T-Bird Anni Rides Again

I wasn’t planning on going to Melrose, it’s quite a bit of money for just 2 of us (Duke won’t come again, he has precious little leave adn isn’t a social bug!) when you add in fuel (okay, so most of you travel further!) and the fact that we don’t join in with communal meals because they are always stuff that she won’t eat so we end up either battling for space in a busy kitchn or spending more money eating out, and the annual sickness bug (why does this never happen at other hostel "camps"?  What goes wrong at Melrose? is there some sort of curse on the place?) but now I know many of Aprilia’s friends will be there I’m feeling a real cow for not signing up, especially as it’s only half booked and she really misses certain friends who are going to be there.

So I’m wondering, who is going?  Does anyone go past our house on the way up (she won’t be sociable by the end of the week so there’s not so much point inviting anyone on the way down unless we leave a day early to give her time to recover a little!) or would anyone fancy a visit to us for a few days instead of or as well as Melrose…..

How can Aprilia love Harry Potter so much, lap up the stories, watch the films back to back give me funny looks for sobbing uncontrollably at the sad bits and STILL be reduced to a quivering wreck at Finding Nemo

She’s a funny kid sometimes…. what do I mean sometimes? 

She also had a major melt down the other day with the arrival of the Kung Fu suit.  I’d promised her a suit for her first grading and ordered it in plenty of time assuming it would be the regulation 28 days delivery, it was posted the same day it was ordered!  Trouble is that although she is really excited about the whole getting a yellow belt thing, she is really quite bothered about the process, wants to do it but doesn’t, is convinces she’s not going to manage it then demonstrates the whole sylabus perfectly, in short is a total bag of nerves about it.  I’ve told her she can skip it for this year if she wants but can still keep the suit because she’s proved she’s going to stick with it, I’ve told her that she will ahve more than one chance during the celebration to show what she can do, I’ve told her Shifu wouldn’t put her in for the grading if she wasn’t ready, she’s still wobbly.  Sigh, sometimes I think there is just too much of me in that girl!

In other news, I spent quite some time yesterday downloading books from LibriVox so I can enjoy some "reading" without so much effort, well, it’s the only way I can see of me ever getting through the huge list of books on my "must read before I die" list!  Trouble is, whilst I was browsing, I found several other books that weren’t previously on my list but looked good too!  So, just need to burn them all to CDs and settle down for some storytime (Duke bought me a shedload of blank CDs and cases taht you can fit lots of CDs into to try to keep the growing collection under control.)

By the way, has anyone else lost all sense of humour over children not adapting to this hour change?

Saturday I had Kung Fu without Aprilia, it’s all going up a notch at the moment as we are heading for gradings in a month, not convinced I can do the 50 push ups and sit ups required yet…… but aparently I don’t need to do them all in one go!  Sifu came up with some suggestions for helping Aprilia with various things including making her write left handed as well as right handed to make her brain work differently, he gets the kids in his class to do this and aparently they all write much more legibly with their dominant hand after doing it!  Also getting her to do lots of "cross patterning" activities so things where you use oposite arm and leg, where you bring arms or legs across to the other side of the body and so on.  Can’t even remember how we got onto the subject!

Having the rest of the day for me was rather lovely even if I did have to spend some of it doing housey things and some of it reading up for Sunday’s ambulance aid exam (bit harder than normal first aid).  Uncontested custody of the remote control is something I don’t get often!

Sunday. Well, what can I say?  I went the wrong way twice on route to where I was supposed to be.  It’s somewhere we go fairly regularly but I just turned totally the wrong way at 2 junctions.  I was too busy getting wound up about how awful the last time was, I can’t link back to it, it was on the Blog of Doom that died a few years ago.  Never mind, you don’t want to revisit it anyway, it wasn’t pretty!

The exam part was okay, I made the decision right at teh start taht if I didn’t understand the question I’d just move on and come back to it later.  So when I hit ambiguous questions like "blood in the pulmonary artery is deoxygenated and under low pressure, true or false" I moved on quickly before I could get all bothered by the fact that that particular statement is half true and half false.  There were a few bizarre questions, some of which gave us scope for silliness in the waiting area during the rest of the day….. which would be fine if they weren’t meant to be sensible questions!

The "medical" part was so easy that I spent the entire time wondering what I was missing, it was a simple first aid treatment - give the diabetic some lemonade - and I ended up paranoid that tehre was some other condition I was missing!

The CPR bit was also easy although I did give the guy a blank look when he asked  how I would know my patient was getting worse…. um, lemme think, he’s already not breathing and has no pulse…… rigour mortis maybe?

Sadly I totally stuffed up the trauma test on one very stupid error that I knew I’d done wrong as soon as I did it.  And I wouldn’t have made the error if I hadn’t had brain fade and not had the remotist idea on how to use one of the basic bits of kit so had to do things a less ideal way!  Mutter mutter growl etc.  Am re-sitting that one bit in a few weeks.  From a quick glance down the list (which I suspect wasn’t supposed to be visible) a lot of people are having to resit one or other bits though so I don’t feel so bad.  And at least this time it was MY mistake not some ******** delibertately trying to wind people up and make them fail.

Which brings us to yesterday.  Brief trip to JJs until it got too noisy!  Far too much TV time.  Sat fairly nicely for stories but then had a total hissy fit at any brain work resulting in me removing her PC’s power cable and informing her that she was to sit in her room and think about her attitude (cable removed to stop her just playing when she was supposed to be thinking!)  She did eventually apologise and said she thought she was just very tired and grumpy.  I agreed.  Then at bedtime she suddenly wanted to know where Italy was and where Rome and Ostia are in Italy (reading Roman Mysteries still!) so we got the puzzle map out and spent nearly an hour working with that and branching out into how the map would ahve been a lot different when I was her age with East and West Germany, USSR and all those little countries that were merged into bigger units that have since splintered off again with the collapse of the USSR.  Then she did a few pages of maths and went to sleep…..

an essential bit of kit for those whose jeans slump down during wear…. the Buttcrack detector!

This morning we went to Chester for Spiderwick Chronicles, met a home ed family from N Wales and waited for the hoards of overexcited children to arrive.  They didn’t!  Aparently they phoned to say they weren’t coming after all but the manager went ahead and screened the film anyway.  Aprilia said it was her fave of the 3 films we watched, I prefered Nim’s Island myself but then I think most of that one sailed over her head!

This afternoon we were at JJs (I got a monthly ticket so we are making the most of it, today was effectively free) and now she is at Granny and Grandpa’s and I feel strangely compeled to go and read the next chapter of The Hobbit anyway because it’s so long since I last read it and I’m enjoying reading it so much!

yesterday was Film Ed in the morning, which got me thinking, can I call it Media Studies when she fixates on a film for a week and watches it twice a day every day????  Anyway Charlottes Web was lovely, the teachers in the cinema were all really well behaved and several of them seemed to have laps big enough for several children at once in the sad bit which was nice to see.  We also met up with another HE family who told us about violin lessons!

So later on we grabbed her violin and headed off there and for the princely sum of £1:50 she had a full hour with 4 other girls and apparently did very well. It’s a bit "Suzuki style" so no music and lots of being involved even if you can only play open strings etc and really perfect for her as she doesn’t see me as being someone who can "teach" her things, just someone who provides her with things to learn from so things like me correcting her bow hold were unacceptable in her view of the world!

Then it was annual re-qual time for Red Cross which, this year, we managed to do all in one night as someone managed to convince Brunhilda that actually you don’t have to do every last bit of the pack issued, just one bit from each section which made life much more simple!  Aprilia has decided she now wants to do her Advanced First Aid Brownie badge so I need to arrange with Lola to go round and do that some time soon.  She should sail through, there’s nothing too taxing in it for someone who has been watching it all going on round her for years!

Today we did violin practice then went off to JJs for a play, met up with A (really must think up a better name for them!) and co who invited Aprilia back to their house.  This turned out to be very handy as my planned Rainbow meeting when down the swanny as the Charlie and Lola resources are no longer available on the Red Nose website so I had to replan tomorrow’s meeting.  I found a really good activity which will fill the gap really nicely but it took some searching.

And then there was my next Freecycle "win" which is a set of 4 Dickens books including one that I need for my next course.  So that’s my first one for having a good read of before it all starts then!

is a really dangerous place to be in autumn without a hard hat!   boy to those things hurt when they land on your head!

Yesterday we were worked very hard at Kung Fu, in fact I suspect this will be a common theme for the next few weeks as we have a Celebration coming up (it’s like a grading but it’s to celebrate what we can do not pick holes in what we can’t do so well apparently)  Aprilia’s teacher has asked if I can help her practice a Form (it’s the same idea as Kata for those who have done karate but our particular style of Kung Fu doesn’t use oriental names for things) so she will be more confident with it when the time comes, funnily enough, it’s the same form I have to learn so we are working together on it!  By the time we got home we were a bit limp so we decided to chill out and listen to the very lovely Stephen Fry reading HP1.  Well, that was the plan, 2 hours later we both woke up again!

So we decided a bit of fresh air was required and headed into Delamere to be bombarded with chestnuts and to enjoy a bit of peace off the main track away from the Sunday Walkers and Cyclers who invade "our" forest!  We came home with pockets full of bits and bobs for a collage Aprilia is doing for her Artist badge at Brownies or is it her Seasons badge, actually I think it may be both but hey ho!

Today we nipped up to the craft shop to get some black card to do her collage on (it’s a bonfire night scene so it sort of had to be black card really, you can’t hot glue sticks onto paper that’s been painted black, the paint peels off and all your collage ends up on the floor….) and grabbed a few other bits and bobs there too but totally failed to get decent watercolour brushes which I’ve been intending to grab for ages as Whiskers "killed" my big broad one

We also calling in on Grandma (Duke’s mum) and ended up with armfuls of crafty bits as she overbought on Christmas card making bits and didn’t see any point in keeping it all til next year!  Oh, and she found some knitting machine yarn too, we are having a bit of a fight with the knitting machine, it’s not as easy as it should be and she suggested that using the proper yarns may cure it.  We shall see….

This afternoon we have both painted, I was very brave and shared my extra especially lovely proper watercolours with Aprilia, on pain of slow agonising death if she messed with them, and she produced some good work whilst I got adventurous and not only filled an entire sheet with one drawing rather than my usual tiddly little things but also did a landscape sunset which I was rather pleased with and something I’ve been threatening to have a go at for ages.  Aprilia has asked to do art more often, and dug out the Drawing With Children book to back up the request.  I guess I’d better clear the kitchen table then!

This week I have aquired a knitting machine off Freecycle, it’s something I’ve fancied a go at for ages but it’s not something you can just buy to have a go at is it!  It’s half set up on the kitchen table waiting for a bit of peace and quiet for me to read the really hopeless manual for how to work it!

and then Duke got a car off EBay to replace the Volvo which, though utterly lovely for long journies is unreliable and a serious gas guzzler.  He’s got a diesel Mondeo for £400 which, even allowing for his lead right foot will have paid for itself within a year just on the fuel it will save even if he doesn’t manage to sell the Volvo (which he’s hoping to if only as "spares or repair" for £100)

and to cap it all, I noticed a kid’s bedroom for our new small-ish tent on EBay and , very tongue in cheek, put on a very low bid, and was the only bidder for it!  So that’s her main Christmas present all sorted out (she KNOWS how much they cost because she wanted me to buy it when I got the tent and was TOLD exactly waht I thought about interior decor for tents at £60!!!!)

So really, for all that there is a lot of doom and gloom in the bank account, things aren’t all bad!

Yesterday did not go according to plan.  2 mnutes after blogging I got a phonecall saying Aprilia had fallen off the trampoline!  She hadn’t, she’d landed awkwardly on it and turned her ankle over but it was still mighty painful!  Some time (and a full dose of everything from calpol to hugs via frozen peas and teddy bears) later Duke arrived home and decided that if someone had presented themself to him with an ankle that was still too painful to take any weight and very swollen after this time he would pack them off to A&E so that’s what we should do.  I was reasonably sure that what it needed was a good night’s sleep and see how we go in 24 hours but to be fair, he was right, had it been someone else we would have sent them off!

4 hours later, having sat in a stuffy waiting room without a drink (because neither of us had any change) a very lovely nurse practitioner prodded it, poked it and encased it in tubigrip declaring it to be a rather nasty sprain that will take at least as long as a fracture to mend properly, longer if she isn’t a very sensible girl bout doing her excercises to keep it moving.  Then we were robbed of £4 to get off the carpark and finally got home just past 11pm.  I could have nipped down to Asda and grabbed tubigeip off the pharmacy isle faster and cheaper than that……

All that, of course, meant that at gone 11pm, my PC was still upstairs rather than downstairs.  And the house was still chaos.  But we sorted the PC and I decided that I didn’t got a stuff about the bit on the form that I’d signed to say that I would be sitting my exam in a clean and tidy room!

And so this morning I let her lay in bed for as long as I could get away with before giving her the option of staying home with a pile of DVDs adn popcorn in her bedroom or going off for the day on the planned playdate.  There was much dithering but eventually play won the vote and off she went with planty of sashets of calpol and a few ice packs (actually, I think strapping her into really sturdy boots helped as they supported her much better.)  Was just back in time to open the door to my invigilator!

 Exam was fine, well, as fine as I could have hoped for.  Certainly I’d remembered enough to woffle on the required number of sjuects although I’m not sure I used the right format for this course as it’s different from last year’s preferd format for text and image analysis (ho hum!)  Time will tell.

And now, the sun is shining and I am sat outside enjoying it because I have a laptop with a battery that lasts a respectable amount of time and a facility for wireless network!  Aprilia isn’t home yet so I assume she’s still happily playing.  I am planning on staring indecisively at the bookshelves later trying to decide waht to read first. All is well with the world!