Too much of a good thing.

K & M have been listening to Harry Potter cds on a loop lately.  Much as I appreciate Stephen Fry's reading of the books, I would appreciate a break from it occasionally and I've found that the girls have become so fixated on it that they seem to be doing little else for much of the day, or at least little else that involves any sort of thinking or concentration.  Generally I like to go with the flow, but occasionally I feel the need to encourage a bit more variety and since Harry Potter plus mostly mindless games on the computer has been the order of the day for K & M for rather more time that I'm comfortable with.


One thing they are both generally happy to stop listening to Harry Potter for, is me reading to them.  So today I continued with quite a lot more of Tom's Midnight Garden, which I started yesterday and already we're not far off half way through.

Having had a conversation about poetry and how it's best read aloud, I also heard M reading some of the Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats poems to herself as she sat on the loo!  Both girls have a really good memory for poetry and are already quoting parts of some of the poems to me.

This afternoon we also did a couple more of their 'Magic Science' experiment kit.  The first experiment we did was a 'test tube crystal ball', which was fairly underwhelming.  The experiment introduced the idea of density by using vegetable oil (not exactly new, we did a much more interesting experiment on this subject a while back), but apart from that there wasn't much new from the previous experiments.

'Test tube crystal ball'.

The second experiment we did was a combination of various of the previous experiments, but it did look much more impressive!

'Magic Wizard Lava'

M had a bit of a meltdown after this, I'm still not entirely sure why and I don't think she is either.  She had really wanted to meet up with friends today and wasn't happy that it hadn't worked out with any of the friends I tried, even though we did arrange meet ups with various friends over the next week and that's without the various groups that we go to where we see friends.  Ideally in her world she would get to play with friends every day, but made it very clear that she does not want to go to school to get that.

Having had a big hug and a talk, K having disappeared to play her own solo version of Carcassonne, M and I had some one to one time playing Pairs in Pears.

Our Pairs in Pears pairs!

Happily, one of the friends we'd tried to see about meeting up with replied to my text by phoning, so M spoke to her and fortunately she was just on her way home and happy to have visitors, having established that the girls would rather go to her house, because then they could see George, her guinea pig too.  She is the most delightfully bonkers person and while there we played a game that she'd been given for Christmas by someone who had seen it and thought of her - Plop Trumps!  It's Top Trumps, on the topic of poo - with the categories compared including frequency, hardness, length, width, smelliness and yuckiness.