One word? When seven would do…

Off to work for me this morning. Ady was at home with the children; it’s really making so much difference that arrangement, a complete win:win on all counts, not least regular time for Ady and the children together without me :).

I had a nice morning at work. There are four of us on a Wednesday morning, open for 3.5 hours and a good blend of staff with me and the library supervisor, a woman who is sweet enough but gives us plenty of scope for taking the piss out of her and the new starter; S. I had tea with S and we chatted about her little girl who is 2 and has cerebral palsy. She is really into the idea of HE but confessed that she has really struggled so far with motherhood and her daughters disability, feeling that she needs a lot of support and that she has not necessarily adapted well to it all. Her daughter has no mobility at all – she can roll about but not yet even crawl and she doesn’t drive so it is pushchair or nothing which she finds pretty limiting. She said she often feels judged on how her and her daughter are progressing and I was shocked to learn she has not found any sort of support of others in a similar position – I would have assumed Health Visitors / doctors would have put her in touch with support groups. She does have internet access so I showed her how to join yahoo and printed off a list of 15 UK based yahoo groups specifically for parents. friends and carers of children with CP. Hopefully she’ll take them home and get herself into the loop. I explained that for us HE had only seemed a real possibility once we’d found others doing it and that online communities and support were what had kept us going in the early days- and of course led to real life friends now, locally and nationally. She was really pleased and grateful so hopefully it will be a real first step for her.

Back at home among other things they had done a jigsaw puzzle of a pirate ship with Ady tasking them to find and count a list of various animals featured in the puzzle. When I got in they were watching Peter Pan with the subtitles on which I think was accidental but had Davies pointing words out and telling me what they said.

After lengthy cuddles with both children I got Davies to bring me one of the books he’d chosen to read for the summer reading game. He brought over Meg and Mog and with really, really minimal help (on words like cauldron where I helped with what sound the ‘au’ made and words like ‘brought’ which phonetically are never going to work) he read the whole thing. I was surprised at the words he knew straightaway as whole words, many of which are either from his DS or Xbox. He worked through it by spelling out each word in a sentence and then going back and reading the sentence with feeling. I know this is something of a milestone really as although he has been technically able to read for quite some time inasmuch as if I sat him down with a page of writing he would eventually decode it this was reading proper with acknowledgement of the story. It was still slow, he still hit 2 points where he would have happily decided he’d had enough and I was careful not to insist he finished it but to remind him how fab he’d feel if he got to the end and read a Whole Book :). I doubt this is about to be any sort of huge turning point but my key hope is something along the lines of ‘they can if they want to’ for the children and I think we’ve probably hit that point with D and reading :).

Scarlett listened for a while and then got bored and wandered off to play with the chickens. She came in very excited to report that one of the two remaining eggs (she’s kicked the others out) under the broody hen was pipping (Pipping is when the first cracks appear in the egg as the chick starts to hatch out). Throughtout the afternoon I refereed a big old fight between our two hens. The one who has already hatched chicks, one of which she still has following her about everywhere had suddenly decided that actually she’d quite like to hatch these eggs and have the hens for herself. The poor broody hen who is knackered from sitting and being broody for weeks was getting a real pasting from her and the eggs were being nicked from each other and rolled about every few minutes with both of them ‘helping’ the pipping chick by pecking bits of the egg off. The poor chick (already hatched one) was utterly confused about who was his mother now and just kept following the eggs and scrambling underneath whichever one had them at the time.

Ady chatted to someone at work who suggested we needed to deal with it before the egg fully hatched as whoever the new chick saw first would become it’s mother and we could end up with a dead chick if the hens continued to squabble over it not to mention the reaction of the older chick. Eventually Davies and I chased out the hen with the chick and left the broody hen in peace with her hatching chick and one remaining egg that both hens seem convinced is going to hatch too. By the time we put them all to bed tonight it was fully hatched and seems fine. So we now have our 3 hens and 3 cockerels chicks who will be all mixed up soon when 2 of the roos get rehomed next week, our hen with the middle sized chick and our hen with one or maybe two brand new chicks. I’ve said it before – they really deserve a scriptwriter or a blog of their own, the politics are so indepth in that coop!

All that egg-sitement over with the children and I settled down with Where’s Wally which was one of Tarly’s choices of books for the summer reading game. We had a Where’s Wally fest last year but she is back into it again. She is at a bit of a pre-reading milestone too and suddenly seems to know most of the letter sounds despite noone ever teaching her them. She is doing lots of deconstructing words and tonight was asking me things like ‘I know ‘No’ has an ‘o’in it but what other letters are there?’ I said ‘N, like N for Nic, or naughty or nonsense’ and she came back with a few other n words too. Later still I found her lying in bed with a book moving her finger under the words and deciding what they said. She wasn’t right as she was working from memory, the pictures and her own rather active imagination rather than any adhesion to what the words actually were but again it’s the start of the journey.

I did some taking badges off and sewing them back on to other jumpers, gathered up all their uniforms and plaited Scarlett’s hair ready for Badgers while they had some DS time. Then we headed off to Badgers. Ady managed to join us there in plenty of time for the presentation. We looked at the ‘work’ they’d done this term which for Davies and Scarlett doing ‘creative badger’ including making picture frames, painting pebbles, making kites, painting bandanas, a collaborative hand and foot printing collage, sewing a glove puppet and weaving paper. Both of their efforts were lovely in everything, they’ve really enjoyed this term. Scarlett has made firm friends with a new little girl too.

Scarlett was as rubbish as ever at standing on parade doing the full range of ‘little kid at nativity play’ stunts including fingers up her nose, down her skirt, showing her pants, sitting down in the middle., waving frantically to us, sighing midway during someone’s speech, and pirouetting regularly when the mood took her :roll:. She does make everyone smile though and my frantic gestures of ‘calm down’ ‘be quiet’ ‘be sensible’ and ‘get your bloody finger out of your nose’ probably look much the same to her as she does to us 😆 It all seems to be tolerated in good humour though. They were both presented with their Creative Badger badges and certificates and then Ady brought them home while I nipped to Sainsburys for various bits to bring camping to tide us over til Friday when we find a supermarket.

Unfortunately Ady didn’t have any keys so although he was able to start sorting the chickens into new accomodation to deal with the fox, chicken, grain type situation we have with all the various aged bantams and who will and won’t attack each other then children were not able to get themselves ready for bed. They did when I got home though and aside from packing clothes and actually loading up the car we have everything dug out and assembled ready to be packed for camping. 🙂