Very quick round-up

Lordy (or as F used to say: 'Oh my giddy lord!' - yes you can tell it's just like Little House on the Prairie here, with J in his Charles Ingalls braces, a-choppin' wood while I shake rugs and, er, stuff, etc.) I have worked really hard this week. I had a document that was already, by size alone, a contender for the Godzilla of translations, but then as I wrestled with it, it started developing all sorts of extra attack skills like phantom footnotes and stroppy tables and such. Eventually I emerged Mothra-like, not exactly triumphant but able to fight another day.
But with that as a background activity, there have been other more HE-relevant things and other more life-relevant things. F has continued to play a lot of Viva Pinata, she has about 8 or 9 gardens now but she doesn't visit them all. So conversations about bees, honey, cows, milk (talked a bit about cows not actually 'giving us' milk), money, fertilizer and other pinata-quirked agro-economics chat.
She sat and wrote the word 'FRENCH' copying it from the spine of one of my dictionaries, then talked with me about it and added all the vowels she could think of on the end for some reason, coincidentally forming the word 'oui' by doing so. So I told her what that was and we had some fun with a bit of French briefly. She also commented on 'y' being a nearly-vowel.
She drew a lot of pinatas in one of her diaries and has done a bit of sounding out other words here and there.
Yesterday we went to a pre-martial arts group to try it out. She started out sitting with me and watching but after about 5 minutes she decided to give it a go and enjoyed it. It was a bit more, er, vigorous, than I expected, and I thought she would object to the fact that she was one of only 2 girls out of 20 children, but I could see a lot of positive things in it for her, and she really liked it, so we're going to go regularly starting next week, but go to the smaller Friday group, taken by 2 female instructors. On the walk home she told me 'I've been very good all day and I'm very happy'. Nice to know, and she had been good too.
Now F is 5, there is a whole range of activities becoming accessible to her, quite a few of which are at the Leisure Centre. I quite like that after-school slot for doing something in too, it suits me to go out after 4, rather than in the morning! So I might see if there are others she can try. Another thing that makes a difference is that she is old/strong enough now to walk there (20-30 mins at her pace), do an activity and walk back - sometimes I would take a taxi but it's nice to know you can walk it if you want to, and healthier of course.
My mum came down on Tuesday and spent a lot of time with F, which was nice, we saw a mortgage person for what felt like 8 hours but was closer to 2 on Wednesday and are going ahead with looking at houses at 250K level (stamp-duty awareness).
Stopping there because I'm knackered.