what are we watching??
we are enjoying a few programmes on i-player currently to watch with the girls. Human Planet, War Farm, Great British Bakeoff and Merlin. BB is also rather taken by Leonardo and SB by Danni’s house. however, we tend to pick up the odd dvd cheaply, so this week we have enjoyed the jurassic park trilogy – bit of a gorefest! one is scariest, but we enjoyed them all. Particualry BB, and our friend Big who was staying seemed to enjoy them too [will see what Jax feeds back!]. Tonight we are watching the mountain episode of human planet with the girls. excellent and gripping and both girls and parents learning from it of the marvels of our planet and humans ‘on the edge’ as it were.
DH and I are really enjoying Andrew Marr History of the world, who do you think you are and Neil Oliver Vikings [with QI and Bones as a bit of fluff 
] . We do tend to limit the tv time the girls have, a little bit of fluff on getting up or getting in from somewhere, and a shared thing in the eve, which we tend to talk about and comment on. then dh and i will watch something before we go to bed.
what are we reading?
DH and I are reading different books in the greg mandel series by peter hamilton. It is scifi, and i really like it, as does DH. You need to like the genre to like the books SB is loving a book from her book box – troubadour. her book box is book people and cheap books i come across and squirrel away, and have to be earnt – working hard on home ed, doing well in exam/grading, being a lovely sister etc etc. SHe recommends this book. BB is currently not reading a book. I try different styles, genres and push at age boundaries a bit [tho not too adult]
what are we playing?
bb is still playing a lot of roblox on the computer 
SB and Big have been playing wii winter olympics, and we have all including Big played board games, carcasonne, agricola, smallworld and giro galippo. very different games but all great fun
Our boy enjoyed Human Planet and has the book. We don’t limit TV at all and so there’s a lot of comedy in our kids’ diets but I still maintain they’ve both picked up loads from The Simpsons
we didn’t use to particularly Ali, and SB prob reasonably self regulating. BB likes order, the sameness and was getting stuck in a rut of watching the same progs/dvd and playing roblox pretty much all the time, and then not being able to think of anything else to do. we have a house of stuff, a garden of dens etc etc so felt that we needed to limit things so she had to make choices on how to spend her time, rather than defaulting. we enjoy comedy too, but obv in a horror phase! and both girls always love natural history type programmes.
lol Allie – I always joke that I should make a Simpson’s related curriculum! There was a point when we’d be learning about something and it would click and they’d say – ‘oh like in the Simpsons when…’ Seemed to happen daily!
I saw that Andrew Marr program advertised the other day and was thinking we should watch that