a busy weekend

Can't believe it's December already! Where has 2012 gone?

I was going to write this post on Monday, but after 3 exhausting days and far too many asthma attacks I decided instead to go to bed. Podd and I spent the weekend rearranging furniture. We have been given a wall bracket for our TV by my parents for Christmas, so we put that up on the wall, and then shuffled some other furniture around to make more room for the kids to play.

Monday was gymnastics as usual, with a lovely trip to the dentist as well (joy!), and yesterday was our usual lazy day (and we needed it after 3 busy days). On Monday afternoon the sprogs asked if they could play on Minecraft, and I said yes, but only if they did half an hour of Reading Eggs and Eggspress first. Although there was about 30 seconds of resistance, when they actually got started up Little rattled through a lesson in no time and proudly informed me that she got 81%, and then read a book in the library; and Small did 3 lessons, and was enjoying it so much that even once the timer beeped to say their half hour was up he still chose to do another lesson. I did wonder if that was the right thing to do, but they both seemed to enjoy it once they actually got into it so I'm not regretting it.

What else has happened? As past of our tidy up and sort out (has to happen when rearranging furniture - we have waaaaay to much crap!), we cut the cable off a broken computer keyboard and gave it to the kids to take upstairs and play with. Small Clanger set it up on top of his car box in his bedroom and asked me how to spell Minecraft, so I explained that you need the "e" on the end of mine to make the "i" into an "I" sound, and not only did he understand what I meant but he's remembered it as being a general rule when spelling. We also found the Uk Snooker Championship on BBC2 and he spent a while working out what the players names were for the match we were watching... cue lots of giggling when he worked out that one of them was called Trump. Boys, eh?!

Tiny Clanger found a stencil as we were sorting things out, and after being shown how to control the pen and move it around she had lots of fun stencilling different shapes and pictures (I forgot to take a picture of it though).

The sprogits spent a while playing Masterchef. Not a game I would have thought of playing, but they did it so that one bedroom was the kitchen where they all prepped their dishes, and then the other bedroom was where a judge was sat at a table and one would play judge and the other would bring in the dish and set it down and tell them what it is. I was impressed at how they played it for a whole morning with absolutely no bickering or arguing or anything - just them all playing together, in harmony.

They've also been watching loads of Mythbusters, and even spent a while role playing Jamie and Adam! They were all fascinated to learn that elephants really are afraid of mice; Small very excitedly informed Podd that you can't go fast enough to cheat a speed camera; and they loved the experiment in which they were trying to blow up medical nitrogylcerine patches with a home-made defibrilator. They've decided that they would like to make some videos of them doing some simple experiments in the same way that the Mythbusters do, so one of my things to do in the new year is to look out some simple science experiments that they can do. I also see a new camera in our future soon. Our current camera is now 6 years old and is showing it's age by claiming that even brand new batteries do not provide enough power and shutting down saying "change the batteries".

We have not yet put our Christmas decorations up. Partly because we wanted to sort out the living room first before we thought about filling it full of tree, but also because we don't like to put them up too early as it always ends badly with the cats! Cats + dangly decorations + sparkly decorations + a new interesting tree to climb up = recipe for disaster and stress and pulling out one's own hair. I imagine they will go up on the weekend of the 15/16th, as this coming weekend is full of stuff.