Before I write about today, I’d like to post some photos from yesterday. In England it was Father’s Day. Now last year we had taken Gary out for lunch and thoroughly regretted it after spending a lot of money on food which came late, was cold and the restaurant was so busy and noisy, none of us could enjoy it, least of all Gary. So this year we went out to our favourite Italian the week before, and had a wonderful time in relative quiet, with excellent food. So yesterday was spent quietly at home. Gary had to work in the morning, so once he got home at 9ish he was guided straight back to bed! The children allowed him to sleep until 130pm when he was woken for pressie opening, and lunch.
Becca had made him a really gorgeous card, and wrapped up some favourite sweeties:
Abigail had also made him a card, as well as a board game which they could play together:
The twins had bought him chocolate, and a couple of T-shirts:
One of the T-shirts said ‘Am I bothered?’ in big letters (a private joke between Lil and her dad!) and the other said the following:
He was delighted!
Meanwhile, the littles had been preparing to open their own restaurant, and with Lillie’s help they cooked Gary and I up a feast of dough balls served with garlic butter; chicken kievs, new potatoes and salad; and mint choc chip ice-cream for dessert.
Yummy!
Anyway, onto today! I felt like super-woman today. I was out of bed at 645 and walked into the village to grab some bananas, dog food and an early morning walk. Before I left, I woke the rest of the house. They were less than impressed! But I had a busy day planned and wanted to get a start as soon as I could. After a breakfast of oats, bananas, blueberries and nuts and seeds, we did chores and then I took the little ones to the park (see? Super Woman)
Our village has a fun thing going on at the moment. Someone has painted and varnished lots of pebbles and hidden them around the village. When you find one, you are meant to take a photo and then re-hide it somewhere else. My girls had quite the collection, which needed to be re-hid:
Which they did when we got to the park:
We didn’t have long at the park, but they managed to have at least one turn on everything. I am trying to get Becca out in the sunshine more, and tire her out physically so that her quality of sleep is better:
Back home, and I tried a latte made with almond milk. It was okay, but left a bitter taste in the mouth. I’m gonna try soya next 🙂
We were alternating a half an hour on school work and half an hour on home-making. The first half an hour, Charlotte did maths and Lillie got on with work for her GCSEs next year. The littles did their workbooks completing just one page of each: English, Word-building, Creative Writing, Social Studies, Science and Maths. Afterwards we all worked on the kitchen. I hope to be finished tomorrow, but think spring cleaning. We are going through every cupboard and drawer, washing everything, including the walls and ceiling:
The next half an hour saw the twins continuing with their schoolwork whilst I went over tables flash cards with the littles, followed by Latin vocab flash cards. Last week I had written out flash cards for the second chapter in the children’s Latin course, Minimus and also the second chapter of the GCSE course. It has taken over a week but it was well worth getting the girls familiar with the vocab first. We began reading the short stories in both books and the girls did so well!
I read out the lesson on King Solomon from the Mystery of History, and three lessons from Life of Fred: Goldfish. We then returned to the kitchen for half an hour:
Then we all had a half an hour off to relax.
Our next half an hour school was taken up by maths and GCSE subjects (twins) and some excellent Botany work (littles). We are really enjoying the Botany book, and the girls notebooks are filling up like a scrap book with loads of specimens stuck in. Anyway, today they girls dissected a flower:
It was very cleverly done in the textbook because the girls were instructed to a particular structure, given information about it and then told to remove it and stick it in their book:
I took photos of each part as well so I will print those out for them to stick in their notebooks under the actual specimen.
The dissection took two half hour sessions, so we left it half way to return to the kitchen and then break for lunch. After lunch we returned to the dissection. Once the girls had finished, they coloured a diagram of a dissected flower and labelled it:
After spending another half an hour on the kitchen, which was beginning to look fabulous, the older girls (who had finished their assigned work for the day) worked alongside their little sisters (partnering up) to create a plasticine model of a dissected flower:
There were lots of witty comments going around. I was in the bedroom nearby, hanging up clothes, and was giggling away at their antics the whole time! Here is Lillie and Becca’s flower:
And Charlotte and Abigail’s:
Fun times.
Becca traded in one of her Christmas vouchers for a milkshake with me, so we popped down to the local café (literally a ten second walk from our home) and enjoyed a happy half an hour just the two of us. On our return home, Gary, who had left for work at 330 this morning, was back from work and mowing our lawn. He jump started Thomas’ van and charged up his battery. He is exhausted and is now fed, bathed and tucked up in bed. He has the day off tomorrow, so he can look forward to a nice long lie in 🙂
It feels so good to have been away from the computer. Something I hope will happen more and more over the summer.
The models of dissected flowers look gorgeous. What a neat activity.