The never-ending (puppet) story

Genevieve was excited to wake up this morning as she’d earned a reward yesterday. Her eyes lit up when she was presented with (yet another) LOL Doll. Life is full of simple pleasures when you’re a six-year-old!

We were up and out the door nice and promptly this morning to get the kids to Grandma Lindsey and Grandad Lawrie’s house for more government approved, socially distanced fun in their back garden. It was a good way to maximise child-free job time.

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Grandad Lawrie kindly wrote a blog entry for what the kids got up to in the garden.

Some of the old games are still the best games, so it was not unexpected that everyone enjoyed a game of quoits to start the day. This was done quite peacefully although, shortly afterwards, the neighbours certainly knew that Genevieve and James were visiting from the cacophony of noise (sorry, music!) from the kazoo and recorder being played very loudly around the garden.

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The rest of the morning saw the ‘Genevieve and James puppet show’ featuring characters from an assortment of books, and an interesting and convoluted storyline. It went on a lot longer than we were expecting.

Savoury pancakes were made by Grandma Lindsey for lunch, with James declaring he’d have ham and sweetcorn with his, but that he hated pancakes for pudding. However, it was difficult to wipe the smile off his face, and to turn down his request for seconds, after he had been gently persuaded to eat a pancake covered with strawberry jam.

When Stephen came to pick them up, both Genevieve and James were keen to show off their latest skateboard skills.

There was even video evidence of their new tricks.

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Today I had lots of work to complete so dived into that as soon as I was back from dropping off the kids. I was also able to join my work call nice and easily without any interruptions.

Stephen was sad to discover that some foxes had attacked the kids’ seedlings. Oh well. Hopefully the children won’t be too sad, and at least their sunflowers are still growing (as is the new turf I laid).

Stephen collected the kids from their grandparents after lunch at which point it was time to do some work for school. Genevieve was super up for getting it done today so I leapt on the positive mood with gusto. She not only assimilated the knowledge needed for her non-fiction book on narwhals and giraffes, but also happily wrote out all the facts neatly into her booklet. Hurrah! It totally felt like I was winning with this for once.

Not wanting the momentum to stop, we then jumped into tasks two and three of her maths learning for the week. She loves maths so this was not an issue at all. I rewarded her fab work ethics with a new film called Astrokid. It was a big hit.

We had no Grandma Lindsey chat today as the kids had just been with her and Grandad Lawrie, so we had dinner followed by a quick trip to see the friendly neighbourhood monkey (who was playing badminton), and then bed.

Stephen found the “monkey tennis” rather amusing (even though it was technically monkey badminton). It’s an Alan Partridge thing, apparently. He’s such a geek!