A Cold? Surely Not!

Emily woke up this morning absolutely FULL of cold. Poor love has barely been finally free of the bronchitis for five flippin minutes. This one's more of a sniffly, sneezy head cold but it's still pretty rotten.

Anyway; yesterday Emily found out that she'd passed her yoga test, so she was mightily pleased about that. Her teacher spent a long time talking to me before the lesson and was saying that Emily's really lovely (her words), extremely polite and grown up, very attentive and really into what she's doing. Apparently, together with another girl of 11 who also takes it very seriously, Emily is her star pupil :-)) Proud parent moment :-))

Emily and Daddy came back from the hairdressers yesterday afternoon minus 6 inches of hair and plus some scrummy gadgets. Emily's hair looks gorgeous now. She had it washed, cut, straightened, moussed, blow dried, the works apparently. It's about 2" below her shoulders now, which is a big change from half way down her back, but it really suits her. While they were out, they spotted a juicer on offer in Lloyds Pharmacy, and a heart rate monitor too, as well as a blow up gym slope Emily's been wanting. Love it when they go shopping, they always come back with much more interesting stuff than when I go!

We spent the rest of the afternoon before yoga playing with the new toys. Juicer is a big hit, we've made all kinds of combinations with it, really delicious.

This morning, despite being very sniffly, Emily did some excellent maths. Decided it was time to investigate angles, as she's always being told in tai chi, yoga and art things like "turn 180 degrees" or "have your paint brush at a 45 degree angle". So we dug out Emily's protactor and away she went. She grasped measuring angles incredibly quickly and did three whole sheets of angles on a straight line up to 180 degrees without a single mistake. There was also a compass in her maths set so she had a play with that and we talked about diamters of circles and how to measure them, and how to measure the radius on a ruler before drawing with the compass to give a circle of a certain diameter.

After maths, Emily did some beautiful encuastic wax art, following some new ideas from a book she and Jon found in the local library.

After lunch, we worked on some simple design and technology stuff - using nets on paper to make 3D containers, to begin with, and then we moved onto looking at how materials can be strengthened by folding and by adding depth. Emily investigated this by making some paper beams to span across a gap between two chairs. She folded various shapes of beam including corrugated, rolled up etc and tested them with weights to see which worked best.

That's about it for the day, I think, home ed wise. There was a lot of playing too at various points. Jon and I pondered a lot on how to cope with a work load that seems to increase every single day without fail, expecially since neither of us are feeling very well at the moment. My back's playing up again, and Jon's so tired he's almost asleep on his feet. We were supposed to be having an early night tonight, and indeed did go to bed early.....but as I write this, at 00:50, the two kit-kats are going absolutely beserk up here. If we close the bedroom door, they scratch the hell out of it (so loudly you think they're yanking their claws out) and if we keep it open they're bouncing all over the bed hissing and spitting at each other. Don't think they used up quite enough energy in the garden today. Hey ho. Well, since I'm up I guess I may as well do some work!