A Year In The Life....

It's our blog anniversary today :-)) Can't believe a whole year has passed. That's quite a scary thought, so I think I'll mentally file it in the "too hard" box and press on!!

The bits of Emily's weekend that I haven't already blogged were, well, wet and football-y. She switched from the paddling pool and scorching sun to the shade of the sitting room and the TV with great regularity and a permanent grin. Thanks to the world cup I think she's watched more telly this last three days than she normally does in a whole week. Yet another paddling pool photo:
Today we were promised thunder, so I'm having a bit of a sulk that it has failed to materialise. I LOVE storms. So beautiful, so powerful - uncontrollable nature. And so energising and uplifting too. Must be all those negative ions flying about. Anyway, no thunder here although it has been very overcast for most of the day, but still extremely sticky and generally TOO HOT. [Added at 17:42 - stop press! Right on cue! Thunder!!!]

Emily and I have both felt inspired to get back to some serious work and today has been a good start to that. Emily steamed through some English work on suffixes and synonyms, then we spent a long time on French, revising what we've done so far and looking at colours - played some great games with that and it was interesting to see Emily make the connection between the Italian colour words she already knows and the new French ones, correctly deducing that it must be to do with their common latin ancestry. After that we moved onto maths and she completed several "tests" of mixed problems from a KS2 mental maths book. Some of them were pretty hard, so I was impressed with that.

Lunchtime was taken up with Emily gleefully sticking loads more Harry Potter stickers into her album, then she had time for a quick play on Pharaoh before doing nearly an hour of gymnastics and general "exercise" (rushing about like a mad thing with the odd bit of yoga thrown in) and then settling down to her art course. She completed the last two "practice" exercises of the first module - the next three pieces of work she does she has to send in to the tutor - ooh err! So far the course has concentrated on drawing and shading pieces of fruit and veg - Emily's done brilliant work in particular of an apple and a red pepper, and has worked really hard on it, making tonal strips with her different grades of pencil to make sure she can get the light and shading just so. Really proud of how well she's sticking at it - it's by no means easy!

For the last art task today, she had to choose an ornament to draw and shade. Off she went and came back with various china cats from her massive collection. Unfortunately, drawing a china cat is practially as hard as drawing a real cat, and she couldn't get it how she wanted it and ended up quite frustrated (read: lots of tears) with her efforts. Jon and I gently pointed out that the course example had been a kitchen egg holder in the shape of a chicken - basically just a square with a chicken's head on - and that they probably wanted her to choose something much simpler than a flippin' lifelike pair of playing kittens. Tears soothed and point understood, Emily settled on a big stylised goose thing that holds porridge oats in our kitchen, and did a very good job of it too.

Speaking of cats, I just wanted to add these two beautiful photos Jon took of Juliet yesterday. Poor Romeo hates the hot weather; it's a job to persuade him to go out at all at the moment, lol, but Ju Ju doesn't seem to mind it and just snoozes in the shade. She particularly likes sleeping under Emily's old climbing frame, which is where she is in the first photo:
Busy week ahead; we've got to fit in a trip to the museum and lots of swimming (apparently) as well as a ton and a half of work Emily wants to do. Looking back on the blog I can see that a year ago (sob!) we were in the middle of Tudor mania. A Roman project is itching to get started, so we'd better get a move on with the human body!