Blog At last…

You won't believe me if I tell you I have been trying to get time enough to write my blog for three whole days! And even now I'm writing it with a wailing baby grabbing at my arm! I'm a bit cheesed off actually. It just seems that everyone wants/needs my time and then some, and I haven't had any to myself this last week or so. It's been a non-book week which is supposedly meant to be a rest for me, but in actual fact has been anything but. We've done some fun stuff, but somehow even that has been tinted with stress. We are going away this weekend for my 20yr school-leavers re-union. Right now I should probably be sorting clothes for the smalls' suitcases, washing up a very messy kitchen and tidying the house so that it's respectable to come home to. The bigs have all just arrived home from club and C is begging for someone to do his Tot-Book with him. N is grizzling - having just napped on my lap for the last half hour when I sat down to write my blog - but then couldn't because I didn't have two hands to type with and it's too frustratingly slow to do with one! But I AM going to blog if it kills me!! I'd have done it last night if it weren't for a lengthy phone-call, evening having coffee with a friend till gone 11, and then P wanted to spend some time with me too - I didn't even get last nights washing up done! I have been ploughing through the washing for the last two days, so as to not leave any dirty pants lurking in our absence and so that P & I have enough clean clothes to wear over the weekend! Not sure it will all get put away though L.

Anyway - grumble over - lets see how much I can type before the next person comes calling for my time!

Monday: On Monday afternoon Caleb brought home with an activity to make a Christmas card to be printed and raise funds for the playgroup. So we all did that and enjoyed it. The results were quite good too J. I guess I had better invest in buying the cards now, as the kids put the effort in!

Tuesday: Did some Spanish in the afternoon - learning the alphabet and spelling out place names and our names. This was quite hard, but as Spanish is so phonetic once they have grasped it and the basics of the grammar they will be away. Reading and writing it is pretty easy when you have the building blocks - there are so many less broken rules than there are in English J. The only thing that spoilt this activity was my children's expectations of themselves. They had to listen to some place names and write down as best they could how they thought they were spelt, then the same thing with some people's names and where they lived. I thought this would be fun, but they got a bit muddled and lost - and despite my reassurances this brought tears and frustration - esp' from JI. He and A basically expected themselves to be able to get it all right when they had only been introduced to the alphabet in Spanish half and hour before! When I pointed out that they still spell words wrong in English and they've known our phonetics for a really long time it made more sense to them, but still came the echoes of 'this is too hard, I can't do it…!' Anyway - once everyone calmed down (me included - I get so irritated by whinging and whining) we moved on through the exercise and Jake had done very well. P is not expected to do the writing, but she does listen in on the whole lesson so I'm hoping she will learn by osmosis, if not it will all be very 'familiar' to her when she does it officially later on. The fab' thing is listening to C. repeating Spanish with us - numbers, letters, words - he says them with more clarity than some English words!! He also learns some through Poissonrouge (and French) and I think he might speak Spanish as well as the rest of them by the time he is about 7! E is not really interested and is rarely around when we are doing Spanish, but as the older children learn more of it and use it more generally I'm hoping she will begin to pick some up, if not she can learn it when she's older if she wants to.

Wednesday : We all decided together that we would go for a walk, but as we were getting ourselves together the heavens opened and it poured down with rain. So we didn't go any where - much to C's disappointment (boots at the ready!). Instead we stayed home and Hama'd which made for a peaceful and successful morning. The afternoon was filled with a visit by a HE friend of mine (S) with three of her children (d9, s7 & d1), which was lovely J. Her little 1yod (B) was quite 'loving' towards N, who had just woken up and not quite ready for it! Once he gathered his senses he was quite 'strong' keeping his distance!! LOL. S & I nattered happily for a few hours, until she suddenly realised she had to run for her train home!

Thursday (today): We worked on our Astronomy project this morning and made a pin-hole viewing box - all we need now is an eclipse to observe!! We also did a visual illustration of how eclipses work with a torch, a globe and a ping-pong ball. That worked well too. After lunch I read almost to the end of The Arctic Tern - which has been quite gripping and the kids are keen to know the end now J. It is not easy reading to them all though - they kick, elbow, whisper to, and generally pester each other the whole time, coupled with C's constant brumming of cars around the room (at various volumes depending on the number of seconds since I last asked him to "sssh!") and E's inability to be quiet and listen for more than a minute at a time. She came down to listen clad in a princess dress, but only lasted a few sentences before she started to chatter away to herself again. At which point I asked her either chatter to herself somewhere else, or listen to the story. She stayed another minute or two, but soon left the room in preference for her own little world.

Somehow, despite this all sounding lovely & idyllic, it has been peppered with stress and irritation; kids not clearing up after themselves, older boys fighting, arguing and generally being horrid to each other - and me feeling pretty horrid towards them because of it, arguments over incomplete work from the previous week needing to be finished, far too much back chat and disobedience, screaming and running around the house (which is the inevitable result of wetter weather L), mess everywhere, not listening to seemingly anything I say unless I YELL, chores not being done when I ask or in a reasonable amount of time - and now it seems spitting!! Match that with a baby who has discovered how to climb into my bed, so that we are disturbed in the night (about 3am the last couple of nights), but I'm hoping this is only because he seems to be a bit 'under-the-weather' these last few days (teething I think and a temp') and he will go back to full night's sleep when he is feeling better. I feel SOOO tense and am really, really looking forward to nearly the whole day on a train by myself tomorrow (5hours) going down to Portsmouth, with nothing more than my book and my music - BLISS! J.

OK - not sure why it's was soooo important to me to blog tonight, but sometimes I just need to write 'stuff' down and I won't be able to get on the computer over the weekend I bet. P's dad is very possessive over his PC and doesn't like us surfing much. Oddly though, he likes to send 'chain' emails with silly ditties on which quite honestly irritate me and always worry me, that they might come laden with nasties!

Have a good weekend everyone J.