NotSheep

In replying to an email from a friend yesterday, I realised that I hadn’t mentioned our most recent telephone call with Barney. In fact there’s quite a lot I haven’t mentioned, though admittedly most of it is of the “got up, fed kids, walked dogs, tidied kitchen…” variety, so it probably isn’t really worth going back over all of that. So instead I’ll just try to note a few of the things that are either worth mention, or that I might want to remember.

So. Telephone to Barney last weekend was good. He wasn’t sounding quite as chipper as he had the previous weekend, but he still sounds positive and happy, and although he says he misses us, he does seem to be settling well. He said that he actually finds it easier to speak French than English now, which is wonderful, because it means he’s allowing himself to be immersed, if you see what I mean. A few weeks before Henry left, we asked him what the French word for something was and he couldn’t remember - and it really is best if the child can temporarily “forget” their native language, so I’m very pleased to hear that Barney is on his way there. The two boys have also been seated separately in most of their classes at school now - although the exchange organisation recommends that the children are in different classes if possible, Barney and Henry were apparently seated together, which wasn’t good for either of them. Barney also mentioned having done fairly badly in tests in geography and history class… I think/hope that this is because it’s a) about France and b) in French - otherwise maybe we’re not doing such a good job as we thought

Jack started this week sick; turning five has not made him a less annoying patient. He just continually wails at the top of his voice; it’s as though he thinks you’ll forget he’s sick if he doesn’t loudly remind you every 30 seconds or so. I’m afraid my tolerance for this wanes fairly quickly. That he coughs all over me constantly doesn’t make me any more patient - and as expected, I came down with whatever this (no doubt non-specific viral) illness is: first signs on Wednesday, total hide-under-the-covers time by early Thursday morning. I spent yesterday doing the absolute minimum required to keep the children and the house under control - well, not quite, I did read the whole of Flight of the Doves to the boys. But I’m not sure there’ll be much done today. I could just stay in bed and read blogs all day; I might even get to catch up if I read fast and don’t pause to leave comments. I haven’t really read any blogs at all since getting the new laptop set up, because by the time I got my opml file moved over, there were a couple of thousand unread items… not that being behind with things is stopping me from adding to my look-into-this list - I see Merry is twittering and I thought I might give that a go. I can’t actually think how it would be useful, but that’s never stopped me before

George and Freddy chose not to go to ju-jitsu on Monday, but did make it to Beavers and Cubs. We took the Beavers out onto the local green and set up a “sports centre”; something we’d scheduled for a few weeks ago, but then it rained every Tuesday evening until this week. Was very glad we’d done it on Tuesday when I saw the weather on Wednesday. This year being the centenary of Scouting, there have been a couple of television programmes about about it this week and I will admit that I very much enjoyed those. That our esteemed Prime Minister was, in the words of his wife, “not a Scout or anything useful like that” seems to me to be a very good argument for joining the organisation