It's been a long few weeks

I've been having prodromal labour for five weeks now so things here at home are all a bit... strange. But we've had a few nice incidents. Linnea drew a picture of what she imagines might happen if I had the baby in the waterbirth pool we have in the front room (leaving no room for anything else at all) and the midwife was so struck by it she seized it to send to a midwifery magazine.

Linnea's first term of swimming lessons since the ones that stopped her swimming is almost over. She started lessons shortly after turning 3, because she could swim, but at that age they are sorted by age, not ability, so she rapidly lost interest and with it skill, and we left it for a couple of years. But now she's in with the five- and six-year-olds and has done a term of Level One, so can move up to Level Two in September. Apparently she's very good and the rest of the class were called upon to observe her backstroke the other day.

Emer will start in Level One in September and we shall see how that goes. She claims to be looking forward to it.

Linnea wants more Learning To Write books, like the Peter and Jane ones but with better stories - she likes the size and the illustrations but not, unsurprisingly, the plots. She still likes those minimal plots for Learning To Read though. Meanwhile she's working through her workbooks, allowing herself to do one thing from each page on each day, apparently.

Emer and Linnea have both been doing a ton of phonics and maths games on their laptop.

And we've been growing things, except when we've been killing them by accidentally or purposely bashing them to the ground with footballs or whatever.

Oh - the other thing we did lately was haul out my loom and have a bit of a go on that. It's interesting to see how it works but neither of them has anything they hugely want to create with it yet.

And we bought a pocket microscope which is incredibly useful.