Saturday, April 14, 2007

We've got babies in our household...

...but before you all get really excited, they are baby RABBITS! These are a late Easter present that has long been promised. They are absolutely gorgeous. One is blue-grey and called Rosie. She is the girl's rabbit. The other is all black and called Beth - she belongs to the boys. I'll post pic's in a couple of days when they've settled in better and more up to a little handling. The kids can't wait to get a cuddle - understandably (nor can I!), but they need to wait at least till Monday.

Other than that we collected Jake's bed today and typically Ikea were out of the right size mattress, so the poor lad still doesn't have his bed as he really needs it., but he is up there tonight on the flop-out sofa chair as a mattress. It'll tie him over for a week, til we can back up to Ikea - nightmare! The boys rooms do look really good now though - clean and much less cluttered (I love Trofast). Joel is especially chuffed because he does seem to have significantly more room. Jake says he doesn't really have enough room to play, but in reality he has enough to do what he ever does in his room - lego, Knex, subuteo - that kind of thing. And afterall - he still has more room than we do in our room!

The baby hammock has been suspended under our bed (only place we really could put it) and now I need to get one of these bean2bed bags to snuggle up on under there in the night for feeding and/or sleeping! All the clothes are sorted and I feel we are more or less prepared for the arrival of No7 - as ready as we'll ever be kind of feeling!

Back to the grind stone on Monday, but it shouldn't be too much of a grind because I've taken measures to make it easier for a while... I've signed up for Brightminds Online for £20 (as many kids as you like for that price) to help me out over the next term/year! Great thing about that is that it covers all of KS2 (yrs 3-6) for Maths, Literacy and Science. (if anyone wants the voucher code to get the delivery charge knocked off (obviously unnessecary) let me know and I'll send it to you (it came on an email, so it's perfectly legit!) - so that's Joel pretty much sorted - and Jacob too should he need any of it! There is so much material in there!! Couple that with MEP maths (some of which I notice he can do online now too if he wishes to) / Singapore maths, S&S material which I have in abundance and EC and he'll be busy enough! :-)

Then I have Phoebe doing Headsprout and loving it - and doing really well with it too I might add. It's definatly right up her alley - even with the need to translate the American accent for her! She is also working on EC quite a bit and doing quite well there, but there are bits that annoy me about that site - it has some major inconsistencies at the 'phonics' level that I have noted and emailed them about - no reply as yet though :-( And the one other site I am making use of for her a fair bit is Starfall - free and fun, but also American! Then there's always the Reader Rabbit CDRom which she loves and between all that lot I reckon she should do pretty well. For a little bit of written work and for 'Maths' we are using Schofield and Simms pre-school materials, but she is beginning to devour those at a pace now and has nearly worked her way through the whole 4-5 mateials now, so we will be ready to start with the 'reception' level work in September as planned (actually she would technically be Yr1, but she is no where near ready for that level of work yet - she would be so lost at school!) and for Jolly Phonics is we still need to do it (i.e. if she hasn't learnt to read through Headsprout and Starfall by then. I'm hoping Brightminds will release the online KS1 materials soon too and we'll sign up for that too - it's great value for money!

Oh and then there's Spellingtime which I've got them all signed up to and they seem to quite like that too :-)

Abbie is quite happy with her S&S materials, her MEP and/or Singapore maths and her online stuff (mostly EC for her atm) and quietly buzzes away at it :-)

I guess I shall need to put in some other less rigorous stuff too, like arty stuff and geography (kids are really loving A Child's Geography) and then of course we have the tad's for our science study atm. They are looking pretty healthy at the moment, so that is great :-) We are anticipating dozens of little frogs sometime soon-ish! They are in a really big old fish tank now, which we were given, so they have plenty of room for there to be so many.

That'll do for tonight. I hope you all had great Easter holidays and had some rest - hasn't the weather been fantastic?! :-)

Blog soon - Cx












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