So girls have dashed out to circus with Sue, for a change we’ll need to do the pick up later – usually we manage to not need to do any of the running about on a Thursday night -but tonight Martin will go out – I’m a bit rubbish at collecting in the evenings.
Martin’s meeting has arrived in the living room and it is now five to seven. Those of you who know me well will know that this means I will be settling down to listen to the radio. Jonathan has had a couple of late nights and early (for him) mornings so I told him he could listen to the Archers and then head off to bed. He stopped playing with the Wii and came and sat with me at the kitchen table to listen with me. He is also turning into an Archers fan.
I had been fiddling about with some oil pastels based on an idea from the art projects website. Jonathan liked what I was doing so had a go too.
This was my attempt:
This was Jonathan’s:
Now it was no longer early for bed – we had moved on from the Archers to Front Row and Jonathan had decided he quite liked The Unthanks. Art finished it was time for bed and a story.
Reading stories together is one area I feel I have failed a bit as HE mother. We have not read many longer books together – we just don’t seem to have consistent enough bedtimes. We are on our 3rd attempt at reading together The Lion Children we started again on our holiday on the Broads in October and have read no more since we got home! I hear other HE mums talking about reading together and wish we had done more of it. We read picture books togther and then either the children read themselves longer boooks or listened to story tapes. I have been better at reading to Jonathan than I was with the girls (Rebekah learned to read and Ruth listened to story tapes over and over – mostly the Owl Who Was Afraid Of The Dark, the Narnia series and then Harry Potter) but still not good at novels as they need to be read on consecutive nights or you lose the plot.
We have remedied some of these issues by reading a book which has short individual chapters which can stand alone. It also helps to fulfils Jonathan’s desire to learn about history. We are reading Britannia, 100 Great Stories From British History
I tried to get Jonathan to pose for me to take a photo but he wasn’t impressed as he wanted to find the story we were on and get on with it.
Then it really was time for bed!