A sort of fame

Millie & Amber’s Auntie Kristine emailed from Australia today to tell us that the girls have achieved a smidgin of fame over there.

Kris works at a hotel in Australia organising, erm… stuff.

Anyway, the “stuff” this week included some kind of conference or other, and Kris had to loan the General Manager her laptop for a big presentation.  So for a good ten minutes while it loaded, everyone was treated to the wallpaper on her laptop – which is this picture of the girls.

Imagine that six feet high and in your face for ten whole minutes! 🙂

I tried to explain to the girls that they were a tiny bit famous now in Australia, but they were unimpressed.

Australia is a long way away, I suppose…

The heat is on

We’re in the middle of bona fide Indian Summer at the moment, which means I have to check the girls at night to see that they’re not drenched in sweat beneath the bedcovers.

Amber, in particular, is prone to this – I’ve found her literally dripping before, hair plastered to her pink face as she huddles under her covers.

I sometimes – and this is slightly gross – have to have a surreptitious sniff of her when I pick her up, just in case it’s wee.  She’s that wet.

But it’s nice to get a surreptitious whiff of your sleeping children – you don’t often get the chance when they’re awake; and there’s something about the smell of your children.  Amber and Millie both smell different, but not too different.  If you were to blindfold me and let me smell them I could easily tell you which one was in front of me. 🙂

Hello, Keith…

Keith the Gorilla has come home from school with Millie tonight – Keith is the Year 2 equivalent of Year 1’s Alfie The Bear, a cuddly toy that every child gets to take home for an evening or weekend.  They have to take care of Keith and fill in a diary saying what they got up to.

Last year I suspect we “won” after taking Alfie and the girls to the Tate Modern.

We are so middle-class!

I’m told Millie is ridiculously excited; that Keith wants bananas for his tea; and that Amber is treating him to her unique interpretation of the Sammy Seahorse show.

From the mouths of babes…

Amber consoles us all by noting that:

“At least we can still look at pictures of Uncle Trev on Daddy’s iPod.“

Very true, little one; very true.

(although, it’s not an iPod…)

A good post

There’s a heartfelt and moving post by my brother on his blog today about Trev’s birthday.

Wish I’d thought of the annual birthday letter to Trev idea, but Rich makes an excellent job of it (although his spelling and grammar remain atrocious).

I’ll just repeat what I said in the Comments section on there, that it’s a beautiful post – I was reading it at work and had to stop because there were tears in my eyes.

And Trev wouldn’t have called you “soppy” for saying you loved him, but I think he might have said simply that he knew. Because it’s better to show someone that you love them than tell them. If you need to keep *telling* someone that you love them then you probably need to *show* them more.

And Trev knew that.

Birthday

Trev would have been 38 tomorrow.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this – how I’ll feel tomorrow.  At the moment I’m a bit numb, to be honest; and am mostly expecting to be snappy and unpleasant to be around tomorrow.

But that’s not what Trev would have wanted, so fingers crossed I can rise above it and be better than that.

Happy birthday, little brother.  I wish you could be here for it.

Millie’s Mathematical Plan

Poor Millie, she’s really struggling with her maths at the moment – to the point where we’re going to mention it to her teacher, Mrs Childs, when we see her next week.

The new maths seems to have come from nowhere this term; it’s caught us out, so no wonder Millie’s been caught out too. Last year there was some number work (I wouldn’t quite call it “Maths”) but now we’re straight into multiplication tables, adding and subtracting, etc., none of which Millie quite grasps yet.  She can add and subtract but only by using her fingers, and has yet to make the mental breakthrough of manipulating numbers in her head.

Now, I’m slightly more numerate than the Lovely Melanie, but that only means I can do arithmetic in my head.  To my ongoing embarrassment I don’t actually know how to do long division and only scraped a C in GCSE Maths the second time around.

Anyway, because she’s at home in the evenings it’s the Lovely Melanie who currently deals with most of the homework, so my arithmetical genius is a moot point.  Millie and I read together on the bus in the mornings and I always enjoy answering questions from both girls (such as “What is dew?”) but that’s as far as my homework contributions go.

Without wishing to make excuses for Millie, it’s worth remembering that she’s effectively a year younger than most of the other children in her class as a result of being born so prematurely back in 2005. So she’s not stupid by any measurement – her reading has improved immensely in just the last couple of months – she’s just, well…small, I guess.

Millie did, in any case, quite innocently come up with a brilliant solution to her missing mathematical acumen just last week.  We only found out because she helpfully warned the Lovely Melanie, who was worried about how she would fare in the weekly maths test, that there was no need to worry – she had copied her answers in the test from Maximus Tubbs (he of the legendary name!)

We didn’t have the heart to tell her off for coming up with such a practical – if morally ambiguous – solution, but we are going to have to mention it to Mrs Childs next week (sorry for grassing you up, Millie love!)

It would have been easier if Maximus Tubbs was rubbish at maths, but he (and Millie) got full marks in the test!