Stone Age Art & A Pink Volcano

Emily and Daddy came back from the car boot sale yesterday absolutely laden down with goodies - among which a certain Harry Potter featured heavily, lol. They got some really nice stuff; they'd like to go more often, but with karate normally on a Sunday, it's not often possible.

Today we had a bit of a drama at lunchtime - a water pipe under the sink in the kitchen burst and flooded the kitchen floor to paddle-able level :-// Had my Mum not happened to be in the kitchen at the time it happened, who knows how much damage would have been inflicted. Emily naturally thought it was exciting - who needs paddling pools? I love that magic of childhood, when a kid can look at a crisis as purely an object of fun and fascination, free from any worry about it at all!! Fortunately, the old Vax water hoover thingy was still in the shed, so it only took about half an hour to mop and suction it all up, although it took my Dad the rest of the day to replace the pipe with the whole sink unit having to come away from the wall.

Aside from the flood, we had a good home ed day today. Emily did brilliantly with her latin this morning, ably translating four paragraphs full of nominative/accusative bits and bobs and lots of words she'd not met before but mostly figured out without help. She then worked on some literacy exercises connected to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Our history curriculum starts with the Fertile Crescent so it misses out the "stone age", so we're doing bits and bobs about that separately but alongside. Today Emily made a "rock" and tried out cave art on it, painting an animal and hunter on one side and experimenting with hand prints on the other. That turned out rather nicely.

We also had lots of fun with a plaster of paris volcano. For some reason, the dye provided only produced pink lava instead of a nice bright red, but hey, it was still as messy as hell and a big hit.
We like this volcano kit a lot; it comes with earthquake stuff too and various models to make, so we've lots left to do with that.

While we were busy getting suitably messy, Jon managed to install our new fax machine - it's been waiting for over a week now, since the old one gave up the ghost, but he hasn't had two minutes to breathe until now. He also hot foooted it out to the football club to sign Emily up for the next set of lessons after Easter. Got back to find that Grandad expected him to mow the lawn. Apparently it simply had to be done today. Fortunately common sense prevailed. The lawn did not get mowed. Frankly, as priorities go, it doesn't even make the list.

This afternoon I took Grandad out to the doctors while Emily made more "props" for her Remus Lupin pretends and tried to get the better of her out-of-control cassette collection. We're, um, not the tidiest household at the best of times, but Emily's audio cassettes and CDs are threatening to take over the house. It's not helped by the fact that she has all but the first of the Harry Potters on tape rather than CD (can't afford the CD versions, lol) but they come in such inadequate little cardboard boxes. It's murder to get the tapes in and out virtually every day (yes, she does listen to them in her every waking moment......obsessed? My child? How dare you??) so they end up just scattered about loose. So that's 64 HP tapes rattling around, plus dozens and dozens of other tapes and CDs - we need a storage solution.

Have just bought 50 blank cassette cases to tame the worst of the HP ones, and bid on a 72 tape storage unit on ebay, so that might help with those. What to do about the rest I just don't know. No matter what, they always seem to end up in the wrong cases, half missing, or with cases broken or lost. Since my beloved daughter seems to take after her father in her ability to do twelve different things at once of which only one is listening to a tape/CD, I guess she's usually too preoccupied to marshall them into order every day.

We could do with a house elf.