Would You Like A Little Musical Accompaniment With That?

It has certainly been musical "round these parts" today. Loaded the Black Cat Compose software this morning, and Emily absolutely loves it. She's spent hours on it composing stuff, and was thrilled to discover that she can print out her composition in real musical notation (she's been composing using symbols since we can only read two notes so far!) and save it for playing on the recorder when she's fully adept at it. Which she confidently predicts will be sometime next week :-)

So, whatever we've been doing, we've had music to match. Excellent stuff. Piccie of the composer at work (and yes, she was too busy to have her picture taken, so we have to make do with the back of her head):

Yesterday Emily and Daddy went off to ballet, where a good time was evidently had by all. As soon as they got back, we baked Crunchy Seed Biscuits with dried apricots, raisins, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds and poppy seeds. Delicious. All gone.

Bad Mummy Moment of the week came yesterday when I realised that there is no ballet lesson next Saturday due to half term. Now, I had fondly imagined that they'd be missing the following Saturday, at the end of half term, not the beginning of it. So, I didn't bother getting free tickets for the Barbie Pegasus film showing at our local UCI next Saturday, because it clashed with ballet and I guessed (correctly, as it turns out) that she would rather go to her lesson. But there, we could have gone after all. Poo. Never mind; we shall think of something suitably mind bogglingly exciting to do next Saturday instead. I don't suppose Emily will mind that much, to be honest - she hates crowded cinemas, and we had already ordered the DVD as an Xmas/Birthday pressie in any case. But it was definitely a kick-self moment.

Have spent the day frantically listing new stock in the shop and on ebay, and have sold several new items within minutes of listing them, which always makes me feel awful....must carve out more time to do this, otherwise we have money just sat on the shelves. Also sold another £50 worth of personal items on the other account, mostly Jolly Phonics stuff, Puddle Lane reading scheme books and the like. If we can manage to list a box a week, we might actually get somewhere, space-wise. At the moment we would seriously struggle to find storage for anything good old Santa might bring, let alone birthday pressies the week after!

Quick kitten update, since I haven't mentioned them much recently: well, they're growing :-) although Juliet is still a lot smaller than Romeo. They have waaaaayyyy too much energy and a scant disregard for the welfare of the stock they're busy moutaineering all over. Romeo has developed a very cute habit of finding his favourite mouse toy, wherever it happens to be, carrying it in his mouth to wherever we are (right up the stairs and across the other end of the house if needsbe), dropping it in Jon's shoe and then doing a very peculiar "aren't I clever?" miaowing repertoire. Juliet's miaow has disappeared again (well, it only ever appeared that once in the vets), which made it quite hard to discover she was locked in the corridoor last night. They love to watch the TV, and they love to watch the PC screensavers too, especially Juliet who pats at them whenever she gets the chance. They adore going out in the garden and enthusiastically get into their harnesses (well, with our help, you know). They have a great time out there each day. It's obvious they'd love to be let loose, but well, they're just so small still, and so young, and so close to the damn road. We shall see.

Well, off for a manic evening of packing orders now - have two desks covered in items and can only just get to the PC on this one, and we haven't even pulled them all out yet. Plus Hazel and Romy are coming over to play tomorrow and it would be nice if they had somewhere to actually sit, so I feel a tidy up coming on....