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Day 31 – Last Friday of the Easter Holidays

Tracy spent the day at work, and I had an annual leave day. This is the last day of the Easter school holidays and it rained just at the point when we were going to go out for a walk to get some exercise. Lucy also had a bit of a meltdown at that point and she had an afternoon nap while she calmed down. I suspect she’s been staying up a little too late and then waking up when it gets light in her bedroom.

Lego Houses

As with most of the last week Lucy built and rebuilt rooms in a Lego friends bungalow. She also played out some scenarios in the bungalow between the building.

Today she talked me through the bedrooms for the family members. There were three, one for the parents with a double bed. One for their son, and a third for twin girls who had bunk beds.

Bread

Alexander and I finished off a two stage bread. Yesterday we mixed some self-raising flour with water and oil. Separately we made a loose dough of spelt flour and the sourdough starter. Today we mixed it all together, kneaded it for a bit and put it aside to prove.

At lunchtime Alexander made some flatbreads in a frying pan using some of the mixture. Afterwards he used most of it to make some pizza bases. We had pizza for dinner, and the remainder went in a loaf tin for later.

Green belt

During the afternoon Mrs E dropped by with Lucy’s new green belt. She did testing over zoom earlier in the week, and is now the proud owner of a green belt.

Fixing Spindles

We’ve had three broken spindles at the top of our stairs for some time. We’ve been meaning to go and get some from a DIY place but not quite got round to it. With the lockdown Tracy ordered some online and we’ve been waiting for a rainy day before putting them in.

So it rained this afternoon. While it did I got the tools out from the garage, measured up the spindles and cut them to size. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would. Once they were all in place, I dragged the vacuum cleaner upstairs to clean up all the sawdust.

Last Emperox

The third book in John Scalzi’s latest trilogy got released earlier this week. So between all the other things going on I got stuck in to reading it. It’s pretty good, if you like science fiction I’d recommend it to you.

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Day 30 – 16 April 2020

Today it was my turn to work and Tracy was off with the children. I spent most of the day on my work computer or on video and phone calls. Some of them were quite interesting, but I can’t tell you about them.

Shopping

Tracy went out on a big shop today with Lucy. We’ve decided that Sainsbury’s in Redhill is clearly awful. Tracy went to Morrisons and it had plenty of everything that we wanted. There weren’t significant gaps in stock like the Sainsbury’s has, and it was much cheaper because Morrisons give NHS staff a 10% discount.

Deliveries

The other feature of today were a number of deliveries. Over the course of the day we had several parcels delivered

  • A load of meat from a local butchers
  • Lego for Alexander and Lucy
  • Garden stakes so we can continue to fabric bits of the garden we’re taking back control of
  • A degusta box (with cider, broccoli crisps and other interesting things)
  • A replacement laptop battery

Exercise

After dinner Alexander and I went on a long walk to burn off all the calories we’d eaten. We covered 4.5 miles and walked most of the way he went to school to the bottom of Frenches Road, and then back up along the A23 to Merstham station. When we were at the station a 12 carriage train pulled in. None of the doors opened, and when it pulled away we saw only three people in the whole train.

When we got in Tracy suggested Alexander try on his PPE.

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Day 28 – Back to Work Tuesday

The four day weekend is over, although the kids are still off school. Tracy was back on the ward, and I rolled out of bed and logged into my work laptop to catch up on what happened over the weekend before Lucy woke up.

Last night Lucy had decided to sleep under her bed, which I only realised this morning when she told me. She wanted a change and built herself a nest in the area under the bed. If you look closely you can see her bedtime reading, Bedtime Stories for Rebel Girls. She’s gone to sleep in there again this evening.

Working

My work was in three distinct phases. From 0700 until just after ten, and then from 11 until after half two, and then three until just before five. Lucy had a martial arts grading by zoom and a birthday party. In between those I read a lot of emails, and spent some time on the phone and video. Over the weekend I found an attachment to hold a mobile phone on a camera tripod. I fitted that to my mini gorilla tripod and am now using that for video conferencing.

Birthday party

Lucy’s friend Amalie, who lives round the corner, turned 8 today. Because of the lockdown she couldn’t have a proper party, so her mum organised one on houseparty. Lucy wrote the card out, and wrapped the present (Lego dots – a flexible wrist band with Lego studs on it that you can decorate with Lego pieces). Then we decided to go and deliver it in person just before the party.

We met another of Lucy’s friends on the way out. Lola and her mum had the same idea as us, and their car was parked in front of our house. So we waved and said hello for a minute. Then Lucy and I went round to Amalie’s house and left the present and card by the door. We waited at the end of the drive and had a chat with Amalie and her mum for a few minutes before going back home.

Once I’d got Lucy logged into the houseparty app on Tracy’s phone I hid in my bedroom so that I could carry on working. From the excited shouting coming from downstairs I’m pretty certain Lucy enjoyed the party. I only had to intervene once!

Shopping

It’s Lucy’s birthday in a few weeks, and I needed to go to the Argos at the back of Sainsbury’s in Redhill to collect the present I’d ordered. We also needed a few things, including cheese, diet cola, pasta, flour, cotton buds and any cheap Easter Eggs that might be left over. Immediately after dinner I took Alexander with me to help carry it all.

We did OK on the Easter egg front, scoring four medium and one large egg for £5. I also found the pasta aisle had been restocked, although only with penne and fusilli. There still wasn’t any flour, but I found the paprika that we hadn’t been able to get last time, and everything else that was on our list, plus half price grass seed for outside my hut. We also got a video that Tracy said she wanted to watch and some sweets as small treats.

With the shopping done we collected Lucy’s present. It was rather larger than I’d expected!

Exercise

Having spent most of the day behind my work laptop I needed some exercise. So I took the kids on four laps of the green in front of the house, and we had some fun with a ‘magic’ stick. Alexander pretended to be Boblin the Goblin and did a character voice and walk. Lucy turned herself into Vikki the Fighter from Carmena. I was Dad the Bad, and we each took a turn wielding the stick to chase the other two round the green. There was an extended roleplay story going on as we raced round at a fast walk.

Once Lucy had done four laps I took Alexander on a longer walk over the railway and back down through the rec to home. We got in about three miles. That gave Lucy enough time to be in bed so that we could stash her present in the garage.

Technology

The last thing I did, before writing this and going to bed, was to try to fix a couple of issues Alexander has been having with his laptop. His school uses Microsoft office 365 for the schoolwork, and go4schools to allocate homework. Alexander hasn’t been able to print to our printer and couldn’t open PDF files or PowerPoints from the browser. Each time he tries to open one (from a link in Firefox) it causes a cascade of new tabs. You need to kill Firefox to make it stop.

I installed a PDF reader to solve that issue and it was straightforward. I tried the same with a PowerPoint viewer but that didn’t work. It garbled the presentation. But I did discover that saving the file locally and then uploading to open in the PowerPoint web all worked fine.

Alexander’s printing issue from Office 365 is a feature, not a bug. The web versions are not as good at layout as the native apps. So they produce a pdf instead. You are then supposed to print the PDF from your preferred PDF viewer app.

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Day 25 – 11th April 2020

I think it might be Saturday today. Tracy is at work and the rest of us are having a very lazy day. My excuse is a very sore left foot from having stood on a nail yesterday. I managed to clean it, treat it with tea tree oil and put a new dressing on it. I did take photos, but I doubt anyone wants to see a puncture wound in the sole of my foot, apart from Tracy who likes that sort of thing (why else would you go into nursing?)

Lego houses

Lucy continues to evolve her Lego house and spent some time explaining her new acquisition of the word ‘renovation’. There are a couple of new rooms, and some of the other rooms have changed significantly. She has been building almost all day, with only a brief break to jump on the trampoline and to make her own lunch.

Modelling

I did some modelling of my own, there’ll be a separate blog post about that, but not today because I want to reflect before I share.

I took all the open source data that I could find about what’s happening in the UK and built my own pandemic model. There were some surprising insights, but the big caveat is that the data is only partial.

Food

For dinner I made jambalaya with king prawns and chorizo. It was the first time I’d made jambalaya and also the first time I’d cooked prawns. It wasn’t as hard as I’d expected it to be, although it wouldn’t qualify as a twenty minute meal!

I made quite a large pot, with enough for today and tomorrow. Largely because Tracy was very late home from work (just after half eight) and she didn’t eat any jambalaya. I found a recipe on BBC good food for chicken and chorizo and adapted it a bit. I used risotto rice (two different kinds, because an open packet with 200g in it was a different kind from the fresh packet, not for of any poncy hipster reason). I had a large red pepper and a large yellow pepper, a red onion and a whole chorizo sausage as well as a bag of king prawns.

I fried the onion and peppers with some garlic and Cajun spices. When they were softened I added the rice (400g in total) and some chicken stock (700ml, but not all at once). I cut up the chorizo and lightly fried it in a separate pan while I added a can of chopped tomatoes and about a third of a jar of hot salsa to the rice.

Once the chorizo was fried a bit I tilted the frying pan so that I could scoop out the chorizo while leaving the fat in the frying pan. The chorizo for stirred into the rice, peppers and tomatoes along with the remainder of the chicken stock. I turned the heat down on the jambalaya mixture and covered it.

The frying pan that had the chorizo get in it got a bit of olive oil added. I then turned up the heat (8 on my cooker). I drained the prawns in the sink and let them drip for a moment while preparing a couple of cloves of garlic. Then I threw it all in the frying pan and stirred the prawns until I was happy they’d cooked. I was looking for them to change colour, and they did, but it was sort of masked by the orange from the chorizo!

When the prawns we cooked I poured the content of the frying pan into the jambalaya pot, but I didn’t stir it in. I left it for about fifteen minutes on a low heat so that the rice would cook properly.

It tasted really good, and the only trick I think I missed was having some freshly baked bread to accompany it.

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Day 23 – 9th April 2020

Both Tracy and I were working today, I started super early to clear as much as I could before needing to look after Lucy and Alexander. However they were both quite good at amusing themself.

My work involved quite a few meetings today, evenly split between zoom and straight phone calls. More than usual as both my peers were on leave as was my boss, so I was covering everything that couldn’t be delegated. Our remit is evolving and becoming clearer, and we’re plugged in to most of what is going on. So I spent the day directing traffic. I also did the quiz at our team meeting with the extreme close ups we took at the weekend. The team did really well with them, I only had to give extra clues on four of the ten. Only one wasn’t guessed.

Lego Houses

Lucy had taken out conversation during last night’s walk about building to heart. She started building modular rooms and then connecting them together.

It was a very iterative process for her, because the 3d joins weren’t strong and stable. So bits came crashing down from time to time. I was quite proud though that she didn’t lose her temper with it and instead rebuilt it afresh, usually with quite a different design.

She had a few attempts at making a video to explain it, and shared one of them with her cousins via WhatsApp. She was also very patient with me in meetings. When I got off the call she would ask how long until my next meeting. When there was more than a few minutes I’d get taken through the latest remodeling. It was rather like some of the construction projects I’ve worked on, although with a much shorter time between the highlight reports!

After lunch Lucy began watching YouTube videos about Lego friends construction and room design. The house was progressively moved from the table into the floor and it became a bungalow in style because that reduced the complexity of her build.

By the time Tracy came home from work Lucy was on videos showing her how to modify Lego friends figurines to make them into child sized figurines. That’s her next thing that she wants to do. I suggested that she asks Alexander to help as he has a track record of customising Lego figures.

Food

For lunch Alexander and I had paninis made with the bread rolls he made yesterday. We also took the cover off the patio furniture and had lunch outside. We decided that it must have been the self-raising flour that made it rise, because there was a very tight crumb, like a cake. The bread was also very dense. It tasted nice, but definitely not a sourdough.

Dinner was a defrost and heat meal, I worked until after six. We had chilli con carne with tortilla chips and a side order of breaded chicken from the freezer. No preparation, just applied heat.

After that we got our daily exercise in, three times round the green with Lucy and then down to the Merstham rec and back for Alexander and I to get us up to 10k steps. We chatted about the d&d campaign and also about subverting tropes when you design stories or games.

Washing Dishes

We’ve been getting our dishwasher and washing detergent from Smol. They post eco friendly detergent to you in demand. It’s a just in time sort of system, and like most other just in time systems of late it’s got a bit disrupted. I also didn’t get Tracy’s reminder to get dishwasher tablets when I was at the supermarket yesterday. So we’ve run out.

However we have plenty of washing up liquid. So, only realising when I’d filled the dishwasher with dirty dishes I had a moment. I decided that I’d just squirt a bit of washing up liquid into the machine. I gave it what I’d usually put in a bowl if I was washing by hand.

When I got back in from my walk I realised that there’s a reason why we use dishwasher tablets.

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Day 22 – 8th April 2020

Today is Wednesday, my usual non-working day. So I’m not working and Tracy is. We had a fairly relaxed morning. Lucy found the camera tripod I used to take pictures of the moon last night and we played with attaching it to the banister upstairs and took some selfies.

One of the better selfies.

Gardening

After we’d done that we spent a brief period in the back garden doing some more hoeing and prepping the raised beds to receive the seedlings we’ve planted. So far one bed (of five) is completely ready to have things planted in it. Another has been turned over but needs the lumps of turf shaken out and thrown into the compost heap. We could probably do with digging over the compost heap and sticking some of it in the raised beds too.

Making Bread

After a very brief stint in the garden we went back indoors to make sure Alexander was making his bread.

He needed some help recovering the sourdough. It had sat out for too long and it collapsed. It smelt pretty alcoholic, and it was runnier than it ought to have been. We ran out of plain flour, so it got a wee bit of the spelt I picked up yesterday, and also some self-raising flour. We also added a tiny bit of the starter to it. Alexander mixed it all up and split it into three batches.

One batch became pitta bread.

The other two batches became rolls, we were aiming for paninis for lunch tomorrow, and a loaf.

Lego Houses

During the afternoon Lucy decided to build a Lego house. She spent quite a time combing through the boxes of Lego and finding all the pieces she needed.

There are two levels. The lower level has a garage and some garden. The upper levels have a bedroom, complete with a very fancy bed with a hinged cover so that the Lego person can go inside. There’s also a closet with spare clothes and a robot from a TV show. Although one of the best bits is the built in zip wire for going out.

Hot Chocolate contest

After dinner (teriyaki chicken, noodles and stir fry vegetables) the children had a hot chocolate competition. They each made two cups worth of hot chocolate, one for them and the other split between two espresso cups for me and Tracy to taste.

Alexander made the Flanders Hot Chocolate from the Simpsons which was in the Binging with Babish book he got for Christmas. It was a very rich recipe and it produced a very dark chocolate.

Lucy made the cardamom hot chocolate from Nadiya’s Bake Me a Story book. Hers was a bit lighter and definitely had fewer calories.

Exercise

After two hot chocolates, even small ones, I needed to go for a walk. So I took Lucy round the green four times and we chatted about building Lego Houses and I reminded her about the modular rooms on the house she got for her 6th birthday. After that Alexander and I went on a longer walk to make up the balance of my 10,000 steps. We also talked about the sort of houses we’d have if money wasn’t an object.

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Day 19 – 5th April 2020

I had a lie-in this morning, I didn’t get out of bed until after half past eight. Tracy had gone to work, Lucy was playing quietly downstairs and Alex was on his explorer scout Minecraft server. It was a relaxed morning, I read and drank coffee between ensuring Alex and Lucy had breakfast, emptying the dishwasher, putting clothes away and getting dressed.

After lunch Tracy came home. Alex spent the afternoon in the kitchen making sourdough and bao buns. Tracy did some errands, and Lucy spent some time with me in the garden, and some with Tracy.

In the Garden

When Tracy came back after her half day on the ward I went outside with Lucy and we did some garden things. Initially I tried to flatten the area outside the hut while Lucy bounced in the trampoline. While I hit the lumpier bits of ground with a pickaxe Lucy realised that her friend was just over the fence. So the pair of them started shouting to each other and fetching things. Their game also involved throwing things into the air to see if the other one could see it.

It certainly made sure Lucy got some exercise, and it gave me some space to swing the pick axe. It took quite a while to dig up the larger roots and make the area less lumpy. Then I started to cover it in black fabric to hold back the weeds. Lucy tired of her game and came to help. So we had a look at the sunflower seeds we’d planted last weekend and watered the pots. With luck there will be some shoots next week.

Lucy then went off with Tracy to help her deliver flowers to a colleague. I got back to more digging. I decided to make a border round the edge of the area and line it with old bricks. So I dug a channel along the edge of an ancient concrete path for the bricks. At some point this might become a step/retaining wall for whatever we end up doing properly in this space.

Tidying up

Lucy has a great habit of slowly spreading out over the house. Lately she’s brought a couple of bags of toys and books in from the garage. These have all started to take up most of the dining space in our open plan living room. So while I was finishing off moving paving stones Tracy started a tidy up of the back of the room.

There were some complaints, but Lucy and I joined in while Alexander got his Bao Buns made. It looked a lot better when we were done.

Food

As mentioned above, Alexander spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen. He took the sourdough starter and made some bao bun mixture. He also started some bread, although he hasn’t baked it yet. The bao buns were really delicious, but he ended up having to do them in the oven because we don’t have an effective steamer. This made them take a little longer too. He made a lovely pork concoction to go inside them.

After dinner I managed to sneak off and have a bath. It felt very relaxing, and I feel much cleaner.

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Day 18 – 4th April 2020

Today is a Saturday, none of us are working. Despite this a young lady, who shall remain nameless, decided that we needed to get up early. So we’ve been at it just as long as the weekdays. I’m knackered and ready for bed, and it’s only nine o’clock.

Creative writing

I wrote a short story this morning, it’s not brilliant, and life writing rather than fiction. I’ve been meaning to write it for a few weeks, since the first Write Club meeting in the Merstham library at the beginning of March. I couldn’t make the meeting, Saturday mornings are when the kids do martial arts and we do our shopping. Or at least that used to be what we did. Lucy did her martial arts lesson over zoom, but we didn’t go shopping until later.

Anyway the challenge was to write 1,000 words on a place where you’d lost something. I struggled with that because I haven’t really lost anything. In the end I decided to write about a loss of innocence that I experienced, although it wasn’t my innocence that was lost. You can read Lost Luggage on my main blog.

Extreme Close Ups

We had a lot of fun taking photos of things this morning. It’s my turn to set a team quiz this week. We did a picture round of TV shows last week. So we had a chat and thought that extreme close ups of everyday items might be a really interesting idea.

This snowballed and we’ve taken pictures of about thirty things and challenged each other to identify them. So I’m definitely doing this with my team on Thursday. Here’s one for you to guess.

Food

Lots of cooking went on today. This morning Alexander made French toast for his breakfast. I had a little bit and it tasted fab, although I’m not a fan of the texture of French toast.

When he’d done Tracy moved in and made a large pot of chilli con carne. She also started the prep for dinner, which was an experiment. We had a mixed feast of quesadillas for dinner, there were at least four flavours, chicken, sausage, chorizo and peppers. It was a very good meal.

Exercise

We all went for a walk after lunch. It was supposed to be a rough circular walk round our house. I’d had a quick look at the map and decided that because there were public footpaths marked that we could walk round our house. The chosen route was to go up to Furzefield Wood, get onto the embankment and then follow it round until we got back onto Bletchingley Road. From there we’d go over the road and follow it back to our house.

It didn’t quite work though. When we got to the motorway junction the path became quite overgrown with brambles. Alexander was in the lead and he’d chosen to wear shorts. So we turned back and had an attempt to follow the embankment in the woods. However that brought us to a similar dead end. We turned round and went back to the other marked footpath and followed that instead. Total distance was 2km, and we were out of the house for an hour.

After that Tracy and I sat outside the house and enjoyed the sun. I read some of my current book, Polgara the Sorceress, and we just chilled for a bit.

Shopping

After dinner Lucy and I walked to the co-op. Lucy navigated us by her special route. We went up the hill towards her school, past the childminder and a couple of her friends houses before arriving at the co-op. She talked the whole way there about what way we were going next and whose houses we were going past. It was a good walk.

When we got there it was just over half an hour before closing time and it was quite busy. There were four people ahead of us waiting to go in. While we were waiting a couple of NHS staff appeared and we encouraged them to jump the queue.

We were there for milk, bread and ice cream. We got some sweeties too. The shelves were pretty sparse, I’ve never seen them so empty. We managed to get some skimmed milk and a nice loaf. There was plenty of bread and milk. There were almost no crisps and half the sweet aisle was empty. Fizzy drinks were likewise depleted, just coke and some Schweppes lemonade. Pretty much just the more expensive stuff was left.

When we came out, with twenty minutes before closing, there were about eight people waiting to go in. All standing their two metres apart.

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Day 16 – 2nd April 2020

I started work when I got out of bed, and caught up on a lot of emails from my day off yesterday before Lucy appeared. Tracy went off to work at the hospital, so it was just me, Alexander and Lucy in the house for most of the day.

School at Home

Alexander spent his day mostly doing his art homework on the computer. He’s been learning to use gimp and painting a face. He picked a black and white photo of Joe Exotic, of Tiger King fame, and painted half the face in colour, and the other half as a tiger. It’s pretty impressive, although painstakingly slow compared to how long it would have taken with pens or a brush.

Lucy has had a productive day. She read an entire Captain Underpants novel, and then did the Logic and Data workbook for a computing lesson. We spent some time talking about that too. There were two bouts of dancing, including dancing with Ote where she was singing along in the background of an SLT video call I was on.

Between a couple of calls I spent half an hour with Lucy talking about what she thought might happen with the science experiment we started yesterday. We then drained the cups and weighed and measured each of the fruit pastilles. Lucy touched each of them and was delighted by how they’d changed texture and gone slushy. She also managed to write a long paragraph in her book about it afterwards.

Food

Lunch today was bratwurst and bread. Alexander made his into currywurst with copious ketchup and curry powder. I just ate mine.

For dinner I did something I’ve never done before. I spatchcocked a chicken. It was both simpler and harder than I thought. I found some instructions with a quick internet search. That was the easy bit. The harder bit was cutting out the spine with a pair of kitchen scissors. It took a bit more effort than I expected, but once I’d got the first cut in it became a lot more straightforward because I could see where I needed to cut.

Evening Exercise

After dinner Alexander and I went for a walk, this time we decided to go a little further and planned our route to walk down to Wiggie Lane, then come back up the A23 towards home. When we left the house, about half seven, we spotted a police helicopter hovering in the direction we were walking about a mile or so away. As we got to the Merstham rec the helicopter banked and flew off towards Redhill aerodrome.

By the time we got to the bottom of Nutfield Road we saw an ambulance and a police car. As we carried on, there were more police, clearly conducting a search. We carried on through the Watercolour towards the railway. As we got to the Tesco people started appearing for the 8pm big clap. We paused briefly to join in. As we continued we saw some of the police cars moving on. It turned out they’d caught someone who had attempted a mugging in the area.

We did the route we’d planned, and we saw Molly and her family when we went down Frenches Road and said hello from across the road. We covered 4.6 miles in 1 hour 25 minutes. The walk on its own was 9,500 steps. So today is the most exercise I’ve had since I was unwell.

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Day 15 – 1st April 2020

Lucy launched herself onto me while I was still in bed this morning. Pinch, punch, first of the month. No returns! Alexander was next on the list, and we all piled into his room and got him while he was still groggy with sleep. He was not amused. He started this weird tradition in our house and Lucy is now determined to best him every month, I think this was the first time she’d done it.

Change of Routine

For the first time since Lucy’s cough started we’ve had a change of routine. Tracy was back at work on the ward today. So she left just after eight for the hospital. Before she went we rehearsed the preparations she’d made for minimising the chance of bringing any infection home. She’s identified work shoes that stay there. There’s a change of clothes every day just for coming home, and a washable bag to put her uniform in. When her shift ended she got changed and washed her hands. On getting back to the house she used an antibacterial wipe to clean the steering wheel, gearstick and door handles in the car. Then she came in, had a shower and put the uniform and change of clothes on a very hot wash.Meanwhile we had a pretty relaxed day at home. I’ve maintained Wednesday as my non-working day. I didn’t really do any of the things I’d hoped to. I did have a go, but my computer wasn’t behaving. In the end I had to reboot it, which is pretty unusual for a Linux machine.

Food

We ate too much today. Breakfast was normal, bit lunch was home made sausage rolls. They were really nice, and it was hard to resist the temptation to eat more of them. Then in the afternoon I did some science with Lucy, and we needed four jelly sweets. The best we had was a large packet of fruit pastilles, so we ate a lot of the spare ones…Earlier in the month I’d promised to buy everyone takeaway on payday. Tracy forgot this yesterday and made us a lovely dinner. So I did it today instead. I checked before lunch what the kids wanted and then asked Tracy by text. She had a mixed kebab from the local kebab house. The rest of us has pizza from the pizza project. So we supported a couple of local businesses.

School at Home

Lucy and I did a fair few things today. We started with some reading, both of us read, and then Lucy picked one of the activities off her list from school. She acted out a scene from the book for me. After that it was time for writing, and she wrote a book review for The Bolts. It was accompanied by a drawing of the cover in her book. That took us up to break time. After break we did some maths, involving finding some coins and doing sums with them. At 1130 Lucy did dancing with Ote via the YouTube live stream. Today it was a Greatest Showman dance, which she just loved. So much so that she watched it a second time when it stopped.We double handed lunch with topic, by watching Horrible Histories Rotten Romans. We also had a bit of a chat about the Romans too. After that we did some checking on the seeds we planted at the weekend, the pansies had sprouted, but the rest of them hadn’t. I don’t expect that we’ll see many shoots for another few days, but I wanted to check that they hadn’t dried out. Then it was time for science.

Science in Progress

In the pack from school was a set of science experiments from the Glasgow Science Festival. So we picked one to do, which was measuring what happens when you put gummy bears in liquid. We didn’t have gummy bears so we substituted with fruit pastilles. The first step was to measure them and weigh them. Mostly they were 10mm high and 20mm in diameter and weighed 4g. Then we put 50ml of water in three cups. In one we added 4g salt and 4g baking soda in another. The fourth cup got 50ml of white wine vinegar.Tomorrow we need to drain the cups and measure and weigh the fruit pastilles. Before that we need to have a think about what we think might happen, and why. Then we need to compare that with what we measure.