Library day

Today we ventured into town.

We had a few errands to run, and I met up with a friend I hadn't seen in a while.

Then we went to the library.

Captain has finally gotten into Mr. Men and Little Miss series, so she was excited to find new ones.

Mr Buttons was delighted when I spotted a Captain Underpants he hadn't read yet. I'm sure I'll be seeing the newest Flip-O-Rama numerous times tomorrow...

I picked up a beautifully illustrated book about nature, which I can't wait to read for story time in the morning. My Little Miss was so tired after her busy day, that we only got in a story and a half before she fell asleep tonight.

I am happy to have 20 new books to enjoy with the kids in the next couple of days. We have everything from animals to winter and poetry to pirates. I love library days!

I got a call from the hospital saying I need to go on some insulin to control the gestational diabetes. That really shocked me, as I thought the diet controlling was going well and I had done everything by the book. So I'm feeling quite frustrated and upset. Thank goodness for a brilliant friend, who is minding me by being the most supportive human being you could ever meet (and promising me post partum cake dates). That will keep me going for the weeks ahead.

Furry friends and Freddy

How has your day been?

We were warm and cosy.

Wild child and wildlife

PyjaMath

Mr Buttons stayed in his pyjamas all day, with varying masks on top.

The kids baked, made lots of noise and created lots of characters from paper, foil and colours.

Bigger pal also studied setting, and made up lots of characters for his very own school. One of the characters was a dog disguised as a teacher. (So no, I don't think this is his cry for help to be sent to school...)

The ponies left today, and I cried, as much as I was trying to convince myself to be brave.

I'll miss them, but we have lots of lovely memories of our time fostering them and their little furry faces.

Captain is fast asleep after her busy day, but Buttons has decided that only math will make him tired enough to go to sleep. So he's working on his math quota of tomorrow after nine.

Oh well...

Math and mayhem

Today has been a busy day.

I got up in the morning with the littlest lady and bought some extra time under the covers with a few books. We got up and I made her banana pancakes, while she stood on the chair next to the cooker and tried to eat them as soon as they touched the plate.

Mr Buttons got up, got his breakfast and woke up enough for me to go out and patch up the fences after the ponies’ last break-out attempt. The fostering time with them coming to an end is getting easier to live with the bigger I get and the more I fall around in mud.

The kids played, I cleaned.

Mr Buttons is loving our kitchen scales at the moment. He is being super helpful by weighing my rice and pasta (not something I used to do pre-GD) and everything else he can find. Of course Captain sees this going on, hears the fantastically loud beeping sounds and wants to get in on the action. So at some point I could barely see the kitchen table for all the things we now know a very precise weight of. (Although I don’t quite trust Captain’s units of measurement like

“Three, like me!” and “A million dollars!”)

Buttons did a project on Minecraft, which taught me a lot. He is now making brilliant, sprawling mind maps, and using them to figure out what he wants to write.

The kids had a band going on for a while, with Captain on ukulele and vocals, Mr B on slide whistle and guitar. It was loud enough to completely drown out Linkin Park, which I had had playing on the background. Also, very entertaining. (And yes, the guitar could use tuning…)

Then we started playing games. I found this beautiful wooden bingo set Captain got last Christmas from my cupboard of mysteries. This gave us several good rounds. Then we played a very confusing game of Number Navigate, with very little concern for rules.

Bingo!

We all cooked a vegetarian curry with lentils and chickpeas, just to add to the cosiness of today. I’m fully embracing a winter menu, with lots of stews, soups and nice warming spices. They work well with gestational diabetes too, it appears, and there is always plenty in the pot. And lots of veggie prep for my kitchen assistants.

There were stories read by me, and Harry Potter by Buttons.

Captain and I made jigsaws, and she spend some time with her treasure collection. She has developed a fondness for my tealight stash. She loves opening and closing the “special box”, taking them out and putting them into various containers. They also work well as pretend cakes, gifts and stacking blocks.

Treasures

Hubby made a brief appearance between work and ukulele band, and found us sitting on the floor in front of the stove with various activities. He listened to the kids’ news, brushed Captain’s teeth before bed and headed off while I was reading bedtime stories and Buttons was playing Minecraft.

And when both kids were in bed, I added up that Mr B is 30 pages from completing the whole year’s math curriculum. Six months early… This is the same boy, who used to be near tears with his math homework. Setting his own target and having the support to work at it has clearly been a good way for him to learn.

So, tonight I am tired and my hips ache. I also messed up my knee at some point during my DIY fence fixing job, I think. But I am delighted to be taking a moment to appreciate my two crazy little friends and Hubby, who tells us we’re doing great every day. Even when he has to have his dinner surrounded by piles of books and days’ worth of art projects…

Copies

My whole life is contained within five copy books.

Five squared exercise books. Squared ruled 7 mm, 88 pages. Three of them are blue, one is orange and last one is red, with about a hundred and ten stickers stuck on the covers. I did get a fancy diary from Hubby for Christmas, but I find the pre-written dates daunting and the pages unapproachable. There’s a lot to be said for a humble copy, where you can easily tear off a few pages from the middle for an emergency drawing session for a bored child, or make a shopping list without disturbing the perfect flow of days.

So technically, the bit about 88 pages wasn’t true.

The first blue one belongs to Captain. It moves from my back pack to my canvas shopping bag, and comes with us everywhere. That way she can draw all her important creations before they escape. Also, playing “five in a row” is a great way to kill time. This involves her cheating considerably and always winning, even though she only draws one giant “O”.

The second one technically belongs to Mr Buttons, but is a huge part of my life. This is the copy, where I write down his plans for each week. We have settled into an eclectic style of homeschooling with him, where he does math from a book and has started to read the Harry Potter series for his English. He set his own target of pages per day for math, so we map that down onto this copy. He also decided on a few things he wanted to learn about this year, and does projects on them most weeks. These get divided into reasonable chunks too, to help him visualise what he’s planning on doing. Any trips, activities and going to visit his mom also get written into this ‘plan’, so he can easily see what is happening each day. He likes having this physical plan, and it seems to help him work independently. He often changes things around in it himself, which has really made him take interest and pride in his own work. He also uses the copy for ideas, math work (though he prefers to do calculations in his head) and working things out.

The last blue one is for me tracking every bite I eat, thanks to being diagnosed with gestational diabetes a few weeks ago. It’s the only one of the copies I can’t wait to get rid of, as writing down foods brings back bad feelings of the eating disorder I had from my early teens right into adulthood. It’s always in my bag, with times, foods and trying to figure out any spikes in my blood sugar. Roll on February, is all I’m saying about this part of my everyday kit.

The orange one is a very recent addition. This is the one I’ve taken to writing little notes about the books I read. At the moment, everything I’m reading is about breastfeeding and parenting, thanks to a sudden urge to do a good job as a LLL librarian and actually try to read the books in our group’s library suitcases. That way my baby brain can forget everything safely, and I have quick reference guide to whatever it was doctor so-and-so said about family beds or omega-3. It also helps to compose my thoughts on paper, as I can get quite anxious about talking in front of a group of people, as lovely as they all are.

The red one is the most time consuming, but most definitely my favourite. That’s the one I use to keep my homeschooling records on Mr Buttons. I write notes every day (recently, anyway) about everything he’s doing. This is where I translate the unschooling into subjects, record all his reading and write down math progress. I also add any observations, that I feel are important in his development in general. It gives me so much satisfaction to look at the pages of enjoyment in learning, when less than a year ago the same boy “hated reading” and did “nothing” in school when asked about his day. Now you couldn’t stop him from learning if you tried. Trust me, I’ve tried. (True story. I announced a family-wide holiday for his birthday, and he taught me all sorts of interesting facts about coffee plants at the end of it.) This notebook is the magic potion that makes me feel happy on days when I’ve had to explain to yet another person why we homeschool, or heard another comment on how I only do arts and crafts around the table with the kids all day. I can see the love I’ve poured in on those pages filled with my horrible handwriting, and that helps me tolerate people’s views on what I do as a stepmother. And that more than makes up for sitting there, surrounded by my copy books after bedtime, writing things nobody will ever read.