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Tears at bedtime

 
We are at last after 6 months a skip free house - hooray! Goodness it feels like its taken an age to get here but its so good to finally feel like we are saying good bye to the various people, who seems ed to have been a permanent fixture in the house over the last months. The girls will miss them, part of the Sunday routine is to ask who will be in this week and whether they will be around after school so they can see them, but keep your kids occupied is a poor excuse for paying your builders to hang around for another few weeks so go they must!
This week we have a new front door coming, the final bits and pieces of decorating and then I can safely say the interior of the house is finished, phew.  It's cost twice the original budget, but then we only originally set out to do less than half the house so that's not surprising. We've spent a huge amount but I can account for exactly where it's all gone and in retrospect we've been lucky that the only disasters have been at the cost of others rather than us. I've loved the creative side of renovating our home while Glenn has hated the practical realities.  Regardless we both love the end result and agree it has been worth it.
 
This weekend has mainly been about getting our heads around additional paperwork.  I've had audit committee papers to wade through (never a great sound when 200+ pages of detailed reports land on the doormat with a weekend to read them in); and Abi has had homework.  Poor Abi is finding the transition to year 3 tough, and we are finding it tough to have to make her knuckle down to finish her homework with the care and attention it deserves.  This evening I had to push really hard to finish her work off properly and this ended up with tears at bedtime.  Basically she's like to go back to Year 2 where it all seemed much easier. In her mind they played all day and never had to do anything difficult.  I seem to recall it wasn't quite that easy but I agree it's been a big step up.  We were warned by everyone that this was the first of a number of hard transitions and she's not the only one struggling a bit. We are finding it hard as well. I had to google what it means to 'parse' a sentence and I got so confused on prepositions, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and so on that I've now drawn up a crib sheet, after all we are going to have to do it again next year! The hardest thing is finding the right line between pushing her to get it done and ensuring she doesn't feel completely overwhelmed.  Trouble is it isn't going to go away and it's only going to get harder. We'd all prefer to play all day but life just isn't like that.
 
Izzy is still in the wonderland of year 2 and loving it. I'm hoping she will benefit from having to listen to all of what Abi has been through. She joined me in my paperwork this morning, singing away happily to herself as she coloured in pictures of ballerinas and fairies. Abi and Glenn were outside (as ever!) but the weather is turning and Izzy is a fair weather child. She'd far rather be warm and dry inside than out in the elements. Her memory appears to be outstanding so I'm hoping that will help - this afternoon I was telling them little anecdotal stories of people they know and she could remember pretty much all of them. Trouble is she can't help but blurt out the details before I'm done, much to Abi's frustration!

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