Happy New Year

I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year! And I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas. Life here has been pretty busy over Christmas. My Mum was with us, but she was her usual late-running self and didn’t arrive until 9.30 on Christmas morning, having stayed up for two solid days and nights to wrap presents and pack her bag for going to my Nan’s for New Year. You can imagin what she was like by then..! Anyway - I won’t off load about her on line, save to say she annoyed me +++ !
New Year was great though - my two sisters in law and their spouses came to stay for a couple of days. It always means an extra 4 children in the house when Esther & Rueben come to stay, and totally exhausted children by the end of it, but they all have such a lovely time together. There’s always a long hard game of Mum’s and Dad’s all entwined with school & teachers (three of them are school age now and mine seem to be able to join in with Issy (who goes to school) pretty well considering they have no real idea of what school is like!) Jake is a bit on his own really - being a bit too old for all that, but Uncle R is great with him and likes to play lots of games (Othello being Jake’s latest discovery) so that works out OK. :) They all get on so well that it’s always worth the bit over over-tiredness it brings!!

(just a little pic of some of them just before E&R went home!)

Plus of course, us growny-ups get to chat lots while they play and we had a great laugh New Year’s Eve playing on the boys’ new PS2 and their eye-toy. I never knew a virtual assault course could be so exhausting!! The children are now just veg’ing big time - in front of the telly & PS2 way too much, but I’m doing much the same; giving myself time to catch up on my blog and emails, church newsletter and website - all of which have been seriously neglected for the last two weeks. Jacob is so exhausted he has a sore throat and crashed out at 5pm yesterday for the rest of the evening and night (save for changing into his PJ’s and getting into bed). He needs to recover some pace as he is back to school on Thursday! I shall probably wait until Monday with Abbie and Joel - gives me an extra weekend to prepare for having two full-time scholars again! I think even though I want Boo to be PT she will push into ‘more, more’, so I shall just play it by ear.
As far at Jake at school is going all seems well atm. His homework for the last week of term was to write a story to be assessed by the teacher. Apparently, all the other children had written one at the beginning of the half term, but Jake had missed those first couple of weeks and hence the assignment. So he sat down to write one at home. I was out at the time (with Joel at swimming) and when I came home, it was done! A full side of a note-quite-A4 exercise book - full of story and straight out of his imagination. No planning, no basis in his real world or experience and pretty good even by my high standards!! WHY? Why could he not just do that for me at home? Why, even after a full year of teaching how to write good stories, would he throw such a huge wobbly when I asked him to do the same thing, and yet as a homework assignment it’s done in about 15 minutes (according to Paul) with no fuss at all? There were a few spelling errors (he consistently spell went as whent) but he realised that and was willing to go through in the morning before school to correct any he could find. I didn’t look again so I don’t know how many he corrected, but I’m sure it will be a good piece of work for his teacher to make an assessment of him with - it’s just that in my eyes it was fairly exceptional! That, aside from his spellings each weekend, has been his only homework so far and he tells me that is because he finishes everything in class. Homework is only given to children who need to practice something (“they don’t get it”), but as he is finding everything too easy atm that doesn’t include him!
Socially he is happy too (phew!). The worst the children can find to tease him with is “Salad Boy!” because he likes to have salad with his school lunch every day. I have reassured him that if that is the worst it gets he has nothing to worry about :). The other tease he’s had has been for picking his nose (YUK!) - which they are welcome to continue as it does seem to be encouraging him to stop! He has made plenty of friends across the year groups and the teachers seem to like him so far (according to the one I spoke to at the school Christmas presentation and his Head teacher).
All in all - I really think we made the right decision - praise God! And I’m hoping that 2006 will be a fantastic year!