Wah Grr Whine

I drank too much fizzy wine last night and slept really badly and woke with a headache. Also Ady had had a bad night’s sleep and unusually (I normally sleep through anything) had disturbed me lots. Coupled with hormonal stuff making me stroppy anyway I’ve probably not been the best company today. Which means spending 4 hours sitting in the car wasn’t the very best place for me to be really :lol:.

I ordered our Christmas cards online last night, about 930pm ish on Costco’s order today, collect tomorrow advert fully expecting it to be not actually the very next day if that was a Sunday and you weren’t ordering until late Saturday night but thought I’d get warning of that part way through the ordering process and be able to cancel. I didn’t though – just got a confirmation email to say they’d received our order and would email us when it was ready. Which I fully expected not to be today so I emailed them to request that order be cancelled as we were going to Costco today and would just order them there and then. But I got another email at 9am today saying they were working on the order and when we arrived just 10 minutes after the store actually opened at 11am the cards were sat there ready and waiting. I guess they don’t check their emails cos they’re too busy working – what a quaint concept! 😆

Costco is right next to the big wind turbine in Reading so we stopped to have a proper look at it. There is a little information point with some bench seats which I assume they give proper educational talks on so we looked at that and stood right underneath it listening to the swoosh as the sails turned and talked a bit about how it works and how it harnesses power. It had a digital readout telling us it was gathering enough power for 214 homes which sort of makes you visualise one at the end of every few streets in years to come. I like them, there is a sort of grace and beauty to them, but then I also like the bit of the M25 where it meets the M4 with Heathrow airport and about 8 lanes of traffic meeting, flyovers and bridges, planes and towers and massive illuminated roadsigns (normally decreeing a 40mph speed limit :roll:) cos I can see a sort of grace and beauty in those too, particularly when there is a spectacular sunset happening as a backdrop and sheep grazing alongside the motorway. There is all the workmanship of a beesnest or birds nest, albeit a rather more environmentally damaging and less natural element to it but it’s a feat of a species nonetheless.

We managed to combine a speedy visit to Chris and Alison at the same time by virtue of being just along the road and also returned the tent which fingers crossed we won’t be needing any more as we are ever hopeful the Outwell will be ok. Davies has been talking and asking about time and numbers lots recently and spotted the pattern in number bonds to 10 today while we were talking. We also talked about plus, minus and times which seemed to make sense to him and he played with a bit. I tried to explain the pattern of number bonds repeating up the numbers (eg 8 minus 7 is 1, so 18 minus 7 is 11, 28 minus 7 is 21) but he struggled with that a little. I think it might make more sense written down. We have posters on the wall in our playroom (from Joyce :)) which I discovered Scarlett standing on a chair looking at yesterday, counting things up and checking the numbers next to them. Both of them seem to be going through a bit of a learning spurt at the moment. My Dad apparently has been talking to Davies about fractions and less than whole numbers and trying to teach him to tell the time too, all of which seems to have gone in and gets brought out every so often, usually as an apropos of nothing type statement (such as ‘the little hand on a clock is called an hour hand and it takes one hour to go all the way round the clock’ which he turned to me and said while we were watching TV last night, then turned back to the TV again :lol:). I was talking to someone at work this week about having a five year old and a seven year old and how odd it feels having children who are now ages I can actually remember being myself – and how I can also recall thinking and *being* those ages, how I was aware of things and had comprehension and thought about stuff. I can see, particularly with Davies how those processes are starting to happen and how he is starting to surprise me – both good and bad, with some of his unexpected reactions to things lately. His grasp of some things seems to have come suddenly such as numbers and time but actually I’m sure it’s just been a gradual procees I have missed happening until it’s being shown to me. Odd to think he would have been at school for two years and a term already and would be one of the very oldest in his class when I still think of him so much as a baby and still so reliant on me. Actually I am coming to realise he is far less reliant on me than I think he is and he is taking great leaps towards independance that I am struggling to adapt to far more than he is. I guess that is the right way for it to happen though – in his time and on his terms, rather than an enforced process just because he has hit age 5. It’s good though, as I get my head round it I am liking it, it’s just getting my head round it at his speed rather than mine. He’s doing cold turkey rather than gradual weaning :lol:.

We got home and the children carried on with what they’d been doing first thing this morning – Davies drawing and Scarlett cutting bits of pink paper into shapes. She made me a heart and lots of snowflake style ‘Christmas things’. Davies was like some sort of drawing machine, outputting well drawn, fully coloured sheets of paper every few minutes like a possessed person. It’s like he takes mental snapshots throughout the course of a day and then feels the need to download then to paper later to free up space in his mind again. We had Christmas pictures, airplanes, robots, all sorts. Oh and because we were watching Dreamer at the time there was a horse picture in there too. I wrote some Christmas cards but didn’t get very far because I was too busy snarling at everyone and crying at the film and moaning about my headache really. I’ve since had some painkillers, the end of the bottle of fizzy wine and a long bath and am feeling much better. I’m about to serve up roast beef and planning an early night to ensure my frame of mind is better tomorrow.