Birthday Doings & Back to Work

Had a super birthday yesterday. I was very moved by how much trouble Jon and Emily went to in finding me some fantastic pressies, and by the work my Mum and Dad put into making a scrummy birthday lunch too.

Emily spent much of last weekend doing secret arty crafty stuff, and I can see why now! She made me two beautiful encuastic art pictures, some fabulous cards including one covered in fake clay sweeties, lol, an amazing scratch art tiger and a lovely abstract painting which repeats words like happy and birthday over and over amid the swirls and also contains cut outs of the sort of things she'd like to give me if we had lots of money, bless her heart. The encuastic picture on the left is called Mystic Mountains and on the right is Doorway to your Dreams.

Present wise I was completely spoilt, with books, DVDs, perfume, body sprays, slippers (I LOVE slippers), buddhas, incense sticks, a beautiful pagan mug and all sorts of other things from Jon and Emily, as well as Emily's beautiful handmade presents; Mum and Dad bought me six bottles of wine and some champagne, a silver necklace and some black satin sheets and duvet, rofl!! And Grandad gave me some lovely, lovely Lush bath bubble bars and shampoos. I was an extremely lucky girl, to put it mildly! Oh, and you can tell you're a keen home educator when you're thrilled to bits to get, for *your* birthday, a big chemistry set you'd been wanting to do with your child ;-))

I'm delighted to say that Voldemort made a full recovery from having been at death's door on Sunday and both kitties are fit and well. Yesterday we started giving them the ear drops the vet had prescribed - that's a messy job and no mistake. And for such wee little things, they can't half put up a fight when they really don't like something :-// Despite being administered correctly the ear drops, however, manage to make their way from kitten ears to all over kitten heads, necks, chests and front paws, so by the time they'd had their second dose, they looked like little alien kitties. I must admit I though the original back of the neck thing had cured the ear mites. But the incompetent woman vet we saw told us not to clean the existing muck out of their ears. I don't know whether she thought it would spontaneously vanish. Sigh. So when the new vet looked in Voldemort's ears and saw all the muck, he had no way of telling whether it was old or new. I reckon they no longer have mites. So today we've cleaned their ears, which will make it easy to tell whether there's any fresh granules appearing or not, and we'll stop the ear drops unless and until there are.

Today Emily and I have got back to some work since it's only today and tomorrow free this week. After a quick times table practice and some English, Emily worked on a "timeline timeout" from the history course. This involved looking back at the separate civilisations studied so far (Sumerians, Assyrians, Hittites, Babylonians, Ancient Egyptians, Ancient Africans) and getting an idea of the bigger picture, who was around when, who was more advanced than who at the same time. That was a really useful exercise and I think she enjoyed doing it. As we progress with this course we'll have ancient China, Ancient India, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans etc to add to the picture too, so there are several more of the timeline timeouts spread about later on.

This afternoon we worked on chemistry, looking at paper chromatography and doing an experiment to separate the colours in various ball point pen inks, and learning about the differences between filtration and evaporation and when each can be useful for separating mixtures.

After that, we started looking at English from the Roots Up which Emily liked a lot; I think she's going to find it fun being able to decode long words or make up new ones using the right roots.

And so September is nearly here. The year's gone scarily fast, yet again! Emily's birthday isn't until January, but we're already throwing around ideas. She'll have a party this year, since we didn't have one last year and our original plan was to have a birthday party every other year. No idea what the theme will be, though. So far Emily's come up with ideas for a Fashion Designer Party, Ancient Egypt Party, Medieval or Tudor Party, King Arthur Party, Goddess Party or Cat Party. Hmmmm. Food for thought indeed.