NotSheep

After a less-than-stellar start this morning - meltdowns and tears before breakfast - today turned out good.

Once breakfast was over, I did some French with George and Freddy while Jack drew and did a huge jigsaw puzzle on the kitchen floor with Toby’s “help”. Then we pulled out some of the guide-materials from our visit a couple of years ago to Vindolanda and Hadrian’s Wall, and talked about the Romans in Britain and how we know the things we do about them. Lunch was a cooperative effort between Freddy and George, and then we headed out into the garden to tidy it up a bit and have a look at the plant-pots from last year. We planted some sunflower seeds in those seed-tray things - the ones where you can grown individual plants? I don’t know what they’re called, because I’m not a very good gardener, but I bought some on Sunday, and planted some veg in them then. Today I found the three heads from last year’s sunflowers which had been hanging up in the garage all winter, and harvested the seeds from them. When I say “I’m not a very good gardener”, I really mean it - I had to google to figure out how to get the seeds from the sunflowers, and then again for images to make sure I was planting the right thing We did discover that one of our strawberry plants from last year is coming back, which was a pleasant surprise - and something else is re-growing too, though I can’t work out what it is. The shoots look familiar, but not quite familiar enough…

Toby managed to get hold of the bowl containing the rest of the sunflower seeds and pour them all on the conservatory floor, but I retrieved most of them. If they work well, I might get the Beavers to grow some too. Later George, Freddy and Jack drew mind-maps - we got a book on mind-maps for kids from the library and it’s really appealing to them. One of the mind-maps we did was on “things I like”, and Jack drew a picture of me as one of his links, “because I like you”

My Beavers co-leader wasn’t able to make it tonight, and our plan to make shoebox guitars wasn’t happening since we didn’t have any shoeboxes, but I managed to throw together a pretty good programme anyway. We started by playing Twenty Questions, with the first item being “eggs” and the second “faces”. Then each Beaver got an egg-shaped (and egg-sized) piece of cardboard to turn into a self-portrait (”faces”, see?), and we glued those all to a bigger “golden egg” made from gold cardboard, and put it on our notice-board. We had egg-and-spoon relay races, using Creme Eggs, and then in the last five minutes, the three race-teams had a contest to see how many ways of cooking eggs they could think of. The Beavers got a Creme Egg each to take home (but not the ones we’d used for the races, as they were a teensy bit mangled ;-))

In the meantime, one of the Beavers’ dads was outside, very kindly putting my spare tyre on, since I’d a tyre that was almost flat. Driving home was a bit scary though, as it was making big flump-flump noises - I don’t think it’s meant to do that, so I’m not going to drive on it again until the proper tyre is re-inflated or repaired or replaced, depending on what’s needed.