I’m feeling completely superfluous this morning. B has spent over two hours playing Runescape and consulting with Caitlin over the phone; K tossed me off my computer after Play School so she could listen to Playground Radio and then watch her Play School DVD for the nth time. So I’ve been doing laundry and occasionally helping K to whatever food she wants to eat (so far cereal, Mexican beans with sweet chilli sauce, and olives). As for any overt educational content, I have just finished recording a documentary on ABC about the possibility of humans colonising other planets, which sounds like it’s something that E would very much enjoy watching with B since it definitely takes his utopian, technology-will-conquer-all approach to the future of humanity 😉

We did graze the academics this morning with B reluctantly doing some multiplication flashcards, then starting to read The Bad Book. I was cross with her about refusing to try to reach an understanding about the flashcards, and she was in an “I can’t do this! SCREEEEAM!!!” mood, so the reading didn’t last long. But since then she’s been happily, if slowly, reading her way through the instructions in the Runescape game, which is why I’m fine with her doing that for hours. I certainly can’t think of any other way of getting her to do something which involves reading (however tangentially) for hours! *g* We’ll be meeting up with Nannie to go swimming at 1:30, so there’s not much point in expecting her to do anything between now and then…

Yesterday was also fairly relaxed. We didn’t get organised to do anything in the morning, especially since I thought B was having a sleep-in after her late night on Sunday and told Nannie not to bother coming in until 10am. I think B did a little bit with her after K and I left for playgroup, and before she and Nannie went off to pottery. Nannie brought her back again, and we all had lunch, but I can never really be bothered doing work after we’ve gone out and come back in again. Instead, we went to Spotlight so I could get ripstop nylon as an inner waterproofing layer for the AIO/pocket nappies I’m planning to make. She read bits of her new Double Helix magazine to me in the car on the way to Spotlight, although the vocab and font size meant it was a bit of a struggle. But she was reading words like “conceives” perfectly from the context, which impressed me. She expressed her frustration with not being able to read this magazine easily and asked us to re-sub to Scientriffic!, but I pointed out that she several years of back issues, most unread, so she was happy with that compromise. K fell asleep in the car on the way, so B didn’t bother to get out of the car and I managed to be in and out in under twenty minutes, a mighty feat! K did wake up on our way home, so we went op shopping at Belconnen SVDP, where B found a pair of roller blades which actually fit! How could I expect her to do any work after that? *g* It was about 4:30 by the time we got home, anyway, so that was it for the day.

On a more general note, I have noticed that B is increasingly reading environmental print, and from what she said to me the other day, it appears that she’s finally tipped over into automaticity – ie. see print, read print, instead of seeing symbols which have to be mapped onto sounds (like me looking at Cyrillic, for instance). Yay!