Home from Helmsley

Too much to blog and a bit ill so not likely to do it properly, but here goes.
Halloween camp: had a lovely time in Helmsley - beautiful area, not that F was interested in seeing much of that. Her focus was very much on the YH, its garden and the people and toys in it. We could have been anywhere, tbh! But she thoroughly enjoyed the 4 days, played with Teeny quite a bit and thought Alex was "very beautiful" in her red and white dress and insisted on saying goodnight to her every night. Several 'parties' were hosted in our room, with various groups of children appearing, which included a great deal of leaping off furniture onto the floor mattress. F also spent quite a lot of time playing 'the pussy cat game' with Teeny all around the YH, playing with the toys in the playroom and watching a film in MonsterTeeny's room. One of my favourite moments of the week was watching her play a game with the littlest Raine, where they copied each other with taking a witch's hat off and putting it on and making funny faces. Other than that she did a lot of running around, took some pictures with her camera, snuggled up with me in our room for stories now and then, had her nails painted purple by me and generally just revelled in having a big space and lots of people to enjoy/explore. She enjoyed the party, especially the costumes, musical statues, marshmallows and toffee apple.
And me - I'm not the world's best communalist, but I enjoyed it too. I surprised myself by really enjoying preparing food on a couple of nights for a big group of people and it was great to find that that was appreciated. I found I tended to want to be a bit more chatty than most other people there, partly because many of them know each other pretty well already I guess, and partly because I'm a gobby cow. This made me a bit restless so I made up for it by drinking and conga-ing to excess. Always a winner.
I did kind of miss the Internet though and all my (equally gobby!) imaginary friends. Next time maybe I'll take a gadget for that! Or is that cheating?
The journey back was probably one of the worst train journeys I've ever had - door-to-door in an unbelievable 12 hours! Partly because there were a number of trains cancelled and also some that I just couldn't take her on, feeling ill as she did (we've come back with a cold/cough), due to them being absolutely packed with standing passengers everywhere - not sure I could face it, let alone ask her to. Friday in half term is not the best day to use public transport, although we did meet some nice families, including a very disarmingly honest and charming 7-yr old girl who told me she didn't want to grow up because she didn't think periods were much fun (she had three older sisters).

So, apart from that, what have we been up to?
F continues to be really interested in letters/sounds/words and will notice/ask about something in this area every day at the moment, e.g. how do you spell such-and-such? or what does such-and-such say? She doesn't always actually write or read, she does a lot more talking about it at the moment.
She also asked me for some French words yesterday - how you say 'hello' and 'I love you'. And she did some counting in tens and 'ten times' stuff the other day, a-propos of nothing much at all.
We've been watching Japanese anime films from the same studio as Spirited Away - Howl's Moving Castle last night was really good. Also The Waltons (ill mummy needs The Waltons on loop and duvet on sofa) and Lady and The Tramp.