Jean and Piggies and Cat (by sarah)

This photo is from a few years ago at the old house - the Christmas after we got the ginea pigs - as you can see they were well loved and we miss them greatly - I think we were so busy at the time that we never really got around to blogging and stuff about them. I may add some back blogs in but just wanted to share this pic with you all.

Along with this one of the run being protected from the sunshine - Jean is sitting under the big umbrella if you look carefully.

Sleepy People with Cats (by sarah)

I found these two pictures of cats and sleeping people from when we lived at The Bakery 🙂

Jean’s Reading (by sarah)

Jean got an entire stack of books for Christmas - mainly due to the fact she loves reading. She started reading The Worst Witch All At Sea on Christmas Day and within about a week she had finished it.

Excitedly she went and grabbed another book from the pile and too my astonishment read it within a couple of days. And then she picked up a third book from the pile and read it all before the day was out and took her last Worst Witch book to bed with her. She reappeared at about 11 o'clock announcing that she had read the whole of that one too!

She is now back on The Hobbit and is rooted in the fantasy genre, she agrees that we need to go to the library as we can not sustain her book addiction!

The most amazing thing I found was that she worked out she was reading the books in the wrong order due to plot lines and stuff within the books themselves. She wants to own the other Worst Witch books rather than get those ones out of the library.

Her reading speed now exceeds mine though not Alaric's.

Old Photos of Jean Being Cute (by sarah)

I think she is about 3 in these photos - it's definatly pre-school 🙂 If I remember correctly she is being a super hero in two of these pictures and the other one she was doing some random classification of nuts and berries which I was going to blog about but never got around too!

The End of the Festive Season (by sarah)

Today we had our last Christmas visitor, Barbara, so I put out the minced pies and cut up Christmas Cake and we apologised as we seem to have lost her tea towel with Mary's print on it that we were going to give her - so we gave her same homemade jam instead.

She gave Mary some lovely Hello Kitty wellies which is brilliant as it was starting to be a squeeze to get her into the ones she has and the previous bigger set she lost one of whilst we were out shopping one day. Jean got an art casse which she was excited about and Al got cheese which is always a hit with him. I got a pot of tulips which shall be going outside the front door.

Jean also tidied the front garden, litter picking the litter that blows in and sweeping up the leaves - mainly as she is whipping through her worst witch books and wants to earn money to buy the missing ones.

There would be photos of today but unfortunately Jean was taking photos yesterday and dropped it and today it has gone completely screwy 🙁 It was on it's way out anyway which is why I had saved up money to get a good one but I spent it on the TV so that we could use the X-Box, I do not regret this but I do now find myself with out a camera - right at the point where I am trying to launch myself back into things seriously - sigh.

On the other hand I do have a rather serious back log of photos to sort out anyway so maybe this will give me time to do that?

After Al's aunt left we started taking down all the decorations to general chagrin of the kids - Mary was walking about saying 'Oh! No!' whilst Jean was whining that the room was starting to look so bare which we felt too. Somehow Christmas went so fast this year.

It has been a fun one though.

Of course tomorrow I have one of my best friends from school visiting in a sort of post-Christmas/pre-birthday type of way which is going to be ace!

And last night I forgot to go to the pub with one of my local friends which I feel really bad about - It wasn't a good day medically for me but still...

Anyway the good thing about the decorations coming down is that I am in the mood for Spring Cleaning to be honest. We started today with putting hooks up to hang various house type things up, such as sun catchers and wall art butterflies and the broom and duster and carrier bag suasage.

Today also marks the constructed language Lojban's 25th Birthday - this is the language that Alaric has been learning for the past few years and that he has been teaching to Mary. So we have begun work on a little language comic type thing - we came up with the idea ages ago but haven't had the time to act upon it!

Apart from that we made bread in the bread maker and made our own sauce for the chickpea hodge podge we had for dinner - January is already a month of highs and lows but net effect seems to be positive at the moment.