After a few weeks of incipient burnout where I found my thoughts dwelling wistfully once or twice on the peace attendant on putting K into school and H into childcare, I seem to be pulling myself back together again. This week we’ve stuck to our routine, and our at-home days have not degenerated into stressed-out yelling, although they may not have necessarily been all that productive. We finally made it back to the library today, altho I piked out of confessing about the missing DVD since I found I could still renew it for another week. Probably entirely too optimistic to think we’ll find it given how thoroughly we have searched, but still… Going to the library meant that we had to read all the neglected books which had to go back today, so we finished off a few we hadn’t read, including the book of African tales, which H was emphatically NOT interested in. Peeved to think that I could have read it to K in lieu of Laura books the last couple of nights, and avoided the aggravation of H continuously trying to get my attention while K begged me to keep reading and I kept my eye on the clock to make sure it didn’t get too late! But we did pick up the very last Laura book which was on hold at the library today, so we’ll be back on track with our bedtime reading from tonight.
I introduced K to iView the other day, which means that now she wakes up and starts watching ABC kids’ shows. Which I don’t mind so much, since at least there is new stuff to watch and they’re not watching the same things over and over. And it coincides with my catatonic period in front of my own computer, after all. I’m also pointing them in the direction of new nature documentaries as well as the kids’ shows. Actually, I’m quite enjoying having it available to me, too – I watched two episodes of a David Attenborough show I hadn’t seen before last night while I did some mindless crafting.
On Tuesday we went into Hobart for a park meet, which was a bit of a washout for us as we got there late and it started raining about 45 minutes after we arrived so everyone packed up and left. But since I discovered that this particular park is only two blocks away from Windmill Educational Supplies, we went and spent some of Mr Bat’s freelance pay cheque on edumacational things. Since K loves flashcards and games so much, I picked up My First Word Snap and My First Number Snap games, both of which we have been playing and having heaps of fun with. We don’t play either competitively but K loves the excitement of sounding out a word when I’ve given her a bit of a hint to look closely. She’s much closer to being able to play the maths one with me just taking on a ten-second handicap while she works out the longer numbers, but I’m trying to nudge her in the direction of recognising the groups of objects by their pattern (eg. 3 rows of 3 = 9). We also bought a prism, and have had fun with that for the approximately five minutes of sunshine we’ve seen in the last few days, and a set of gears. I am peeved at their online catalogue now, because it doesn’t work on Linux, and if I’d had a chance to actually look at it properly, I would have bought the other line of gears they stock, because the set I bought seems to be much simpler and has less potential for expansion. Oh well. Not Windmill loot, but related: Mr Bat has been playing multiple games of Tummy Ache! before bedtime with H and occasionally K as well.
On the weekend Mr Bat took the smalls to Bonorong Wildlife Park, and K came back telling me all about Tasmanian Devils. We also did a bit of reading aloud together, although K is not keen to read for the sake of it (unsurprisingly) so I am not pushing it past the occasional suggestion that she might find a book we are looking at something which she could read for herself. And, cross-posted from my LJ so it’s all in one place:
The BatPup has fallen in love with a ghastly book of the pink-sparkly-merfairyprincesses genre, and my refusal to read her the entire book in one sitting made her decide that she was going to read it herself, dammit! And perhaps I should have just read her the damn thing in the first place, because now I have to sit with her and help with the big words, so it lasts even longer… But she is well on the way to independent reading, which rocks like a rocky thing, and not only because then, when reading the author’s bio at her request, I will no longer have to carefully omit the information that the author of the aforementioned ghastly book has written five other ghastly books about pink-sparkly-unicornfairyprincesses.