NotSheep

Everything was late this morning. Nobody even woke up until after 8, and even then, there was a lot of hanging-about-doing-nothing going on.

Eventually we all got downstairs and got into our day. Barney finished some maths he’d been stuck on yesterday while George worked on his French using Rosetta Stone. We’ve been playing with Chorebuster and they all seem willing to do whatever it throws at them, so they did what it told them and I made pizza dough and really by lunchtime you’d never have known we’d had such a late start

Lunch, by the way, was really excellent pizza; I found a website written by a guy who is slightly, erm, obsessive about making pizza, and while I’m not hacking my oven so it can cook pizza at 480 degrees, I did make use of many of his other tips

Sometime around the cooking of lunch, Toby also took three steps on his own

After lunch we headed for the pool, stopping en route to pick up something for Henry’s feet; he’s got verrucae. I’ve never had to deal with this before, so asked a) a friend and b) in a good local chemist, and bought stuff to paint them with as well as latex socks for him to wear in the pool - well, first I bought a pair that were much too small (I never even thought to look at the size ) and didn’t realise until we’d opened the package, but fortunately the leisure centre sells them too, so we bought another pair which fit.

The older boys went to the cafeteria for half an hour while Jack had his lesson - he’s distractable (or should that be distracting?) enough without all of them leaping around him. The instructor was very good and quickly developed a rapport with him. Jack was keen to show him how he could fling himself under the water but was also surprisingly cooperative, once he’d spent the first five minutes or so establishing that he was in charge The lesson went well and he’s looking forward to the next one. By the end of it, everyone else had joined us in the pool. A while later I got out with Jack, Toby and Freddy (who wasn’t pleased about it, but the rule is that they have to be with an adult if they’re under eight) and we went and sat in the cafeteria and ate buns until the others came to join us.

While Barney went to soccer, the rest of us came home and did a thorough cleaning of the living-room, in preparation for putting up Christmas-y things. I plan to try to buy a tree tomorrow morning, but have missed working out all of this week, so will do that first. Other plans for this evening went awry - a special event in the leisure centre meant there was no basketball, and when Scratchy took Barney to fencing, the hall was locked and deserted and nobody else showed up. Hm.

We’re about half-way through Henry’s time with us now, and I’ve been intending to write a blog-post summarising the experience and everyone’s feelings about it all so far, but haven’t had a chance. I will try to get to it in the next few days; somebody nag me about it if it doesn’t appear, please!