Oracles and a Bat

Voldemort came home from the vets late on Friday much improved; they haven't a clue what was wrong with him, so let's hope it doesn't happen again. The swelling in his tummy went down, so that's something. He's been as happy as anything since he came home. Very sweetly, as soon as he saw us he wanted to get from the vet's arms to us and started purring and nuzzling :-))

Jon's father has now had his angioplasty done, apparently successfully. I went to pick him on Saturday morning and hopefully life should now start to get easier for him (and us). He's planning on going back out for walks etc, having basically refused to move from his chair for the last several months, so that's a good thing. Now we get to start on an endless round of follow up appointments, but at least we're getting somewhere.

Emily's been very self sufficient this last couple of days. She was fascinated by the I-Ching when we learnt about it during Ancient China work a few days ago, and she has spent a long time researching that and trying it out, asking the I-Ching to comment on all kinds of aspects of her life, with interesting results. She has also started to make her own crystal oracle set, with laminated crystal casting mat and interpretations.

While we were all busy looking after Grandad and Voldy, Emily was busy being the Tidy Fairy again, although this weekend she did manage not to injure herself in any way! She cleaned the kitchen out including the hob and would have washed the floor had she not run out of time!! She has this passion for cleaning and tidying at the moment. Oddly enough, however, it doesn't extend to clearing up her own room or clearing away after she's been crafting somewhere. She's a very efficient but selective Tidy Fairy, this one ;-)

This morning Emily went to karate, where George told he she has the strongest punches and kicks in the group :-) and came home bursting with a secret crafty idea she simply HAD to get stuck into. And that was the last we saw of her for a while, before she came upstairs proudly displaying this rather fabulous poseable, stuffed vampire bat:She'd designed it using a loo roll holder as the cylinder pattern (which she then removed to stuff the bat) and wire in the wings to make it poseable; she'd drawn and cut out all the patterns, worked out how to attach the wings and head securely, done all the sewing, the lot. :-)

Emily's also been busying herself with an entirely self-directed Victorian Servants project. We'd done a bit of Victorians work with Jasmine and Mei-Lin but Emily's imagination has really been caught by the whole upstairs vs downstairs stuff. She's read tons of books about it, made notes on everything that interests her and is now in the middle of writing a very detailed and imaginative Victorian Servant's diary.

Yoga test on Tuesday, which we'd forgotten all about, so there's also been a fair bit of frantically trying to learn the benefits of the poses involved in this level. Emily keeps coming up with things like "It feels like this one opens up the base chakra" or "This definitely stimulates the thymus"....which is a bit more esoteric than the very basic "stretches the back" bit she's supposed to be saying, so it's a bit of a struggle for her to remember what it actually says on the sheets she's been given. I'm supposed to be assisting in the yoga lesson Tuesday, now that my CRB check has finally come back revealing what a seedy and criminal past I've (not) had. Should be interesting.

Trying to plough through my writing deadlines this afternoon was greatly assisted - or not - by the continuous presence of some beautiful black kitties on and around my desk.