LiAM had been looking forward to yesterday for a few days, as we had most of the day at home and he would have the chance to play Lego Marvel Superheroes for a nice long chunk of time, rather than squeezing in half an hour or an hour between other activities. When I got up around 7.30 he was already awake and playing, said he'd woken up at 7. He really enjoyed his long play, was able to really work at some of the difficult levels, get a heap of new characters, and really become immersed in the game. He chatted away the whole time he was playing, telling us what was happening, what he was thinking, talking about the characters and how they react to situations and whether he thought it was true to their character or not, or things he would have done differently if he'd made the game. The girls and I watched, commented, looked up walk throughs when he got really stuck (I love that I can read an instruction that makes no sense to me and he immediately says 'oh yeah, that would work!') and the girls both played with him on and off.
When Amelie woke up she curled up with me on the couch and we watched LiAM for a while then we did some quizzes - one on the Disney Princesses, (we got all of them except Merida from Brave), and one on the planets. Amelie is fascinated by the planets at the moment, we chat about them most days and we've talked about the difference between a moon and a sun and a planet, and the names of the planets in our solar system, and why Saturn has rings, and which planets are hotter, and why Pluto is now classified as a dwarf planet (I still need to look that up). She has a little model of the solar system with the sun and the planets revolving around that, and we play with it a few times a week - she grabbed it yesterday to help remember the names of all the planets - all the names are familiar to her now, and she's starting to associate more of them with the correct planet and remember some without looking at them. It's cool to see an interest develop that's completely hers, not something that has grown out of things the others were interested in.
We also all spent time looking at an alien book we'd picked up the day before, lots of great pictures and discussion starters about whether there really are aliens, what they might look like, what they'd think of us and so on.
Amelie watched some more pokemon and I watched with her for a while and played Hungry Babies, then Caitlin came and joined us. She played some Coolmath-games while she watched, and discovered one called Coffee Shop, where you have to buy supplies, set a recipe for your coffee, and sell it to make a profit over a fortnight, as well as get a good reputation for your store. She really loved it and asked me to play a round of it - it was fun and challenging (and I made a profit of $184, I was pretty happy). There were so many factors to think of, Caitlin was fascinated and it started a great discussion about all the decisions and planning involved in successfully selling products.
I spent a good chunk of the day catching up on some of the housework that had accumulated from us being out and about so much lately and me not having the energy when we got home to do much about it. I got quite a lot done and felt happy that it wasn't too much to handle.
It was another hot day and we had an unexpected power outage in the afternoon (which brought a stop to Lego Marvel Superheroes). We got ready to go out as there was no way we could stay in the house for very long without cooling. The girls had Thinking Day activities at Guides and were dressing up as someone from a country they'd chosen (out of the countries that have World Centres for Guides). Amelie was England and wore a pretty dress to be a princess, and Caitlin was Mexico, we found a flowery, swirly skirt and an embroidered top, and Tony's sombrero. Once the power dropped out the girls got into their costumes and I gathered up the library books and we left as quickly as we could. (Still not quick enough to avoid feeling hot and sweaty and cranky before we left, but once we got into the car and got it cooled down everything felt a bit better). The power came on just before we left but seeing as we were ready to go we kept going. The girls were asked to take food from their country as well, so we went to the IGA to buy supplies - and it was closed due to the power outage. We went to Coldstream IGA and Caitlin got corn chips and salsa, we couldn't find anything that Amelie wanted to take. We really wanted scones but I hadn't felt up to making some. We went back to the Yarra Glen bakery and the best I could do was a tea cake, so at least we were taking something. We dropped the girls at Guides then LiAM and I went to the library, he watched some youtube videos and I read my book and it was lovely and cool and relaxing.
Once the library closed we sat outside and read/watched for a while longer, then went to the bakery again for LiAM to buy an apple cake - they didn't have any so the girl helped him decide what else to get (the girls who work there on a Wed afternoon know and love him) and he got a French Vanilla Slice instead. I also bought some chocolate milk for Amelie as she'd been wanting some all day. We picked Amelie up and went home to a house where luckily the air con had worked enough to cool it back down again (enough to be inside anyway). The kids played some minecraft and some more Lego superheroes, until Big Bang Theory was on at 7.30. We taped it so that we could watch with Caitlin when she got home, and it was a relaxing hour after a bit of a full on afternoon out. When it finished we watched a bit of Degrassi, which had some full on issues being discussed, so we talked about that a bit - standing up for people who are being victimised, and how hard that can be, especially when the person in the wrong is someone you are close to - and then watched Heartland. Caitlin was also playing a game on her iPad which requires amazing dexterity and quick reflexes, I love watching her because she's so calm and so good at it. I had a try and I'm a lot clumsier. She was trying to get to 10000 gems to buy a new sub-game and worked hard at it for ages yesterday, and eventually got there - she was so happy and really enjoyed the new game.
Amelie and I went to bed and she was going to watch Pokemon but got distracted talking to me, then the others came in and they were playing a game on my bed, and massaging my feet while we all chatted. We'd been talking about starting to read Brisingr again as we hadn't done so for ages, with the big kids doing more things in the evening they hadn't been wanting to stop and listen when Amelie was ready for bed. So we read a couple of chapters and it was great to get back into the story - we could all remember different bits of what had happened so far, so we were able to keep going from where we were up to and piece together the story.
No comments:
Post a Comment