Quickie Update

Just back from yoga; Emily has passed her level three :-))

Other happenings today: lots of English this morning; Emily did a revision test thingy which covered all kinds of things - suffixes, prefixes, adding -er and -est to adjectives, plurals spelling rules, first/second/third person and other stuff I can't remember. She sailed through that so I think we're ready to move a bit, grammar and spelling wise.

We also recapped on addition and subtraction with borrowing and carry over, or "Faff Sums" as Emily somewhat memorably named them nearly two years ago, lol. She's been doing this on and off for those two years but this morning she had a bit of a blank moment over it. As they do. She was OK with the additions but completely stumped with the subtractions, so we went right back to basics with coloured dots in hundreds, tens and units columns and lots of moving them around to solve the sums. Seemed to do the trick for now, but isn't it funny how you think children have something off pat only for them to then suddenly lose it again, only to pick it up again later!!

Emily also tried on a lilac fairy outfit she was given a long time ago and has never worn - it's what she wants to wear to K's fancy dress disco party and fortunately, it fits a treat. I must say she's being rather braver than I would have been at her age about the party, since the only child there she'll know is K herself and also since Emily hates pop music, lol. She's adamant she wants to go, so her self-confidence must be increasing :-))

This afternoon we played around in the sunshine. Got Emily's beam out of the garage and she mastered climbing up onto it with perfect balance and without falling off (previously she's always had to be helped with the actual getting on bit) and spent ages twirling, prancing, twisting, doing yoga poses on it (???) and inventing posh dismounts. Think that covers PE, then. Emily also spent a long time lying on her lounger reading whilst I sat in the shade and plotted and planned, business-wise.

Am currently extremely narked with an ebay "customer" from the US who bought a cross stitch kit from the new Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady range last week and paid straight away. Great. Except that despite my explicit instructions to overseas buyers, she paid the UK rate of postage only. OK, no problem, I'm used to that, so I politely emailed her to explain and to request the balance. Silence for the whole week. Then suddenly today we get a flood of rude emails from her demanding to know why it hasn't yet been sent and complaining that we are unethical and dishonest in displaying one shipping price and then asking for more "just because you want to send it airmail instead of regular mail. I didn't ask for airmail." She demands that it be sent immediately "by the method I paid for". That would be first class post, then. Dozy so and so doesn't even realise we're in the UK. We refuse to send items surface mail because of the length of time and the constant customer complaints - to overseas buyers we offer airmail only. As it quite clearly stated. Short of transatlantic carrier pigeon or perhaps hot air balloon, I'm not sure how she expected it to get there at all, let alone for the princely sum of £1.25. My instructions specifically state that postage quoted is for delivery within the UK only and that overseas buyers should either contact us first to ask for shipping costs or, if they don't want to do that, at least wait for an invoice showing the correct amount. I don't have time to list overseas costs for all of our 500 odd items. It isn't much to ask. It annoys me when people stereotype whole nations but honestly. US ebayers, far too frequently, don't do their country's arrogant image many favours. :-((