Some more days that went

Friday
At last I had no work to do, and had managed to get a really good sleep Thursday night. Did a few housey chores in the morning (housework is never high up on my list but it fell way down in January, with the work I had) and then F and I each wrote/drew 5 different things we'd like to do on 5 bits of paper each, folded them up and put all 10 papers in a bowl. For the rest of the day we took turns to open one up and then we did that thing.

The ones she drew pictures of were:
Snuggle in big bed with laptop watching Pony stuff on YouTube
Go for a short walk
Watch Ballet Shoes on telly
Watch a film on telly
Build a tower of books as tall as her with a couple of tables and a stool for support and make it a castle for F, Dozy Mog (in his 'King of the Books' persona), Fuzzy Mog and a few other soft toys

And the ones I wrote were:
Go for a short walk
Start a big jigsaw
Read library books for an hour (me reading her books to her)
Snuggle in big bed with laptop watching a film
Each have a 20-minute bubble bath with Lush stuff
So we had a lovely day doing those - we managed 8 of them before we were too sleepy to do anything much at 11pmish.
The first one was the walk - we went up the big steps (helped a woman with her buggy and chatted), along poo lane (very squelchy), saw the goats, found a twig shaped like an 'F' and stuck it in a slope near the goats, then found one shaped like a 'Y' and put that there too, ready to add in other twigs shaped like the rest of the letters of her name, should we ever find them - I did suggest that they probably wouldn't be naturally occurring and we might have to make them.
Everything fitted really well, the bubble baths fitted in nicely with me getting our dinners, the walk was early, so sunny and nice. The films later for being dozy with.
She was in a really buoyant good mood and when a couple of things went wrong was very flexible about changing - we had lost the recording of Ballet Shoes (due to not checking Delete settings on Media Centre), and we couldn't get the thing to work for another film we wanted, so ended up watching Shrek the Third and Shrek the Halls. It was a lovely day, we agreed we will do it again sometime - would quite like to do it once a month. F started out trying to see what the papers were before choosing but she quickly got into the swing of them all being good surprises and just going with the flow.

Thursday
My main agency had a crisis and I singlehandedly came to the rescue and was very appreciated, which was nice. I did my end-of-month invoices and found I had had a record month and earned just over £5000! Found it quite hard to believe, especially since I had combined it with doing a lot with F. Unfortunately it is all owed to the Inland Rev. at this point but still, it's fantastic to see what I can do, I felt quite proud. Also it means I can clear my tax a bit quicker. And I won't give it all to Mr Rev., will have a few treats too, promise.
After I had finished working and invoicing and playing with the currency converter for the thrill of it (I get paid in Euros - strong Euro is part of why it was a record month), F and I watched Ballet Shoes, recorded from Xmas. She was quite annoying and kept asking what had happened, so I had to keep pausing and rewinding and we probably watched the whole thing in 5 minute chunks! She seemed to like it though.

Wednesday
Another WW (Wonderful Wednesday!) at Drusillas - this time we took the train to see how that went, but won't be doing it again - the walk from the station starts off really nicely, a comfortable path slightly away from the road, but halfway down it's suddenly tiny grass verges, boggy bits and clinging to hedges and the cars go pretty fast. I think there is another longer walking route that would be safer, but not really worth it right now, maybe when she's a bit older and walking is less tiring. So back to buses next time (which is apparently going to be this Wednesday - I've said we'll do something different after that, though, 3 Wednesdays in a row is enough!). This time round we were mainly focused on Petworld and the Zoolympics challenges - F did the running speed one, hanging like a monkey and standing on one leg like a flamingo, among other things.

It was a beautiful day and would have been nice to stay a bit longer, which was one of the reasons we'd wanted to try the train, but having done the walk down and found out how dodgy it was, we decided to get the bus back, so had to leave by 3pm (next bus isn't until 6pm!). We looked at the gift shop and discussed how it used to have more wildlife-related items and is now mainly Thomas merchandise with little enclaves of Fifi and Dora. F preferred the train when it was a zebra and so did I, so we talked about the whys and wherefores of the transformation (economics, world gone to tat, TV characters, etc.). She was really interested in all that.

The bus we get back makes a special stop at one of the villages for schoolkids and F recognized some of the same older children as last week, particularly a girl with a bag that was 'spiky' - I didn't see it, so not sure quite what it was like, but F was impressed enough to choose to write 'spiky' in her diary for that day (as opposed to anything more edjamacational like 'A monkey can hang from a tree for 10 minutes and 32 seconds longer than I can hang from a bar' for instance, or 'Economics is driving culture downwards' - my daughter definitely takes exactly what she wants from our days out and her autonomy!).
Tuesday
I was mainly working during the day but we went out about 3:30ish to go into town to buy Pinkie Pie from Woolworths (F had a bit of money saved up and I added to it) and then to go the library to rejoin. Successful missions all round and we came back with a small pile of books, mostly for her, but I managed to find a couple quickly for me, will look on Amazon beforehand next time to note what I'm after). Also F made a friend there, E, and the two of them sat together chatting reasonably quietly for a while.

Other stuff I forgot to blog anywhere else
F was watching 101 Dalmatians and spotted (hah - see what I did there) that the dogs change the channel from The Aristocats to Homeward Bound
Looked at bark pattern on a tree, listened to the ground
Sang Brooooooooooooadway style songs called 'Secretly Sunday' and 'Totally Naked'
F's diary - I am helping F to keep her diary, as mentioned above - I write a heading when required and she does pictures and chooses what the main thing of each day is. I hope we will keep this up as she is really looking forward to being able to look back at a whole year of days.