So far so good ;-)

Okay so he’s only been gone for four hours but I have been busy and industrious! Davies was in our bed by half midnight, but he is an angel child to have in the bed compared to Scarlett and simply snuggles down and goes to sleep. Ady was up at 5.30am and he woke Scarlett who refused to go back to sleep so when he left at 6.15am I had to get up. 🙁 Which did mean that by 7am I had already got the first load of washing drying, moved the clock on the kitchen wall so I can make one of the new shelves my ‘tea shelf’ and cooked pain au chocolat for breakfast. Also booked a tenner room for the way home from Melrose in Notthingham. We might well end up not using it but for a tenner it doesn’t matter! Davies got up and is veering between rowdiness and sword play (urgh!) and slumping on the sofa dabbing at his runny nose with a tissue. Reckon they’ll both burn themselves out easily to go to bed tonight though!

I have rung Julie to warn her about our colds – which meant that Chris said they weren’ coming. She put her fierce voice on and said ‘I think we need to discuss this, I will ring you back’ and rang back ten minutes later all victorious to say they would be coming:-)

Davies has just appeared with a really well done magic maize picture (you can get picture cards to cut and stick the maize to) of a vase of flowers. It’s excellent – I will try and get a photo of it later. He used to be really into arty stuff but he rarely does it anymore, too busy with his games. I am planning on trying to draw some pictures of the Incredibles later for him to stick maize onto / colour in. Strike while the irons hot and all that 🙂

We also re-did his reward chart yesterday (it’s a weekly one). He had done really well last week – four out of the seven days he had got a magnet on every single thing – so 80p reward for that (20 p a day for any day he gets magnets on everything), and managed to remember sounds from a-g too 🙂 Only a couple of slight alterations for this week – I’ve changed letters to numbers and then next week we’ll go back to the same letters we did this week again so they really sink in. I’m undecided as to whether to do 1-7 or something like 10-70, I think the tens might be a better idea, particularly as he has been amazing me by seeming to recognise numbers 1-10 which I had not realised he had grasped. (I think Scarlett being able to count up to 14, which is where he gets to before losing it may have spurred him on – has he really not progressed in two years with numbers????)

I have a mental list of stuff I want to get done while Ady’s away, which I will turn into a real one so I can feel better about constantly blogging over the next few days under the pretense of checking my progress 🙂
Kitchen – needs a big sort out really, we have in theory got more cupboard space with the new shelves and stuff, so I want to clear all visible surfaces to make it look like a ‘busy kitchen’ as opposed to a pit!

Playroom – I know, again! Actually the kids bits of the room are fine, but Ady tends to dump all sorts of stuff on the corner of my desk and in my in trays – I think Scarlett has grown out of messing with the on/off button on my tower so it can go back on the floor under the desk again which will free up some desk space for me. Also I think the last remnants of Christmas chocolates and stuff can go into the kitchen now.

Books – I am going to make a real effort to go through all the books in the bookcase. The three binliners full I cleared a while back with the intention of taking to a bookshop for about 30pence each I am going to bring to Melrose to see if anyone wants for the Tsunami bring and buy, along with any books my two have really grown out of.

Bathrooms both need cleaning and decluttering. I am a bugger for stashing posh toiletries and never using them until finally end up chucking them cos they’ve not been used and have gotten all dusty/faded/out of date. Dad is going to finish repainting our bathroom while we are at Melrose so the less junk he has to shift around the better.

Inane and frankly loony blog posts less an intention, more a certainty I reckon 🙂 But if I put it in my to do list I can feel like I’ve achieved something when they happen 🙂

I was reading Junior this morning – someone remind me next time I go to buy Junior because some interesting looking article advertised on the front cover catches my eye, that it is infact a crappy read serving only to annoy or irritate me. The best I can hope for when reading Junior is smugness at some of the frankly mental ways people parent their children! Anyway there was an article in there about Baby Blogs (I think someone might have mentioned it on a list somewhere but I was not paying close attention and only remembered I’d heard it when I was reading the article). In the usual skimming over the surface, making lots of half made points and never following any of them up the article drew no conclusions, left several doors half open and quoted from a couple of frankly very boring blogs (no offence meant!). It sort of nodded at the ‘are these people mad for posting such intimate and traceable details about their kids????’ hysteria without going any further, which I have come to view as a bit of an overreaction really. When I first started on lists and with blogging I was very careful not to reveal too much detail about me or the kids. I would now not worry in the slightest. I think I am at more risk of some weirdo taking a shine to me as I wander round Tescos yelling at my offspring and buying sanitary protection, then following me home and sitting outside my house in his Fiesta wearing his anorak and noting my every moment in a spiral bound notebook with a biro (with a chewed end), than I am of someone happening across my blog, deciding I am exactly the sort of woman he would like to be stalking and then trawling through my blog archives to get all the details they need to set off in their Fiesta, wearing their anorak to find me! And similarly for the children really. I do post their names, I do post their pictures but that’s cos I’m very proud of them, I think they are beautiful children and I want other people to see that. If there is someone harvesting these images and doing awful unthinkable things to them then a) I’m not thinking about it and b) it is only their pictures, not them. And quite honestly as I am frequently debating the less attractive side of all four of us I doubt anyone would be wanting to come find us anyway 🙂 I may be back later with further Junior related rants though, I’m only half way through reading so far 🙂