Flags & Footie Fun

Doesn't "preparing to go away for a week" involve an inordinate amount of work?? We're busy trying to get the business ready for abandonment on Thursday, which is proving tricky.

Emily meanwhile has been having some flag related fun this last couple of days. On Sunday she did this fab flags of the world jigsaw all by herself and spent ages working out which were her favourites.

She's also been designing numerous flags for countries both real and imagined. Oh, and Hogwarts, naturally :-))

On Sunday morning Emily's karate lesson went very well; she's really getting to grips with it now. When we get back from holiday she'll be getting her uniform and "passport" to record her progress - apparently we got the wrong end of the stick, it wasn't that George kept forgetting her uniform, it was that he doesn't give them out until the child has attended for a month as so many kids start and then give up again.

Yesterday Emily did lots of English in the morning. She wrote a thoughtful piece about the chapter we'd just finished reading in Half Blood Prince, where Harry first uses the old potions book with spectacular results. She wrote about who she thought the Half Blood Prince was (she thinks it's Slughorn; I'm positively bursting with trying not to give away the plot!!) and what she thought might happen if Harry continues to use the advice in the potions book. We also worked on spellings, specifically adding -ing to words and whether or not the last letter is doubled or the -e dropped. Think we've finally got that one now. Thought she had it cracked a long time ago but just recently Emily's been writing a lot of -ing words quite, um, imaginatively ;-) so hopefully this bit of revision will have helped!

Yesterday afternoon Emily played on Zoombinis all afternoon. She loves that game; I'm fairly taken with it myself. She's on the "oh so hard" level now (Which is only the second level up, after all) and even I'm struggling with some of it, so it was nice to spend time figuring some of it out together. We were supposed to be working on tornados in a bid to finish up the weather project before we leave, but hey ho, we'll get round to it, I'm sure.

After the major Zoombinis faff it was time for football practice. Emily came back exceedingly muddy and pretty soggy as it had drizzled the whole time, but very happy. Apparently she scored a goal and also did so much tackling that the coaches named her "tackler" instead of calling her name :-) She's really, really loving football. It's *such* a shame there's only one Monday left (apart from next week, which we'll miss) and then she can't go to the Saturday ones because of flippin' ballet. I'm sure she's getting a lot more out of football than ballet, personally.

Today Emily went off to play at Romy's for the afternoon. While she was having a great time playing, I got stuck into clearing out our bedroom. Contrary to popular belief, I discovered that we do actually have a bedrooom floor!!! Result! Got rid of two great big bin bags full of assorted stuff. Feel better now. Once I picked Emily up from Romy's we went straight off to yoga where the yoga teacher made me glow by telling someone who'd come in to see her all about how marvellous Emily was, polite, grown up and talented :-))

Poor Jon's foot is still giving him merry hell, which doesn't bode all that well for all the walking I've got planned for this holiday :-// Romeo's chin is getting worse, Ju-Ju's found her miaow again, Merlin is eating us out of house and home and STILL losing weight and Cassie Cat's being adorable. So at least someone's in good health.