Author Archives: Daddybean

Getting on with the reading then…..

Resding the Grauniad

Sidebar Princesses

This piccies just popped up in the sidebar. I love it, a gaggle of princesses/fairies from our first Muddlepuddle Camp – Melrose 2005.

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Wikipedia meme – Chris

Passed on From Making it Up among other places. Type your birth day and date only into wikipedia
From February 24th

3 Events?

1582Pope Gregory XIII announces the Gregorian calendar.

1831 – The Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek, the first removal treaty in accordance with the Indian Removal Act, is proclaimed. The Choctaws in Mississippi cede land east of the river in exchange for payment and land in the West.

1938 – A nylon-bristle toothbrush becomes the first commercial product (DuPont) to be made with nylon yarn.

2 Births

1304Ibn Battuta, explorer

1786Wilhelm Grimm, German philologist and folklorist (d. 1859)

1 Death

1810Henry Cavendish, English scientist (b. 1756)

Holiday or Observance?

Dragobete in Romania.

Problem with Birth and deaths is that the lists in more recent dates is dominated by Americans.

‘Well, that’s smelly bonfire…’

is what I was thinking as I closed the doors and windows open downstairs. There was a little bit of smoke drifting across the back garden, with a bit of? ‘burning rubber’ smell to it. About 10 or so minutes later, I remembered that the some upstairs windows were open, went up to close them and noticed the smoke was coming from ttowards the front of the house, along with a couple of popping/cracking noises.

It turned out to be this across the road from us:

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Realized that our car was parked on the road almost opposite, so although I thought it’d be ok, I got it back on the drive pronto.

Soon put out by the firebrigade off course:

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From what I gather so far – I’ll probably get the full story in the bakers tomorrow, the occupants (an elderly couple by the looks of it) were just driving along and it caught fire.

A bit dramatic for round here.

ummm

Yesterday,  was library day, but before that managed to be organised enough to have children dressed, breakfasted etc. in time to sit down and start on the Getty and Dubay handwriting book B. So did that and then checked up on what books we had out, found most of them, decided which ones to take back, which ones to keep or renew, got grumpy as one card wasn’t with the other two. And as usual just about made it on time for storytime. Which I keep waiting for SB to decide she is bored with, seeing as it’s aimed at under fves, isn’t really that well attended usually, and most of those going or 2-3 yo.

But she likes it, and as it’s round the corner, we keep going. BB was rather cute, she has worked out she can carry her book bag by sliding it up her arm to her shoulder – rather than just dragging it along the ground. So she proudly walked along, going on about carrying her books.

For the first time as well really, BB found herself some books she wanted to take home but it did involve herremoving rather a lot of the books from the shelves/boxes and piling them up. Found a nice one about ‘xray book of abcient buildings’ and one about rivers that has some practical project ideas, which we may have a go at some – though some are rather complicated. Sb had an eclectic collection – including 2 board books for toddlers (why?) and a Rainbow Faries or Jewel Faries or whatever they are called book.  She’s seen them before at other peoples houses, but not read one before. But it looks like she will manage it, so I guess it might start a bit of a ‘thing’.

So, home, to peruse  a few books and have lunch. after lunch BB got increasling grumpy, and annoying towards SB,  when we sat down on the sofa, she clambered about on me grumping for  bit and then fell asleep pretty rapidly sort of dangling off me. Well she had been up until about midnight the night before.

Afternoon passed with SB doing a bit more maths from MPH 1B, we are slowly approaching the end, but never seem to quite get there. We went into the garden for a while,  I moslty hacked back a lot of the very overgrown fig tree that gets in the way once it comes into leaf and shades the Greenhouse to much. The hacking is the easy bit, removing the piles of hacked stuff is the tedious bit. Sb was sort of helping, but mostly clambering about on the swings.

BB woke up, we sat for a bit in the sun with a book reading with SB, till she was perky enough, i finished up clearing up, and then came in to cook, whilst they played around for a bit more outside. They came in, we tidied the playroom and  they watched a bit of Bob the Builder which is BB’s real TV obsession until tea was ready.  After dinner and gettign ready for bed we all sat down on the sofa and watched a bit of one of the ‘Natural history of the British Isles’ DVDs. We must have got pretty near to the end, but we all three had dozed off, when Helen got back from work about 20 minutes later (it was late- about 8.30pm) we were al snoozing away- ah well that was an easy single handed bedtime. :-)  So me and Helen settled down to watch the season finale of Battlestar Galactica.

H did do  blog for today, but then lost it, so it’ll have to wait for another time.

Well Actually….

I sit down to blog today, and find H has reprised it already ….. Well that’s me for the week ;-)

Additons:

needed to send Grandad J’s birthdays cards off today, SB decided she had something to finish on it, so spent more time faffing about with stickers, meaning we left later to go to Nanna and Grandad F’s than intended. And because it was encrusted with great big fluffy pom-poms they? needed to go as a large letter, so a quick trip to the post office was needed. Well, at least I realised – unlike some people :-)

Noticed my Dad has some weird? thing on his eye – some sort of? swelling under the bottom lid – really quite big – GP had no idea really – not seen anything like it (nor did the other doc there), so he is off to the Eye hospital in the morning. hope it’s nothing to major.

Trauma of the Day? – finding out Little toe Radio Show has gone, not listened to it for a couple of weeks, but Stringbean has really loved it. Went to find it? (on listen again on the BBC website), but it seems to be no more :-)

There is something called Cbeebies Radio, but we tried a bit of that, but first impressions weren’t good – a number of old pop songs from years ago which seemed rather odd, I think there was a story, but amongst the songs and the chatter and drivel . In fact my initial impression was sort of like ‘radio drivel – aka most radio nowadays’ for littlies. Big toe has? into Big toe Books’, so may give that a go. not sure if she won’t find the stories a little old for her, though. Anyway, grump, grump.

just perfect with raspberries ;?)

“We are tidying, we are tidying..”

Could do with the Mice? from Bagpuss, to sing songs and help us out since that is what we have been mostly doing this week. in particular, as mentioned by Helen, tidying, and reorganising the playroom, which seemed to be disappearing under piles of ‘stuff’, boxes etc. I seemed to have moved most of the books around, organised things to be more accessible. There are now some shelves just for ‘Butterbean’ toys rather than being thrown in a box, which means she does actually now play with them. Also been tidying other places, like spending about 2 hours other day, just putting away piles of clean washing, sorting out the cupboards in the girl’s room – which have loads of space which was mostly filled up with boxes/bags of outgrown/waiting to be grown into clothes.
Basically, things got so messy and disorganised that it’s hindering getting on doing educational stuff, either you can’t find things, or you can’t face getting something out and adding to the chaos, or it just sits there praying on your brain as it needs doing or you end up doing a bit of sorting out or tidying, instead of doing stuff with the kids, but not enough to make an impact – it needed a concerted effort. Yes I know we have plenty of space and storage space, but that just means you can put off things for longer…..

So still things to do, but much improved.

So abandoned attempts to do much ed stuff really, some maths, reading here and there about this and that. As part of the maths stuff on money, SB did a shop the other day, priced up somethings, including putting barcodes on them,

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then I had to buy things and she gave me the change. Realized when she had done it that we haven’t really done decimal addition or subtraction yet which we needed to do to calculate things. We could have done it all in pence, but SB decided she wanted to use the toy till, which has a calculator bit on it, to do them, so she did that, and I explained what the ‘point’ was – or tried to anyway

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Today, so far, SB gave me a ballet lesson, SB and BB have made mothers day cards, my parents popped round this morning, and Helen has baked/cooked, assisted in various ways. BB is a real Bob the Builder fan, so to add to the couple of well played videos we have I’ve downloaded a couple BTB things so they’ve been watching some odd thing where they all go off on some sort of Cowboy holiday in America.

Ahh, Helen has been cooking with SB, she has just come in to say the ‘kitchen is all mine’ , which is rather ominous.

I hate kitchens, no sooner do you get it cleaned and tidy, you blink and it’s a disaster zone again. I want two kitchens, one we use and spends most of it’s time messy, the other would be just for going in and enjoying the pleasure of sitting in a nice clean and tidy kitchen. No cooking, or children allowed ;-)

At last.

Flickr have launched a way to group/organise your sets.

Which will give H something more to fiddle with :-)

Writing in my head.

 

Stringbean was talking about doing mental arithmetic last night. she desicrbed the process  as ‘Writing in my head’. Which I rather liked.