Settling in.

We had a lovely but rather busy weekend, not ideal in terms of rest but it fulfilled M's wish to keep in touch with friends.  On Saturday morning M and A got up early (well early by my standards) and joined our neighbours, H, C & L for a Park Run.  M and L got their best time yet and it was A's first time and he apparently did pretty well too, although struggled to go up and down stairs for the rest of the weekend!  Later that day we were invited to a barbeque at our lovely neighbours' and had a lovely time.

On Sunday, it was the weekly cleaning of the rats' cage in the morning.  Then there was some conflict over getting homework and other things done.  That's putting in mildly really, but we resolved it eventually and finished with cuddles.  We met friends who we haven't seen for a while for cake in the afternoon.  We had a lovely catch up and they came back to ours for a play afterwards.  We finished the weekend with K's birthday meal treat, which had been postponed from the previous day, which was takeaway pizza in front of Strictly Come Dancing.

This morning was hard.  M really didn't want to get up and she definitely did not want to go to school.  When we got there, she told me that we had broken our promise that she could change her mind if she thought she'd made the wrong decision.  When I reminded her that the agreement had been that she needed to give it a really proper go and that we were working on the basis of going for a year, that less than two weeks really wasn't a proper go and that we had already compromised by saying we would reassess the situation at Christmas, she wasn't impressed.

Things seemed somewhat better when I picked her up after school fortunately and we returned a short time later for parents' evening.  As soon as we walked in she spotted a friend and went to chat to her and there were several other girls she went to talked to as well.  Having spoken to most of her teachers, she has made an overwhelmingly positive impression, that she was doing well with the work.  We spoke to one of her two English teachers, who said she had an excellent understanding of what she read, could predict what might happen and understand what a character might be feeling.  Rather predictably the thing she noted as needing to be worked on was M's handwriting, which is fair.  Most of the teachers said she was quiet and encouraged her to volunteer answers occasionally, although one (who M has said that she likes and who is less strict than most of the others) said she was rather chatty!

Talking on the way home, M said that she does understand why we're saying she has to say until Christmas, she just doesn't like it, but actually when I suggested that she might even change her mind by then (with reference to doing different sports later) she didn't disagree.  I'm feeling much more hopeful that she will settle in and enjoy the experience, whether she decides to continue or not.

Meanwhile at home, K and I had a conversation about what is reasonable and realistic for her to be doing and together came up with a loose timetable for her.  She had been trying to come up with one for herself, but it's been taking so long that she's not been doing much work!

She then did some maths on Khan Academy, but very frustratingly (from my point of view at least) she got stuck straight away.  It wasn't anything to do with the maths, but with her refusal to accept the standard notation used.  What she was doing was solving a problem that was written with a couple of letters in place of numbers and finding the answer by replacing the letters with the values given.  She really, really does not like the fact that you don't use multiplication signs when letters are used instead of numbers and insisted that if p=6 and q=8 then pq should =68 rather than 48.  I got very frustrated and raised my voice slightly when asking her to just accept the standard notation and solve the problem.  K got rather upset and after a big cuddle when she couldn't tell me what was wrong, she told me it was because I'd shouted at her.  I'm inclined to think that it was more likely to be a reaction to the emotions that have been running high at home over the past couple of weeks, but after a big hug she did get on with the maths.  She reconciled herself to accepting the notation by writing extremely large multiplication signs when solving the problems.

I found out this evening that she has led me to believe that she had made more progress with the English course she is doing than is the case, so we've had a chat about honesty and agreed that we'll check in with each other more frequently.  K is very private and doesn't want to show me what she's writing a lot of the time, so it's tricky to find the balance between respecting that and keeping an eye on how she's getting on and supporting her to make progress.

In addition to the new situation for the girls, changes are afoot for A too.  It's not entirely settled yet, but it's very likely that he will be changing jobs soon.  Assuming this goes to plan, the new situation will mean possibly more travel (although less of the very long day trips that he currently has), including around a week each month in Amsterdam from January.  The biggest change, however, will be that when he is here he will be working from home rather than going to an office in town each day.  We told the girls this at the weekend and their reaction was a unison, 'Working from home?  That's just wrong!'  Another new thing to get used to.