when it’s dark enough, you can see the stars…

…Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Been quote surfing today to find something suitable to send to Jan along with a bead and some sparkly stuff. Found what I was looking for and a few other little beads of wisdom too! I have a book on the shelf called ‘pocket positives’ which I picked up for 99p sometime somewhere and the above is a rather nice quote for getting through those darker days I thought.

So how has my day been then? Well luckily for all concerned that I am having it this week and not last week when it could well have been the day to finish me off 😉

Scarlett was back out of bed again within half an hour of my post last night and I sat up with her ’til gone midnight. Ady did a shift ’til 2am and then she came into our bed. I don’t think any of us got more than about 2 hours sleep. Surprisingly I have coped today without feeling too groggy but it is just starting to catch up with me by way of a headache now.

She has slept and dozed all day and is in bed again now – doubt she’ll stay there too long but it’s too difficult to even attempt to keep her awake and hope for a routine or a nights sleep, so better she gets the sleep while she can. I have been giving her piriton today which seems to have eased the itching – she was clawing at herself through the night 🙁 Both my two are so rarely ill that when they are it really scares me how little I am able to do to ease their suffering – I imagine this is one of the worst parts of having a seriously ill child – I am so used to being able to ‘kiss it better’ or cuddle away the tears that when I can’t – and they still expect me to be able to – it is really hard. 🙁 I started to count her spots this morning and gave up when I reached 70 odd just on her face – they are starting to crust over though so hopefully today has been the end of them appearing and tomorrow will be the start of them improving.

While she was asleep this morning i thought it would be the perfect opportunity for me and Davies to try reading the Bob books – well he did managed the first one but with huge reluctance, much wriggling and fidgeting and a very thinly veiled dose of impatience from me. Its so hard, he *wants* to read, he has the mechanics there to do it and he is really good at letter recongition and remembering what sounds they make, but he just fails to reach that final step – today I have sat next to him faced with the word MAT
D: Mmmm, Aaaaa, Tttttt
M: okay, so put them together….
D: MmmAaaaTttt, MmmAaaaTaaa?
M: Yes, now say it a bit quicker….
D: MmmAaaaTtttt – Sam?

WTF????!!!!

Two more totally out of sequence Horrible Science mags arrived so the freebie gifts were played with and I read him a bit of one of them for a while then Scarlett got up and we had some lunch.

Then he played his Thomas cdrom for a bit on my computer while Tarly did some colouring and I wrote some cheques out.

After that I thought I could persuade him to come and do some more cdroms on my laptop in the lounge so we could all sit together and perhaps get him to do something vaguely educational. We did Zoombinis, which he was pretty good at although again made some wild and silly guesses which always serves to really annoy me. I tried to persuade him onto StudyDog but he was having none of that (too repetitive for him, or slightly too hard – either way he gives up quickly), then a bit of Bear and Penguins Maths Adventure, which went down quite well and he appeared to get the gist of – again slightly too much repetition for him and he got bored and started being silly. I can’t decide whether this is a problem or not. OTOH life can be full of stuff which is a bit repetitive and we have to stick at it (although I realise he doesn’t need to fine tune that skill just yet at 4.5 yo!) but without repetition how is he going to grasp these things? When he does do something he is so thrilled and proud of himself but it is still not enough to spur him onto trying more. 🙁 He truly needs to percieve something as fun for him to stick at it and I am struggling to make reading fun really I guess… maybe I need to find something which inspires me more than MmmAaaTtt and see how we get on – also – deep sighs – I know I will be doing it all again in a year or so with Scarlett so that just compounds my weariness with it 🙁 100EL has been great for that letter sounds learning and we will stick at it on our current once a week ish basis til we eventually get all the way with it – just wish something a bit more inspirational to get him over the next step with accessible to him.

When he got bored of Bear and Penguin I refused to load any more games onto my laptop so we looked at the nick junior website and he played a few of the games on there – his numbers are getting really good actually – i ordered a dot to dot book from the book people last night (along with a couple of other things 🙂 ) which I think he will really enjoy so I’m less stressed about maths and numbers atm anyway. There were a couple of good games on the site including one about the alphabet of ‘face’ which involved clicking on a letter and face acting out something beginning with it, so that was good.

I’ve been pondering on what Davies’ skills and things he enjoys are actually (lots of time to think when sitting on the floor next to one child playing zoombinis with the other asleep on your lap!). He is a total sponge when it comes to learning anything and everything about something which interests him – a case in point being dinosaurs, or certain stories which grasp his imagination (I printed off the bits that Sarah linked to about the very hungry caterpillar and he LOVED them and played with it for ages), his memory and imagination is amazing – he plays made up games, tells stories and recreates films he loves for hours (quite theatrically actually!), his thought processes are awesome, the way he processes information, constructs an argument or point of view are impressive and he articulates himself so well (today he said to me when I had been out in the garden putting some washing out ‘I have just checked Scarlett and she is still fast asleep. Now, I can’t seem to get the TV to work’ – his phrases and ways of speaking can be so gentlemanly and old fashioned – he is such a showman!) and he is quite artistic too.

I think perhaps I need to find some sort of inspiring project for him which uses these skills and see if I can sneak in some reading as a result – a lapbook type thing perhaps with some models or similar to go along with it and maybe a poem or something to learn and recite or story to act out…. hmm will keep thinking on that when I am on cuddling on the sofa duty either in the middle of the night tonight or tomorrow!

Despite the self pitying slant of this post I am actually feeling quite upbeat generally, just very tired and ready for a break – oh and it’d be nice to have Ady out of the house for less than 12 hours a day too 🙁 but other than that I am feeling far more at peace than I have been for the last few weeks so that’s all good.