Mega Madness Ultra Time

Saturday:

Was a quiet day, starting with a long lie-in for me - think I had something like 16 hours sleep, much needed, which helped to kick that nasty bug off, along with rest and sipping water.

F played some Sims 2 on XBox, building a room, buying and placing furniture, etc. She and J looked at some XBox live arcade games together - various block-moving, Tetrissy, ball-rolling and colour-clustering type of games. It's amazing how something as supposedly 'uneducational' as that can generate lovely conversations that touch on all sorts of stuff, some of which is 'Educational', or all of which is educational, depending on where or whether you delineate your 'educational'!

I was laptopping and reading HE books some of the time - just finished How Children Learn by John Holt and now halfway through Free Range Education edited by Terri Dowty. Also playing Zuma. Yes folks, Where The Days Go has gone (get your Fifties Movietone/Pathe News accent out now) Arcade Game Mad!
*looks into left-upper-middle-distance like in Friends and remembers wasting hours on Gauntlet when I lived in Clickety Clacton-on-Sea with my best male gay friend one winter, long, long ago*

Of course the 'secret positive' of the XBox for F is that it makes her use her right hand and specifically her right index finger - she doesn't have pincer grip with her right hand, but I think it could still develop if the fingers get stronger. So there we are, poor F has to spend time playing games of a barely-educational sort on the XBox. Sad ain't it? What a trooper! I have to put in the hours too, so that I understand them enough to help her. I know, I know, I'm dedicated...

So what else was there: F came out with me to the local shop to buy curry - Moong Dal, Petis, Samosas, Kachori, Aloo Gobi, Dudhi Chana, mmmmm (told you my bug was all gone!) and ran around plenty on the way there and back - seems OK with her boots again now - the mystery of that girls feet and footwear will be an ongoing preoccupation of mine for many years I suspect...
And drawing and colouring - I bought her a comic at the shop and it had a picture of four 'My Little Mutants I Mean Ponies' in the middle, so she coloured those in in bed just before sleep, coming down a couple of times to get the pen colours she wanted.

Sunday:

No lie-in for me this morning, as it was my turn to get up... at 10:45!!! What a family of non-larks we are.

F brought down her pony picture all coloured in and set to work copying it on paper, doing some good pony pics and colouring them, then asking me to cut them out. Then she said that since she has 3 ponies and there were now 4 more that she had made, she now had 7. And added that if she had 5 more she would have 12. Not sure if the ownership of precisely 12 of them is some aspiration she has, but the maths was impressive. She actually has quite a lot of small ones given away on comics plus 2 'real' ones, 1 'fake' one and a Barbie Pegasus horse, but she had identified that the ones in the pictures were like her 3 medium-sized ones.

So all this drawing and colouring and maths took up a large part of the first bit of the day (can't technically call it morning, really!), and was interspersed with some music - have been in a Simon and Garfunkel mood, but also dancing around to the Scissor Sisters, Tom Robinson Band and a few other lairy items. Then I was asked to plait all the tails of all the ponies except for one that doesn't seem to have a tail any more and the donkey who pretends to be a pony but only has borrowed hair. So we were talking about weaving a bit in that context briefly, and colours, etc.

Other than this the weekend has been characterized by us announcing things like 'Super Jump', 'Mega Marble' and 'Time Travel' in funny cyber voices, the way you do when you've been playing arcade games a lot.

F and I also made up a poem about beds for sticks:
Big beds, small beds, little beds
Long thin beds like spaghetti
That no-one can fit in
Except perhaps a stick.
(WTF is that about? = not part of poem)

Now we've just had burger sandwiches (Tescopolized Nut cutlets - boo!) and will shortly be having Swedish Glace and raspberries and pineapple (largely from local shop and Waitrose - hooray!). F has just told J that 'Mummy's never wrong', so I guess HE is progressing well, according to my dastardly plans.

I will have to settle down to some work in a bit and maybe stay up very late again. Good to have the work though - March has already been a good month and it's not quite halfway over, so if I can keep next week largely free of work, I can and will try to do so.