This morning seemed to disappear really but reading back over my own and others blogs I have a sneaking suspicion where it went! 😉 I’ve been casting around on the rentahostel site and have a shortlist of middle of the country type YH which are available during October and have 40ish beds. I’ll ring them tomorrow to check availability and what the room layouts are and then post the shortlist for feedback. If anyone is interested in coming to a Halloween themed YH break and has not already said so in the post a few below please do so 🙂 So I was industrious, just not in very practical ways!
The children watched W&G again and some of the dvd extras so they were happily entertained. Davies also did some drawing of the characters and then I got him to do some writing. I tried to get him to write Gromit and spell it himself but he is not totally familiar with some of the letters – particularly ‘G’ so I wrote all the letters out jumbled up and got him to use them all. He did it with a small amount of assistance and then had an attempt at the same exercise with ‘Wallace’ too. That seemed to work well actually, he had lots of enthusiasm for it, so I have a bit of a plan to do some more of it. Also reminded from Katy’s blog that some of the Dr Seuss books are probably within Davies’ new reading ability so I might do some of them with him tomorrow
Then we headed over to Ali’s and listened to Peter & The Wolf on the way over there all happily singing along with the children ‘acting’ it out as best you can when strapped into a car seat!
Had a lovely time at Ali’s. Davies and Freya played together for ages and Tarly hung out with the grown ups for a lot of the time, but aside from being slightly annoying by talking to me all the time 🙄 she was also pretty cute. She drew a picture of me which was pretty good and some excellent really tidy colouring and multi-fingered hands 🙂 Ali got out the paint pens and there was a slightly hilarious lengthy debate about the crapness of there not being a yellow one with lots of very educational chat about colour mixing with Davies more of less remembering that blue and red made purple and Scarlett wanting to know why if blue and yellow made green then green and blue didn’t make yellow! After about half an hour of this with the children making do without it and me and Ali muttering about why pink was included when a primary colour like yellow was absent Ali found the yellow one hidden on a shelf! 🙂 Freya did a fab volcano picture including lots and lots of orange and some black to the lava before it melted (or as Ali put it, that’d be the rock then!) and Davies doing a rather good extention picture with grass and sky on one picture then the sky continued onto another piece of paper above it fading into black to be ‘space’ with a very good planet Earth too. He also did a complicated picture of a scene from W&G on a TV which had an ornamental boat on top of it (reminded me of Crowded House Weather with You)and Wallace’s hand on a remote control with specks to show the remote control doing something and Gromit’s head. Scarlett did something abstract with dots and fully enjoyed being allowed to mix colours! My two showed their conditioning from me by being very anal about putting lids on paints and pens though much to our amusement!
Ali and I managed a record t hree consecutive sentences and I’ve not remembered any conversations we started but didn’t end yet so I consider it a success!
Came home and persuaded the children to have beef stew for their dinner. They were not at all sure and indeed Tarly will only consider the veg and Davies only the beef but they both cleared their plates and Tarly had seconds! Frankly I needed the praise having been cheated out of it last week 😉 (I know, I know, if I will bugger off early!), I dashed off another CV and a very creative covering letter – hell I’d give the girl an interview on the strength of it – so only 2 more to do in the morning and as they are actually both for the same person, one with spin for a retail job (yes, know about that then) and the other with spin for a nursery placement based on her own experience as a mother to two young children (erm, yep again!) they shouldn’t be too tricky!
Then I headed off to the library for reading group. It was really good tonight actually. I still felt a little like the token bimbo but having outed myself as chicklit fanatic who’s never even read Catcher In The Rye and is there for that very reason I felt far more comfortable in joining in generally. The couple I thought seemed like really interesting people last time were there again and I found out that she is a teacher! There was another woman I’d not really noticed last time who is American and also very interesting, the poet guy didn’t turn up but we did have a very deaf old lady to add comedy value! 😉 We’ve been given Tash Aw’s The Harmony Silk Factory for next time which is another one I’d not have picked up to read myself and we also all brought home a book from the teenage section. I’ve got Anne Cassidy’s Looking for JJ which looks really good. And having said I simply hadn’t engaged with the characters of the book I didn’t finish I have been sent away with the dvd of the film to see if that makes it any more appealing!
Can’t reemmber what you were reading last time?
The Harmony Silk Factory looks interesting – but like you, not hte sort of thing I’d ever be likely to pick up. Looking for JJ is more appealing, but sounds a bit grim!
I would consider an October get-together depending on finances…
Graham Swift, Last Orders was last times. As I was the only one in the group who hated it we concluded it simply has no points of reference for me to identify with. The main ‘cast’ is all male, when men were men type characters, it’s set in the 70s/80s, in London and the only female characters (who don’t have their own voices anyway, they are refered to by the men)are giddy teenagers running away from home or all but prostituting themselves to get a ‘better life’ or downtrodden wives. I guess all the books I enjoy reading do either have at least one character I can see myself or someone I know in them – or at least have characters I feel like I care about. I described the book last night as an episode of Eastenders – you are thrust into the lives of these people without much prior knowledge of who they are and whilst the book is based around a certain event it doesn’t (apparantly – I didn’t read it to the end) tidy up all the loose ends at the end either.
Oh yeah, knew we’d talked about it, but had gone completely blank earlier! Haven’t read that thoguh I do have a couple of Graham Swifts here. Who’s picking these books?
It’s a sort of group thing based on someone suggesting something they’ve either read and really enjoyed or something they’d like to read and then the rest of us either agree or not depending also on whether the library have enough copies in the area for us to get it. This is usually the point where I shut up a bit as I don’t think suggesting something by Sophie Kinsella or Marion Keyes would go down so well 😉 I did suggest some of the ‘classics’ though such as Catcher in the Rye or To Kill A Mockingbird neither of which I’ve read before and a couple of the others were quite keen on those.