New Start

I have struggled with February, as I always do, but since chatting to Nicky on Sunday, I'm hoping to have turned a bit of a corner. The house is looking presentable due to my own variation of the FLYLady regime, and I have instilled a few gentle and subtle boundaries that the children have yet to detect but have responded well to!

For her science lesson this morning, I took Rose out for a walk with her I-Spy Trees book, and we managed 115 points which was pretty good as there are obviously only a few broadleaved trees with sufficiently distinctive bark or buds for Rose to be able to identify them at this leafless time of year:

The oak tree helpfully had some of last year's crop of acorns on the ground though so we could tick that one off. Amber has been having a go at The Times spelling bee, until Tristan came along and started showing off. Still, it made a change from them fighting over nothing :-D Rose and I did history this afternoon from Susan Wise-Bauer's magnificent The Story of the World and fortuitously we had cooked rice at lunchtime, which tied in nicely with activities about the Mauryan Empire of India. Tris is working his way through Key Stage 3 Science and GCSE Biology, Physics and Chemistry, and all the children are doing their handwriting practise every day. I spent my 15 minutes decluttering a corner and found a couple of good workbooks that have been missing for ages so that was a result. I just need to find Tristan's missing shoe now.

The friendship cake starter yielded a round of blueberry and apple muffins for breakfast, and the February fairisle socks have been completed! They went a bit wrong but my hand-knitted socks are certainly unique. Unique as in not like anything else, let alone the other sock in the pair. But! - I have made them myself and does it really matter if they aren't the same length? I want to finish the green Kidsilk Haze wrap so I might sit down this evening and do some, although it's Professor Iain Stewart tonight *swoon* with his programme about How to Grow a Planet so I won't be able to crochet in front of that. It's a good series even though as my parents and I often joke: he, like Brian Cox, only seems to find decent examples at spectacular, far-flung, exotic locations. All my seedlings that I pricked out are doing really well on windowsills throughout the house; they love the sunshine even if they are straining a bit towards it.

Oh...I've just heard from the girls that it's the Brit Awards tonight so I might be able to crochet in front of the tv after all! I'll save Prof Stewart for iPlayer in bed ;-)