So Friday

F woke me 4 times during the six hours sleep I could have had last night, so I took a while to wake up this morning. When I had finally galvanized myself with tea the shopping arrived, accompanied by a neighbour's cat for one of its incessantly miaowing visits (I think it can't believe we have no meat or fish in the house). I just left most of the shopping sitting around while I did a bit of hoovering and other such houseworky nonsense.

The MonsterTeenies then arrived and eventually the sun did come out as the BBC Weather site had promised, which meant that the children were able to spend golden hours out there requiring little intervention for something like 15 minutes at a stretch for much of the time, attraction to sticks and dirt notwithstanding. They played pretty well together - not many mishaps - and Mrs MT and I had some good chatting. Also Cake (which I always feel I have to say as 'KIYKE!!!' but I can't remember why, something to do with either ex or best gay male friend or both, some ancient semi-buried in-joke that is no longer in and hardly even out) - chocolate chip rock cakes baked by Mrs MT with extra bacon in (it's OK I retaliated by grinding borlotti beans into her chai). The children did some great drama (over-reacting like a Greek chorus to the presence of a bumble-bee in the conservatory) and then some drawing/nature (drawing pictures of the aforesaid bee - D's picture showed him with his 'friend' the bee and its hive and brought up the concept of perspective and how it is sort of an optical illusion - F's showed the bee very much centre stage with yellow pollen stickers on its legs and then had some smaller pictures of it in action and a hive - and S's was a multi-media sticker-based representation. They really concentrated on their drawing, focused on it and talked about pollen and hives, etc.

Other than that they played all sorts of outside games, largely messy, involving sand/water/ash/sticks/mud/danger, went on swing/slide/trampoline and at some point F decided to put on her princess dress for the second time in 6 months and flounce around a bit in that. I've been making a real effort to make sure I listen to her when other children are here or we're visiting other people - it's quite easy to get distracted by whoever is loudest at the time or appears most in my face, as I'm not used to more than one child, so sometimes before now I have listened to another child even though they've been interrupting her, because they have sounded more urgent or got my attention in some other way, a skill that I guess siblings learn naturally! But I'm deliberately trying to make sure that I continue to listen to her if she has started speaking, however quietly. She finds it hard to keep talking if someone interrupts her, or even if someone else starts speaking in the same room sometimes, so it's good for her to get used to it.

As the MTs left, J turned up (he has been on early cover this week so finishes early too). He admired the bumblebee pictures and then helped F to make herself a princess hat as she declared she needed to do so using paper and a baby wipe all painted with pink paint pen.

This evening has been nice - good wine, tasty curry and some telly recorded during the week. Tomorrow off to see cuz and cuz-in-law and chooks. Rest of the weekend we are aiming to keep for sleep catch-up - F has been waking every night at least twice lately. Next week, we have my mum on Tuesday, Katya on Wednesday and the MTs again on Friday. And I have a difficult sod of a job to fit in too.