Today, after the chicken drama detailed in the post below I made cheese scones and the children made birthday cards for Jack and Maisie. Scarlett drew a picture of Spirit the horse for Maisie’s and Davies drew a collection of dinosaurs for Jack’s. Tarly was able to write all the letters in ‘Maisie’ with me just telling her the names of the letters – A, I, S and E are all in her name, she know’s M from Mummy (and McDonalds :oops:) and I from ‘Davies’. Davies can now very rapidly write any letters I call out to him and spelt ‘to’ ‘happy’ and ‘love’ by himself. Once we’d done the ‘To Jack’ and ‘To Maisie’ bits inside they both just wrote ‘happy birthday, love’ and their own name followed by the cards being passed round the rest of us to write our names in. I was really surprised (although I shouldn’t be really, if I didn’t think it would work then I shouldn’t be doing autonomy!) that Scarlett knew most of the letters when I called them out and the ones she didn’t Davies showed her his and she copied those. Her writing is actually very neat, she can do as tidy and small as Davies without much effort. Davies enjoys writing but he likes to copy, it’s rare he will want to go to the effort of working out how to spell something, I guess the day it all clicks and stops being ‘an effort’ will be the day he suddenly starts doing it :).
We all got in the car and headed over to Lewes to collect Ali (with debate on the way about which of her two houses that would be from :)) and then Ady and the children dropped Ali and I (and the cheese scones) off at our Writers Retreat day. It’s the third one I have attended (thank you Ali 🙂 xx) and I can really feel progress being made. I am getting more able to cast off my life and focus on writing, while accepting that huge chunks of whatever I write will be autobiographical and working with that rather than against it. I got some great inspiration for working with that in new ways and the exercises pulled together lots of thinking I’ve been doing anyway. It’s a really supportive, safe environment where I feel able to cast out ideas and get honest, unbiased feedback without people’s personal feelings clouding their responses. There were three people (plus Ali of course) there that had been at previous ones – including the teacher and one new attendee who was a very interesting person too, so lots of chatting was done aswell as writing. I did a piece of writing at the end which I was pleased with and will probably work on some more and got some positive, constructive feedback on that too which was great. 🙂
Ady and the children picked us up, we dropped Ali home (at a different house to the one we’d collected her from :)) and came home via Asda for a few bits for dinner. Some X factor watching, late dinner for the children followed by even later dinner for us.
Ady, Davies and Scarlett had been to Jack and Maisie’s fifth birthday party over at their house today. Ady has pictures but his camera battery is flat so I can’t download them tonight but they had a good time apparently. It feels odd that they all got on with something without me but Ady said all the other party attendees were most envious of me being at a writing day :).
And now, because it’s been a fairly emotionally draining day, even if most of it has been positive, I’m off to bed!
Thanks for the lift, it was another good session for me too, even though I had thought I would have real problems disconnecting from moving stress etc.