The Plot Develops

Swimming seems to have tired them all out.

Sebastian has been utterly whingy all day, with much screaming and complaining. He's saying "Ow" about his knee, which he bumped in the swimming baths, and about his neck, which wasn't bumped. He's had quite a high temperature at times, to the point where paracetamol was necessary, and I wondered if he had a sore throat or swollen glands or something. Anyway, he wanted to be carried about all day, which was most inconvenient. At one point, the screaming got so much that I put him in his coat, in the pushchair and parked him in front of CBeebies, hoping he'd fall asleep. He didn't but he sat quietly until it was time to go out.

Elizabeth, finding herself unable to get a word in edgeways over her screaming brother, also joined in the wailing and clamouring for attention.

So... amidst all this Francesca did get some 'work' done.

We looked again at the opening paragraph of The Enormous Crocodile and decided that Roald Dahl quickly introduced some intriguing dialogue and thus, we'd need an extra character to be involved in a conversation.  Francesca invented a girl called Emily, who was friends with the crocodile in her story, and she was the only child the crocodile didn't want to eat.

The story now reads:

"In a big, fat house at the top of the tallest, steepest hill in London, there lived an enormous, greedy, scary crocodile. He liked to eat children. But there was one child that he did not want to eat and she was called Emily."

I was especially pleased that Francesca wanted to write the next sentence herself, since writing has been such a chore to her so far.

We then thought up some possible questions for Emily to ask the crocodile to move our story on and increase the curiosity factor. We're not going with, "What are we having for tea tonight?" (the first suggestion) but we've thought of some better ones, which we'll decide upon tomorrow.

For something vaguely mathsy we played "Naughty Threes" which I'll write about separately.

Then, in the afternoon, Abuelita came round to teach Francesca how to work with watercolours. They painted for nearly two hours and Francesca loved it.

One of Francesca's friends came to tea, which was a nice end to the day. Sebastian even cheered up long enough to show Abuelita his new tool set and work bench. Needless to say, we had a prompt bath and swift bedtime.