What we've been up to:

F came down with a cold at the weekend, with a slight temperature off and on and a high level of floppiness and fragility. Poor old thing. Can't remember what we actually did, to be honest, not much really. Think we had a conversation about Japan and a few other countries briefly - she asked what was the best country in the world, and then we got onto discussing what that meant. She has also asked a few questions about God or gods over the last few days. Also 'are humans more important than animals?' which led to more discussion.

She's on the mend now, so today we took our new badminton set, plus toy tennis set with foam ball, plus a foam football, over to the park. F helped me a bit with the slightly fiddly net erection, then we did some practising stuff and then moved on to hitting over the net to each other - she improved a lot over the time. She does get put off by some things requiring a lot of practice, but others she doesn't mind at all with. I gave her loads of encouragement as I think it could be a good sport for us to play together - think it's a good one for her - light racquet, don't have to use much strength, don't need to use both hands. Certainly she quite quickly got the feel of getting her racquet in the right area at the right time, but wasn't quite quick enough at first. But by the end, we managed a rally of 4 hits in a row, so I thought that was successful going - she's not really done much of any of that kind of thing. I'm sure all that stuff is good for some of her difficulties with balance/coordination.

We had a break for a picnic and then played with the other things, including the football, for a while. We had managed to find a sunny spot, but as the sun moved round it started to get very chilly. We moved over to the playground for a last 40 minutes or so and bumped into another local home-ed family - the first one I ever met in our town, ages ago. The daughter is 11 and the son 4. We had a good chat and I took her e-mail address to pass on info about the new group, which I've just done.

Other things F has been doing:
been on her laptop a lot, mainly on PixelChix site, but also exchanging e-mails with A, which they seem both to have been enjoying. She tends to type half and then get weary and dictate the rest for me to type, which is fine. She's also been watching Bear Behaving Badly on i-Player and My Little Pony episodes on YouTube.