Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud

There's something about children and mud, isn't there? Every childhood should be jam packed full of the stuff. Emily certainly started her 2006 quota in style yesterday - she spent a fabulous afternoon at Normanby Hall with Nana, Gramps and her new scooter. She came back worn out and happy and, well, brown. As did the scooter.

Meanwhile I finally managed to get over a hundred pictures sorted out, rotated and filed in their proper homes on the PC, having dumped them in our photo holding folder at various stages recently. Found some that had been languishing there a while of the kittens in September - they were soooo tiny compared to now!

Also gathered together the resources I want to use starting from Monday, and realised that we have far too many/much of everything except the one thing I particularly wanted. Put an order in with the wholesalers, so that's one resolution up the spout. Oh well. I don't like clothes shopping or any kind of "girly" shopping at all, so I think I'm allowed to compensate for my lack of expenditure in that department by indulging in some home ed retail therapy on a regular basis instead!

Yesterday we got up at the grand old hour of 6.45 am (yes, apparently such a time does exist). Why? Well, umm - to watch The Winx Club on Nick Toons. Okkkaaay. Emily has a couple of the dolls but we've never actually seen the show before. She got the DVD for Christmas, which was a US region one, but since we have a multi region DVD player we assumed it would work. Wrong. Apparently the telly needs something or other which ours doesn't have. So, 6.45 am it was. Have to say, mind, that I did quite enjoy it, and Emily loved it. The DVD is being released in March over here, so I guess we'll be getting it (if only to preserve my beauty sleep!).

So, Winx Club fever is now in full blown operation, and Emily spent the early hours of yesterday morning making a lovely Winx Club poster. This and her current obsession with Charlie & The Chocolate Factory (both film versions, the book and everything else she can devour from the net) seems to have knocked fairies, Barbies and even unicorns well and truly off their perch as "favourite thing". Coupled with her announcement the other day that she no longer likes pink and her favourite colour is now black....seven seems an awfully long way away from the little girl we once had, lol.

May need to re-think our do-more-poetry objective. I read Emily a poem about a duck in Sainsburys yesterday. I thought it was quite funny. She looked at me blankly and said "I don't understand". Which *I* didn't understand. Having checked that she understood all the vocabulary, I asked her what, exactly, she didn't understand. "Any of it. I don't understand the point of it." Oh. Right. Establishing which poems have a suitable "point" and are therefore worthy of her attention could prove interesting to say the least.

Speaking of poems, here's something that has been driving me potty. For my O level English, the poems we studied were war poems by Charles Causley (which I loved) and old church poems (or somesuch) by Ted Hughes, which I loathed. There was one poem by Causley in particular which I was really drawn to, and now I can't find it anywhere. It was about (or at least partly about) rememberance at the centoaph, and contained lines about a young widow wearing her grief in a locket around her neck for ever, not just for that one day. Does anyone know?

And one other thing - does anyone know how I can change the photo that appears at the top right of the blog, the one of Emily in her red/blue dress? I obviously managed to put it there in the first place, but can't remember how, and although I can see where in the template code that photo is, changing it to the URL of a new photo seems to have no effect at all :-(