NotSheep

I know, I know, it’s a bit of a shock - a post arriving only three four days after the previous one (assuming I get this post finished tonight - it’s entirely possible I’ll still be writing it on Monday… got it done on Sunday!) - but there you go. I blame the weather. I know there’s no reason why the weather should affect the frequency of my blogging, given that it’s just the same right now as it has been for weeks, but I’m blaming it for everything else, so why not? I was tempted to turn on the central heating on Thursday, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept that summer might be over, given that it never seemed to have started. But I resisted, told anyone who complained to put on a sweater (and socks! - is it only my children who don’t wear socks unless absolutely necessary?) and let the body-heat of six children warm up the room.

We’ve been doing a bit of skoolwork this week: mostly English - learning about punctuation and writing stories and suchlike - and history. History wasn’t my thing at all when I was at school; it was years before I realised that I was actually quite interested, but that the way it had been taught in school had completely put me off. Slavedriver that I am, I even sat the boys down to some studying this yesterday afternoon - mainly because they were starting to bicker, and I could see they needed a bit of guidance in what to do for a while. We even sat at the dining-room table, the surface of which hadn’t been seen for nearly a year before this week. Between pregnancy-and-not-feeling-very-well and then the end-of-pregnancy-and-not-feeling-very-well, I hadn’t put anything away properly in a very long time - and nobody else does it! I put both pcs back in the dining-room too, and I want to get a long narrow desk of some sort to put them on, so I went off to Ikea this yesterday morning in search of solutions, but it didn’t provide any. Most of the laptops still live under a sofa, although it’s a different sofa these days - our neighbour offered us hers. It’s in perfectly good shape; it just doesn’t go with her new decor. It goes with ours though, and we can certainly use the extra seating, so we had to make some space in the living-room. As a result of that, we also refreecycled our Mac (i.e. we acquired it via Freecycle and now we’ve disposed of it by the same route). It was collected yesterday on Friday morning by a lovely woman who arrived with her two-year-old son and stayed for a cup of tea - and who confessed to still nursing her son and seemed relieved to discover I was even weirder than she was. I mentioned my blog, and she asked where she could find it, so M, if you’re reading this - hello! and *waves*

Huge pile of post this morning yesterday; I think they’ve been saving it up all week. There was a letter giving us another speech therapy assessment for Toby. We do very few medical-type appointments, so of course this one has been conveniently arranged for exactly the same day and time as the dental appointment I made months ago for all of us. There was also a pile of envelopes from Film Education - I’d booked several films for National Schools Film Week, figuring that it would be the same as the last couple of years, and we’d not get tickets for some and others would be cancelled - but we’ve had confirmation for all of them. We’ll be square-eyed (or wide-screen-eyed) by the end of the week.

Jack cut a chunk of his hair off yesterday on Friday. He’s blaming Barney, who apparently put toothpaste in his hair - don’t ask me why. As I said in my previous post, it’s up and down and up and down with Barney at the minute. He phoned his “French family” last on Friday night; they were away through August, so he hadn’t had a chance to tell them about his French GCSE result - in fact he hadn’t even told them he was doing the exam, because he wanted it to be a surprise. We’re glad they’re all well

We’re around the table again this morning (really today this time), doing things like making databases and mindmaps. Toby is at a pc, playing a Tots TV game about letter shapes and sounds. And I’m about to print off instructions for origami throwing stars - an activity I’m sure will go down well