Long Time No Blog

Keep forgetting to blog. Bad Nikki. Must do better. Now then, let me see: catching up with the last three days.

On Monday Emily did lots of recorder practice in the morning, and helped with a big tidy up. That afternoon Romy and Hazel came to play; Hazel showed me the first steps in crochet and (with a lot of help!) I managed to make.....wait for it.... a Barbie Bonnet (or a basket, depending which way up you hold it). Which naturally quickly became a cat toy. Oh well, Barbie's loss is Juliet's gain.

Merlin was feeling rather sorry for himself all day; a bit jealous of the attention the kit-bits were getting, I think, so Emily made up for it by giving him an enormously long huggle.

Yesterday morning we did more recorder practice (boy is she keen!) and Emily wrote a looonnnng story about being lost in an Egyptian temple and meeting Bastet. She gets very indignant with the Just Write book now, because it only ever gives a page of widely spaced lines to write the stories on, and of course she wants to write reams, so she ends up squashing it all onto the page and fuming about it. "If they want to teach children to write you'd think they'd give you enough room to write a proper story," she says. Quite. LOL. Maths passed like a breeze - can't remember what we actually did, but I know it proved pretty easy for her and was accomplished without a hint of a moan, groan or strop. I think we've moved on from maths being a hurdle now. Can't say as she's exactly enthusiastic about practising her skills in that department, but at least she's resigned to doing it and doing it properly. And nobody's enthusiastic about everything, after all.

Denise and her daughter Katie very kindly sent us a ticket to the Barbie Pegasus movie in yesterday's post, so Emily wrote a thank you letter in time for it to go in the post. So, we'll be going after all!

Later yesterday afternoon, Emily spent ages playing with her Ello sets, and built what is quite possibly the biggest Ello shop scene in the known universe. On the floor Then the kittens came into the room. Yes folks, you can guess the rest.

Speaking of kittens, we had a good long play with them in the garden yesterday afternoon, of which here are some piccies, since we've been short of kitten pics recently.
Firstly, Juliet practising camouflage skills - so useful when mousing, don't you know:

Romeo surveying his kingdom from the bottom of Emily's baby slide (on which, incidently, he does impressive belly slides):

Juliet looking ever so grown up and alert in the middle of a weed patch:

and finally Romeo being carried away from trouble....he thinks wasps nests are fun, fun, fun:

Also managed to fit in some swimming too. At this rate it might yet be worth taking out membership at the pool - Emily's enthusiasm certainly isn't waning.

And so to today, Wednesday. Emily spent a few hours playing on her Dazzle art software, after which we went to pick up Hazel and Romy for a visit to The Deep in Hull. They've finished the new Deep Sea section now, which was very good, with giant Japanese crabs, a very shy octopus and all kinds of jellyfish. The girls had a good time and got to touch some crabs, sea anenomes and starfish. You could stand for hours watching the sharks, rays and sawfish in the huge central tank. Fascinating. Here are Emily and Romy in front of the tropical coral reef tank:

and here's Emily with nose pressed against one the biggest shark tank:

Unfortunately I managed to drive completely on autopilot on the way home, and missed the Humber Bridge turn off altogether, going some 15 miles in the wrong direction before turning round. Ahem. That's twice in a row now I've got lost on the way back from a day out. Hazel and Romy will be having second thoughts about coming next time ;-) Getting lost did mean we didn't have time to visit the park on the way home, which probably didn't make me very popular, but then again there was a massive cloudburst on the way, so we'd only have been drenched and miserable if we had made it to the park. That's my excuse, anyway!