Who’s Normal Anyway?

Quick catch up:

Wednesday

West Park - possibly the less said about that the better. The children were all getting on fine. The adults were having a few challenges on the communications front, shall we say. What is wrong with everyone having an equal say in running a group is beyond me. Anyway, M had fun. He helped build a theme park out of Lego, played in the playhouse, tried snooker and generally kept himself busy. L smiled at everyone and enjoyed being chatted to and held by some other people.

Wednesday evening we let M stay up later than usual and we all watched Freaky Friday on DVD and ate lots of popcorn.

Thursday

After doing his maths and sounding activities I took M into town to buy a Spy Bug from Tescos with his pocket money. He’d spotted it the week before but needed to save his money for another week to afford it. Unfortunately he’d interpreted that as “We’ll go and buy it on Monday” and then when we didn’t go Monday or Tuesday he got upset. So I promised we’d go Thursday if he got on with things in the morning. He got up early and had his maths finished by 7.20am! He also did his phonograms and spelling in double quick time, so that was a bonus. He is so chuffed with his new gadget and keeps trying to hide it around the house to listen in on conversations, but so far he’s not been very subtle and he hasn’t caught us out!

Friday

What did we do on Friday? Erm… M had his Musical Theatre class in the afternoon, and we finished listening to “Great Expectations” during the journey home. I downloaded the small file size of it from Audible (when Kirsty mentioned the free books), which was all I could manage on dial up, but it’s fine to listen to on a car journey. We do so much time in the car getting to things I like to have stories to listen to. This was a little bit too involved for M, so I kept pausing for a round up of events so far, but I think he got the jist and he asked to listen to more.

I applied online to upgrade to broadband after Joyce suggested trying and seeing what they say. I was getting hopeful - our postcode said we could probably get broadband, our phone number said probably not, but when I applied it said we could have the 500K speed though they might need to send an engineer out. Unfortunately a couple of days later I got a letter saying they’d decided our line wasn’t up to it after all. It’s so frustrating! I’d love to be able to download books, send digital photos for printing out easily etc etc but it’s not going to happen for now.

Saturday

We tried driving into town to go to the bank and change pin numbers on new cards, but there were no parking spaces to be had anywhere so we gave up and went supermarket shopping instead. We popped home for a quick lunch and then took M to his dancing class. He seems to be getting the hang of his 2 dances now. Don’t think we did anything memorable on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday

We got up early and went swimming for half an hour before church. It was L’s first time and we weren’t sure how he’d do, but he looked like he was enjoying himself in the pool. A and I took it in turns to hold him and swish him through the water. He liked to go on his tummy and splash his legs, but pulled some peculiar faces when his mouth and nose went in the water. He looked as though he was trying to taste the water with his tongue, then screwed his nose up at it.

Church was church, with a fairly unintelligible sermon about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesars. Why he can’t just say what he means instead of pontificating I don’t know, I just let it wash over my head most of the time. Coffee afterwards was better and I started getting to know the new assistant’s wife. There’s another lady there with a baby of 6 months, so we got chatting about the health visitor and the mums and babies group and stuff. She is the only other mum there who is breastfeeding past a few weeks, cosleeping and so on, and the HV keeps having a go at her for cosleeping and not doing CIO, so we encourage each other. I promised to lend her the Continuum Concept when she has time to read it.

The HV is really irritating me at the moment so I’m giving her a wide berth - whenever I see her (e.g. at baby weighing) she is always telling some poor mum she *should* do this or that, she never says anyone is doing a great job of mothering their baby. It’s all negative - breastfed babies don’t sleep well, the only way to get any sleep is to leave them to cry, grrr…. like there’s only one way of doing things. Do they not learn any counselling skills on these HV courses? What about asking how the mum feels about things before ordering her about?

Sunday afternoon M and A went for a bike ride and then tidied up the garden, and I caught up with a few emails. In the evening we watched another DVD - Maid in Manhattan. It was OK for a romantic comedy - watchable and not taxing. M was falling asleep though so he missed the last 10 minutes.

Today

A did maths with M first thing and then when I got up we did his phonograms and spelling. Then we went out for the day up to Teesside Park, where we watched Wallace and Gromit and the Were-Rabbit. Think it’s one of those films where you’ll see alot more the second time you watch it. We all enjoyed it, L was fascinated by the moving pictures, though the sound was a bit too loud. He screeched a bit (happy screech, but loud) and I tried to BF him off to sleep but he as having none of it - he wanted to be facing the screen. He eventually nodded off sitting up on my knee and slept through the second half of the film, so we could watch without worrying he was disturbing anyone else, though there were only about a dozen of us in.