Words on Friday

F slept much better last night (Calpol). One of the first things she did when she woke up was sort out some jewellery in a jewellery box (actually some plastic jewellery stuff from front of various magazines that she has had, in a bead box). She sorted them with pinky colours on one side and bluey colours on the other and said the blue side was the Cinderella side (wears a blue ball gown) and the pink side was the Sleeping Beauty side (wears a pink dress at some point?).
We watched a Dr Who episode (New Earth) and then she watched Snow White, then played up in her room for about an hour with her LeapPad. When she came down she did a bit of colouring in a rather gorgeous Kandinsky-based colouring book that my mum gave her a little while ago. She wasn't really colouring with much attention or care, but she was making up stories about the shapes. I got down some of the stream of imagination as it happened:

Someone was going to turn him into an animal, here he is, he has an enemy. Next he dreamed of people fighting him and turning him into a stone and he didn't want to get locked up in the building full of nasty people, then he dreamed of getting bited by sea-crocodiles, and of getting into the white snow-machine and lots of bath-bombs and bubbles exploding at him and then oh! he popped but as soon as he woke up when he was there he found out that when he opened the door ready to get eaten and ready to die he saw instead a warm giraffe that would let him snuggle against her warm fur and let him sleep and the giraffe would always leave a scent for him to follow so he could get right back and they lived happily ever after.

Then she got a red pen and a piece of paper and sat down and said 'I'm writing a word and it starts with D'. I guessed 'daddy' or 'dog' but it turned out to be 'Doc' from Snow White and she had written it really clearly. She had remembered it from her LeapPad. She then went upstairs and looked at her LeapPad again and came down and wrote Dopey, followed by Grumpy and then all the rest of them and Snow White, each time taking trips upstairs to the LeapPad, remembering a number of letters at a time and coming down to write them - again she managed to put a journey into the process, movement, and I'm convinced that helps her to get the information to go into her head! During this exercise she asked me a few things and told me a few things she knows about vowels and magic 'e' and tried out sounds and letters a lot. She also commented on how she was making the letters, objectively assessing some of them as not looking how she wanted and mentioning the differences between some of them, like 'this letter n is an upside-down letter u', 'you can make a capital F into a capital E with a line', etc. She mixes small letters and capitals and you know what - I don't care! She finished the whole thing off with some heart-shapes, circles and crosses (love, cuddles and kisses) by the names of her favourite characters.

I had been doing my invoices during some of this, alternating between that and giving encouragement, agreeing or not with her comments, etc. We have so much good conversation at the moment about all sorts of things. Invoices were a woeful story, so November payments are coming in well below the break-even point. So to celebrate her fantastic writing and to cheer me up we got the duvet on the sofa and watched The Shaggy Dog, which I so enjoyed. I love watching a new film with her. I don't really like watching things over and over, except for a very few favourite films, so it's really enjoyable to watch a new film with her in the afternoon, hearing rain on the roof in the background and speculating together on what's going to happen next. Had to give her a brief explanation of the animal testing laboratory though, which wasn't so easy. I had to keep it not too harrowing, don't want her having nightmares. There were some animal rights protestors in the film so I did tell her that I used to do that a long time ago.

After that she watched The Queen's Nose and played a bit of XBox and we all had Chinese takeaway for dinner and watched the final Dr Who episode of series 2 and two of us got very teary. Not F, who turned her back on the most emotional scene and had to bounce it off afterwards.

Drama tomorrow morning, so I suppose I ought to get an early night tonight. Might watch some comedy recorded from yesterday though first.