New year, new term

New Year’s Eve – lovely party, which we left rather later than planned having been seduced by the promise of sky lanterns at the time we should have been going home 🙂 They were worth it though! Thanks for a lovely time Em 🙂
We listened out for the seven pips at midnight (leap second!) but disappointingly Radio 4 (which we had thought our best hope of getting pips) elected to play the usual chimes of Big Ben instead 🙁 Lots of fireworks to watch as we drove along the quiet A14 though 🙂

We spent New Year’s Day with Rebecca and family, back from the States for a visit. As usual, a little time is not enough, but it’s good to have the chance to catch up a bit. Perhaps we’ll make it out there one day. Or maybe the University will come through with a fantastic job for Benedict 😉

I was preaching on Sunday 4th, so it was handy on Sat 3rd that there was a children’s Christmas party at the local Methodist church to which Bob was able to take J, K, L and A while I worked on the service. (Incidentally, I’m thinking I might start putting services in here, maybe tucked away a bit or something…) It was all age worship, so lots of props and activity. Seemed to go well, I think 😕

Monday 5th was CHEF sport, the first session of the year. The only way I managed to get the children up was by pointing out that there was snow (!) and that we could go and play in the park after the sports session if they wished. In the end the traffic was so bad that we missed half of K’s session, L decided that she’s not yet big enough to do sports (fair enough; she’ll do it when she’s five and stops Mummy milk, she said – one thing ending and another beginning 🙂 ) and J enjoyed his session until almost the end when the teacher (who treats the older group rather like Army recruits at times) made the losing team in some contest or other do burpees. J was so tired he stumbled out and burst into tears 🙁
We went to the park with a few other families and the children enjoyed playing in the snow, once we had established a few ground rules for all, including the boy who looked at me as though I was mad when I told him off for putting snow down BB’s back (really shoving it down inside her T-shirt!) – apparently that’s how they play with snow in his family, as his mum pointed out when I mentioned it to her. He was a bit put out when asked not to throw snowballs in people’s faces at point blank range too; a useful lesson in not taking family rules for granted, I guess.
Bob was giving blood in the evening, but somehow we hadn’t made an appointment for me (usually they get made together so one of us can go while the other childminds, then we switch over – the mobile donation unit comes to an industrial area 5 minutes’ walk from the house) and apparently you can’t make appointments on the day or donate without an appointment. The alternative date I was offered I can’t do, so I guess I’m going to miss out this time 😕

On Tuesday Big Alice came for the day and we had a nice day of not much. There was no CHEF swimming so we had thought about going to the local pool, but Alice was late and we had dental appointments in the afternoon so the children took Alice to the park instead, while I got an hour or so of assorted housework done. Dentist was fine. J needs to clean his teeth better (which we’ve been telling him for a while, but maybe he’ll listen to the dentist!) and the others are all great 🙂

Wednesday was Latin etc – the first one with added Puddle girls. It went very well, and J, K and L all agreed at the end that it had been more fun with the extra girls than without them, so that was good. There may be a little shaking down of groups, I think, as we now have a fast Latin group (F, J, J) and a rather slower group (M, A, C, SB and K) but the slower group is fairly spread… We’ll see! Merry brought lovely soft toy sewing stuff, which the younger ones enjoyed while the older ones were doing Science, and they were all very excited to make a spirometer and find out their lung capacity. We did pencil case contents in French and the non-fast Latin, non-younger science girls also did some interesting-sounding work with Gina and some handbells 🙂 It was quite hard to drag ourselves away at 1:30 to get to Baby Music. I’m looking forward to the sessions when we don’t have to but can fit in some afternoon fun too – maybe Art and French, or some playing in the field…
Baby Music was fun, but K was desperate to see what we were doing so asked the teacher if he could watch too and was instead invited to sit in the circle with us, which meant he could not help himself but just had to join in with great gusto!
No gymnastics yet, and no cubs, so an unusually leisurely Wednesday evening 🙂

Thursday 8th Tots and Nots should have been a Book Club week, but the older group organiser was ill, so it was actually quite a quiet session. Rebecca and co came along, which was lovely (Tots is where we met so it feels right to have them there!) but very hard to say goodbye at the end, knowing that we won’t see them for at least another 6 months 😥 We stayed very late in the end, getting useful things done. I like T & N sessions where we feel we’ve done okay by the families who come along for a toddler group but also managed to fit plenty in for the older children and added a bit of straightforward box ticking work for our own children too 😀

On Friday we had intended to go and see R and co, but they were busy so we postponed until 16th and had a catching up day at home instead. We got out all the crates of books and decided which workbooks the children will use this term and where we’re going to try to get to in them. Susan dropped Joy off (we’re dog-sitting for a week) in the middle of all this, so there was also lots of playing in the garden 🙂

Writing thank you letters has made me realise that while K is very willing his writing is still very unformed. We have done work on letter formation but not recently and he doesn’t seem to have translated that skill to actual writing. His preferred way of writing is to have the words written down for him first so that he can copy them, but watching him closely I realised that he is copying the letters almost like pictograms, so that they look right but they are produced in a fairly random way. The big goal for this term, therefore, is to be letter formation for K and L, because he needs to revise it before bad habits become too ingrained and she needs to learn it all anyway. J, meanwhile, is going to work on getting his cursive script going properly, because just a little work on it made him realise that it is not only neater but also faster 🙂
On Saturday I wrote out a plan for the week and we got cracking 🙂 We’re a bit behind on Singapore Maths, so the aim is to do 10 ex. in the course of the week, with a big catch up on Saturday if needed, ready to start a fresh week on Sunday. English will mostly revolve around letter formation/cursive. We looked at the week and where we can fit work sessions in (not many places) and when might be good times for Bed Ed instead, curling up to read SotW or similar because we’ve been out all morning and are too tired for anything else, for example. I’m determined that the automatic telly-turning-on that the children seem to have fallen into will stop!

Monday 12th was a busy day (not good for our work schedule!) with an animation workshop for the boys and a Police dog handlers talk for the girls (not gender specific, it just worked out that way!). We picked up J and E on the way (from a school where their parents were busy doing Plough Monday stuff) and then went to S’s house with assorted Lego bits. S’s dad had stepped into the breech when the planned animation workshop leader was unable to do it 🙂 Small groups worked with him and Lego doing storyboards and then lots of photos to be run into animation while the rest of the animators worked with magnetic pictures on a board (again taking photos to play in sequence), flick books and zoetropes. The littler ones just played and parents chatted or helped out until it was time to head off for the police dogs talk in a church hall in town.
We arrived at the same time as the policemen, which was great as the children got to see the dogs in their vans and to chat to the handlers a bit first. The session itself started with a quick run down of what the policeman was wearing and why. One of the mums asked how heavy it all was and was given the vest and accoutrements to wear so she could see for herself – general answer = a lot! We met two different dogs, the first a general purpose German shepherd, who was asked to attack the policeman who was not his handler (through a large padded sleeve, but it still looked slightly scary) and the second a completely soppy Labrador trained to sniff out explosives, who demonstrated his skills by finding test-tubes containing blotting paper which had been wrapped around plastic explosives. They’re trained not to touch what they find (thanks to the number of dogs killed by IRA booby-traps) but to sit and stare at it until the handler comes to investigate. This particular dog loves to play so has been trained using a ball, which he believes comes out of the wall near to the smell- the trainer was very careful not to let him see the ball before it bounced off the wall above his head! Afterwards the children queued up to pet the sniffer dog (but not the attack dog!) which he put up with very nobly for a while, before retreating under a table.
Back across town to pick up the boys, then we dropped J and E off at a different school (still Plough Monday stuff) and came home.

Swimming on Tuesday 13th was momentous enough to have a post of its own!

Wednesday was Latin etc again, this time with added smoking! Joy spent the morning in the garden, with occasional visits from children wanting to play with her. Had to dash off again to Baby Music, then back for Gymnastics, then a quick tea for J before Cubs – busy Wednesdays back with a vengeance!

Thursday 15th was Space Day at Tots and Nots 😀 One of our regular parents worked on the Phoenix mission and this was a follow-up talk to one he did a while ago about it. I think it went well (I was with the Tots so missed the talk itself) and apparently there were lots of interesting questions, like why didn’t they use windscreen wipers to keep the dust off the windscreen so they could see? There were some fun activities too, which kept the children busy, but again we managed to fit in some normals, so Gina and I were happy 🙂 I think this Tots and Nots might just work out 😉

On Friday 16th we finally managed to get down to Horsham to see friends we’ve somehow failed to meet up with multiple times. By the time we’d exercised the hound and everybody had got ready we were rather later leaving than we’d hoped, but that didn’t seem to matter when we got there and we were able to stay late enough to see all the children as they got in from school 😀 The Dartford toll has gone up though, which took us by surprise and meant we had enough change to get there but had to borrow from our friends to get back! Oh, and the headlights didn’t do anything when I turned them on, so we had to drive home on full beam 😯 Fortunately the car has a control which adjusts the full beam to be high or low so I managed to dip them enough not to dazzle everybody, I think. We didn’t see any accidents anyway…