Monday, July 10, 2006

Time Flies By

I'm not entirely sure where the days are disappearing to at the moment. It's rather alarming. But anyway - time to update with "stuff" that's been going on since last Weds.

Thursday morning Emily and Jon went off to tai chi and had a ball detecting auras and talking about psychic abilities as well as learning more of the next form. On Thursday afternoon they went to Kirton Lindsey for what we thought was Emily's dentist appointment. It turned out to be Jon's appointment instead but the dear dentist saw Emily too, which was very nice of him, and she got to watch Jon's hygenist appointment too. Saves them having to go back tomorrow which would have been Emily's appointment - muggins here wrote down the wrong names on the calendar. Back from the dentist it was a quick change into her drama costume and off to the dress rehearsal for that. Out she trotted and hour later with her face painted and all smiles.

On Friday Emily went to Romy's for a play; once she came home she spent a long time telling me and Jon about a very long and complicated pretend play they'd had which seemed to involve, to greater or lesser degrees, witches, princesses, poison and seperate but connected worlds. I think I lost the plot half way through, but from the way she was chattering it sounds like she had great fun.

While Emily was out I had hoped to start whittling down the massive pile of goods-in that has yet to be listed on either our shop or ebay. Unluckily, as it turned out, I chose to start with ebay. And discovered the "new and improved" HA HA HA listing form which takes forever to load, forever to refresh after you click anything and just generally forever, even for a relisting. Spent most of the afternoon huffing and puffing over that and listing about 3 items in nearly three hours, before abandoning all hope and opting to try Turbo Lister instead.

Saturday was ballet; surprise, surprise, the teacher was absent, yet again. The lesson was taken by her teenage helper plus sister plus a new, younger helper and despite finding it hard to control waayyy too many children they did rather well, teaching the class some of the choreography from Beauty and the Beast (the Be Our Guest song, Emily got to be one of the plates which she was pleased about) and also managing to fit in some tap which the class hasn't done for **months**. Emily loves tap. Anticipating that they might finally get back to it now the show's over, we had to buy her new tap shoes last week as she's outgrown the ones she had back in February, even though they were new in January :-// Half the class had no tap shoes on Saturday for exactly that reason. Anyway, so ballet was good, and Emily enjoyed messing around with K and came home with an invitation to K's birthday party next weekend.

Sunday morning Emily took virtually every Barbie item she possesses downstairs into the dining room and had a wall to wall faff session with it all, listening to the first Lemony Snicket CD, which she pronounced excellent-and-please-may-I-have-the-book-of-it - yes, dear, it's sat on your shelf with three thousand others awaiting your attention once you've finally finished or got fed up with HP & Azkaban AND Warrior Cats 1 AND Nurse Matilda (Nanny McPhee) and History of Fashion and whatever the others are that are "on the go" just now.

On Sunday afternoon while I worked Jon and Emily did a mammoth art session. Jon worked hard on his art course, finishing off this fabulous garden seat for the "textures" part and then painting a vivid alien landscape:


Emily wasn't really in the mood for spending hours on something, but she did two pieces of art, the first of which is her abstract take on the same alien city theme as Jon and the second of which is Blue Dolphins painted in about three minutes flat, lol.

And so to today. This morning we had a mammoth yoga session to begin with, as we suddenly realised that Emily's got her test for level three tomorrow and hadn't even looked at what she has to do (we're not normally that bad, just got out of synch with it this last week or two when she missed a lesson for the show). After that we pressed on with a morning of Body Project looking at the brain. Read lots of books, labelled a diagram or two, colour coded areas of the brain and what they control and did lots of experiments to test reaction time (catching a ruler), balance (up against a wall and not) and how to confuse the brain with optical illusions, trying to write while looking in mirror, that thing where you have the word red written in green (etc) and you have to say green instead of red (can't remember for the life of me what's that called), spinning blindfolded on a swivel chair and trying to tell which direction you're going, etc etc etc. Lots of chart making, stopwatch using and general giggling.

This afternoon we started some basic low budget scrapbooking - instead of a posh scrapbook we're just using white card put into clear wallets in a ring binder. Emily produced three sheets on the theme "The Big Cats" and I did four on her Egyptian project from last spring.


And well, that's about it. Apart from the annoying conversation I had this morning when trying to book Emily's appointment for her eyesight checkup at Specsavers. "I'd like an appointment for my daughter, please." "How old is she?" "Seven." "We have after-school appointments from 4pm any day this week." "No, she doesn't go to school - I'd prefer a morning appointment, please." **Cue long silence. And I mean long.** "We have to book children's appointments for after school so they don't have to take time off, you see." "She doesn't go to school. As early as possible would be good, please." **More long silence. I could almost picture her reaching for the phone book and looking under S for social services.** Eventually I got fed up with waiting for a response. "Emily's home educated. In the past we've always had appointments for about 9.30?" "Um, errr, right. I see. We have 9:10 on Wednesday if that's suitable?" "Perfect, thank you." And I can see I shall have to turn up (again, had this problem last time round) armed with a copy of the law, a big sign on my forehead saying "Yes, it's legal" and a big sign on Emily's forehead saying "No, I shouldn't be in school today. Should you?"

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