K wanted to watch Sleeping Beauty during her computer time, and was asking me to spell it for her so she could search on YouTube. I’m sick of spelling it over and over so I suggested I could write it down for her. She came up with the idea of having a book for spellings, and asked me to draw a little crown next to the words “sleeping beauty” so she would know which ones they were next time. So I did, but I put a couple of ZZZ next to it, then drew a crown and a picture of a shoe on the next line, wrote cinderella, and told her to work it out. She made her extremely funny squinched-face look which means “I am amused but I don’t want to gratify you by admitting it” and didn’t have any trouble decoding “cinderella”. Then she went off and found what she wanted on YouTube without difficulty.

H and I played a very funny impromptu game after he came to me and asked me to sing him “the piggies song” (This Little Piggy). So I did, but each time I sang it I’d change it from “piggy” to his name on one line. He’d catch me out, I’d pretend I hadn’t noticed and start singing it over again, then change it somewhere else. It lasted through five or six different nursery rhymes. He sang back to me a couple of times so I would get the word right (aww), and his pitch is great.

Then there was grumption because he wanted to watch Playschool and Mr Bat’s study is out of bounds now. I asked K to come up with something they could both watch, so she suggested Shrek and they’re happy with that. Mr Bat is trying to figure out how to share Playschool episodes by remoting in to his desktop, but so far without much success. Instead, K asked for more bookwork, so I started looking for some phonics workbooks to work on vowel sounds. I had some I quite liked (but B didn’t, lol) but I can’t find them and they probably disappeared years ago. I brought in the basket of random literacy bits and bobs I had collected, and K seized upon the flashcards and the shufflebook. She was interested in the Silly Sentences game but it’s a bit old for her at the moment. So we did the flashcards, and she had no problem recognising or figuring out any of the blended consonants. She worked out quite a lot of the words, too. After she went onto the shufflebook I finally managed to finish my menu plan and shopping list, so we went to the shops.

They were just gorgeous at the shops, it was lovely. They were a bit painful at one point when they were getting overtired, but we got through it with lots of cuddles. We went to the cheapie shop first because K is almost completely out of socks, but they didn’t have any in kids sizes (dangnabbit). I picked up another couple of the sticker books that they both passionately love, instead. Then we did the supermarket shopping and they were mostly cheerful and K wanted to help get things off the shelves for me.

When we got home, they went back to playing happily together, and eventually they discovered that, thanks to technowizardry, now they could get Playschool to work. Mr Bat got home and provided a diversion with stories and books, then a comment on a forum about megatheriums led to finding episodes of Walking With Beasts on YouTube. K was far more enthralled by that than by dinner. I foresee a new interest in fossils, perhaps. She watched that til Mr Bat’s computer ran out of battery, then it was time for Little Town on the Prairie before bed. We were up to the chapter where Pa and some of the other men put on a black and white minstrel show *cringe* so we spent quite a while talking about racism. I asked her to think about what it might be like for her friend Bee watching the show Laura described, which I think hit home for her.