Today is Mother’s Day, so we started with Lucy getting upset that Alexander wasn’t doing exactly what she wanted to follow her Mother’s Day plan. While she complained loudly about it Alexander got on with making his mum a cup of tea in the biggest cup he could find. It was a two tea bag job and he proudly delivered it to his mum.
Breakfast in bed was the next order of the day, along with making some vouchers. Everything had to pause while Lucy cut some card up to make the vouchers. Once that was done cards were given to Tracy along with the presents, and an order for breakfast was taken. The presents were Jack Monroe’s Vegan-ish cookbook, two Lily O’Brien dessert chocolates, and the bottle of syrup that I’d ordered to meet the minimum price on Amazon pantry when I’d ordered the chocolates. The syrup wasn’t supposed to be a present, but the kids just wrapped everything in the box!
Alex made everyone breakfast, bacon sandwiches for most of us, and cereal for Lucy. It was very civilised.
Tidying Up
What we spent most time doing during the day was tidying up. We started in the bathroom with a general clean and sorting out the basket of bath toys that has been there for about a decade. A number of older ones for thrown away, some that weren’t properly bath toys got washed and put in the right place. The rest got a decent soak in the bottom of the bath for a few hours before being scrubbed and rinsed and returned to the newly cleaned basket.
I spent a couple of hours before lunch in the garage. I moved a lot of stuff onto the driveway where Tracy and Lucy sorted the toys into ones to pass on to others, some to bring inside and things that were beyond playing with to be recycled. While they did this I moved the bikes round the back, pumped up all the tyres and then put things on the shelves in the garage. Lots of stuff had been randomly brought in, and we had so much stuff that it was hard to get to the shelves. So I used the space I’d created to restack a bit and put things together, and make better use of the space. In the end it felt like we could get to everything, which is a good result.
Alexander used the pressure washer to clean the driveway, and when he was done I had a sneaky shot of it on the car. It was dirtier than I’d expected.
While I was finishing off Tracy and Lucy came back out and painted some of the blocks on the drive. Lucy had painted a rainbow for the window a bit earlier, so this was a way to avoid wasting paint, and to brighten up the drive.
School Prep
A new thing tonight was prepping for Lucy’s lessons. We’ve not had to do this for Alexander because the school assign him work and at 14 he’s pretty good at just doing it. Lucy is only 7, so we need to work out how we’re going to keep her busy learning. She’s bright, and good at learning, but we can’t just tell her to get on with some maths.
Luckily we’ve got her logins for Mathletics and Reading Eggs. We’ve also got some material for her topic this term, which is the Romans. I’ve dug out three books she can read, and a couple of more advanced ones with lots of pictures that I can read with her to get in more depth if she’s interested in any particular topic. I also thought I’d get her to read some Asterix.
Overall I think today has been pretty good, although I’ve done way more than any other day this week. I even managed to hit 10,000 steps, probably down to a bit of dancing with Tracy and Lucy to some loud music after dinner.