The morning began with a little lie-in and cuddles with Button the cat. He’s a fickle old man of a cat, but when he’s up for a cuddle then he’s a little cutie (even if he dribbles everywhere).
James asked for “rectangle” toast for breakfast, so Stephen tried to be a geek and make “Fibonacci golden spiral toast”. However, he was visibly distraught when he realised he’d not quite achieved this and had just made steadily smaller rectangles, but James was happy with the result nonetheless.
Today Stephen was really broken from doing too much yesterday. It had a real knock-on effect on all of us and was the beginning of the end for a few days of struggling to cope. It’s really obvious that the children are struggling to deal with Stephen and me as much as we’re all struggling to deal with him being poorly and me not coping.
But we had a mainly successful home school morning. James wrote all of his numbers from 1-40 mostly by himself, and also wrote the whole alphabet (although this latter part took more encouraging). His pen grip (arrow hold!) has improved so much in the last few weeks and this has impacted how much clearer his letter and number formations are. It’s fantastic!
Genevieve wrote up her re-telling version of the story of the week. She did a brilliant job explaining the story to me along with interesting reasons and fab use of language. Getting her to put her pencil to paper was the tough part though, and her work ended up being finished on the bathroom floor with Stephen bossing her around from the bath. Not ideal but we got it done.
After lunch, the kids had a real treat (and a favourite from when I was a kid): Ice cream in a cone with sprinkles (unicorn and dinosaur sprinkles, no less), chocolate sauce and squirty cream. Yum! I couldn’t resist a small scoop myself and followed it up with a yummy hot chocolate and squirty cream while they watched Ugly Dolls.
After TV time and while Stephen was sleeping again, Genevieve did some coding challenges for her Beavers including writing her own message in code and then decoding my wax message with blue paint. She really liked the wax resist idea so we will have to try that again. Genevieve also made a code from objects – see if you can crack the secret message.
We’ve had some seedlings from M&S growing before the lockdown that have long been in dire need of replanting. Stephen felt with it enough to supervise this activity. Both children started strongly but James soon got tired and bored of shovelling compost in to the trays (wimp!). We’ve ended up with a reasonable crop of chilli, radishes and parsley. Will it survive? Only time will tell.
I went for an evening walk to get some headspace after a challenging day. The friendly neighbourhood monkey was undertaking one of my favourite activities from a few years ago – he was knitting!
The Smiths Family Blog 