Wintery Precious Moments (January: Week Three)

Another funny ol’ week.  I’m not sure if it’s the infections, the exams or the number of birthdays we’ve been celebrating, but none of us have settled into school like we usually do.

We ended last week with a family games night.  You might remember that one of my goals was to have a family games night once every two weeks.  This was our first of the year:

We had lots of fun, and hopefully this will be the first of many.  I kind of organised this one, so Lillie will be organising our next one, then Charlotte…and so forth.  This will give the nights some variety.  I really want to get Pictionary because I think we would have lots of fun with drawing pictures 🙂

Over the weekend we were all helping out at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party.  I was on set up with the girls, and Gary, Thomas and the girls were on set down after the party.  None of them got to bed until about one in the morning.  Everyone started off the week with low energy and tiredness.

Lillie came down with another nasty cold during the Sunday.  We separated her from the rest of the family, and banished her to her room.  She hated being apart from her twin, but I couldn’t risk Charlotte coming down with anything before her last exam, which was on the Wednesday.

Sunday night, Lillie had such bad pain in the left side of her face and ear that she woke Gary and I crying.  We sorted her out with hot water bottles and medicine.  By morning she had a small bleed out of her ear which was still causing her a great deal of pain.  We took her to the doctors and she was given antibiotics.

Tuesday night Charlotte was awake all night, anxious that the alarm wouldn’t go off and wake her in time for her 9am exam.  She’s never been anxious about exams before.  Anyway, it did wake her and we arrived at school a good hour before her exam was to start 🙂  I think she felt the exam went well.  She had worked really hard on the poetry anthology, so she was fairly confident about the poetry part.  The unseen prose was critiquing a horror story.  Her favourite kind of story!  She was in her element 🙂

Wednesday afternoon, we started back at Manna, the Christian performing arts group we are involved in. It was fantastic for the older children to be back. Lillie unfortunately had to miss it. She stayed back home on her own 🙁

Wednesday evening, Charlotte suddenly went quiet with exhaustion.  She was just so tired from all the hard work, the stress of the exams and being separated from her twin.  I made the executive decision to take the rest of the week off school.  Thomas was feeling drained, as was Lillie.  I’m not sure if we were all slightly under the weather.  That night I fell asleep whilst watching Friends.  That is unheard of!  I literally never fall asleep in front of the TV.

Thursday (as decided) we took the day off.  B(6) and I went to bed and snuggled for the afternoon.  By Friday morning we were all feeling a bit more ourselves.  It was Granny’s birthday, and we wanted to surprise her with lunch and cake.  I woke to Thomas cleaning the living room with the little ones.  I am so grateful for children who do not need to be told what they need to do.  They see the need and just go ahead and do it.  I left the older girls to sleep in for a while but they soon joined us.  We managed to get the house clean(ish) before Granny came round at twelve.  We even squeezed in a visit from friends 🙂

Mum loves a simple spaghetti with tomato sauce, so that is what we cooked, using fresh spaghetti (no, I didn’t make it myself!).  It was a success and hopefully Granny felt loved and cherished.

I shall leave you now with an image I never thought I would live to see:  Gary in an apron, cooking dinner!  We are a family of seven and we now choose one main meal each week to cook and serve to the rest of the family.  This was Gary’s night.  He was cooking chicken in a mushroom sauce served with rice and peas:

It was delish!  Thomas cooked a roast on Monday and did a fine job.  Charlotte did baked tortillas, something we have never had as a family.  B(6) did a vegetable stir fry with pasta, whilst A(9) cooked pasta, pesto and sundried tomatoes.  It was all very tasty, and a brilliant way to spread the work a bit more.

We have a dentist appointment to attend this afternoon, and another early night. Tomorrow we are filling the skip with all the rubbish from the building work done to our house in September. The skip was our Christmas present from Mum. Good and practical! Hopefully it will fit in all the rubbish, and our garden will return somewhat to normality over the weekend.

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!