Finally Finished!

Emily has at last finished her huge "seasons" canvas/acrylic painting. She did summer and winter months ago but finally yesterday she did spring and autumn.
You can't really see from the photo but spring was meant to be in a very loose, squiggly style with splattered rain drops on it. I really like the perspective and colours in autumn.

Today Emily's lost her voice thanks to a persistent little cold that we all can't get rid of. She and Jon went off to two Christmas Fayres this morning and came back with various goodies. Apparently lots of ladies from tai chi had stalls there and made a big fuss of Emily, bless 'em. We must get a stall at the next one.

Yesterday my Mum took the big cats to the vets for their booster vaccinations and to find out more about what on earth is happening to Merlin, who is now so thin that it's really awkward to pick him up without hurting him. He's going back first thing on Monday morning for a further round of blood tests and liver function tests. Yesterday evening the poor thing had diarrhea all over our sitting room floor. He's constantly eating but since they've ruled out thyroid and diabetes they now think it could be something with his liver that's stopping him absorbing food properly. Emily's PC up here has a photo screensaver on it and recently it's been showing a lot of photos of Merlin in the last lot of snow we had, so I guess that would be about 11 months ago. He was never a fat cat but the difference between how healthy he looked then and how poorly he looks now is shocking :-((

Work wise we're plodding on through an ever increasing work load. Our run of bad luck with our business bank continues, as they've decided to bounce yet another cheque to a supplier despite the fact that by the time the statement had updated to show the bounce (and the hefty fee) it was also showing the several thousand pounds in that would have covered the cheque if only it had been 12 hours earlier. Ridiculous. What with several corporate customers being so late in paying us and a hugely long run of payments arriving just 24 hours too late, it's been a traumatic couple of months, but we're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel now.

With only a few days to go until December I guess we'd better get up in the loft and find Emily's advent calendar box thingy. This year the advent fairy's going to bring her a colletion of Harry Potter collectable badges in the little drawers instead of choccies ;-) so we're looking forward to seeing her enjoying that. After much thought and soul searching, we've decided against having an 8th birthday party after all. With the cashflow situation as it is, we simply couldn't afford both that and the riding lessons we'd promised Emily, so we sat her down and explained things and asked her to choose. Very sensibly, imo, she chose the riding lessons, and fortunately didn't seem in the slightest bit bothered at not having a party after all. Which is a huge weight off our minds. I'd already got lots of HP themed decorations etc so we'll still decorate everything up and I think we'll do a Harry Potter type task/treasure hunt thingy for her so she's got some games to play before finding her pressies. And a fab birthday tea with all the family, obviously!

Beautiful Birthday Butterflies

I mentioned at the end of my last post that we'd likely spend all day Friday on arty crafty things - and indeed we did. Emily worked her socks off for hours and came up with some really beautiful bits and pieces for my Mum's birthday tea. Emily's asked me to put the pictures on here "so that Nana won't forget her decorations" (not that there's much chance of that!)

Altogether on Friday, Emily made two different types of hanging butterfly chains to hang up over the table: One type was transparent film with shreds and sparkles sandwiched in between, but into butterfly shapes and threaded together with beads; the others were six stained glass butterflies hanging each on their own threads. The picture's not very good, but it looked fantastic when it all the bits were hanging over the table at birthday tea time :-))

Emily also made six butterfly/dragonfly plate decorations, one for each of us, which she set out on the plates at birthday tea:
Also on the craft menu on Friday was this lovely balloon butterfly
and a pretty heart/butterfly bag filled with peanut brittle: and of course a beautiful butterfly birthday card, my photo of which has decided to be incredibly blurry.

Phew. Well, that took care of Friday. Saturday morning we got up really early to make Nana's birthday cake before Emily had to go out to ballet. She's getting so good at baking. We had a recipe for a chocolate/orange marble cake and apart from reaching down ingredients and handling the oven, Emily did the lot from start to finish. She had a fabulous idea for decorating it as a butterfly flower garden, so when she got back from ballet this was the result:
Nana was overwhelmed with everything and very touched by how much effort Emily had put into it all :-))

Today I've been hard at work on boring old BBC stuff while Jon and Emily have been painting rocks. We've also been playing an excellent Egytpian board game which they picked up for the princely sum of a pound from the charity shop on Saturday. It's quite old but in fabulous condition, called Piramid (yes, that is the spelling). You have to trade slaves and gain protection from the Gods against various things that befall you on your way to the Valley of the Kings to build your pyramid. Good stuff. Which reminds me, Scunthorpe Museum's Egypt exhibition is on now, with stuff on loan from the British Museum. Emily doesn't want to go to any of the half term activities on next week as she's done them all before (writing in hieroglyphs, wrapping Mummies and the like) but she's very keen to visit the exhibition itself "once the kids have gone back to school" ROFL. The Tutankhamun Exhibition at the Millennium Dome is creeping closer (well, November 07 - that's close in my head) and we're being pestered not to forget that we've *promised* that we'll spend a week in London at that time. I didn't know the Millennium Dome was now called O2 - ??? Oooh, I just read the site and discovered that you're advised to reserve ticketing certificates as they expect it to sell out. OK, reserved ours.

Meanwhile, Emily's enrolled on the Young Artist's Course at London Art College, so she's very excited about that. Oooh and of course Springwatch starts tomorrow, which is the cause of even more excitement. I think Bill Oddie is now rivally Tony Robinson in Emily's Heroes List. She's been watching some of his How To Watch Wildlife DVDs.......and was extremely surprised when she watched some episodes of the Goodies recently!

Thought I was seeing things earlier this morning. Went out in the garden to call Romeo as I'd just put some food down for the kits bits and whilst his sister was chomping away, he was nowhere to be seen. Saw this:
Couldn't see the rest of him apart from a few bits of black blob inbetween the leaves - he was stretched out in the branches of next door's apple tree with his paw hanging down like a leopard, bless him. Here's His Royal Pink Nosed-ness on his way down!

Therapy: Retail & Art!

Am attempting to move on past Saturday's emotional shock to the system. Thank you to those who left supportive comments for my last post; it was very comforting.

The rest of the weekend passed with a large bout of therapy of both the retail and the art kind. Emily and Jon spent most of Sunday out shopping for both food and holiday bits and bobs. At other times over the weekend and this afternoon they were busy with arty stuff. Emily painted this lovely abstract piece which she's called "Flight of a Butterfly":
She also spent a long time making clay cats - this is Yellow Fang, Thunderclan's Medicine Cat (yes, we still have Warrior Cat fever):

This morning, Emily worked on some tricky money maths problems, and did lots more handwriting practice (her choice). After that, she wrote a nonsense poem about her ballet class, swapping around verbs and adjectives to best effect.

This afternoon, it was more arty stuff with Jon. Emily painted rocks we found in Cumbria and Jon did some beautiful miniature landscapes.

Meanwhile, I've been hard at work (still) on the new shop which will hopefully be launching on Wednesday. It's just dawned on me that this weekend, due to our being away the following week, I need to write two weeks worth of BBC stuff, the big long monthly press agency piece and an Aspire magazine article. Hmmm. Considering I normally struggle to get one set of BBC work done each weekend, I think I may have to re-plan the weekend and actually - gasp! - do some of the work in advance instead of leaving it to the last minute!

Pastels & Pyramids

It's been a productive day and a half. On Monday, Jon went for a chat with the doctor following his recent blood test. They had noticed a very low white blood cell count, which is apparently the result of an unidentified (as yet) virus - this is actually good news, as it helps to explain why he's been feeling so tired and pooey recently, and also why his blood sugar levels have been unusually high. He has to go back for another blood test in two weeks to see if it's resolved itself; if it hasn't, they'll do further tests to find out what's going on. Meanwhile, his Metformin dose has been upped temporarily to balance his blood sugar whilst the virus works itself out.

While he was out, Emily and I cracked on with some work. First of all we did some literacy work, looking at examples of two "settings" passages, one from the Mousehole Cat and one from something or other I can't recall the name of by Dick King Smith. Emily answered questions about the way each passage described the settings, and searched for similes and metaphors. She then looked through the first Warrior Cats book (did I mention how much we love those? Audience, have you read them yet? If not, why not?) finding real examples of similes and metaphors in the settings in the book.

Next we moved onto maths. Despite having a horror of being timed at anything, Emily bizarrely decided to try some of the time tests in the back of a KS1 book. Expecting the worst, I dug out the stopwatch and agreed. ROFL. She must have done half a dozen of the little tests, each expected to take something-in-minutes according to the space where you had to write how many minutes it took. All of them took her under one minute, with her record being 18 seconds!!!! They're only simple little ten question arithmetic sums test, but since technically she wouldn't yet be at the end of KS1 until July, I think that's pretty good going! So that now just leaves me wondering why, when I don't have a stopwatch out, a page of maths takes anything up to a flippin' hour depending on her mood. Hmmmm. Food for thought.

After lunch we started on our Human Body project, with a big chat about growing up and periods. Given that this is a little girl who has hysterics about a tooth falling out, you can probably imagine that the idea of periods didn't exactly go down a bundle to begin with. However, after LOTS of reassurance and hugs and reading and talking, I think we've now passed that hurdle, and she wants to do some diagrams and things to go in her project. Seven is a hell of a lot younger than I was when when this subject was broached but it fitted well with what we're going to be doing regarding the body and with puberty seemingly striking ever earlier, well, we felt it was a good time.

Next Emily did some yoga and we discussed the loads and loads of things we want to do in this body project; I think it's going to be a biggie.

Then it was time to go off to art class. Emily and Jon chose to do pastels this week, having a rest from acrylics, and came back with absolutely stunning scenes of pyramids at sunset. I LOVE these! Jon's is first, followed by Emily's:


Oh, and here's Emily's monet-esque harbour from last week:

This morning Emily put the finishing touches to her pyramid picture, and then did some more work on chakras. She discovered that the throat chakra can affect confidence in speaking up and approaching people, and that if it's not balanced it can lead to shyness and reluctance to be heard. She felt that hers needed some work, then, and discovered a yoga breath called Humming Bee Breath which apparently helps, so she practised that and then wrote all about it in her yoga journal.

More maths followed (more timed tests - should have discovered those ages ago!) and then some more English work on settings. That left just enough time to unpack the Tescos delivery and have lunch; Emily has now gone out with Jon to have her hair cut, and by the time she gets back it'll be time to get ready to go out to yoga and get her test results!

Tuesday's News

Emily and Jon had a good art lesson on Monday night. They painted harbours in Monet impressionist style. Emily didn't finish hers in the lesson and hasn't yet had a chance to complete it, but here's Jon's:
Tuesday morning Emily and I went off to the doctor's; she's finally clear of the lung infections which means no more steroid tablets (and boy was she pleased about that!). Doc wants her to increase her asthma inhaler for a few weeks just to stave off the very last bits of it.
We hot footed it back to pick up Romy and Hazel for an afternoon's play, having unsuccessfully tried to find a newsagent selling Harry Potter Goblet of Fire stickers on the way. The girls had a lovely play and treated us to the World's Longest Play (no kidding) which also involved a lovely mime sequence by Romy and a poem about servant's life by Emily. Emily and I dashed off to yoga for her test, which seemed to go well apart from some confusion over her crossing her ankles in Lion, which the instruction sheets tell her to do, but which her teacher (who wrote the instructions...) said was wrong. Don't know if she's passed yet (won't know until next week) but I'm sure she has :-)

Weekend Round Up

Well, Emily's feeling much better, so she went off to ballet on Saturday with no trouble. She enjoyed the lesson, although Jon and I have been left fuming by her teacher's brilliant organisational skills. This show they're doing - parents were asked to inform the teacher which group they'd like their child to be in (to be with friends, etc) and told that she would do her very best to accommodate everyone's choices. Most parents apparently didn't bother saying anything (so it's not as if she was juggling too many conflicting requests), but Jon did let her know that Emily had asked to be with K and her other friends, and K's mum asked for her to be with Emily. Teacher said to Jon that that would be no problem at all. This was a week or two ago. So, Saturday, the children are told the groups they're to be in. Yep, you've guessed it. Emily is in "the blue group". ALL of her friends, every single one of them, are in "the red group". So they will be perfoming on different nights, attending different rehearsals and, after Easter, even attending different lessons as she is splitting the lessons in two. What the hell was the point of even asking for preferences then?? Makes me so cross. Hrrrmpph. Mind you, I think we're crosser than Emily is. She just shrugged her shoulders and informed us "Well, I'll just make some new friends in this group." And I'm sure she will. But that's not the point!

Oh well, at least it means her lessons after Easter will be earlier in the morning, so our Saturdays won't be cut in two any longer.

On Mother's Day Emily gave me some beautiful hand made cards, a Mum bookmark and a lovely new wallet. And lots of hugs :-)) Also on Sunday we waved my Mum and Dad off to the St Bees caravan for a few weeks, and we also investigated the loft trying to find the boxes for my myth and magic collection, the pieces of which are far filthier than I thought they were. Hmmm. Will have to brush up on my pewter cleaning skills before I can sell them, I think! Emily experimented on a few of them on Sunday afternoon, trying to find out what would clean them best. Does that count as science?

For the rest of Sunday, Jon and Emily followed a watercolour DVD by Frank Clarke - they loved it and had a ball! Here are their efforts, Emily's first:

Followed by Jonathan's:
We also splashed out and joined the Society of Artists as art materials are costing us a fortune at the moment and they have some of the cheapest membership prices I've found, plus other benefits. Jon and Emily are out at art class this evening - Emily had to come home half way through last week's one 'cos she was poorly still, but hopefully she'll make it through this one. When this course is finished (think there's another three or four to go) we'll look into private lessons with Gary for both Jon and Emily. They're bothing having such fun with it, it would be a shame to let it drop.

While the artists were having fun at the weekend, I listed sixty more items of stock on ebay (but still haven't touched our new online shop, naughty, naughty business woman that I am) and wrote to some more of the endless deadlines. We got a new magazine contract confirmed this morning, and the press agency renewed theirs, so I have another fourteen deadlines to pencil into the calendar between now and summer. Hey ho.

This morning Emily worked on some maths and English while I wandered around cursing myself for having got up so late. Hate it when that happens, it just throws the whole day. This afternoon she played on Civilisation for ages and then spent a long time creating some beautiful computer art. The latest version of Dazzle is on sale at the moment here, down to £9.99 from £49.99 in case anyone's interested. Emily also spent some time discussing with me and Jon what she wants to do over the next week or two. Because Jon and I have so got so much work to sort out, we're going to take it in turns to "educate" and we're going to adopt a lucky dip system, apparently. Emily's written loads and loads of subjects on bits of folded paper, and whatever she draws out will be what's done at any particular time. Should be interesting - it's been a bit of a faff making sure we've got something in mind for whatever she picks, but it sounds like it could work well for the moment at least, giving one of us adults at a time some breathing space to work.

Tomorrow we've got the return visit to the doctors for Emily, then Hazel and Romy are coming round to play, then we'll be off to yoga where it's Emily's first exam night. She doesn't seem too worried - if it was me, I'd be a nervous wreck by now!

Churchyard Charm & Other Adventures

It's been a busy couple of days. Let's see... Wednesday I spent all morning at the doctor's with Grandad. She told him that he didn't need to keep coming back for blood tests every five minutes. For some strange reason that I daresay you need to be Grandad to understand, he wasn't pleased. Wednesday afternoon Emily and I went over for a play at Romy's house. I gather they played Gladiators (of the 80's/90's Ulrika Johnsson Lightning/Shadow/Jet type, not the Roman type) upstairs, which chuffed Emily no end, as she's added that particular show to her lengthening obssession list. I think she's in love with Wolf ;-)

On Thursday morning Emily and I spent a while in a long, involved Barbie Does Gladiators session, and she made special leotards and helmets for them all. Okkaay. Then she and Jon went off to tai chi, and came back worn out again but very pleased with themselves.

Thursday afternoon Emily and I walked up to our beautiful old church and churchyard for a bit of a local history investigation. Well, actually, we ran out of time to investigate the church itself, and will go back to that another day, but we did spend several hours in the churchyard. I made up some question sheets for Emily to work on, and she seemed to really enjoy doing that. In fact, she was so at home wandering around with a clipboard she looked as if she'd been lost from a school party, lol. It was so lovely there; bright sunny afternoon, absolute peace and quiet (apart from the alarming numbers of crows), and the oldest part of the churchyard that leads into the woods was completely carpeted in snowdrops. Emily searched for the oldest gravestone she could find (1743) and the most modern (1971 - there is a new cemetery elsewhere in the village which has been in use since then); she made notes of the most common surnames and Christian names, answered questions about why some of the stones were so weathered, speculated about what might have caused some deaths, noted the graves of children in particular, and made notes about the Christian carvings and wording on many of the stones, and what that told us about the beliefs of the people buried there and their families. She also sketched her favourite memorials and completed mood/emotion charts about how she felt in the graveyard at that time, and how different she might feel if it was dark or foggy.
To begin with, Emily had an inherent sense of unease about walking among the gravestones, even though it's something she often did when she was smaller. She said she felt it was disrespectful, bless her. So we had some interesting conversations about respect, and discussed the differences between just charging about without caring vs walking quietly looking at information with interest. Eventually she agreed that the spirits of those buried there would probably be pleased that someone was taking an interest in their lives and memorials. And she was absolutely outraged when we did find a couple of stones with grafitti on!

Back at home we read a book about the history of Scotter, and were delighted to discover the background to some of the names we had noted from the churchyard, notably a family who had a line of seven gravestones together and turned out to have been owners of the manor house at some point, and the man who had by far the biggest memorial there who, we discovered, was the owner of a large chain of drapery shops the main one of which had been founded in the village in the 1800's. We also discovered that there used to be two watermills on the river here. Hmmm. Will have to go hunting. We knew about the windmill (which is still there, minus its sails) but that's the first I've heard of the watermills!

This morning we did some work on times tables for maths, and then Emily was thrilled to receive some post with a Buckingham Palace postmark. It was a lovely timeline of important events during the Queen's life, produced to celebrate her 80th birthday, apparently. I only requested a copy the day before yesterday, so that was impressive! I'm pretty apathetic about the monarchy, personally - I wouldn't particularly want to see it abolished, and I don't do the whole righteous indignation we-pay-our-taxes thing, but then again nor do I do the kow-towing to hereditary titles thing either. Take it or leave it, really, although I do have a sneaking affection for the entertainment value they provide. But Emily's interested, and the timeline was very good, definitely sparked an interest in several things mentioned on it, noticeably Anne Frank and Martin Luther King.

This afternoon, Emily and Jon have been very, very busy with a load of gardening, a big sketching session, tai chi to music and baking too. Scrummy chocolate log was produced, along with some rather good sketches from Emily; I especially liked her pig, dog's head and magical scroll!
Emily and Jon have been using The Lost Art to hone their sketching skills, and it's been a real confidence booster, recommended to anyone!

After tea with said scrummy chocolate log, Emily and I did some yoga practice but were interrupted with some Very Important News: it was snowing! With a vengeance, in fact - judging from the depth of our footprints I reckon we had a couple of inches in half an hour. Of course Emily just had to go out and play in it, even though it was dark, and even though she had no trousers on!It quickly became clear that five minutes outside the back door just wasn't going to cut it, so once suitably attired she was off for the next hour!
I don't know how she managed to stay out there that long since she had bare feet in just slip on shoes....brrrr....constitution of an ox, that girl!

Back indoors, Jon soon warmed her up with homemade cherry pancakes for supper - we missed pancake day on Tuesday, but better late than never! She's now reading Harry Potter again before falling asleep, whilst I'm typing this and trying to avoid leaving horrible feedback for the ridiculous woman who has just left negative feedback for us on ebay. Silly moo had immediate replacements for items lost in the post *yawn* but still managed to be rude, offensive and ignorant even once she's received them. I sent a frosty but *polite* reply to her raging abuse - I just don't do outright rude - but my reply was apparently was the most offensive thing she'd ever seen. Oh well - she must have led a very sheltered life. I'm working towards a dignified silence. So far.

Jon, meanwhile, is seething over an exceptionally rude email he received from an amazon customer who bought an out of print and hard to find item for the grand old price of £4.99. Due to a competitor finding new stock from somewhere, the price has been driven down in recent days - and she emailed in a tantrum because the price had dropped since she bought it. Huh? You buy something from Tescos. Next week it's on special offer. Are you outraged? (Well, I wouldn't be, but you never know, some of you may have lower tolerance levels..). You buy an item of clothing from a major retailer. Some time later they include the item in their sale. Outraged? You list something on ebay. Three days later they decide to have a half price listing day. Outraged? A supermarket publicizes the fact that it checks it's rivals prices daily and lowers its prices where appropriate. Great! You bought something the day before its rival lowered their price, so you paid 5p more. Outraged? You buy something from amazon and it later goes out of print and the price *rises* - outraged? Same situation. What's the difference? Supply and demand, anyone? Sheesh. Customers. I'm one, and I'm sure I was never this much trouble, being fully equipped with a brain, a conscience, a basic business sense and a polite command of the English language. Told her she's welcome to send the book back for a full refund if she's unhappy with the price she paid, and welcome to search for it cheaper elsewhere (we've already sold our cheaper copy) but apparently that's not good enough. Ho-hum.

Poppy Fields

Here are hubby and daughter's achievements from this evening's art class - Jon's, then Emily's. I love the depth and the shades!
That class is going so well. We've been fretting for ages about finding an art class for Emily and then there you go, one turns up right on our doorstep. Couldn't be better. Mind you, they did trudge home from the village hall in very heavy sleet tonight, and looked like drowned rats on arrival - nothing a cup of hot chocolate couldn't sort out, though :-)

This morning Emily went back to "The Collection" in Lincoln with my Mum and Dad, to look in the art gallery part we didn't get to look at when we went with Hazel and Romy the other week. They had some fascinating clocks there, apparently. Emily also showed my parents around the rest of the museum, and caused a few raised eyebrows in the gift shop - she asked the lady behind the till if they had any Shakespeare figurines to go with the Henry VIII and Elizabeth I ones she already has from a particular collection. The woman rather snootily informed them that "we don't cover that period here". So Emily piped up that Shakespeare was Elizabethan and they did have Elizabethan stuff in the musuem and indeed in the gift shop, where she had bought the Liz 1 figurine from on the last visit. Ahem. I'm not sure the lovely lady liked being corrected by a seven year old, especially one that doesn't go to school ;-)

The getting-ready-to-go-out routine was rudely interrupted this morning when Juliet burst through the catflap and rushed upstairs into our sitting room with a dead mouse in her mouth. Eeek. She then helpfully proceeded to growl at us when we near to de-mouse her, tossed it about a bit, and left bits of it all over the carpet before we got it off her. Sigh. Quite the little huntress, this one. Even once that was all over, she came back in ten minutes later with a bit of mouse fur that she'd obviously left behind outside and gone back to fetch. Gee, thanks.

While Jon and Emily were out this evening, I've been planning our local history/geography project, which we plan to begin in earnest tomorrow. Hopefully, that will work well - I've got lots of ideas........

Another Arty Weekend

This is becoming quite a pattern, I'm pleased to say. Whilst I've been busy working to deadlines this weekend, Jon and Emily have been artists at work again, which is working really well.

Yesterday morning before going to ballet, Emily disappeared into the landing/stockroom/education room/junkhole (call it what you will) where all the craft materials are and spent two hours working on a beautiful textured sunset collage. Then she had to wash her hair, as her ballet teacher is definitely not the type who would approve of the purple streaks, lol.
When she got back from ballet, she and Jon worked downstairs painting the clay things they made the other week. Jon also did this fabulous abstract piece, based on the unremitting negativity of the headlines in a particular newspaper. I love it!
This morning, Emily spent another two hours making a textured mermaid collage complete with hot glue gunned seashells. I love the way she's getting very self-sufficient with craft stuff - she just disappears off there and we don't see her for hours.

After dinner, the artists returned to their lair - Jon did some lovely sketches and Emily decided she wanted to do an abstract piece like Jon's newspaper one, so she spent a long time creating this, which she's called Rainbow:
Needless to say, it was a messy business :-))
In other news, my ear is getting a lot better, not before time. Tomorrow Emily's going off to an art gallery/museum thingy in Lincoln with my Mum and Dad, which hopefully will give us time to plan some work for the next week or two. I've got loads of ideas in my head, but as ever the time to actually gather resources/plan/implement any of them is scarce!

Flying Yogi

Well, she hasn't quite mastered "yogic flying" yet, rofl, but we've just got back from Emily's yoga presentation and she's definitely walking on air, so I guess that's half way there! :-)) Our small bendy person was very confident in the display they did. She wasn't due to get a certificate because she hasn't had her first test yet (as it's quite strict in that respect, they have to have attended ten lessons before the first test), but in fact she was awarded a special certificate of achievement for excellent work and effort :-)) She was exceedingly chuffed, as were we. And I forgot my camera, so guess who has no piccies of the event?? Tomorrow Emily's going back to the yoga studio for a photoshoot/interview for the local press, so that should be fun.

Yesterday Emily and I worked on maths in the morning, and also practised more perspective drawing - this time a country lane disappearing into the distance i.e one point perspective instead of the two point perspective of a cityscape. Emily also had fun taking a little cardboard viewfinder and her sketchpad out into the garden and sketching little parts of things, odd angles and strange shapes.

In the afternoon Emily completed a verrrrryy long Viking quiz; she knew most of the answers anyway, despite our dire lack of effort in that department. We also spent some time puzzling out what happened to the Viking age in the end (i.e. the Norman conquest and the spread of Christianity) and pondered (yet again) making a nice big timeline to show the various periods of history. It was meant to go down our stairs, but that's been turned into an art gallery. So it's been put off yet again. That was the one thing I was really keen to do back in September 04 when Emily left school, rofl. Guess we'll get round to it one day.

Emily and Jon's art class last night was a tricky one. Just as the class had started to get to grips with the acrylics, Gary moved the goalposts and had them all painting in watercolours instead. They had to sketch and then paint a secluded cove picture. Here's Jon's rather lovely effort:
followed by Emily's - bless her, she's got the perspective kind of muddled here, but it was a smashing attempt at a difficult task and I love her watercolour sky, the blended textures in the rocks and the spray effect. Can't get over how happy she is to spend a whole two hours working on a painting - I'm sure I wasn't capable of that aged seven (or even now!).
Today we had a fantastically fun morning doing Encaustic Art (painting with molten wax and an iron) for hours. Back in September 2001, Jon won an encaustic art starter set in a competition, and we completely forgot about it as Emily was far too young to be using an iron then. The other night I stumbled across Create & Craft TV when I was looking for something else, and they had an hour long demonstration on there, which prompted us to dig out our set. I love that channel now, actually - it's great for arty inspiration, so long as you don't have your credit card anywhere near...
So, here's a gallery of Emily's encuastic art efforts. The top set of three, from the left, are "Staircase in the Sky", "Arrival of the Birds", "Sunset over a Mountain Road"; the next set of three from left are "View up the Valley", "Bridge over the Ice Lake" and "Steps to a Flower", and the bottom two from left are "Alien City Reflection" and "View from the Cavemouth"