both spent some time doing Rosetta Stone French too. Freddy, George and Henry did maths; Henry struggled at one point, but his understanding and his ability to manipulate decimals has really improved. Jack insisted on “doing work with you” and promptly worked through half of Superphonics as well as some alphabet worksheets I printed off.

I spent the morning attending to one child after another, sewing badges on Freddy’s ju-jitsu gi (and the badges are huge! - Barney started singing “This is the badge that never ends” because I was moaning about how long they took to sew on LOL), and phoning Hotpoint to complain… oh, I forgot to say that my washing-machine refused to drain on Friday night, didn’t I? Huge, spendy washing-machine, three months old… and it fails to drain, throws up an error code, the only service number is a national-rate one, and the soonest they can offer an engineer is two weeks away - uh, nope, not happening. So I phoned this morning and pointed out that people don’t generally buy washing-machines like mine unless they really need them, and that I wasn’t prepared to accept a two-week wait, and that if they didn’t get someone out by Wednesday, the washing-machine would be returned for a refund under the Sales of Goods Act. Less than an hour later, I had a phone-call from them saying the engineers were all fully-booked but they were squeezing me in on Wednesday…

I left Barney and Henry making dinner (well… they had instructions to remove bread from the oven and turn on the rice-cooker at a specific time anyway) while I took Freddy and George to the sports club, then waited at the leisure-centre until Scratchy showed up, gave him Jack and Toby (and traded cars with him, since the baby-seat’s in mine) and went to work out. Collected Freddy and George from their club, came home, threw food at everyone and then almost everyone went back out: Barney and Henry to the youth-club (they should be home shortly), Freddy to ju-jitsu, where he was grading for his yellow belt tonight, and George to watch him (why do I suspect George might want to go back to ju-jitsu soon? ;-)) Freddy arrived home a short while ago and told me he hadn’t graded - but the huge grin on his face gave it away, and he produced his new yellow belt from behind his back