I woke up just after 8am this morning and considered and intended getting up but must have fallen asleep again as next thing I knew it was 830am and the doorbell was ringing. I ran downstairs, pulling on a dressing gown which I must have removed at the same time as a nightie last time I wore it as a nightie was trailing out of one sleeve, half blind without contact lenses and Davies was peering at the front door hissing ‘I think it’s Grandad!’ so he let him in and I went back upstairs to get dressed. 😆
We had a nice hour or so with Dad while the kids ate their breakfast and then he headed off one way and we headed off the other to visit Ali and Freya – and J too as it turned out :).
We’ve not seen them for quite a while so it was really nice :). Freya ran out to meet us and the kids went off straight away to Freya’s room. Scarlett reappeared but was in the main happy enough to play with the kittens and leave Davies and Freya to it (they were playing a W&G computer game on Freya’s laptop). Considering we were there for over 5 hours and she spent well over half of that entertaining herself I thought she did well really.
Didn’t excuse her carpet art but we’ll leave that as it’s been dealt with now ;).
Ali and I enjoyed some nice chatting including working our way through a list of Things We Should Remember To Talk About that I’d mentally compiled and Ali added to. Very theraputic :). J came home for lunch so he was about for a while. We all moved outside towards the end and the children all played together, something to do with George’s Secret Key. I did some knitting which was nice, I like knitting in the sunshine chatting to friends :).
We had a super quick drive home – half term does seem to mean less rush hour traffic, which was good as we’d been rubbish at leaving promptly so I was expecting to hit all the traffic. Ady was already home and the kids did something in the garden with him while I got their tea sorted. Our food shopping arrived so we were all taken up with putting that away and then it was storytime.
Ady had printed off the LSO booklet so I read some of that to Davies and Scarlett and we practised body percussion (clapping, finger clicking, thigh slapping and stamping) which was fun but we drew a bit of a blank at learning the song as I can’t read the tune to teach it to them. We got the toy keyboard out but it has 3 octaves all of which are squeaky and I just can’t remember enough about reading music to play it at the right speed which I found very frustrating. I can’t particularly say I regret not learning to play an instrument as a child and indeed I did learn recorder and piano for a few years but I do wish I could play now, especially this weekend at J&Js and again tonight when it would have been good to be able to sing the song or pick it out on a piano to teach the kids. I did find a ‘learn to play the keyboard’ book in our book stash but I think that’s a bit ambitious in a weekend 😆 I did impress the kids by being able to pick out a Katy Perry tune or two for them though so I’m not totally musically untalented 😆 😆
We had a couple of chapters of George and then what we’ve learnt today:
Ady learnt that it was the 65th D day anniversary which he sort of knew but surprised him.
I learnt the Mona Lisa has no eyebrows (but further investigation suggests that she probably did to start with and along with her eyelashes they were lost either in da Vinci’s own titivating with the work or some over zealous cleaning over the years).
Davies learnt how to google 🙂 I’ve never really shown him but watching Freya he picked up enough to come home and show me including using the drop down suggestion-y bit. I’ve said he can use the old laptop and I’ll set him up with an email address so I must sort that out over the weekend.
Scarlett learnt about how earthquakes and volcanoes happen as she was reading one of those little Usborne Science books at bedtime and brought it to me to ask a few questions about the pictures. I notice she is beginning to recognise sounds of letters at the start of words to try and decode them too and with minimal help she worked out the word ‘diamond’ by telling me the sounds for each letter.