14/01: Whoops! So much for daily updates...
Wow, has it been a week already?
Tuesday was pretty much the same as Monday, with more games playing thrown in. I was comprehensively thrashed at Junior Monopoly (luck), Sorry! (luck) and Blokus (drat, she's spotted my tactic). I'm tempted to get Carcassonne as I think she might be able to grasp that.
Wednesday and Thursday were in much the same vein, with the added excitement of morning swimming lessons. Jess got her Float Test and Goldfish ribbons just before Christmas, and has moved up to the Dolphin class, so is working on proper stroke technique now. Once I'd got over the shock of dragging ourselves out of the house early, I started to see some of the benefits not being at school. When we used to go to swimming lessons after school, there would be between 30 and 40 children in the pool. Early morning session? Between 4 and 6 children. Plus Emma gets the run of the observation room without me having to reprimand her for locking the other children out of the wendy house.
I did have a bit of a panic on Thursday when my computer started to exhibit some very odd behaviour - whizzing windows to the side of the screen then back again, cursor all over the place, stock quotes and weather reports popping up and down - which was resolved when I found Emma driving the wireless Mighty Mouse round the wooden railway track in the next room.
On Friday I decided we all needed to get out of the house for some fresh air so we went down to Brazos Bend State Park for some alligator spotting. We visited the nature centre, and had a close up encounter with a tarantula there. Emma was quite interested and even volunteered to touch it, at which point I thought that Jess would pass out from the sheer terror of it all. She has a very instinctive fear of spiders that we first saw when she was very young on a trip to @Bristol. Spider skin? No reaction. Live but motionless spider? Petrified. Ah well. There was also a tank of baby alligators, and numerous bits of turtle / armadillo / snakeskin / wasps nest / alligator jaw / crawfish to handle. Absolutely fascinating, and led to some good questions as well. The Ranger we spoke to made the fatal mistake of telling Jess that he'd been to London once, which of course was her cue to launch into her lecture series on the plague / fire of London / blitz. Actually, I was secretly rather impressed by how much she knew, and the Ranger was good enough to ask her lots of questions, which she thoroughly enjoyed answering.
You can find acorns the size of eggs at Brazos Bend. Well, it is Texas, after all.
Once we'd finished there we walked round the lake to see what we could see - Hurricane Ike knocked a lot of the older trees down and it seems to have changed the lake dynamics a bit. The first lake was teeming with alligators, though they were staying in the water rather than draped across the footpath in their usual fashion. We saw fewer on the main lake, but there were plenty of turtles around, and we did get to see a few gators swimming about. Usually they are content to sunbath, but it wasn't a particularly warm day.
The weekend was mostly just exhausting - with Geoff having been since before the New Year I was in desperate need of a lie in (which means getting up at around 7:30am in this house) but alas my children had other ideas. Jess has decided that she wants to save up for a Lego pirate ship, and so we came up with a list of things she can do to earn some money. She can earn a quarter for stripping all the beds (mean or what), so she'll only have to do that another 399 times until she has enough cash.
Yesterday Jess started the first of her Everyday swim classes, which means that every week day for the next two weeks we will be arriving at the swimming club bright eyed (yeah, right) at 9:30am. I know from experience that the novelty of this wears off for the parent somewhere around Thursday of the first week. However, the gain is worth the pain, and because Jess's class is at a time when most kids her age are in school, she ends up getting a private lesson every day. After swimming we got some more handwriting done - I really thought she may have started to revolt by now, with the introduction of the cursive s, but she's sticking with it and still (mostly) says she enjoys it. She's started to write her name in cursive without any prompting, and I think it really looks pretty good for someone who only turned 5 a couple of weeks ago. The middle of the day got a bit lost, though we did manage to bake a fruit cake (which is edible, but looks more like a giant rock cake than a fruit cake) and did some more reading. She spent some time on Education City, though I think we still haven't quite sorted out the right level there. Certainly I need to move her up from Reception level for literacy, and probably for maths as well.
Emma came up with an all new distraction technique - let's just saying that having to follow little brown footprints around the house to find the nappy-less one year old doesn't rate as my favourite activity. Luckily she confined herself to downstairs, which is almost all hard floors. I have no idea how we coped before we moved to America and discovered Clorox wipes.
Today we were more organised and managed to fit in some handwriting practice before swimming. After swimming we dashed home and Jess managed to work through another chapter of Singapore Maths while Emma was asleep. She also polished of some more Peter and Jane, though this book didn't feature Peter and Jane at all. Thankfully we've finally gone beyond Peter climbing trees, and onto the 'adventure' books. Given her enthusiasm for 10b: Adventure at the Castle, I may need to try and track down some Famous Five books. We're also finishing off the Hooked on Phonics 2nd grade box - the books are very easy for her to read now, but I think we are getting some value from seeing the phoneme blends so explicitly. There's also been a lot of Magic Faraway Tree reading going on, and I think the penny has finally dropped that she CAN read books that don't have pictures on every page. She still doesn't read silently, but I think that will come soon. I haven't said anything about it, so it may not even have dawned on her NOT to read out loud yet.
By the time Emma woke up we were all famished, so dashed off to McNasties for a junk food treat and to let off some energy. I must remember to take my iPod touch next time and take advantage of the free wi-fi while my children terrorise play with the other kids. Jess made friends with some 7 year old Vietnamese triplets who didn't speak a word of English, though that didn't seem to matter as they all understood the International Language of Kid. I did giggle when I overheard another child telling them that they would all have to be on the 'B team', to which Jess nonchalantly replied over her shoulder that that was OK as everyone knows that B stands for Brilliant anyway.
When the children were worn out (and Emma's incessant begging for food from the other tables had become too embarrassing to bear any longer) we headed back and polished off a maths facts sheet, and the girls did some drawing until our return trip to the bike shop. This time they had the size we needed, in the colour that Jess desired, so she came home with a new bike (once we'd persuaded her to part with it for long enough for me to load it into the car). It only has a coaster brake, so we'll be taking it back in a few days to have a pull brake fitted when it arrives in the store. The new bike is a huge improvement on the old one, which was heavier than mine, and, well, just cheap and rubbish and built for people with very odd body geometry indeed. I have a feeling it may have been made out of imploded planet.
Tuesday was pretty much the same as Monday, with more games playing thrown in. I was comprehensively thrashed at Junior Monopoly (luck), Sorry! (luck) and Blokus (drat, she's spotted my tactic). I'm tempted to get Carcassonne as I think she might be able to grasp that.
Wednesday and Thursday were in much the same vein, with the added excitement of morning swimming lessons. Jess got her Float Test and Goldfish ribbons just before Christmas, and has moved up to the Dolphin class, so is working on proper stroke technique now. Once I'd got over the shock of dragging ourselves out of the house early, I started to see some of the benefits not being at school. When we used to go to swimming lessons after school, there would be between 30 and 40 children in the pool. Early morning session? Between 4 and 6 children. Plus Emma gets the run of the observation room without me having to reprimand her for locking the other children out of the wendy house.
I did have a bit of a panic on Thursday when my computer started to exhibit some very odd behaviour - whizzing windows to the side of the screen then back again, cursor all over the place, stock quotes and weather reports popping up and down - which was resolved when I found Emma driving the wireless Mighty Mouse round the wooden railway track in the next room.
On Friday I decided we all needed to get out of the house for some fresh air so we went down to Brazos Bend State Park for some alligator spotting. We visited the nature centre, and had a close up encounter with a tarantula there. Emma was quite interested and even volunteered to touch it, at which point I thought that Jess would pass out from the sheer terror of it all. She has a very instinctive fear of spiders that we first saw when she was very young on a trip to @Bristol. Spider skin? No reaction. Live but motionless spider? Petrified. Ah well. There was also a tank of baby alligators, and numerous bits of turtle / armadillo / snakeskin / wasps nest / alligator jaw / crawfish to handle. Absolutely fascinating, and led to some good questions as well. The Ranger we spoke to made the fatal mistake of telling Jess that he'd been to London once, which of course was her cue to launch into her lecture series on the plague / fire of London / blitz. Actually, I was secretly rather impressed by how much she knew, and the Ranger was good enough to ask her lots of questions, which she thoroughly enjoyed answering.
You can find acorns the size of eggs at Brazos Bend. Well, it is Texas, after all.
Once we'd finished there we walked round the lake to see what we could see - Hurricane Ike knocked a lot of the older trees down and it seems to have changed the lake dynamics a bit. The first lake was teeming with alligators, though they were staying in the water rather than draped across the footpath in their usual fashion. We saw fewer on the main lake, but there were plenty of turtles around, and we did get to see a few gators swimming about. Usually they are content to sunbath, but it wasn't a particularly warm day.
The weekend was mostly just exhausting - with Geoff having been since before the New Year I was in desperate need of a lie in (which means getting up at around 7:30am in this house) but alas my children had other ideas. Jess has decided that she wants to save up for a Lego pirate ship, and so we came up with a list of things she can do to earn some money. She can earn a quarter for stripping all the beds (mean or what), so she'll only have to do that another 399 times until she has enough cash.
Yesterday Jess started the first of her Everyday swim classes, which means that every week day for the next two weeks we will be arriving at the swimming club bright eyed (yeah, right) at 9:30am. I know from experience that the novelty of this wears off for the parent somewhere around Thursday of the first week. However, the gain is worth the pain, and because Jess's class is at a time when most kids her age are in school, she ends up getting a private lesson every day. After swimming we got some more handwriting done - I really thought she may have started to revolt by now, with the introduction of the cursive s, but she's sticking with it and still (mostly) says she enjoys it. She's started to write her name in cursive without any prompting, and I think it really looks pretty good for someone who only turned 5 a couple of weeks ago. The middle of the day got a bit lost, though we did manage to bake a fruit cake (which is edible, but looks more like a giant rock cake than a fruit cake) and did some more reading. She spent some time on Education City, though I think we still haven't quite sorted out the right level there. Certainly I need to move her up from Reception level for literacy, and probably for maths as well.
Emma came up with an all new distraction technique - let's just saying that having to follow little brown footprints around the house to find the nappy-less one year old doesn't rate as my favourite activity. Luckily she confined herself to downstairs, which is almost all hard floors. I have no idea how we coped before we moved to America and discovered Clorox wipes.
Today we were more organised and managed to fit in some handwriting practice before swimming. After swimming we dashed home and Jess managed to work through another chapter of Singapore Maths while Emma was asleep. She also polished of some more Peter and Jane, though this book didn't feature Peter and Jane at all. Thankfully we've finally gone beyond Peter climbing trees, and onto the 'adventure' books. Given her enthusiasm for 10b: Adventure at the Castle, I may need to try and track down some Famous Five books. We're also finishing off the Hooked on Phonics 2nd grade box - the books are very easy for her to read now, but I think we are getting some value from seeing the phoneme blends so explicitly. There's also been a lot of Magic Faraway Tree reading going on, and I think the penny has finally dropped that she CAN read books that don't have pictures on every page. She still doesn't read silently, but I think that will come soon. I haven't said anything about it, so it may not even have dawned on her NOT to read out loud yet.
By the time Emma woke up we were all famished, so dashed off to McNasties for a junk food treat and to let off some energy. I must remember to take my iPod touch next time and take advantage of the free wi-fi while my children
When the children were worn out (and Emma's incessant begging for food from the other tables had become too embarrassing to bear any longer) we headed back and polished off a maths facts sheet, and the girls did some drawing until our return trip to the bike shop. This time they had the size we needed, in the colour that Jess desired, so she came home with a new bike (once we'd persuaded her to part with it for long enough for me to load it into the car). It only has a coaster brake, so we'll be taking it back in a few days to have a pull brake fitted when it arrives in the store. The new bike is a huge improvement on the old one, which was heavier than mine, and, well, just cheap and rubbish and built for people with very odd body geometry indeed. I have a feeling it may have been made out of imploded planet.
Dina wrote: