A little bit of me and a whole lot of you…

Well I don’t know how I did it – couldn’t tell you for love nor money – which is a shame as if I could just define all of the ingredients and the mix and the right temperature for cooking it then I am sure I could make my fortune for selling ‘Nic’s Good Day Tonic’ to all parents everywhere!

But there have been no tears, no raised voices, infact its been peace and harmony all the way 🙂

Another musical beds night – can’t even recall all the details but Davies did a stint in our bed but ended up back in his own, Scarlett started in her bed and ended up in ours, I did shifts in our bed, on Davies’ floor with a pillow and woke up this morning downstairs in Scarlett’s bed (which is both a room and a bed I have never slept in before 🙂 ) and Ady managed to stay in the same bed but certainly didn’t get much sleep either 🙂 Am feeling quite philosophical about it all though as they are both poorly with some sort of cold related lurgy and TBH I don’t know what we could do differently at the moment anyway, so I guess we just hope it improves soon, or list them both on Ebay’s next free listing day 🙂 Amazing how thankful you become for the smallest things though and the fact that we had an evening to ourselves and went to bed and had been asleep for a couple of hours before either of them woke up was a plus.

Anyway, today has been a really good day. I have cleared several things off my to do list and am making great headway with my online course too which is giving me a real sense of achievement 🙂 So up, breakfasted and dressed we broke out the glitter to make some Christmas cards for the MuddlePuddle list:

which actually went pretty well, many of you will be opening envelopes full of glitter and our vacuum cleaner is looking very festive with spangly bits nestling in its clear window, but they were both good at getting into being creative:

We did, of course, end up with Scarlett simply upending the glitter and sequin pots all over the carpet (not the mat I had put down obviously!) and Davies got bored and wandered off. I then spent probably as long clearing up as we had making the cards (I think we managed about 12 so far) but as it was actually quite theraputic picking up sequins and putting them back in their pot I didn’t mind. Then hoovered up most of the excess (although of course there will be glitter in the carpet til February now!) and made lunch. Neither of them ate much, prefering instead to wait until I had unpacked the Tesco shop which arrived while they were supposed to be eating and then nicking crumpets off me!

After lunch Davies did some playing on the computer – a bit of Cbeebies website and then back to his old favourite maze puzzles
which gave me some time to play puzzles with Scarlett:
which she is really good at. We then dug out all the old puzzles from Davies’ bedroom – most of which seem to be missing at least one piece – sharp intake of breath! and played with them too. Davies did a bit of wooden train set too and also joined in the puzzles.

They have been really nice to each other all day, very tactile with their hugs and kisses and just generally cute. Mel emailed me earlier to cancel lunch as they are all ill, which actually was good cos mine probably were not up to being nice to other children too 🙂 They were both asleep not long after 7 although they have both been coughing and spluttering so I don’t know for how long…

Educationally, apart from the arty crafty stuff we have also covered some alphabet stuff when Davies brought in a wooden alphabet puzzle and started talking about the letters, I taught him how to answer the phone – both as in how to do it by which button to press and how to do it ‘nicely’ by asking who is calling and so on – I rang him a couple of times from my mobile to ‘test’ him too. We then talked about 999 emergency calls and I showed him how to do it and we talked about which service he would ask for in certain circumstances, when he would ring and what sort of emergencies he could think of when you might ring 999. We talked about making sure he gave the address (which he already knows) and he did do a bit of faffing about telling the hypothetical operator that we used to live in Manchester but now we live in Sompting 🙂 So I guess that ticks off essential life skills!

I have fought with myself not to start ‘testing’ him on skeletons and just enjoy how organic the learning here is at the moment, but it does go against all my instincts!

Tonight I dressed the kids in red pyjamas and we took them up to Davies’ room to take some pics infront of the Christmas tree in the hope of getting a good shot for our family Christmas cards. Still don’t have that elusive perfect shot like we managed last year, but having decided perhaps we won’t get it we have chosen one which is quite nice so Ady will hopefully get the cards tomorrow for me to start writing.

Tomorrow I have another day of nothing much planned before we have stuff organised for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Although I might need to go on a hunt for ready to roll icing to create the Dora cake I have convinced myself I *need* to make for Tarly’s birthday next week. Maybe an educational, wrapped up warm, walk into Lancing is in order 🙂

Finally the Maths round up for the day:
Dora’s leg iron on – zero, she is still up high on a shelf with one leg from yesterday
cups of tea made and left to go cold before pouring down the sink – three
cups of tea made and actually drunk – none 🙁 (maybe my teadrinking turns me into an evil monster mummy and that’s why I’ve been so mellow today!)
times stll to hoover before glitter is lifted from the carpet – at least four