Mental Tupperware…

Is what I feel the need for right now. Lots of stuff going on in my head which I’m trying to sort through, categorise and organise – nothing bad or negative and I’ve a feeling it will all lead to positive stuff actually but a deep and ponderous time right now nonetheless.

We did loads of reading this morning, a big pile of library books and then Davies asked for some ‘spot the difference’ – I did him two pages of pictures and words to match up instead. On the first I did rat, mat, cat, bat, hat and on the second I did man, banana, moon, sun and house. I’m trying to make them easy enough that they are within his reach and tricky enough that he has to work rather than guess. He followed me upstairs to get dressed so I told him to get a red nose reader book from his room and bring that to me to read. With a combination of guesswork and memory of having the book read to him coupled with an amount of reading he got through most of it. He is starting to have a desire to read, to crack the code and decipher what things say. Every single night in bed he sits surrounded by books endlessly looking through them and whilst he still enjoys having the odd one read aloud to him he tends to enjoy them more as a solitary exercise which suggests to me that he may well be sitting there sounding things out to himself too.

We came downstairs and Tarly disappeared for a while whilst Davies and I were chatting. When I went to check on her she’d cuddled up in bed and was fast asleep, so I left her to it figuring she’s capable of putting herself to bed so she’s capable of knowing when she needs the sleep and let her have an hour or so.

Meantime Davies and I did some baking. I’ve been meaning to try cooking chocolate brownies for ages so I have that a go and by popular request we made some snickerdoodles too. Davies did lots of the weighing and mixing and then when the brownies were ready we woke Tarly and she helped with the rolling in cinnamon sugar of the snickerdoodles. I offered to read them some more stories while we ate some of the brownies but they declined and watched Discovery Kids instead. 😆

This afternoon they played with the geomags for ages, making space rockets and space robots
Geomags are easily one of the most played with toys here and as such it’s easy to chart the changes in their play with them accordingly. I love the deckopanels sets you can get where you can insert your own printed or drawn artwork into panels to create great effects. I think they may well be something we think about asking grandparents for for Davies’ birthday as I can imagine they would get a lot of use.

After school Mel came over with Liam and Lily. Liam, Davies and Scarlett disappeared off upstairs for some riotous and very noisy game while Lily was iin a quieter mood and wanted Tarly’s Dora house to play with, to watch Boobahs and to dress up – pretty much anything to get Mel’s attention really. We had a variety of strange dressing up combinations when the others came downstairs with Tarly prancing round in high heels, a fairy cape and wings and bunny ears, Davies dressed as a traffic warden carrying a Roman shield and wearing a gladiators helmet and Liam wearing a Buzz Lightyear suit with a Peter Pan top and hat 😆 Lily in a Belle dress was fairly normal in comparison!

They had tea and then disappeared for further playing while Mel and I chatted – further adding to my odd state of mind in many ways. Ady arrived home and they eventually left. The children took forever to get to sleep tonight which I hope means they will sleep in a bit in the morning. Ady is off tomorrow for two nights away with work which as usual I am not looking forward to – expect much online presence to fill the gap…