Life is a Highway - it’s the journey, not the destination

was good, although I still had a fair old grumpy chops air to me Bonkers Sarah arrived shortly after I blogged, can’t believe it’s been a year since we saw them last. I do wonder where on earth time is going, so many times I double take at my friends kids and think ‘hang on they’re how old? Nah, that can’t be right. Oh yeah and M’s 6 and a half and Alex is nearly 5 and half. OMG - nooooooooo!’ Or words/thoughts to that effect Anyway, they arrived, chaos ensued, pizza was eaten, we tried to persuade Marcus to give Beavers a go since Dino does it, but still no, he’s not even bothered about going to the same one as Dino so it must be that he thinks it sounds a bit crap. I dunno, not worth pushing though (but I’ll still moan about it )

We walked round to the park after lunch and it was lovely to watch them all playing together, hiding in bushes and chasing each other. Just what childhood should consist of much more than it tends to these days imho. Nice to watch and the fresh air no doubt did them good, maybe M will have a growth spurt and catch up to Dino. Or maybe not.

James arrived home as the bonkers tribe dissappeared and the kids decided to go and play with some friends from our street, although it ended up not being nice play with the boy from across the road excluding Marcus and just playing with Alex. So, (and I was back to being grumpy again as I was getting tired) I got a bit angry with them and all told them to play together or not at all. Specifically I told Alex to not stand back and watch someone get excluded, esp her brother. Anyway they went off and played again and Marcus ended up in the house in tears as this boy was trying to trick him into going down his drain (?) and threatening that his dog would bite him. Obviously since Marcus has first hand experience of being bitten by a dog, this wasn’t a great thing to say to him. james actually said something to the boy (not sure what) when he went to fetch Marcus’s scooter. Why do they have to be so bloody rotten?

After tea Marcus and I sat down to have a read of this book on electricity which we picked up at the library purely as it said electricity on the front and not actually checking the content. It actually had quite a lot of experiments to do and some good explanations. We did a couple of experiments this evening, bending water and we tried to make a spark with a pan but that didn’t work so James showed them how to do it with the telly and a bit of tin foil. Thatw as pretty cool and they could def see the sparks, I also showed them the sparks on the gas hob from the ignition and basically we talked lots about it. It’s started Marcus thinking anyway as he keeps asking now how the electric made the water move, so more needed to explain the concept I think.

*edit* just checked our library catalogue online and my local library has 3 more of the series of 5, plus other libraries have the last one so that should keep us going in sciency things for a while!

Just before bed I found out the kids Reader Rabbit year 1 cd rom that I couldn’t get installed ages ago. tried again and it came up with the same error, but I just clicked a few random things and it ended up installing so I had a quick look at the types of games on it and of course the kids spotted me and wanted to have a go themselves. They can do most of it, but with my help, so definitely one that should improve some skills if they keep at it. We didn’t do it all so I promised more time on it tomorrow. Now I need to see if I can make the one zoombinis we have that doesn’t work do the same. Oh and I’ve bid on a Bear and Penguin cd rom as I seem to remember that being talked about by some people so fingers crossed I get that and that will be something else to add to the growing pile of stuff to do.

Feeling a bit better about the maths thing now, I think I’m gettin ghung up on it too much and need to just try and concentrate on bringing it into every day life much more than I have done so far. Hopefully add in games like we’ve done tonight and the odd work books and maybe we’ll get somewhere. I really mustn’t make it an issue and tbh one thing I’m a little worried about is Alex overtaking Marcus in a maths book. That will not do his confidence much good at all and I really doubt he’d use it as incentive to get better. Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

Oh and finished the evening with 2 stories from 5 true dog stories and managed to end on the one where the dog dies in it. So both kids gone to bed in tears. A succesful day all round methinks