Back Indoors

The weather went a bit pleugh so spring and garden stuff got stopped in its tracks. I've been giving some thought to what I want to be doing with F over the next 6 months (as opposed to things I might like her to do with or without me, and things we already do together frequently, e.g. watching films, chatting, walks, incidental maths exchanges, etc.). The answer I have currently come up with is: museums and interesting places, sandy beaches, general trips and days out, yoga, fun science and good quality craft stuff. Basically, over the last 4 months F has spent a lot of time developing her imagination - the boundaries of her imaginative thinking and exploring have massively increased, alongside some other developments (better pen control led to starting to write things occasionally and the ability to draw what she wants to, what she imagines/thinks about). So this has been great, but I now find she is looking for something to balance her imagination - it has grown so far that she seems now to be looking for a boundary, for knowledge of the real world to counter it. The clues to this have been coming up over the last couple of weeks: very detailed interrogations about things she is aware of not knowing about (babies, plants, animals, geography, geology, all sorts of 'natural world' things; discussions of dreams and films; and lastly, on a couple of occasions she has said (to my mum and to us) 'is this (meaning what we are doing now) real?'! She wasn't entirely serious when she said it to us, more sort of playing with the idea in a kind of early years philosophy way! So I think more 'information' needs to be offered, in various ways (Class TV, museum and similar visits, obviously continuing conversations, and maybe some nice DK or Usborne reference books (*feels "Amazon 1-click" finger twitching*)). I think I really need to make sure we have some good things to do together, because at the moment, as of the last few weeks, she isn't very needy at all in many ways and is off doing her own thing, or companionably in same room as me doing her own thing, a lot of the time. This has been great for me, obviously, as I have a lot of freedom to do my own thing too, but like all relationships, we need to make sure we do a bit more together, and make sure we have new and interesting experiences together too.
So that's my thoughts as they stand at the moment, hope that's made sense.

Yesterday went totally unaccording to plan as first our wireless connection went down for about 6 hours (*shudders*) and also F came to show me she had found a dozy wasp, crawling on her hand. I told her not to play with them because they can sting you and it can really really hurt, so she dropped it and it crawled off. However, she clearly found it again, or another one, a few minutes later and I suddenly heard a piercing wail as the predictable had occurred. I administered Calpol and Benadryl, and we snuggled on the sofa with her duvet, watching Barbie in The Nutcracker! After that, she decided she wanted to watch CBeebies for the first time in about 6 months I think (although, having said that, I think we watched something at Xmas) and Nick Jr for first time in 2 months or so. She watched a bit of Big Cook Little Cook and some Dora and something else in between, quite happily. Then she got me to stick some cardboard to a stick in pogo-stick fashion and called it a 'hopping stick'. It broke (yes, I know, you saw that coming, didn't you?), but she wasn't too fazed and found another game to play with the bit that was left for a while.

In a minute we're off to the MonsterTeenies, which will be a lovely end to a very mixed week. I still have my writing to do (late!) and am making no progress whatsoever, so that ought to be my focus for this evening and tomorrow, really. That and drinking.