Today hasn’t quite stayed on track, since B has perfected the art of procrastination and just-five-minutes-more pleading when faced with my request to fit a minimal amount of schoolwork into the day. Plans to go to the markets and the library have henceforth not come to fruition, and she still hasn’t done two out of three of the things I had on my list *bangs head on wall*

First of all she needed to go outside to wake up, then when requested to have a shower and wash her hair, suddenly she had to go and do some more papier mache so she would get dirty before her shower rather than afterwards (excellent use of logic, but I still wanted to kick her butt!). Eventually she had a shower, and dried off lying on the beanbag on front of the heater reading about half of Peepo to herself. Then she read it out loud to me, and it was astonishing – given the chance to have a look at it beforehand, her reading was almost flawless, expressive and with poetic intonation. When she hit the part she hadn’t read, she got a bit bumpier, but, even grumpy, she was sounding it out loud pretty well. Katy was watching a recording of Play School while B was reading, but she kept getting distracted by the fact that we were reading her book, and demanding it back, so it wasn’t an unmitigated success…

Given B’s success with reading to herself, I think she might be well on the way to reading silently. She only needed to ask me for one word, “pigeons” – everything else could be sounded out phonetically. It would be nice if that means she starts feeling like she’s “really” reading! She is quite excited by this MS Readathon idea, particularly the opportunity to extort money from her loving family *g* She’s very keen to start reading for it, and is disappointed that she has to wait til June before she can do any Official Reading. Yet somehow she is not receptive to the idea of practising to improve her speed. Possibly if we bribed her *rolls eyes*

In the afternoon I made a long phone call to a local mum I know from a parenting board who is about to start homeschooling her kids, and wanted the inside goss. Her eldest daughter is exactly the same age as B, so it could be nice for our munchkin to have another age mate at HENCAST meet-ups. The mum, Melanie, is coming from the same AP background as me with a similar leaning towards unschooling, so it would be nice for me too if she decides to stick with it! While I was talking, B was getting increasingly frustrated with her spelling while she was trying to write a LiveJournal entry, and eventually deleted it in a fit of grumpy and went outside. K was playing the Elmo Keyboard-o-rama game for a while after that, then went outside too. I had to go out and break up a disagreement they were having which involved K screaming at the top of her lungs, and after both of them got more and more strung out I eventually had to hang up on Mel to go and calm them down. After cuddles and lots of validation all round, I suggested making a cake, which was agreed to with glee.

We made the Banana and Blueberry Loaf I had my eye on the other day, and K had lots of fun stirring while B measured and poured and used the electric beaters. B basically did all the work, I just found ingredients and read the recipe for her. Both munchkins were a lot cheerier after their baking exercise, even when we found weevils in the unopened bag of flour B brought back from the mill near Temora for me, and we had to scrape all the flour off the surface of the liquid ingredients and start again! Fortunately that worked and we didn’t have to throw the whole lot out. It just came out of the oven, and it’s scrumptious! Even B forgave it for being banana-y, and ate her whole slice…

Before the cake was ready, B went back outside to try to finish her curtain idea, but just couldn’t get it to work. I was reading to K, who was also still a bit stressed, and eventually B stormed back inside and cuddled up with me on the couch. After a while she perked up a bit and was reading some of the books with me. K picked out a book of photo collages, where the object is to find all the items mentioned in the rhyme, and B had a lot of fun with that. At least my determination to keep the library turnover rate high is being adhered to – I pulled out a new batch today, and K went straight to the library shelf when we’d read the pile and she wanted yet another book. Anything which means I don’t have to read Spot Goes to the Park eleventy bazillion times a day is a Good Thing as far as I’m concerned…

B has just turned the TV off after Play School and is about to go and watch another Dr Who episode on her computer, so I shall go find something to do with K before I get dinner started.

ETA: Their zest for cooking didn’t stop there. After B watched her shows, and K spent ages listening to Playground Radio while I washed up, she came to the shops with me to buy mushrooms. When we got back, I set them both up on the opposite side of the kitchen bench to me so they could chop up the mushrooms for stroganoff. K used a butter knife and was enthusiastically hacking them into chunks. She eventually lost interest and hacked the last lot into halves so I had to go through and chop up the hugest chunks, but even still she got heaps done for me. B lost interest in the mushrooms as soon as I started slicing up the kangaroo steaks, so she took that over instead and I did the potatoes. With their help, I managed to get everything prepared much faster than I would have been able to do by myself, so it was very useful as well as fun for them. The kangaroo stroganoff was absolutely awesome – I won’t be going back to beef now!

By the time we got to eat, B was watching the 7:30 Report, and now she is watching Catalyst. We all watched the first section, on sustainable power microgeneration, and now she’s watching something about GM drought-resistant wheat. We are recording Catalyst, and then Sigourney Weaver’s return to Gorillas in the Mist territory, Gorillas Revisited, at 8:30. B wants to watch the show after that too, Find Me A Family, where a family is matched up with a “grandfather”, although I don’t know if she’ll stay awake for it.