27 November – 3 December
Monday
Eve and Anne (Grace was ill) came round for lunch and the rest of the afternoon! We didn’t have much time to play before we had lunch and then went to our swimming lessons, but afterwards, they came back round again because their mum was busy elsewhere! Mummy had to take Anne to ballet, but I got to play with Eve until six o’clock! We’re making a play together, so she got into our Spanish flamenco dress and I got into my German green dress and we rehearsed the first few scenes (they’re not very good!) The first few scenes are about us at a ball, the next where there’s a fire, and so on. There’s one where all the lights go off so no one in the audience can see it’s me and Eve, and then we strap finger-torches to our hands and hair so the audience can just see the little lights in the black, and we shout in different voices, ‘Help! Fire!’ ‘Mummy! Where’s my mummy? Someone help me find my mummy!’ ‘Can everybody please leave the building. Can everybody please leave the building.’ ‘Fire! Fire!’ ‘Mummy!’ ‘Can everybody please leave the building.’ And it’s all creepy and dark!
At six o’clock, Tilly’s friend’s mum Carol came round to pick me up. She drove me with Tilly’s friend Rebecca to Guides, but today it was at an indoor rock climbing place and we did climbing there until nine o’clock at night! (Mind you, we’d completely forgotten about dinner, so I was nibbling sandwiches in the waiting room). The walls were reasonably small actually, but that was okay because it meant I could go to the very top of them all! At the end we all tried the overhang, but it was incredibly difficult! It was really quite cool at the end when the instructor vaulted up it and back down again, started at a lying position on the floor, in top speed! None of us could do it even up to the drop hang. It was that difficult!
Tuesday
I’ve started reading the next Harry Potter, The Order of the Phoenix, which is a very big book! It’s an exciting plot, although some of the stuff she writes is absolute tripe, like ‘Ginny made a noise like an angry cat’ when there was no reason to make a noise like an angry cat, and even if there was, it seemed rather incongruous for Ginny to be doing so. I’ve watched most of the film already, so now I’m going to finish the film before I finish the book even though Mummy says not to 😉
I’m still coughing a bit but I’m feeling much better this week. I’ve been reading my book and writing on my website all day, alongside writing a page of story! (Our car is broken again, so we haven’t been anywhere.) After dinner I went to Tesco with Andy and bought myself a box of Quality Street chocolates! Then we watched a bit of Attenborough before bed.
Wednesday
Today was Wednesday. Tilly went to volunteer at the nursery, so it was a Mummy-and-Vinsta day again! Today, to do our Wednesday cooking, we made cheesey scones and pea, leek and mint soup! I think the scones were delicious but the soup was a little shallot-y, though it was yummy.
Mummy and I made my 80s birthday disco invitation by stealing one off the internet (wink wink – it was free) and redesigning it to look all paint splatters and tape measures and cool stuff like that! Mummy and I read some of our new Peter Pan in Scarlet book, and when Mummy wasn’t free I wrote my story or read my own Harry Potter. We went for a brief walk, but it was so freezing cold that it had to be very brief indeed!
When Tilly came back from nursery, we had an over-Skype French lesson with Grandad Mal! We mastered some words like ‘parce que’ and ‘c’est’ and all the negatives, but we also concentrated on some new words, mainly ones that you can guess, for instance, ‘moment’ is ‘moment’ just pronounced ‘mo-mon’ and ‘important’ is ‘important’ just pronounced ‘am-por-ton’ (we learnt that when you say ‘im’ you say ‘am’). We also learnt about the Careful Consonants, which is that you never pronounce any consonants on the end of the word apart from the ones in the word ‘careful’, ‘c’, ‘r’, ‘f’ or ‘l’.
Now we’re about to watch a documentary (most likely on fungi because we’re studying that at the moment) with hot chocolate!
Thursday
In the morning on Thursday, I played on the keyboard along with my online course teacher, Mr Hoffman. I also spent some time doing my maths game, MathsWhizz. For lunch we had been invited to our friends’ house, and their mum, Ruth, had made a delicious pumpkin soup! Jasper had made some white bread to go with it, which was also delicious and made the meal even delicious-er! We brought over our game, Catan, for everyone to play. When we did so, Myrren and I got a little absorbed in Mummy and Ruth’s Mastermind game, so we sort of picked sides and played that instead! We played a few round of Myrren and Jasper’s game, the da Vinci Code, before playing a sort of imaginary-survive-in-the-jungle game. Myrren and I used her toy tigers, Sonrita and Something Else, as pets, and Tilly used Jasper’s pig as her pet. It was really random but very fun and we were all sad to go home :'(
Friday
On Friday, we went to drama in the morning and went through the whole of Act 2 in our scripts. We spent some time going through other people’s scenes, rehearsing our own, and then going through ours and showing them to an audience. It was really very fun! At breaktime we had our snacks and then went into the hall (we is me and Tilly) to practice our lines in Act 2 that we are struggling slightly with. The showtime night is very near (well it isn’t actually, it’s in February, but it feels like it is) and we’re all very excited!
In the afternoon, we didn’t do too much, but we did do quite a bit of Latin. I’ve got a new Latin exercise book and textbook, which is full of grammar and stuff which I quite enjoy doing. We also watched a little of our ‘Life on Earth’ documentary. It’s by David Attenborough and is one of his first, so it’s very old, but I think it’s interesting to see what documentaries were like without all the camera techniques and stuff. Tilly once spotted out that he said something along the lines of ‘Crown of Thorn crabs are slowly becoming more and more popular, becoming a bad predator of some of the things in the oceans’. She said that in one of the recent documentaries with him that we’ve watched, he said, ‘Crown of Thorn crabs are rapidly increasing and becoming a danger to the Great Barrier Reef, eating all of its corals’!
Saturday
On Saturday this week, we went to drama in the morning and met William there. In singing we rehearsed our Christmas songs that we’re doing for the demonstration in front of the parents in two weeks, and in the dance we practiced our 60s dance from Hairspray. For drama we’re doing a pantomime clip-thingy and I’m Gothel, the villain (!). When we got home I had Chatterbooks, my monthly book club, where I have a new leader that I don’t particularly like very much. She gave us a book to read over the month last time, called ‘The World of Norm’. I hated it and Mummy said it was banned and wouldn’t let me read any further than the first ten pages. This time our teacher gave us a book titled ‘Wolf Hollow’, which is equally – if not doubly – bad. Mummy won’t let me read this one either. I don’t think our leader is going to be very happy (wink wink)! We made Christmas crackers, but mine didn’t go very well and ended up nearly unravelling in my bag, which was okay because it meant I had to open it as soon as I got home and eat the chocolate teddy inside.
Sunday
On Sunday, we didn’t have time to do much in the morning because I spent nearly the whole of it practising my keyboard! I can play loads of songs now, but they’re only little ones like ‘Listen for Bells’ and ‘Mouse in the House’ and ‘Hot Cross Buns’. I also did some Latin, making a chart in my book full of English derivations, Latin words and meanings. I quite enjoy Latin now that I’m doing this organised Oulton book (Latin for Common Entrance) but I couldn’t help singing along to the rhyme I found:
Latin is a language; as dead as dead can be
It killed off all the Romans, and now it’s killing me!
After lunch, I started on my snowflake mosaic and did a little story-writing. The snowflake mosaic is an activity I found in a ’50 Christmas Things to Make and Do’ book, which I will post a picture of when it is done. We also watched the third Life on Earth episode, and played a family game of Brainbox, where the winner of each round got a Matchmaker chocolate!
