Speed reading, soppy sobbing and super sketching

Tuesdays have always been supposed to be our day at home, I never work them, we only have D’s swimming lessons at 530pm to leave the house for and I think having at least one day a week when we stay home, don’t see anyone else and simply busy ourselves with stuff we have here (of which there is lots!) is good for all three of us. It’s just that sometimes I forget that and make arrangements instead, which means by about Thursday we are all ragged and struggle to get to the weekend. I don’t think we could cope with two such days of not going out, not seeing friends and not being busy as that would make us equally wall-climby and irritable mind you.

So today I had an obviously needed lie in, both children had been up since really early so Ady had breakfasted them and set them up with a wide array of toys – the lounge floor was barely visible but they were having a great time. 🙂 I brought them some clothes and ran through my plan for the day with them. They got dressed, Davies decided to do some xboxing and Scarlett wanted to do some colouring – she settled for some dot-to-dotting and I made the first of about 6 cups of tea and read some of the Most Boring Book In The World. After about an hour, at least one more cup of tea and about 100 pages I decided I needed a break and went off to do some baking. Scarlett joined me and we made cheese scones and chocolate chip rock cakes. Very theraputic 🙂 and of course yummy.

As per the plan we ate lunch and stuck the dvd on – Bridge To Terabithia. I know Kirsty and co saw it for film week and I know Ali and Freya have seen it and warned us about the sob-fest potential but I still didn’t have much of an idea what it was actually about. I won’t dissect it here for those who have not seen it yet but Davies and I really enjoyed it and yes, I did wail lots. Scarlett continued with her dot to dots although she did think Lesley (the female lead) was pretty cool and liked the way she dressed. She was struggling with recognising the numbers in the teens so I wrote out 1-20 for her to follow which meant she grasped the idea better and did some great dot to dotting while we watched the film. She did glance across at me at one point while I was sniffing with tears rolling down my cheeks, roll her eyes at me and say ‘I *knew* you’d cry!’ 😆

After that I made another cup of tea and went back to my book. I was skim reading by now, I did look at every single page but didn’t read every word by any means. It was way too tedious. Davies joined in with the drawing a did a fab 4 piece of paper joined together picture inspired by the film with a troll, a bridge, an underground gold mine and various other details. He then went on a Christmas drawing spree and did a tree, a snowman, Santa and various other things.

My skim reading the book, Ady arriving home and the children getting all the toys and pens tidied away seemed to happen pretty much simultaneously, so Davies and I went off to swimming leaving Ady and Scarlett here. He had a great lesson, his floating is very good. After he’d finished I took him over to the main pool where they have lane swimming on a Tuesday evening and we watched the adults swimmers and their techniques with me pointing out their arms, heads, legs and so on. I think he found that quite helpful actually, don’t know why I’d not thought of it before, the closest I’ve ever come to a practical demonstration was with a Barbie doll, but watching swimmers from above with good technique provides an excellent illustration for him. I chatted a bit to his teacher too who said she is pleased with his progress. I must chase up where Scarlett’s name is on the waiting list and also speak to Badgers about her tomorrow and chase up the Rainbows leader too to arrange for her to go along to that in the next couple of weeks. We chatted about various things on the way there and back none of which I can recall now of course.

I dropped Davies home and went back out again to the library for Reading Group. I was very pleased to discover at least two other people had also just skim read the book and everyone had drawn the same conclusions about it as me. There was much talk about arranging an evening out to the theatre or cinema to see an adaptation of something and read the book of it too which sounds fun.