One word? When seven would do…

A not a lot day today. My throat is still sore but marginally better than it was yesterday so hopefully it will clear up on it’s own. I’ve had several bad throats over the years which have lingered to antibiotics stage and I’d really rather not have another dose only ten days after the last lot. Back to the dentist tomorrow for a check up on those xrays so I hope my throat is improved even more in the morning otherwise sitting with my mouth open wide is likely to be painful 🙁 and my glands are all up in my neck and throat which is very tender and hurty to touch.

So we have had a quiet day. Davies played x box in the morning, Tarly helped me peel and chop some veg for a beef stew for dinner until she had a big strop about wanting to eat ‘all’ the carrot now raw and unchopped :roll:. She did take herself off to deal with it though rather than just staying and yelling at me and returned calmer a while later to request a ‘little bit of carrot instead’. So that is progress.

I’ve been playing with the walkman bit of my new phone. I had this idea that I might quite like a MP3 player for Christmas / my birthday from Ady /my parents but actually I have no need for one now I have this phone. I had done some very complicated (to me) procedure of ripping and burning or some other such terms I feel faintly self conscious using a load of tracks off various cds last night, putting them onto my laptop and then connecting the phone to the laptop and dragging them into a folder on the phone, but it said the memory was full after only about 20 songs which seemed odd given the sony website claims it can hold 100 tracks or something. So I spent some time educating myself about formats and sizes and eventually found a way to redo it so that all the tracks were much ‘smaller’, deleted all the ones from last night off the laptop and the phone and started again. It now has about 60 tracks on it. I’ve also been playing with the headphones that came with it and worked out they double as a handsfree set which will be really handy in the car as I’m often having to pass my phone to Davies to answer if it rings while I’m driving and he’s a rubbish secretary! 😆 Makes me wonder quite why they did the hard sell on a handsfree kit at half price when I ordered the phone thought 🙄 All very soothing and calming anyway all that sorting and ripping and burning, I like tasks like that. I can’t wait to write Christmas cards for that same feeling of mindless repetitiveness. 😆

I’d made soup for lunch yesterday (did I blog that? Can’t remember and can’t be bothered to go and read and check) – cheese and bacon and I made a pumpkin one to have today which just needed warming and some milk adding to it. I thought it was ‘ok’ the children didn’t like it at all. I’m really trying to get better at eating the odd veg myself and also trying to increase the menu that the children eat. They won’t be eating with us for a few years yet – they eat at 5pm normally and we don’t eat til about 9pm so it wouldn’t even be easy to meet in the middle and besides which we don’t have a table for us all to eat round together anyway, but it would be nice if they ate the same sort of food as us at least, so I’m working on giving them what we’re having later if it’s feasible or cooking enough for them to have it the following day if not. It’s going OK so far, they are both really good at trying things at least even if the majority of it get’s a no after they’ve tried it. So I thought lunchtime soups would be a good move, cheap, healthy, wholesome, I eat lunch with them anyway so it’s a nice eating together meal. Trouble is I’m struggling to get over the ‘well this is just a load of pureed vegetables, yuck!’ feeling myself so I’m sure they’re finding it doubly hard :lol:. Davies did eat his stew at teatime though which was good.

This afternoon I planned to walk to the post office but as rain looked set in for the day this morning we drove there speedily this morning instead to get some parcels sent. I’ve sold a load more stuff on ebay ending today and loved the last five minutes hitting refresh on the ‘myebay’ page and seeing the selling total double 🙂

We watched a film over lunch which led to watching another one after that and it was Wallace and Gromit. Davies wanted xbox again but I insisted that he do something else instead so he went and got the floam out. I have surrupticiously been chucking the floam as it goes hard and loses it’s colour and we were down to four out of the original eight tubs so they split that between them and I encouraged them to make something to go hard rather than play with it and put it back in the tub. Davies did loads of colour mixing and made (you guessed it!) Wallace and Gromit which are now drying out on the windowsill.

That done they decided to make various props and spent about an hour and a half acting out Were Rabbit while watching it on screen. Should have videoed them actually, it was amusing and they were pretty good at it. Scarlett was being Wallace and lying there at the end while Davies was being Gromit and waving cheese under her nose to rouse her. Then they danced like crazy people to the music. The end of the film has a sort of compilation of the incidental music through the film, each piece has a name which is mostly just relating to the scene it is from. They are on the OST we got for Davies’ party and he has remembered all the names and was saying them as it went through the overture bit, and changing his dancing style accordingly. 😆

I forgot to blog that he is quite into his counting at the moment and can fairly reliably count up to 100 now and recognises the patterns in the 10s going up etc. And of course once you can count up to 100 you can count up to 999 really so I imagine it won’t be long before he realises that. I mentioned a while back that I think some of his recent interest in things like reading and numbers is peer pressure. Not peer pressure as in anyone has been teasing him or making him feel stupid, just that he has started to realise that other children he considers his equals are doing this sort of stuff and that actually although he has always considered he ‘can’t do it’ when he tries he finds that he can after all. I want him to get to these places under his own steam, because he wants to and because it is important to him, but I’m quite grateful for the odd nudge along the way if it is a nudge towards him deciding he wants to do something rather than making him feel inferior for not being able to. And of course anything which Davies does Tarly wants to do too so my prediction that many things will be learnt together for them seems apt to come true too, which is great :).

Finally today Davies did some drawing so he’s had a very productive day.

Tarly had another strop about not wanting her dinner and then a further one at not being allowed yoghurt for pudding when Davies had one but calmed down eventually and we just had a lovely half an hour of bedtime story reading snuggled up together.