Monday – Bob’s parents were still here, but L went to preschool nevertheless – she’s going to be a patchy enough attender as it is and they’re being very patient with us and our “every other Monday, most Tuesdays, but finishing early, two or three Wednesdays a month, never on a Thursday, nearly every other Friday” 😆
Gran-gran and K finished planting his bit of the front garden (J’s was done on Sunday) and then we had snack and K did his English with Grandad for a change while J and I did Maths and English. A and I collected L a bit early so she would have time to do her bit of planting with Gran-gran too, but got waylaid by the preschool head who wanted to introduce herself to me (she’s only met Bob before) and then by meeting up with a friend on the way out. Still, that gave Gran-gran a chance to listen to the end of a programme she was getting into on the radio 😉
PIL left before noon and the children and I had an early lunch, since they were all starving, apparently, then they played outside, making the most of the sun, while I pottered and did laundry, also making the most of the sun 🙂
Piano and recorder practice happened somewhere along the line, but we never did get round to SotW…
Oh, and we had red cabbage for tea – more on that later!
Tuesday – preschool again for L; Maths and English for the boys, along with some schools tv while I gathered together all the bits and pieces we needed for swimming, then we loaded up the car, picked up L on the way and sat on the A14 wondering if we would make it in time 😡 We did, just, handily spotting another CHEF mum in the car park who was able to take the boys in to get ready for their lesson while the girls and I trailed behind with all the stuff 🙂 A wore her new (to us) baby wetsuit, so didn’t go blue this week, despite the water in the toddler pool being rather cooler than was pleasant (would have been pleasant? weird tense stuff there!) and the boys both seemed a bit more relaxed in the water than last time. K is really getting into swimming and starting to really enjoy it; J has a long way to go and is still really quite uncertain about being there at all – strange to think that he’s the one who got to go to all the mother and baby sessions and has spent by far the most time in the pool, yet L, who has done least, is the most confident and closest to swimming independently. The time in the pool after their lesson is in some ways more valuable than the lesson itself as they get to relax and have fun in a very safe environment (J can sit on the bottom, never mind standing 😆 ) with other children and adults they know well. So far there have been enough spare adults around for me to be able to stay with my non-regulation four children (only allowed two per adult) and we have all valued the time – I get to chat to other parents too 😀
Back at home piano, recorder and even a little Music Theory happened, but still no SotW.
Wednesday – Latin etc. The children started off with making window/seed gardens – seeds and beans wrapped in damp cotton wool balls and then sealed into plastic bags (baggies, I guess, since the mum supervising all this is American 😉 ) to be left on a windowsill to sprout. Then I took most of them through to the annexe to do Latin (Minimus, family trees, birthday invitations and a fair bit of more or less topical chat) before heading back to top-up with toast, then back to the annexe to have fun with purple indicator water thanks to our red cabbage earlier this week (starting off with vinegar to make it go red and bicarb to make it go green, then testing a few household substances to see if they were acid, alkali or neutral) and a clay volcano filled with bicarb and red food colouring ready for vinegar to be dripped into the crater with spectacular results 😎 At one point it felt rather like the Roman circus: a circle of children screaming “More! More!” as I held the vinegar bottle above the volcano :mexicanwave: The noise was too much for A, who screamed until removed from the room and then screamed because she could no longer see me 🙁 so we exploited the Roman circus idea and had the children put their thumbs up or down to determine the fate of the volcano – and of the people living in its foothills (Pompeii anyone?) – that was a bit quieter!
Gina and hers had to dash off at this point, and Mrs Haricot needed to get to work, but the remaining children continued the volcano fizz and cabbage water experimentation by themselves (eek at the mess – thank goodness for a separate annexe kitchen 😀 ) and had to be pretty much dragged away for lunch. All but the Beans had to leave after lunch, but Mr Haricot came along to replace his Mrs and there was much playing (fairly equally divided between the PC and the garden/Wendy house) and chatting until it was time for them to leave for Rainbows. Then followed an earlyish tea and the boys were off to Badgers, leaving A, L and me to do some girlie bonding, culminating in curling up together to watch Top Gear – okay, so not exactly girlie, but we liked seeing Jeremy Clarkson’s superboat beaten by a bike 😆
Thursday – parents and tots; it was very quiet so we decided the time had come to do some more fort painting (a freecycled ELC wooden fort in need of restoration has been sitting half-painted in the church kitchen for months now) and by the time we’d got started on that Anne had arrived with her two DDs and Susan with her K so the kitchen floor became a hive of activity – and grey paint 😯 Susan had baskets of pottery in need of labelling for a fair, so the adults helped with that, then the children decided that looked like even more fun than painting and joined in too and soon we were all finding families of game pieces, checking, counting and price-labelling them – is that Business Studies or CDT? It was all so engrossing that snack time was rather late, but since it was a solely CHEF group that day (hope we haven’t frightened the “real” parents and tots away 😮 ) nobody minded.
Once Susan was safely on her way with beautifully sorted and labelled pieces to drop off at the potters’ fair Anne brought out an activity she had planned, which involved the children lying down on large pieces of paper and drawing round one another (biology, art and cooperation – cool!) and then using some anatomical printouts to help them draw in vital organs such as heart, lungs, and in K’s case bowels 🙄
On the way home we attempted some shopping for Friday Club chromatography things, but found no blotting paper 🙁 and only brown coffee filters 🙁 Came home and found lots of nice cabbage water, chromatography and colour mixing links, which I emailed to Bob to print out for me, since our home printer is somewhat temperamental.
Friday – Friday Club 🙂 After prayer, music (lots of fun singing old favourite songs and nursery rhymes), snack and outside play we did some colourful science: cabbage water again, paper chromatography (brown filter papers worked, but white would be better) using felt-tip pens, colour wheels and hand-prints to show primary and secondary colours… Fabulous to see so many children of such varying ages all engrossed in what they were doing and learning, with even the oldest having fun with hand prints and the youngest getting something from the chromatography 
Lunch together, then a dash across town to get to French and Music. I’ve been researching slings to wear with hijab for another CHEF mum; she likes the wraps she’s tried but is still struggling to get it consistently comfortable so I’m negotiating trading a carrier I don’t use often for a Chunei, which I’ve never tried but am told works well with hijab. Anyway, for now we did another quick demo and she’s borrowed a longer Didy (my finger slipped on Bigmama’s site – half-price Didy too good to miss 😳 ) to see if the extra length helps her feel more confident.
Big Alice was free today and wanted to meet up, but because we were so busy the soonest feasible time was late afternoon, so we got back and toasted scones just in time for her and for Bob to eat them 😆 then had a relaxed evening, late tea and lots of stories for the children.
Saturday – SotW finally happened! J was given a choice of unfinished catch-up tasks and opted for that, so the children all curled up together with Daddy and Bob learned lots about the crusades 😉
This afternoon we finally managed to get to the pet shop and buy new filters for the fish tank, as well as a couple of fake plants and a sandcastle which are now brightening up the hitherto rather dull tank. Then we had fun trying to catch the fish so we could empty out the old water and scrub the gravel…
