Fireworks & Chimney Sweeps

Emily's had an exciting few days to round off the week, and a busy one too with ballet both on Saturday and Sunday. They were practising the main solo dance for the exam (only just over a week to go!) and were doing it one at a time just as they will have to do for real. This particular dance is telling a story and has a lot of mime and different facial expressions etc. One of the little girls said she was too shy and wouldn't do it properly, missing out all the facial expressions and mimes and bits and bobs. The teacher got Emily to do hers alone, and explained to the one who was feeling shy that here was another little girl who she knew was very shy in real life, but who had mastered the art of acting when necessary, despite her nerves. I'm really proud that they've noticed how far Emily's come along recently. It is tough for her and she IS very nervous about the exam, but she's worked so hard on braving it out and it's nice for her when someone comments on her progress so positively.

Sunday, of course, wouldn't have been complete without fireworks. We had a load from the Tesco offer, including some really big rockets :-)) Gramps set them all up for us so we all wrapped up warm and ventured out in the dark for an hour full of bangs, pops, fizzles and tons of "oooooooh" :-)) Took some video of it too. Must be well over a year since our last video of Emily - lots of photos, but we never seem to get round to the video bit.

We've had fun rounding the four cats up early this last week to get them indoors before dark. They haven't seemed remotely bothered by the fireworks, though. Think they're glad to get back to playing in the dark tonight though. We've bought Merlin some tablets which are glucosamine mixed with summat else the name of which escapes me. It's meant to help with joints as I think he's feeling some discomfort there. He loves them! Fingers crossed that might do some good.

Today Emily's had a ball. The chimney sweep came round to, well, chimney sweep as it hadn't been done for a while. He asked Emily to help him ;-)) She had a fantastic time fitting all the bits together, right from the start when he put the shield up, and pushing the brush up the chimney, chattering away about the history and traditions. Think he quite took a shine to her, lol. She was absolutely filthy by the end of it but bouncing around like an extremely excited excited thing! Blogger's faffing about with photos again, so I'll add them above this post.

Emily's also worked on a bit of RE today from a great new book we've found which compares the six "major" religions (no mention of paganism, surprise, surprise). From the first chapter of that, she wrote about whether or not she believes anyone can truly "experience" God, and wrote some very thoughtful responses to a question asking her to list five "BIG" questions she would want a religion to address - namely a) Is there life after death? b) Why does God allow bad things to happen? c) Are ghosts and spirits real? d) Is there such a thing as reincarnation? and e) how are people who do really bad things treated by God?

Oooh, and lots of maths on a very old copy of I Love Maths software, which she deemed far too easy, having finally decided she can do maths after all ;-)