Happy Easter!

This morning, when finishing off the Easter egg treats, I found that the tricky bits weren't entirely over.  I discovered that, because of the amount of glue involved, the balloons are stuck quite securely to the thread, so the trick is to release the thread from the balloon before popping the balloon, as otherwise the thread gets pulled inwards with the popped balloon.  Even so, I think the results are pretty effective!  If we were to do this again, I don't think I would use home-made chocolates, as I think we would be able to find some smaller foil wrapped eggs, which would fit more easily into the water balloons.

In other news, we have watched Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 1, and are planning on watching Part 2 tomorrow.  M went outside with A and separated the numerous sunflower seedlings from Asfordby into new pots, this wasn't necessary for K, as she had only planted a couple of seeds and only one those germinated, rather than the 9 or so of M's.

This evening M had a play with the Bananagrams tiles and I was impressed and quite surprised at some of the words she had made, including toilets, teenager, beetroot and more, there were only a couple of words where I wasn't entirely sure what she was trying to spell - jas (I thought she meant jars, but more logically, given that it was linked with has, she had meant jazz) and the exceeding unphonetic nephew, for which she'd made the creditable attempt of nefue.  While she was doing this, K counted the coppers in our whisky bottle (a 4.5 litre one from days doing bar work during uni holidays).

There's £15.83 in there apparently!

Easter eggs and other stuff.

Quite a while ago now, I spotted a link on Facebook (thank you to whoever it was who put it there, apologies that I can't remember who you are to give you credit!), that I thought might be a nice idea to try.  It was called Easter Egg Treats and looked pretty straightforward, but very effective.  So having made some chocolate egg halves and wrapped them up, I had a go myself to see how it turned out.  I discovered that when they say water balloons, they really do mean that, as the result wasn't brilliant!  So having ordered some water balloons from ebay, we waited and they arrived today.  I had already made some chocolate egg halves, as I said, but since I was making some rum truffle filled chocolates for A for Easter (he's been away for a couple of days and got back this evening), I used the left over tempered chocolate to make some more and wrapped them.



The chocolate egg halves

Then I found that the first stage of this particular craft activity is by far the hardest:  getting the chocolates inside the balloons.  Eventually, with the help of M and a pair of thin chopsticks, we ended up with 9 chicken egg sized balloons, each with a couple of egg halves inside.  The other 11 balloons in the pack all perished in the attempts!


Some of the successful attempts.

M decided that she's done her contribution towards this particular activity and went elsewhere to do her own crafty thing, making Easter presents for various people, the results of which I am sure we will be seeing tomorrow!  So K and I continued...

We mixed 'gloopy glue' with water.

Dipped embroidery thread in it and wound it round the balloons.

Using two or three different colours.

Then, having put the clean, dry socks away, we hung them to dry. 

And hopefully by tomorrow they will be dry enough
 for us to pop the balloons and reveal the final result!

K & M have also been working on a big project, that I have only recently been allowed to know about.  It has involved pooling resources to make a purchase and making various things.  I'm not allowed to say any more yet, but will be allowed to once it all comes together.

I have also finished reading The Tales of Beadle the Bard, which we have all enjoyed.  K has said that she really liked Dumbledore's notes on the tales more than the tales themselves and I must admit that I have found them brilliant.  I must share an extract which had me laughing out loud and having to explain myself to the girls.  It is in the notes for 'Babbity Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump' on the particular point that not even magic can truly bring the dead back to life:

As the eminent wizarding philosopher Bertrand de Pensées-Profondes writes in his celebrated work A Study into the Possibility of Reversing the Actual and Metaphysical Effects of Natural Death, with Particular Regard to the Reintegration of Essence and Matter: 'Give it up.  It's never going to happen.'
(for the non-French speakers - Bertrand de Pensées-Profondes translates as Bertrand of Deep-Thoughts).

 

And we're done....sort of.

Over the last couple of days, I have read the last dozen or so chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Again I struggled at times to read, not so much when much loved characters died, but when their friends and family were grieving over them.  K & M were clearly sad, but not distressed at these times.  Also it was quite tricky at one point today, as I had a slight nose bleed at a point when stopping wasn't really an option, so I continued reading whilst pinching my nose for a while!

I say "we're done...sort of" for a couple of reasons.  Firstly because we've got The Tales of Beadle the Bard and the final two films still to go and secondly because when I went upstairs to say goodnight this evening, K & M were tucked up in bed together reading.  M has started The Philosopher's Stone and K is reading The Chamber of Secrets.  K would still really like me to start reading the whole series all over again, but I need a bit of a break even if she doesn't.

I think the conversation we had on the way home from swimming yesterday was probably a Harry Potter prompted one - what happens when we die?  My answer was that different people believe different things about what happens when you die, including heaven and hell, reincarnation, nothing.  When they asked me what I believe, I told them that I really didn't know, but that I thought heaven was a lovely idea.  Both girls liked the idea of being with dead loved ones again, but decided that maybe whatever you believe is what happens to you.  So those who believe in reincarnation are reincarnated and so on.  I asked what would happen if you didn't know what to believe and they decided that for those people when you die, you go and have a tea party with God and, if I've understood right, decide after you've had a chat!

A sad day (in Harry Potter)

We started the day (before breakfast in K and my case) with Harry Potter in bed, including the sad death of K's favourite character, Dobby.  The day was interspersed with more chapters while K & M kept their hands busy with various activities such as making crafty things or playing with trains.

K finished the crafty thing she's been working on for the past couple of days this morning (while I was reading more Harry Potter of course!).  It was based on this idea from 50 Fairy Things to Make & Do:

However, K gave it a pirate twist, because, as she said pirates 'are much more me' than fairies.  She was particularly pleased with the pirate's freckles.

M made and coloured in some paper dolls (they were all joined up, but she decided to separate them).  To give an idea of size, they're on top of a standard sized envelope, so really quite diddy!

M got the Monopoly out for the first time in ages and we had a game which ended in M & K ganging up on me (M overpaid K hugely near the end, so she'd have more money) because I was winning!  K's mental arithmetic, in working out change seems to have improved quite a bit since we last played.

More Harry Potter - Human Body connections

In addition to the usual multiple chapters of Harry Potter, we explored the Human Body some more today and found more connections between that and what we'd been reading.

A while back we took the girls' pulses before and after running up and down the stairs and talked about heart rates.  Today we finally got around to taking this one step further and took their pulse a couple more times afterwards, having run up and down two flights of stairs three times.  We discovered that their heart rates return to their pre-exercise rate an awful lot quicker than mine, when I did the same.  The plan is to make a graph of the results tomorrow.

Having done this I read some of the section about the heart from our Human Body - a children's encyclopedia, while they were having their tea and it was then that the girls and I both learned something new, that linked Harry Potter and the human body.  For the girls it was that the word 'atrium' has an architectural meaning (there's one in the Ministry of Magic) and an anatomical one.  For me, it's that 'heart strings' (some wands have a dragon heart string core) aren't just a figure of speech, but we do actually have heart strings.

In other news, M has been box modelling today, making a house out of the box our new toaster came in, I'm not sure if it's finished yet, but I do know that it does have a loo.  K has been working on a crafty project that she's doing that she found in an Usborne book.

Finally, an interesting conversation we had in the car on the way to korfball.  We give a lift to a schooly friend, A, who is the same age as K and the conversation came around to ages within school years.  A commented that it was a bit strange that the oldest and youngest girls in her class are best friends because of the nearly 12 month age gap.  M immediately commented that she's good friends with a 16 year old, also called M and we talked about how with HE groups there's much more mixing between ages and that school is a rather artificial environment in this way.  M also pointed out that she, M, is friends with A's mum too.  I find it really interesting that HE children, not only have a much wider range of friends in terms of ages, but also consider adults friends too, in a way that schooled children rarely do.

Funny where things take you.

M wasn't happy again with me today.  This time it was because I wouldn't take her to the park on the way home from the shops.  It was, however, brass monkeys out there and neither K nor I was keen on the idea, to put it mildly.

We did, however, read quite a lot more Harry Potter and we're nearly half way through the last book now.  I'm starting to think about what we might read together next, although K has already said she wants me to start again with book one as soon as we finish!  I've said if she wants them again, she can read them to herself.

In a round-about way we did a bit more on our ongoing topic of the human body.  We managed to get onto the topic of baldness, via Kingsley Shacklebolt (a Harry Potter character, who is bald) and from there to alopecia.  K then asked the question: Do people with alopecia lose the hair from inside their nose?  So we looked on the computer and found out that in some cases, yes they do.  In fact it is only in these cases that alopecia has a direct impact (other than the stress it would undoubtedly cause) on health, since the hairs in the nose and ears and eyelashes are part of our bodies' defences system.

In other news, K & M have gone into production of pigmy puffs, which are of course miniature puffskeins, small fluffy animals that Fred & George sell in Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.

Getting it all wrong.

That's me - getting it wrong by the way, at least as far as M is concerned.  This afternoon, as A is rather stressed and overworked getting ready for his 24 hour trip to Rome (he's leaving in the middle of the night tonight and getting back in the middle of the night tomorrow!), and there was a crafty activity on at our newly re-opened library (yes, on a Sunday!), K, M and I went along to check it out. 
There were good bits and bad bits about the trip this afternoon, although by the time we got home if you'd asked M she would certainly have concentrated on the bad bits.

Good things

Bad things

We met up with friends there

I hadn't checked the time, so we were
rather rushed doing the craft

They made some lovely 3D butterflies

The girls claim they asked me to look
after their butterflies, I was unaware of
this, so we came home without them.

We went to the park with the friends we
met up with (K & A) and the girls had
fun building snowmen.

Then, while my K carried on with her
creation, M, K & A had a snowball fight.

I accidentally hit M in the eye
with a snowball.

 

Unfortunately it always seems to be the bad bits that stick in the mind.  Ho hum!

M & A finishing off their snow creation.

A posing with the finished article.

K's Snow Dobby!

A couple of episodes of Walking With Beasts and a drink of hot chocolate later and all was well once more, so we had a couple more chapters of Harry Potter.  Then for tea, K wanted 'something more than just sandwich-y stuff', so with a bit of help made a cheese and ham omelette for herself and M.  The day was finished off with some More William with daddy before he gets a very early night to get up to head off to Rome and stupid o'clock.  So all in all, I don't think we got it all wrong after all.



More Harry Potter and other stuff too.

We have been making significant progress with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows today.  K & M also decided to have a ball.  It didn't actually happen, but they did spend a considerable amount of time make clothing for various toys for the event as well as dressing up themselves.  I'll add photos later if I'm allowed.  They have both also been building lego houses too.  M seemed a little bit under the weather again today, but she was well enough to get changed out of her pretty summer dress into more appropriate clothes to go into the garden to build a snowman, as it's been snowing her pretty much constantly all day and had been for much of the night by the look of it.

This afternoon, thanks to An ordinary life? blog K & I made cheese!  We followed the instructions in that link and our photos look remarkably similar to theirs.  I do have one of K checking the temperature of the milk, but have been told I'm not allowed to post it.

Milk heated to 200 degrees F, with added lemon juice.

Curds tied up in a (rather smaller!) muslin

The cheese!

I must admit, while successful in that it was indeed cheese, it really wasn't very tastey at all!  So any suggestions for improvements gratefully received!  I'm planning on trying again but with goat's milk for starters and am guessing a bit of salt would help too.

Better, but still taking it easy.

M is pretty much back on form today, although given the weather (sleet and snow but not settling on and off all day) we were happy to stay in for most of the day.  M really didn't want to go out at all, but didn't have a choice late afternoon as we needed to take K to her ballet lesson and buy some milk.

Both K & M got crafty this morning.  K decided to make something out of Fairy thing to make and do, which I have been allowed to take a photo of, but not post it here yet.  M took inspiration from Christopher, her most loved cuddly toy, as you can see!

We not only continued but finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.  It was really quite difficult to continue at times, as I got quite choked up.  K shed tears as well, but didn't seem to get too distressed though.  We then watched the film and talked about some of the differences between the book and the film.  This evening we started on the final book, which I imagine will be our primary focus for the next week or so!

In other news, while she wasn't prepared to tell a stranger what she'd learned about fractions, K was happy to tell Daddy this evening and showed that she had remembered and had a pretty good grasp of what we'd covered earlier in the week. 

On the mend.

M is still not well, but is on the mend now.  Today she didn't sleep, but still spent most of the day on the sofa, not knowing really what she wanted to do, if anything.  She was well enough to be bundled into the car, so that K could still go to gymnastics, where other mums (thank you J & A!) helpfully saw K to and from the carpark and A managed to come home from work early enough to take her swimming.

So we have continued with Harry Potter (we've got to the really scary bit now and only have a few more chapters to go) and K & M have also been listening to Alice in Wonderland on cd.  While K was out, I suggested that M and I could play a game while she was ensconced on the sofa.  She agreed and we had a game of Blokus, it was a close game!  After that we had a play making a symmetrical pattern, taking it in turns to put a piece in first and match the other person's piece.  We touched on reflexive and rotational symmetry and then decided to see if we could fit in all the pieces without gaps, which we did.  After we'd finished this, M went and found the Mirror experiment kit and we both had a play with that for a little while.  Later she and I also played the three different version of Top Trumps that we have (London 2012, Roald Dahl and Dinosaurs), which meant a bit of practice of reading numbers in the tens of thousands in the dinosaurs one, something that M sometimes needs a bit of a reminder of if she hasn't seen used them for a while.

Both Blokus and the mirror kit were still out this evening and K took them off to her bedroom when she went to bed.  I must remember to ask her what she got up to with them!

The best laid plans...

Yesterday we were supposed to be meeting up with friends for M's best friend J's birthday and today we were supposed to be meeting up with other friends for the day.  Instead M has come down with something and has spent the past two days on the sofa, mostly sleeping, with some telly watching and some listening to Harry Potter in between.

K is the only one of us who's gone out and that was only because she was so insistent, so after some persuasion I let her go out and she came home within the specified time limit with a get well present for her sister, which she gave to her along with a 'Get Well Now' card she'd made.

Today, while M was asleep, I reminded K of a conversation we had a while back, about doing a bit more maths and asked if she fancied doing some and she said she'd like some funny stories from Maths for Mums & Dads, which has some great anecdotes.  I opened the book pretty much at random and it opened to fractions, so we talked about them.  Over the course of a maybe 10-15 minute conversation we covered the following:

• what they are and that they are one means of expressing part of a whole
• how the two numbers mean
• the terms numerator and denominator
• that we generally use the simplest form, e.g. 1/2 rather than 25/50 and how to get to the simplest form
• mixed fractions
• adding fractions with different denominators
• simplifying the result after the above

 Then while eating lunch, we also watched several Khan Academy videos on the topic.  Afterwards, in an attempt to check that she had understood what we'd talked about, I asked K what she would say if a stranger asked her what she knew about fractions.  She replied in a polite voice, but with a twinkle in her eye 'I would say "It's none of your business what I know about fractions!"', which I thought was fair enough!  When I rephrased the question to ask what she'd say if Granny asked, she showed that she'd grasped what we talked about pretty well.

Other than this K stripped her bed and remade it far more tidily than I would and indeed it is far tidier than the rest of the room!

We also talked, very briefly, about why M's got a temperature and how her body is fighting off the infection with white blood cells.  Hopefully it'll have made good progress in the battle by the morning.

Bits and pieces.

We've had a couple of visitors here, an old school friend of mine (the person who is the original reason I love the name K so much, and is known here as 'Big K') and her 6 month old baby A, who we were meeting for the first time.

K & M are usually completely uninterested in babies, but they were both very taken with A and engaged with her in a way I have never seen them do before.  A is adorable and very alert and interested in everything that was going on, which obviously helped, although according to K, she has recently (it mst be very recent, as she wasn't interested only a fortnight ago at the LLL Toddler meeting!) changed her mind about babies.

We've done a little bit more on our body project while Big K & A were here, yesterday evening (I'm not entirely sure how it started) I took the girls' pulse and then sent them running up two flights of stairs and back again before taking their pulse again.  We talked about why this happens and how the rate your pulse returns to its resting rate can be used as a measure of how fit you are.  I suggested that we could do a bit of an experiment and find out how quickly K & M's pulse rates return to their resting rate and do a graph of the results.  Watch this space...! 

We also had a conversation about ears, burst eardrums, pressure (both when diving and going up in an aeroplane) and sinuses.

Brain Matters - auditory experience.

In A's view the previously mentioned InflatiBrain talk and this were the most interesting things and the things that A thought that K & M probably got the most out of.

'This' was a touch screen controller with several big headphone sets coming off it.  The researcher explained that the sounds they would hear had been recorded from microphones set in a mannequin's ears, such that the head of the mannequin had acted like a human head, in terms how the sound resonates, so that it sounded much more 'real' (with more depth) rather than a recording.  There were four options to listen to:

A clarinet playing, which sounded as though it was in the room.

A person speaking as they were walking around, which A described as being 'more surround sound than the best surround sound telly'.

A person speaking, you first heard just part of the frequency range and couldn't understand what was being said, then you heard the same thing again but with the full range, before hearing the first part again and the second time, once you knew what you were listening for, you could understand it reasonably well.  The researcher explained that you could train your brain to understand less than clear speech, and as A understood it, this could be useful in understanding people with severe speech impediments.

The fourth option was what the researcher described as the auditory equivalent of this image by Escher, with ever rising pitch.

Out and about

Today was the long awaited opening of the newly refurbished and extended library.  We went to have a look and it's really rather impressive, particularly after the cramped, temporary quarters that has been its home for over a year while the works were going on.  It was extremely crowded, which was I think the main reason for M declaring that she prefered the temporary library to the new one.  She said is was too big, because you could lose your family in there.  We're planning on going back when it's quieter, probably on Monday, to have a better look.  While we were there though, we signed M up for a Faraway Tree workshop, which is taking place the weekend that K is going to be at Granny's.

This afternoon A to K & M to Brain Matters an event put on by the Neuroscience department of the University of Nottingham.  A's first impression was that it was more of an academic conference than an interactive event.  They told me about crawling inside the 'InflatiBrain', although A said it was rather difficult hearing what was being said inside for various reaons, the talk about what different parts of the brain do and A thought the girls got quite a lot out of that.  Then they looked at some brain cells in a petri dish, magnified on a screen and various other things (one of which I'm going to ask A to post about).  All three of them enjoyed it and K & M thought it fitted nicely with our on-going Body project and K & M came home with some goodies, including a workbook each which we'll have a look at together. 

Before all of this, both K & M did some writing this morning.  M wrote a letter to her best friend J, telling her about the additions and improvements she had made to a box modelling creation that they had made together previously.  I wasn't allowed to read it, but she read me parts of it and I was allowed to read the envelope which included the words 'top secret' several times!  K's writing looked like this:

It says: The Chamber of Secrets has been opened.  Enemies of the Heir beware!

Following up on the motivation issue

Today was the first swimming lesson of the new session, the last one having resulted in this post.  Having literally lost sleep that night, with my brain buzzing with imagining a conversation with their swimming teacher and me unable to switch off, I decided that I had to talk to him.  After a couple of days, I'd manage dto put it to one side to the point that by today, I only remember that I wanted to talk to him when we were at the swimming pool.  Fortunately my girls' lesson is their teacher's last one of the day, so I was able to ask for a quick word afterwards while they were in the shower.

I don't know if it was coincidence, but there wasn't a 'swimmer of the week' this week, as they were finishing with a dive into the pool one at a time and he sent them off to shower after they'd done.  I didn't manage to say everything I wanted to and I hope I didn't come across as lecturing him too much, but he did seem receptive to what I had to say.  I said that I wanted to explain a bit more about why I didn't like it and that it wasn't just because it upsets M.  I told him that I thought he was a good teacher and that the children worked hard and asked if the 'swimmer of the week' thing was supposed to be a bit of extra motivation and he agreed that it was.  I pointed out that at one extreme there are those like M, who gets upset by it, and that at the other is K who, while happy to get the sweets, is not bothered in the slightest by the idea of being 'swimmer of the week', so that it really wasn't necessary and didn't really work.  Finally I suggested he could google 'extrinsic and intrisic motivation' if he was interested in finding out more.  He didn't say much, but seemed open to what I was saying, so I hope that he took it as the constructive criticism it was meant as and of course I hope he will stop doing the 'swimmer of the week'.  I'm not sure whether I will take it any further if he does continue, but I am happy that I have said my piece.

Potter and plants

Asfordby this week was about plants, both K & M happily planted some sunflower seeds and then spent the rest of the time playing Harry Potter with their friends!  I had forgotten to take jam jars for the bean growing, so we brought a couple of beans each home and so now K & M have these to put on the window sills in their bedrooms.

While K & M were fighting magical duels, I was enjoying myself chatting and doing some origami!

A tulip

A lily

I have over the past couple of days quickly reread Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, so that I can warn them of any deaths, and have started reading it to K & M. 

In other news, I went for a follow up appointment with the ENT consultant yesterday and had a camera stuck up my nose for him to look at my vocal chords (not nice!), so we talked about that today too.

Mother's Day

I'm generally a bit in two minds about Mother's Day, while part of me thinks it's a good thing to have a reminder to think about and appreciate all that our mothers do for us, I really don't like the huge commercialisation that has come to be inevitable with any day of this sort.

M in particular really likes doing things on such days and, since they generally involve her making or doing things, rather than succumbing to spending money, it's rather sweet.  This morning I was brought breakfast in bed, made and carried up stairs (I think it's the first time she's done that bit!) by her.  Last night she gave me 'a clue' about what my present was going to be, when she came into the front room wearing just an old pillowcase with holes cut for arms and head.

M the House Elf!

This morning though, she told me that she had been going to be my house elf for the day, but had decided that it was too cold for that.  She did, however, lend me her new ocarina, which I can use to summon her if I need anything.  I have also received two cards from her, both early because she couldn't wait to give them, one computer generated and printed from a Dora the Explorer website and one she'd made herself.  K has also given me one from the Dora website.  Apart from that I have been given two chunks of the chocolate bar she bought (there were 6 chunks, so A & K were given one each and she and I had two, M because she'd bought it and me because it's Mother's Day) and a few other things from her and K.

Necklace from K, which she made with beads from a pack she got from the scrapstore last week.

An alien from M, who she made ages ago at Fun Club.

Plasticine rainbow scene from M.

At the end of church this morning (K had stayed at home with A), the children were invited forward to take a daffodil to give to their mother and then the priest added that of course they could take one for any grannies too.  I was sitting next to an elderly lady, who was on her own, so I quietly asked M if she would get one for the lady if she was a granny or mummy and M agreed that she would.  When I asked the lady, she told me in heavily accented, broken English that she was both and, when M went and got a daffodil and gave it to her, was obviously very touched.

In other news today, I finally finished reading The Order of the Phoenix and this afternoon we watched the film, while A was out referring two korfball matches.  Yes, my husband was out for most of the afternoon doing sporty things on Mother's Day and indeed went to cricket nets on Valentine's Day, but since I'm appreciated all year round I don't have a problem with that in the slightest, particularly since he's now home and cooking for us all, which he does most Sundays anyway!  Give me a husband and father to our children like that than one who makes a big fuss on these days but doesn't do anything the rest of the time any day, thank you very much. :-)

Supposed motivation.

K & M had the final 'fun' session of the 'term' of 10 swimming lessons today, which they always look forward to and I don't.  I don't have anything against the last one being 'fun', I think it's good that they are now comfortable having watery fun that includes ducking under water, something that took K in particular quite while to manage.  The thing that I don't look forward to, is that it's the culmination of their teacher's thing of deciding on a 'swimmer of the week', as the 'swimmer of the term' wins a prize (invariably sweets/chocolate - which is another issue).  I don't know how he decides on his swimmer of the week, but my feeling is that since the amount of effort put in can't ever be truly judged by others, it is as likely to be demotivating as it is motivating.  He clearly tries to share the 'honour' around, but in that case it isn't even based on his perceptions of effort or attainment, which makes it even more arbitrary.

K is completely and utterly unconcerned by this supposedly motivating tactic and really couldn't care less whether she 'wins' or not, being very much 'self contained' in this respect.  M, on the other hand, gets deeply upset by the apparent overlooking of her efforts and achievements and can't understand why others (particularly K) have been 'swimmer of the week' more frequently than she has.  So naturally it was K who was pronounced 'swimmer of the term' today and received a bag of sweets (which she shared of her own volition with both M and me).  I commented to their teacher that I really don't like his 'swimmer of the week' thing and that it always caused upset for us, and he tried to smooth things over with M by having a quiet word with her, telling her that she was really close behind K, but he really didn't understand that it's not the result that bothers me but the whole concept.  All the children, as far as I can see, really enjoy his lessons, they get out of the pool happy and buzzing and then all quieten down for him to pronounce judgement over them as to who has done 'best' that lesson, leaving them either happy because they were the 'one' that week, disappointed or upset (admittedly it seems only to be M who actually gets upset) or completely unconcerned.  Hardly positive motivation!

Looking back and making progress.

After reading another chapter of Harry Potter today, I was having another look at our non-fiction books on the body and asked K & M a bit more about what they had got up to at Fun Club yesterday.  I was particularly interested in the people model of an ear and they were happy to explain it to me.

As I understand it, the ear was made up by people holding these things in the following order:
a funnel - the outer part of the ear
a tube - the ear canal
a cake tin with the base removed with cling film over it - eardrum
a hammer - hammer
a spatula (which cleared up why M thought that was what one of the bones was called!) - anvil
a potato masher - stirrup
a bowl of jelly - cochlea
and I think a narrower pipe of some sort to take the message to the brain.

I said that given we'd been looking at hearing we could look at the other senses as part of our (now rather protracted, sporadic) project about the human body.  However, as we chatted about it, it turned out that we'd already covered rather a lot, some of which that I had forgotten about but K & M hadn't!  We talked about sight, touch and a bit about smell and taste as well, for example, about how scientist used to think that different parts of the tongue tasted different types of taste, but that is no longer thought to be true, but that several of our books about bodies state that to be the case.  While eating we also talked about the fact that the tongue is key when eating, not just for tasting but also for moving the food around your mouth.

And speaking of food, it was back at the beginning of last year that K expressed a desire to learn to cook, specifically a whole meal.  While we have made some progress on that front, moving on from just baking sweet things, to cheese straws, eggs or baked beans and toast for example, we still have an awfully long way to go.  So, yesterday, when K asked if we could have what we call 'red pasta sauce' (we do have the pasta with it too!) today, I suggested that she could cook it.  Starting simple, she used a portion out of the freezer this time, she cooked, tested and drained the spaghetti with very little help (I help the sieve that was balanced over the sink still as her wrists aren't strong enough for the saucepan and lid draining method that I prefer), then stirred in the sauce.  She also boiled some peas and sweetcorn to go with it and served it all up for herself, M and me.  We sprinkled some cheese over the top and were good to go.

And it tasted just as good as when I do it!

During the meal, K & M started planning what they could do for a 5 course meal between them!

In other news, M was very sad when her crocodile shaped ocarina broke when it flew out of her pocket at Fun Club yesterday.  So when we went to the shops this morning, we went to the shop where it had come from to see if they had any.  Sadly they don't have them any longer, but K bought M a pretty oval one to cheer her up, happily this one comes on a string, so she can wear it round her neck run about without risking it getting broken in the same way as the last one.

Sound.

Today was Fun Club and the topic was Sound, and there were various activities in various parts of the building going on for various age groups!  Some of which I know about, but I was ensconced in a corridor doing my activity while K & M moved around having a go at various things.

Activities included:
Making plastic cup and string telephones - both K & M had a go
Making musical instruments - K made a plucking instrument with a margarine tub and elastic bands
Experimenting with making different notes using glasses, milk bottles, chop sticks and water - both girls had a go at this.  When tapping a glass with a chopstick the note gets lower when water is added, but blowing across the top of a bottle the note gets higher when the bottle is fuller.
Playing instruments along with a story and songs
Indentifying different sounds on a cd - M joined in with this one
Games finding where sounds were coming from and how far away they are - I think both girls had a go
Using people and some objects to make a model of a human ear - M watched as there were more people than needed in the group at the time

I was doing the plastic cup and string telephones, with various groups of about 4-9 year olds.  We talked about 'old fashioned' telephones, of the sort that had to be plugged into the wall, how sound travels in waves, of the sort that moves along a slinky if you move the end forwards and backwards.  We had a go with the phones and discovered that you can use them round corners if you use two and have an 'exchange' with an operator in the middle holding the cups together!

When it came time for lunch, K had disappeared and I found her with a model of an ear and she didn't come to eat until she had successfully put it back together 10-15 minutes later.

When we got home I got out our 'body books' to have a look at the parts about hearing and ears and both K & M did have a bit of a look.  It was clear from some of M's comments that she had grasped quite a lot from the making a model of an ear, telling me about the 3 little bones, although she couldn't quite remember all of the names, she knew one was the hammer and told me one of the others was something like the 'spatula'!

We had another chapter of Harry Potter and would usually have had korfball this evening, but both K & M were complaining of feeling sick and didn't protest when I suggested not going, which given they both really enjoy it confirmed this decision for me.  Instead we watched Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone again while they did some sewing and M also got the beads out and made herself a necklace.

Finally, in other news, M has been in the wars somewhat lately.  She's one for getting bumps, bruises, scrapes etc anyway but outdid herself on Sunday and is still in some discomfort (she even limps when she remembers!) from this...

Good bits too. :-)

As well as the baking by M (they were very nice by the way!), K got creative too.  She disappeared and came back with something for M and me.

A Gryffindor lion for M and a Hufflepuff badger for me made of Fimo.

A bad start to the day.

Things did not go well this morning, K & M were grumpy (that's understating their interactions with each other somewhat!) and I was majorly grumpy (again an understatement) with them.  I had wanted to make a phone call before leaving the house to get to a 10am meeting on the other side of town, not only did that not happen, but we didn't manage to leave the house until 10 o'clock!  Neither K nor M wanted to go anyway, even though I knew they'd like it when we got there.  K usually likes LLL Toddler meetings, M always claims not to want to go, but they both generally have a good time.  I had a much needed chat with other mums about dealing with frustration and anger around children and K & M had such a good time I had trouble dragging them away!

When we got home, I cut some bread and we each got ourselves something to eat and then we retired to my bedroom, M wanted the playroom, K wanted the front room, so my room was the compromise, for a chapter of Harry Potter (we're about 2/3 through The Order of the Phoenix now).  After that M baked some fairy cakes, the only thing I helped with was using the hand mixer to do that actually mixing as it's a bit heavy for her still and getting them out of the oven.

While she was doing this, K was on the computer doing a Harry Potter quiz and some French.  Then we popped to the shops for a few bits and pieces, before returning for M to decorate most of the cakes (I helped make the buttercream, but she did the decorating), although she did let K do two of them.

This photo doesn't really do justice to just how much icing she managed to pile on some of them!

Then they emptied the dishwasher while I made tea and now it's very quiet as they're out at Brownies.

More French and more other stuff!

We've been continuing with French, mostly on the subject of food.  Last night, after K & M had turned off their lights to go to sleep, K appeared at the top of the stairs to call down 'Le pain, s'il te plait Maman'.  She wasn't hungry, she just wanted to show that she could remember how to say this in French!  Today as a result, we touched on the difference between asking for 'le pain' and 'du pain'.

K & M both had birthday parties they were invited to this weekend.  They both went to Z's Laser Quest party on Friday, M really enjoyed the whole thing, while K chose not to join in, as she doesn't like the idea of shooting people, but still had a good time chatting to a new friend who didn't want to join in either.  Yesterday K went to her friend A's bowling party and had a really good time.  I had wondered if she'd know anybody other than the birthday girl, but there were two other girls she knew, one from Brownies and another who used to go to ballet.

This morning, K decided that she would come to church, but only just managed to get dressed in time, because she was doing some more of her maths workbook!  She also replied to Granny's letter inviting her to stay next month, she decided to do so by email, to which she attached a picture she had also done on the computer using Paint.

On Friday we managed to have a quick go with another Harry Potter game (a trivia quiz board game), that friends have lent us (thank you C and D!), but didn't finish it as K & M were off to the party.  Today we had another go and I thought it was quite good, but unfortunately I'm finding it difficult to balance the difficulties the K & M have of playing games like this.  M is struggling with not winning at the moment, because she perceives herself as never winning, and K finds it difficult to cope with any allowances made for M.  For example in this game we gave her another chance because she didn't realise that the book was specifically about the first Harry Potter book and gave an answer that was wrong according to the answer card, but was something that you find out about in a later book.

Finally for now.  We bought a strip of raffle tickets after church (didn't win), but M decided to use them for a little raffle of her own.  We each chose a ticket and she shut herself away in the playroom and made a prize.  I won this!

Not only pretty...

...but functional too - it's a brooch!

Some French and other stuff.

M has decided that she wants to do some French, which I have been suggesting as we're going on holiday to France later in the year.  She had a look at this site, which I think is pretty good but M decided that she'd rather learn from me.  So we've been doing bits and pieces and although we haven't done any French for about a year, I was pleasantly surprised how much both K & M could remember of colours, numbers and more.  Still on the subject of French, M bought herself a French knitting doll yesterday and both she and K have been making a rather large family of snakes, mostly while listening to me reading Harry Potter. Both K & M have been doing a bit more Timez Attack too.

Each girl received a letter from Granny this week, she has invited K to stay for a couple of nights on her own with her and Big Grandad.  They are going to come and fetch her one Friday and then M has been invited to go down and stay for a few more nights, taking me with her, before we all come home again.  M has been struggling with the fact that K is going to get to go on her own, even though she knows that she will be doing the same on her own at some point in the not too distant future.  Even so, she has RSVP'd to Granny's invitation and I'm just waiting for K to do the same so I can post them.

We discovered that the 'fossils' we made at Asfordby didn't quite turn out successfully.  We have learned from our mistakes though (the plaster of Paris leaked through, so left only a very thin layer, which wasn't robust enough to break the clay off without breaking it too) and have everything necessary to have another go if we fancy it.

On Wednesday we met up with a new HEing family, L and her daughter E at a local soft play place.  M had told me quite determinedly that she didn't want to play with anyone else and only liked playing on her own before we went.  However by the time it was time to head home, all three girls we playing together beautifully and I know my girls are hoping to meet up again soon.