I have been doing a sort of time and motion stylee study on me and the kids today. I wanted to see if we could tick boxes educationally, get some housework’y type stuff done, have some fun together, get out of the house at least briefly, fit in some me time, do some stuff which I had to do without interuption (which will later be writing CVs as I need to see how I can fit it into my day without burning midnight oil on it) and ensure that all three of us felt like we had had a good day by the end of it.
So for my own records really and inspite of what I wrote earlier about not blogging the tiny insignificant bits of my day (although I imagine Jax will enjoy it 😉 ) here is how it panned out:
Managed four loads of washing, got it dried and put away, baked cookies and got dinner on (beef in red wine sauce) cooking slow.
Managed to make a couple of phonecalls including sorting out the venue for the Halloween party (hurrah!).
Had a walk round the block to the shops so I could buy Heat magazine ;-), kids walked there and back holding hands with each other and chattering about what they could see and playing a ‘don’t step on the cracks’ game. We stopped to talk to our opposite neighbour for about 15 mins on the way back too which was nice as she is very pro HE and always very complimentary about how lovely the children are 😀
Made an attempt to keep the house tidy as we went and the children, particularly Davies were actually pretty helpful in this.
Davies spent some time on the computer playing some previously untackled games on one of his play and learn cds. He was introduced to noughts and crosses, four in a row and various other logic games, as well as doing very well on memory games such as find the pair and other visual stuff, which reassured me on the reading stuff too. Must do ‘puter stuff with him more really, as he likes the time alone and seems to get quite a lot out of it and it also allows me to spend some one to one with Tarly.
Tarly and I made some flower people (similar to Fifi flowertot in appearance) from a kit. She likes stuff like that so I should try and do more fiddly things with her and bear it in mind when birthday and Christmas pressie shopping for her. We also played with her aquamat for a while and did some writing, some shape drawing and some stuff like faces, cats and houses.
I did some reading aloud to them – the Enormous Crocodile is Davies’ current fave for this and I aim to do it more as it’s something we all enjoy – I will need to make the selection of book myself though as I cannot face reading the ‘are you my daddy’ life the flap book which is Tarly’s selection one more time!
The post this morning brought the pack for our CP holiday in a couple of weeks time so we all cuddled up together and looked through that – D has been very cuddly today actually, we sat with me on my laptop and him watching TV for about an hour cuddled up together this morning and Tarly is always clambering about on me. Probably the thing I love most about motherhood actually, the cuddles 🙂
Davies watched some show on cbbc and drew all the characters from it then brought them to me to be cut out. I got the laminator out and bunged them in the pouches before making a phonecall to find Davies has laminated them himself while I was on the phone – sod the numeracy and literacy, my HE’d not yet 5 year old can already laminate! 😉 They both did lots of drawing, including Tarly’s party trick of purple felt tip all over her right leg from toes to thigh!
They have played loads together today too, been Charlie and Willy Wonka for hours, built stuff with lego and megabloks as props and generally enjoyed being siblings for most of the day.
I have managed to spent some time online, make phonecalls and read a fair bit of my magazine by doing it when they are occupied doing other stuff. If they have wanted or needed me I have put the computer down straight away and it has really worked today.
woah, have I read some of this before? Serious deja vue on the tarly book choice.
And yes, I did enjoy that.
Comment by jax — 23 August 2005 @ 11:05 pm
oops yes! what happened was I wrote an hour by hour list of the day, then got interupted by cooking the kids dinner, Ady coming home, bathing the kids and putting them to bed and having my own bath and dinner so I deleted the draft post and started again.
Somewhere in all that I must have replicated stuff I had already published earlier instead of replicating the stuff I deleted 😉
See, I *do* blog too much!
Comment by Nic — 23 August 2005 @ 11:16 pm
you do 😉 sounds like more than I fit into a regular day, I have to say, well done.
Comment by Sarah — 23 August 2005 @ 11:23 pm