the other night Duke managed to get a push mower off Freecycle. Aprilia has been hankering after one for ages as my dad lets her use his to trim the lawn and she does like being useful. So she played with that for about half an hour and declared it much better than Grandpas (probably because Grandpa’s has a hulking great steel roller attached for perfect stripes and is older than I am whereas this is a B&Q one that’s only 2 years old!) I have to say, the front lawn does look better for a haircut but I miss the clover flowers 
We had a large delivery yesterday morning too. All our Hama beads have landed which provoked a whole new surge of interest as I’d bought kits that I knew would grab her rather than just getting random beads and boards (although she informed me that it was orange beads she was running out of and not any of the sprare colours I had ordered…. daft bat, that will teach me not to check with teh stock controller before ordering!) I justified the kits on the grounds that, for someone who is actually rather good at maths, her mapping skills are dire. She was trying to do a fairly simple pattern in Hama the other week and just couldn’t follow it across the plan at all. I’m hoping that the incentive of some really girlie results (I got the partytime package) will be enough to make her work at it and I’m REALLY hoping that it’s just a matter of practice and not the problem I have with reading accross straight lines because I wouldn’t wish that on anyone really (and the lenses to manage it are ****** expensive!)
In amongst all the creativity I read to her. We are on our second trip through "A year with Miss Agnes" which is such a lovely book and we started the next SL book too, Follow My Leader which reduced both of us to sobbing heaps, she seems to be getting more sensitive to things like that recently, she used to just look at me and roll her eyes when I sobbed over a book but I think one of those developmental changes has happened and she is beginning to understand how others feel more. Added to that was a chapter from Child’s History of the World, some Harry, some Roman Mystery, some Lemony Snicket and some Narnia and it passed the day in a rather Charlotte Mason kind of way (well, okay, I’m not entirely sure Miss Mason would aprove of Lemony Snicket but it’s great for learning big words!). I do love doing "school" this way, she learns so much stuff just sort of in passing and gets to enjoy lots of storytime rather than dry text books.
I went out to a meeting in the evening and aparently she spent the evening reading Charlie and Lola to herself. You know, there may be light at the end of this learning to read tunnel at some point…..
