This week in brief.

Monday:
Nannie dropped B home after pottery. K, H and I went to playgroup. I finally got H and K down for simultaneous naps and asked B to do some reading with me. B did 90% complaining and procrastinating and 10% reading for the time until H woke up again, causing steam to come out my ears. Went upstairs, got H, and we continued with the reading with H asleep on my knee. Apparently, B learnt to read when I wasn’t looking. She is now reading fluently from context, decoding less than 10% of words phonetically, and panicking much less often when she gets stuck. She still needs to work on comprehension strategies, and needs to pay a lot more attention to punctuation. We made some progress there by explaining that even the best readers still slow down and re-read whenever they need to fully understand something. I said that I read at 800 words per minute, and can plow through a Pratchett book in a couple of hours, and explained exactly how it is that I can mow through so many words so quickly, and then reminded her that when I’ve finished one of his novels I go back and read it again to get all the bits I missed the first time through! I think she believes that she’s still a crap reader because she has to work at comprehension, so I think it made her feel better to realise that I still have to do that too on occasions. After she’d read a couple of pages of Wintersmith, I read to her from a library book about the Roman Empire until H woke up. She then went back on Club Penguin, where she spends the entire day reading and writing… I woke up K, and after she’d finished her post-nap grump, we sat down and played the balancing blocks game while B watched Rollercoaster. When her TV was over she came and played with us, and K played with her big basket of blocks instead. Then she found a muslin wrap and declared that she was “a haircutter”, so we played hairdressers for a while. First K pretended to wash B’s hair, then B did K’s, and then they both played with mine. I ended up with a big sloppy ponytail and some dangly bits, which I’m sure B thought looked terribly stylish. In retaliation I gave her three pigtails and a dangly bit with a comb in it. K got a silly topknot and fingernail polish. There may have been giggling. B cooked a large portion of dinner and cleared off the dining table without being asked. We read some Christmas books and sang some carols. B was knackered and went off peacefully, but K decided to be a pain in the bum about going to bed, and E had a meltdown about the amount of time it takes to get her to go to sleep these days, so I took over. I conked out next to her without getting to any of the things I had planned to do in the evening, and was Rather Grumpy when I woke up several hours later.

Tuesday
E was back at work in the morning again. I spent all morning trying to get H to go to sleep lying down, first in the bed then in the rocker, so I could spend time with the girls. He did not oblige, or at least not for any longer than it took to have a shower. B cleaned out the rat cage. Both girls made far too much noise. I lost my temper and behaved like a dickhead for an hour or so. Fortunately B knows me well enough to know that when I start ranting and threatening all sorts of mainstreamer consequences she just has to wait til I stop being a dickhead again. Eventually I did indeed stop being a dickhead. I wore H for the rest of the day, he slept quite happily, and I spent plenty of time with the girls, and we even tidied up the playroom again so that when K decided to tip the entire contents of her rice game onto the floor after she’d finished playing with it, it was easy enough for E to vacuum up. K is a scrub. B did some spelling, and some more Club Penguin. When E came home, he graciously allowed me to take a mental health break and I went op shopping and found Much Loot. He took the girls down to the playground for a bit while I was out. B made wonglepongs and then she and K had a protest over not being able to drink the remainder of the juice. B made signs saying things like “We wont are jows” and “We wont are right for jows for freedom”. B is also a scrub. She watched a show on ABC in the evening called “War of the Birds”, about pigeons in WWII.

Wednesday
E didn’t go in to work. I slept in til 10:30. E did washing up, and I did laundry, and we traded off wearing H. B played Club Penguin, and spent a lot of time asking me for spellings while she chatted to different players. E took K for a walk in the afternoon and forgot about horse riding, which meant that I had to take B. Walked up and down with H in the sling but he was too hungry to sleep so ended up feeding him in the car for the rest of the lesson. When we got home, B watched Rollercoaster and did some drawing. E complained that this whole staying at home to work thing wasn’t working, whereupon I pointed out he hadn’t actually tried it, and he went upstairs to do so for the remainder of the afternoon/evening, although most of what he accomplished was yak-shaving. B and K entertained themselves: at one point there was a long game in the garden involving upending the pool onto each others’ heads. I finally got H off to sleep, and E moved his computer into the bedroom so he could soothe him while he looked like he was going to wake up. I reheated quiche for dinner, after which K went to bed early for a change, but B stayed up and watched entirely too much pointless TV. I got as far as hunting out some cute material and drawing a pattern for K’s beanbags, but couldn’t find the sewing scissors (grrr).

Must. Go. To Bed. Now.