You walked in to the party, like you were walking onto a yacht…

More cos I like the word ‘yacht’ (which I found really hard to type!) than anything else, it’s one of those words which unless you are in yachting circles you probably only use when trying to come up with an example for the letter Y! And one I have no idea how to explain when we get to sounding out letters to make words with either 🙂

Current Dora leg back on ironing for the day – 17!

Failed miserably to get the house anywhere near ready for Julie, Jack and Maisie to arrive and the lounge was amass with pretend food and crockery, the playroom was full of crayons which Davies and Scarlett were fighting over while colouring in some Thomas pictures and I was midway through tidying up my pit of a desk (which is now super organised and ready to do work at!) I finished sorting the desk out while Julie supervised all the kids colouring before we went into the lounge and set up a game of some sort of cafe with all the food on one table and the crockery on the other. Davies and Scarlett were excellent at getting food we asked for (Davies did stuff like select breakfast foods, all vegetables and so on, Scarlett was finding specific food like ‘a lemon’, ‘a sausage’ or certain coloured foods.) Jack and Maisie mainly just pretended to eat it (or in Maisie’s case actually tried to!), then we made some real lunch which they ate picnic style on a messy mat on the floor.
After lunch we had the usual getting out every toy in the house and scattering it around the place including more abuse of books 🙁 but this time Julie helped tidy up with me behind them all and a fair bit of education went on. Davies played with the dinosaurs and was telling Jack which one’s ate meat and which ones ate plants and what they were all called, Scarlett did a puzzle with me, while Maisie played with the beauty case and pretend dried her hair and put make up on. So although there was mess it was all at least being played with and I was not left to tidy it all up at the end:-) I also trimmed Maisie’s fingernails as she won’t normally have them done but as I did Scarlett’s and she had been playing beauty salons she thought it was great fun:-) We decided it was too wet to venture out to the park this week so they headed off at about 2.30pm. After that we had a bleak half hour with screaming children aplenty! Can’t even recall what about but I know they were both just really horrid and very loud, and it definitely had to do with Davies refusing to tidy up something before I let him have something else out 🙁 So I called time out and we all did some magic painting for half an hour for some calming theraputic quiet time. It did sort of work and by the time Ady got home at 4.30 the house was a slightly nicer place to be. Scarlett was asleep by about 6pm again and Davies is currently fighting it having been in bed since 6.30pm too in the vain hope that he might actually be asleep by 8.30 if we put him there that early 🙁 He has done this before and usually makes himself ill by huge lack of sleep until he ends up totally exhausted and falls asleep for about 14 hours and then gets himself back to his usual routine again – judging by the amount of toddlerlike behaviour these last two days I reckon he is almost at his breaking point so hopefully by next week he’ll be back to normal. I have decided that Scarlett just doesn’t need 12 hours sleep 🙁 She also seems to have some odd inbuilt body clock thing going on whereby she sleeps in two big chunks of 5 hours or so but has a couple of hours inbetween – so she will be asleep by 6.30ish, awake at 1am, back for about 4am and sleep till 9am. TBH if I didn’t have Davies I could almost go with that myself and be up with her in the night doing stuff but as I can’t sleep in with her it is not practical. I think we need to get her to fall asleep later in the evening, so she sleeps later into the night but I am not sure how to accomplish that – will worry about it after Christmas I think.

Have just arranged with my parents to go to Bluebell Railway with them tomorrow, which should be nice. I am having my hair cut first thing (so naturally I have a big spot on my forehead to sit and look in the mirror at for an hour!) so we should get there around lunchtime (which hopefully Dad will treat us to!), so a nice day with plenty of educational stuff to chat about.