Just a quickie to catch up!

We sat down at the beginning of Monday (albeit not the very beginning as we had a late start after a late night) and jotted down a list for the week, with booked activities planned in and then normals plotted around those. Then the children chose things they wanted to use to fill in the days, should there be any time left. It looks a bit busy, but I don’t suppose we’ll stick to it anyway, apart from the booked activities 😉

Monday was a fairly free day, apart from gymnastics for L and Beavers for K. Oh and then I remembered I had a BF peer support course meeting too. Still, we managed to get all the normals done – Maths, English, music practice of various flavours, lots of playing with Octons, a little time on the computer (Tutpup and games) – and still fit in lots of playing (there was a creche during my meeting, so the children all had an hour with nice adults on tap and a room full of toys 😉 ). I took K to Beavers, which was a nice (and unaccustomed) chance for a walk and chat by ourselves 🙂 and Bob read large parts of a KS2 science book with M and J.

Tuesday is our busy day, although I have now bitten the bullet and taken the children out of swimming, for this term at least, on the basis that the money we save will almost pay for Center Parcs in January (so we’ll just have to fit a whole term’s worth of swimming in there!) and the time we save will help me to keep my sanity and the children to keep a little more on top of normals without losing out on free time to just play and be 🙂 Normals took up most of the morning, but quite pleasantly, and interspersed with free time, watching Magic School Bus DVDs and cooking (as well as the tomatoes Bob mentioned we have loads of cooking apples to use up, some from Grandad’s garden and more from the Freecycler who picked up our old bed frame and gave us apples as a thank you 🙂 ). After lunch was violin, where the amount of practice all the children have put in showed, particularly M who looks set to catch up with J and L in a few weeks (even bearing in mind that L has had about 10 lessons and J only 5 or 6 that’s still good going!). On the way back we bought apples, pears and, at J’s request, runner beans from the stand we love outside someone’s house, so that kept the children going for a bit.
J and M have decided that they are happy to be left here while I do Gymnastics drop-off (which takes about 20 minutes) and M was very tired so he took himself off to bed for a bit while J watched Magic School Bus and played on the computer. Timing is really awkward for the older boys gym, as K finishes at 5:15 and the others start at 5:30 but don’t finish until 6:45, when we normally eat at 6. This week (and last) I ended up cooking for about 5 and then giving the older two a small portion to eat in the car on the way and then more when they got home. It sort of works, but it makes for an odd mealtime and a late night 😕

I’m going to have to start hassling M a bit more about piano, I think. He does huge amounts of violin with no prompting, but piano takes more reminding, and I need to keep an eye on the time or he doesn’t make it to the 30 minutes he’s supposed to do. It’s hard as he doesn’t have his own music so nothing familiar to practise, I guess. Perhaps we should get him to choose some music to work on and see if that helps…