I’ve often heard that Thursday is the new Friday, but does that hold true when the days are all blurring in to one? It certainly does in the Smith house as we had a whale of a time today.
After a hearty breakfast and a burst of keep-fit with Munchkin Sport, the kids began the day painting rocks. We found our first painted rock (AKA pebble art) back in 2017 in Heysham while on a family holiday. Prior to that we’d never heard of the concept, but we’re now the sort of parents who have a stack of suitable rocks ready to go in the garage! After a lot of concentration (and accidental mixing of colours), Genevieve ended up with a lady bird, a rainbow, a love heart and a Minion. James produced a baby shark and an amazing dinosaur. The final step was “spray with nail polish” as the children insisted (or give them a coat of varnish as interpreted by the adults).
James thoroughly enjoyed watching Jo from Newman pre-school reading “A Dragon on the Doorstep” on Facebook. He’s really missing his pre-school chums and the amazing staff so this brightened his day.
James excelled himself by demonstrating his stupendous counting skills. Not only did he smash through some tricky exercise sheets, but he also proved a dab hand at dealing with Megan’s hand-made (and hand-laminated) mathematical cue cards. I’ll have him solving quadratic equations before you know it!
Megan wanted to go for a run but couldn’t work out how to fit it in to the day. Her solution was either a stroke of genius or utter madness – only time will tell. Megan decided to run laps around our (not particularly big) garden while the kids played in the middle. Somehow she racked up an astounding 3.5km in a garden that’s probably got a runnable perimeter of around 25m. That would suggest that she completed 140 laps – I’ve tried counting the Strava trace but gave up after just 10 laps. However you look at it, it’s a damn impressive achievement!
In an effort to offset the running, Megan also knocked up a batch of icing. The kids used this to decorate some biscuits along with an impressive array of sprinkles. I’m certain that more sprinkles ended up in their mouths than on the biscuits, but they had such fun doing it that it doesn’t really matter.
During the day we received a special delivery from Halfords. It was a small box containing a set of stabilisers. Thankfully we received a second, larger delivery later in the afternoon containing a new bicycle for Genevieve. We quickly whisked it away in to the garage before she really clocked what was going on, but I can foresee one exceedingly excited little girl on Saturday when we reveal what we’ve got her.
After an emotional clap for the amazing NHS staff keeping the country running, the day ended with a Hollingdale siblings WhatsApp chat. Daisy and I seemed to spend most of it making each other giggle just by looking at the camera “a bit funny” (and I still claim that I wasn’t actually trying to look amusing – it’s just my face). In spite of our childish antics the conversation was great and it was lovely to catch up with the clan. Graham obliged the baying audience by eating a whole cupcake in one go, but he’s still got some way to go to beat the frankly epic tiramisu episode.
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