Friday started with me working in deadline frenzy mode after being up till 5am. The new routine is throwing up some work problems, in that, if one of my work days doesn't go so well (builders on Tuesday) and I don't get the sleep I need on another night (2 nights this week), I'm a bit stuffed (delivered my job an hour late, which is an unprofessionally lengthy time in translation, but seems not to have been too bad, in terms of consequences). So - things to iron out over the next few weeks, since everything else about the new weekly pattern is very positive.

So most of Friday was me juggling my increasing tension with her requirements, fairly successfully on the whole. She did some laptopping and played with her ponies and watched a film and a Dr Who episode. She is really making some leaps with the reading and writing (well, typing) now that she has access to Google and other such things every day!

Then, after I'd finished and done a few housey things, I decided to go out to get curry and asked F if she'd like to make a proper evening walk of it (it was dark by this time, about half five), and since she only got her torch back from C this week, she was very enthused to go night walking.
So we set off out, looking at the stream to see how it looked at night time - very different. Bumped into J on his way home from work, which was exciting, checked out the park in the dark with the torch, popped into the local shop and filled my rucksack with many different frozen spicy vegan curry dishes for later. Then we continued round and did a loop via the station, F playing a game some of the time in which the cars were hunters and she would duck down and freeze as their lights went by. At first I thought she was really scared of them but then when I said something about it she informed me it was only a game.
At some point she read some graffiti - the word 'mob' - interesting, I think she is kind of moving past basic phonics to a more whole-word kind of approach at the moment. She still uses sounding out where she has to, but some words she now just seems to look at and say. We wondered why somebody had written that word there, whether it meant 'mob' or was a nickname.
A bit further on she pointed at the 'W' on a drain cover thing in the pavement, and (from her angle) declared it an 'M'. She was then trying to think what might be down there, beginning with 'M'. We thought of 'mummies' and 'mice' and were giggling at those being piped to people's houses (she knew it was really water by that point). Then she suggested (so I thought - she has a cold at the moment so her speech is really unclear) 'magic'. And I thought, and said, something like 'wow, what a great idea, magic piped under the streets to flow into your home for whenever you need it!'. I was about to expound at surreal and probably tedious length on the possibilities of this enchanting idea, that was surely characteristic of the free-flowing mind of a child, when she said 'Noooooo, not magic - maggots!'