National Poetry Day Uk 2010 (by sarah)

Today is National Poetry Day UK and the them is Home. Like last year Jeany has composed a poem - this time it's a bit longer and she wanted to do loads more poems too :/

I like my home
It is great
But my window
Should be a different colour
It should be rainbow

I told the painter
And he didn't paint it
The colours I wanted
It should be
Blue, green, red, purple, yellow, black

I Jean love my home
I love my drinks bottle
And my slinky
It is rainbow coloured
Purple, orange, pink, blue, green, yellow
And it's boingy

I love my dinosaurs
My plastic ones
I'm covered in rainbows

I love my cats
I love Tom he's white and ginger
I love Helium she's white and black
I love Hydrogen she's white and black and pink

I love my toy baby
I love my rabbit
He's the same as Helium
The guinea pigs are daft

My slinky goes round my head a bit

I love my home
I love my computer
Oh no there's cornflakes
All over the floor

The tea cup and everything are good
Except the windows

Kestral (by sarah)

Albert the gardener came to say there was a kestral on the ground and the kittens stalking about and maybe we should catch them and put them inside before it got messy. Unfortunatly Alaric woke me up with this info which in my half asleep state ment that I though a kestral had attacked either Hydrogen or Helium!

So I rushed outside with towels and what what not and got annoyed at dad for stopping to put cheese away before going out with the teatowels I'd thrown at him. Anyway it turned out to be a juvinile (I assume from the family roosting in the trees along the stream.) And Hydrogen had chased it into Barbara's garage :/ We flushed the cat out and caught the kestral which didn't appear to have anything wrong with it - Alaric had thought its wing was broken but after a lot of faffing and three adults chasing it. Alaric threw a towl over it and I scooped it up!

I then took it up to the top of the paddock as Dad and Al rounded up all cats and put them inside so they couldn't follow. I put it down gently and because I was wearing chunky monkey gloves I had a little look at it. It seemed fine just scared and the painter had said to me he thought it had flown into something.

So we are assuming it is dazed and scared - it's hidden itself in the gazebo/summer house so I left the door open and continued my calls to it (Al kept informing me that they only respond when trained but it definatly responded when I made noises like they do when they fly. On to of that it came out and sat on the grow bag and looked at me - then I called again and one of it's parents answered.

We have left the door open in the hope that it was dazed with collision and then chased by cat and humans and then bundled in a towel :/ It's mother is calling it and hopefully it will be able to fly up and join her.

If not it will probably still be in the gazebo when we check later - at which point we will catch it again and take it too the vets 🙁 I know we probably should have taken it straight to the vets but if we do that and its only dazed then we've sperated it from it's family.

However one issue came up with all of this - the towel got hooked up on some splintering old boards in the garage which Alaric says are asbestos 🙁 So me and the towels ect... where covered in asbestos dust. I stripped and showered and Al put everything in the washing machine. I am hacked off though as I've already paid for one lot of asbestos to be removed from this place and the whole lot could have all gone at one >:( And I asked if there was anymore!

Electricity bills and heating (by alaric)

We changed electricity supplier recently, which is great, but the downside is that I've just noticed a bounced direct debit from NPower (the old one) for £661 on our joint account, to clear our remaining balance 🙁

We were paying a regular direct debit of £130 a month, which we tried to keep to by not being wasteful with the hot water (electrically heated) and by rationing the use of the fan heater (which at 3kW costs just under 50p an hour to run, which at the planned four hours a day comes out to £60 a month, the rest being our normal 'summer' power consumption)

I've no idea how we've gone £661 over in the past year 🙁 I can't find my old workings, but I know my estimate of our summer power consumption involved a lot of guesswork, and I was uncertain as to how many months of the year we'd run the heater for... but it looks like we won't be able to afford to run the fan heater at all this winter; thankfully, we've managed to plug a lot of the draughts in the house, and I'm going to try and arrange secondary double glazing (be it nice sheets of plastic mounted properly... or bubble wrap pinned to the window frames), so hopefully we'll be able to get by with the coal fire downstairs, which normally gets through something like £5 worth of coal a day.

I'll be more frugal with the gas heater in my office, too - last winter, it was used to great effect (especially once we'd managed to close the warped window properly so there wasn't a huge draught), but the office is a high-ceilinged room so a lot of empty space has to be filled with warm air before I feel much of it. I budgeted for one £15 cylinder a month, but we ended up using one about every ten days, from memory.

By comparison, Sarah's electric blanket only uses a sixty or so watts, and keeps her toasty warm all night! Which just goes to show how much of the heat from a room heater goes to heating the walls and air, rather than heating us. I need to get some time to refit Sarah's heated jacket with a cable to plug into a plugtop PSU so she can be kept warm without needing to get through batteries like they grow on trees...

A Five Year Old Monster :( (by sarah)

Yesterday Jean went back to school and was taken by one of the other parents to their younger child's birthday party. Jean was returned before the end of the party under the claim of being tired (having apparently almost fallen asleep in assembly). But then I am told she has been told off by some of the other parents at the party for being naughty and aggressive to the other children :/

I asked Jean about this and she said she had tried being nice but the younger kids had been naughty to her. I gave her a speech about younger children and told her to go to her room and think about her behaviour especially as she had not been that well behaved with Al's cousins kid who came to visit the day before. She mantains she wants the younger kids to come and play but as far as I can see is being awful to them. 🙁

Her behaviour has been bad the last few weeks - I thought part of it was excitement over the party and part boredom of being at home with adults and no kids. Now I am ashamed and embarrassed 🙁

A situation not helped by the fact that Barbara then shouted at the mum for not turning around in the right place in our garden. How are we supposed to have friendships if she does that? The less people who visit the worse I feel Jean's behaviour comes :/

I know she has basically only mixed with boys over the summer when she has mixed at all but really that and tiredness is not an excuess - especially when the tiredness is her own fault for refusing to go to sleep :/

Jean’s Dino Extravaganza! (by sarah)

Saturday saw Jean's fifth birthday and it was dinosaur themed!

I haven't got all the photo's yet but here are a couple to be getting on with 🙂

Mum made Jean a triceratops outfit from Sew a Dinosaur a book I picked up in a charity shop 🙂 It is a fantastic outfit and came out better than in the book (she made some adjustments!).

We had dinosaur biscuits 🙂 Jean made!

And a Dinosaur and Volcano cake!

Jean announced that I am the Bestest Baker in the whole world when she saw the cake 🙂

We also had volcano cupcakes!

Food wise there were also over 90 dino cupcakes with either flintstones or jelly dinosaurs on them! And dinosaur shapes sandwiches and little dino chocs me and Jean spent three days making!

Me and Jean also made Hama dinosaurs as decorations 🙂

Jean also decorated lots of cardboard dinos as decorations 🙂 These also appeared in the Dino make and do along with stickers and cloth party bags for the kids to decorate!

We had a pre-historic safari where we found a mother load of dino goodies 🙂 (even if the kids didn't believe that Alaric was a real trail leader especially once Rob turned up in his National Geographic gear!). There were a few party games and the Land Before Time I, II and III for the kids to watch in the evening 🙂

I was a little bit behind with putting the food out and forgot I had made Jelly and ice-creams for the kids but think it went well 🙂 Jean liked it anyway 🙂