Doing and day dreaming.

K is 11 and a dreamer.  She can easily lose half an hour or more just getting dressed.  I ask her what she was doing and she's is unable (or possibly sometimes unwilling, but I'm convinced it is often the former) to answer.  When we don't have specific things on so that we need to leave the house, sometimes days just drift by and sometimes it seems like she's done barely anything constructive.  I get frustrated, she generally becomes apologetic before drifting off to do thing she was asked to do and sometimes even managing before she gets distracted yet again.  On occasions she decides to do something and can focus on it for hours, although it can be frustrating when she starts things just before mealtimes!

This morning, after sending her upstairs to get dressed and finding she'd made no progress about 20 minutes later yet again, I asked her if we could have a talk.  We snuggled together on the sofa and did just that.  I asked her how she felt about losing so much of the day and if she'd like to try to get a bit more done and she said that she would.  This I felt was a good start!  Yesterday, she had gone upstairs with a timer to spend 10 minutes tidying her room and apparently that had worked well, so using that together we came up with a plan.  She is going to spend 4 blocks of 20 minutes each day actively doing something.  I anticipate that one of those blocks will be piano practice most days and we've talked about other possibilities.  For example she has started work on a collage of a dragon, as the first part of a project about dragons and although she's so far only done one wing, she concentrated on that for well over half an hour and would probably have done for longer had we not needed to eat and go out.  When she gets into something she can and does focus for long stretches of time, but doesn't often do so.  I hope and believe that the very doable 20 minute block will mean that she will start things more easily and some of those times she won't stop as soon as the 20 minutes is up.  In fact that has already happened today, when she finally started this Murder Mystery (Maths) Puzzle given to us by a friend who thought K & M would like it.  Now I need to make sure that I have plenty of suggestions for her that would fit the bill of things that could be done in a way that would give a feeling of achievement in around 20 minutes, but that are such that they aren't necessarily finished but have scope of continuation.

In a different bid to try to get both K & M to find something that they wanted to do, we had a bit of a brainstorm last week about possible project ideas.  I gave them a number of headings, such as science, history, people and asked them to write down at least five things for each of them.  With a bit of pushing they did manage to do so, although some of their ideas were 'silly' ones (their words).  Once they'd done this I asked them to pick one each and I would come up with suggestions of activities they could do for their project.

K chose Dragons and this is what I came up with:

• Find out about dragon myths in at least two different cultures (e.g. Chinese, Welsh)
• If you haven't already, find out about the story of St George and the Dragon
• Re-write the story so it has, in your opinion, a better ending (This based on knowing that death of the dragon is not a good ending in K's view)
• Chose a dragon from two different books that you've read and write a fact file for each.
• Make a picture of a dragon.  You could draw, paint or do a collage.

So far, she's only started on the last one, but is taking painstaking care over it, so I can see this lasting some time!

M chose Making Cheese Straws, but was very resistant to most of my suggestions as she just wanted to cook the cheese straws.  She did however go through our recipe books and find three different recipes.  She didn't want to make any notes about similarities and differences but we did talk about them as she made them with a bit of help.  She didn't want to design a questionnaire for people to compare them either or do any writing about her own opinions.  She was slightly grumpy with me for writing a questionnaire, but when we took the results of her cooking with us to Granny and Big Grandad's the day after she made them, she actually quite enjoyed the event of the tasting and commenting and filled out one of the questionnaires herself.  She may not have designed the questionnaire, but it led to an interesting discussion about how the results weren't particularly useful, because there was no weighting to the questions, so that the appearance and the taste had equal marks, but weren't actually equally important.  A told her about how this is an important thing that he has to consider when he designs questionnaires at work.  It also became clear that some people are much stingier scorers than others!

Today was the eclipse and despite leaving it rather late, I had managed get some welding lenses of the right protection from ebay.  We had already talked a bit about it and were very fortunate that the skies were clear here, so we had a good view.  We were even up in time to see the start!  We didn't watch for the whole time, but kept popping out to the back porch, from where we had a good view, during breakfast and afterwards.  Both girls were vaguely interested at least to start with, but it wasn't really their thing to be honest.  M's view on it was 'It's really not that interesting.' 

The eclipse!

One thing that we (and I very much include myself in that) have learned as a result of the eclipse, is how the phases of the moon work.  I had been pondering the question and trying to work out the difference between that and a lunar eclipse and discovered that I had no idea.  Consequently, I found out and decided to share what I learned with the girls and we read and watched videos and animations about it on Khan Academy.

In other news, this afternoon dh came home early (being owed time in lieu as a result of a lot of recent travels with work) and since M had asked if we could visit one of the farms, we went to Ferry Farm and had a lovely time.  We fed various animals, saw and stroked some babies, talked about the age of weaning of them, had several goes on the trampolines and went for a short walk around the place.  It was so lovely to be able to spontaneously decide and just go.

2-3 day old lambs.

M whizzing around.

And a somewhat slower A.

K & M with a 5 week old bunny.

Finally, after our lovely time down at my parents', we returned home on Monday evening bringing my Mum (aka Granny) with us.  The reason for this particular visit, was so that I could have my birthday present from my brother and sister-in-law, which was a spa day for me and a friend (who, unlike me, has handily local parents who could have her kids).  Her being here meant that, since A left on the Tuesday morning and didn't return until very late last night (Thursday), I could also go to my choir on Tuesday evening and Fun Club's AGM on Wednesday evening, when I chucked them out of the car after swimming and she sorted them out with tea and getting to bed.  My Mum is great.