And if you ever saw it…

Our internet connection slowed to a snails pace last night and hasn’t recovered. Emails are fine and once a web page has loaded it seems fine, it just takes a bloody age to do so. Far slower than dial up would be and sites with lots going on just don’t seem to load at all. I’ve got no joy from our ISP who insist there seems to be no problem with the connection speeds from their checks and despite uninstalling and reinstalling all sorts of things I’ve gotten nowhere in making it any faster. So I’m going to blog and then give up and hope it all magically sorts itself out somehow overnight!

Today has been wonderfully festive. Somehow we found ourselves with no particular place to be, people to see or things to do. The s l o w internet meant I didn’t just install myself behind a laptop. In the morning Davies was doing drawing and sketching and having shown me his latest story in three pictures of Sponge Bob Square Pants and friends, which I am utterly unable to comment on having never watched a single show but can see the pictures are a good likeness of the character I’ve seen depicted in various places, I did some other stuff with him. He does excellent ‘cartoony’ style drawings but often asks for ideas of what to draw next and I think actually he’d be better employed focussing on his actual drawing rather than ever more elaborate subjects and scenes. We did a bit of sketching, me of him (rubbish!) and him of Ady and then I remembered a book I’d seen at first Melrose that I think Merry had brought along about enjoying art with children. I’d been really taken with it and managed to track it down on amazon.com rather than .co.uk and then it sat on the bookshelf ever since (nearly 3 years now then). We sat and looked at every picture, talked about it, read through the notes and the questions and then I read the little biographies and explanations of the pictures out. Scarlett crept over to join in and we all debated our favourites and why. There were a couple of ‘now draw this…’ type suggestions which Davies liked; one was to draw your friends playing on a broken mode of transport – Davies chose a plane and drew that and then I challenged him with drawing a person using the Picasso style of geometric shapes. Must see what other art type books I can get as he really enjoyed a wider range of ideas and inspirations. Scarlett had collected some workbooks off the shelf so we looked at some of the maths ones but she quickly bored of a page of sums. She adores counting and will often pose a ‘maths’ type question to everyone and then say quickly ‘no wait, I’m going to ‘count” and do it herself, which seems much more natural to her than a page of written down fill in the blanks. She stuck with it a while though and I think it was probably the first time she’d written some of the numbers and certainly I was surprised that she recognised 1-9 (not surprised as in impressed that she’d know them, just surprised as I had no idea she did).

I made cinnamon toast for lunch but then couldn’t be bothered to do any of the baking I’d planned and sat on the floor with the children instead and made Christmas stuff. We got out the many pairs of posh scissors and cut out loads of snowflakes, some Christmas trees, snowmen and then in a flight of fancy and over-ambitiousness we recreated my library display of reindeer and santa sleigh. There was glue, there was glitter, there was stick on sparkly bits, there was ribbon and paper and various crimped edge effects but above all there was a good half an hours worth of tidying up at the end of it! 😆 We do now have various little very pretty decorations blue tacked around the walls of the house though so we are, like, totally festived up. 😆

Scarlett – who had got stamping ink on her jeans and foot so had taken her jeans off and put one sock on to avoid spreading more ink onto the carpet then decided to finish off this slightly eccentric look with a long and floaty summer dress over her vest and the single sock, which lent her an odd sort of regal charm, and Davies then disappeared up to his bedroom to play Doctor Who while Ady cooked dinner and I wrestled more with the slowest internet connection in the world (honestly it would be quicker to walk round to everyone for a chat than try and read their blogs).

Ady served dinner up around 530pm – roast beef – and we all sat down to eat and watch A Christmas Carol – (Kelsey Grammer version) which we really enjoyed and coupled with a roast dinner and Christmas decorations made us feel like we’d sort of had Christmas really :). At bedtime I read a pile of library books to the children, a combination of a few story ones, a few silly ones and a couple of festive ones. Then they went off to bed; Scarlett to listen to Amy Winehouse on her MP3 player in bed and Davies to sit in bed and play (loudly :roll:) with some toys.