NotSheep

Another midwife visit yesterday, for her to take blood. I’ve declined most things but asked for hemoglobin (and other things necessary to calculate true iron level) to be done and also for a B12 check; part of me hopes one of those is abnormally low, as it would mean I could actually do something about the exhaustion. I have horrible veins; it takes an age to find one that looks half-decent and then they usually collapse seconds after the needle goes in. The first attempt yesterday resulted in less than half a millilitre in the bottom of a tube - that’s about one-tenth of a teaspooon. Second attempt didn’t get anything at all. L kept apologising but there was no need; I already know it’s me! She left me a bunch of booklets and leaflets, all of which went straight in the bin after a single glance, since I’d either a) read them before and knew they were useless, or b) opened them to a random page and discovered something which was evidence that they were useless.

I did a couple of very fast errands in the morning before she came, then came home and got the boys settled to some studying. They’ll be doing some more this afternoon; it probably sounds awful to be making them study on weekends, but there are things that work much better when there’s an extra adult around - to keep everyone out of the way when Barney’s doing past papers for GCSE, for example.

When we were at the science centre on Tuesday, a friend filled my car with boxes of things she’d been clearing out in preparation for moving overseas, so I got to those this morning. Books, jigsaw puzzles, toy animals (which led to a look of wonderment and delight on Toby’s face), and a marble-run which has already been packed into a box to be given to someone else. It had been out less than an hour and there had been several fights over it, and when Barney physically attacked Freddy to get him to hand over a marble, I decided enough was enough. Barney did not take well to this decision and stormed off (we don’t care about him, we don’t care about anything he wants…) including taking himself off outside in his (short-sleeved and short-legged) pyjamas. It’s cold enough that he was back indoors less than a minute later. He sulked for a while after that, but cheered up while eating lunch (he forgot he meant to be cross LOL)

Freddy sat down and did a KS2 science sats paper, but got very cross about one of the questions, and claimed it was “impossible to answer the question without breaking the rules!” It turned out that the question asked him to “draw a conclusion”, but there were lines for him to write on, so he couldn’t draw anything…

The Toby-induced-smile-of-the-day came when he walked into the room on tiptoe; Barney missed it, so I said to Toby, “show me how you can stand on your toes” and he did - one foot flat on the floor, the other foot on top of it