My favourite waste of time

No, not the Owen Paul ditty (although you'll be humming it all day now and I can't believe it only got to number 19 in the Swiss 'hit parade'!).

My favourite waste of time is walking up to the café with M, I nurse a renversé (no cakes for me now I'm being relatively good on WW) and he orders a jus de pomme and a mini carac. We read, play with playmobil and set the world to rights like 2 old women.

Today I had a parcel to post so we stopped at the post office on the way, with M sitting there shouting "carac" from behind his hands.

I had a horrible feeling that our usual café was closed as it is half term, and after a bet (M was convinced it would be open) it was indeed closed. Luckily there is a bus stop right outside, so we decided to hop on the bus until we saw a café (which obviously had to sell caracs!). Just as the bus pulled up, M decided that he wanted to go home instead, so we started walking home. I thought we should try a bakery for a carac, but we passed a hotel with what I thought was a café, so we went in. Turns out it was a bar, but they did coffee and apple juice so we stayed. They also produced a doughnut for M, which in hindsight was a bad thing, as he was a nightmare in the supermarket later.
I seem to think that we had a conversation about rabbits, but I have absolutely no idea what about.

We called into the supermarket on the way home, as I had grand plans to vaguely acknowledge Valentine's day by buying some little pots of Movenpick icecream for dessert, and cooking dinner just for A and I (obviously with M eating beforehand!). M grabbed a basket, put it on wheels and then proceeded to hare around the place with me trying to remain calm and unruffled, but failing miserably (combination of PMT, tiredness and general moodiness).

On the walk back, M thought he spotted E, one of the educatrices from atelier, as he saw a lady with long brown hair, boots and a baby in her tummy. We then chatted about how the baby came out, the fact that babies grow in wombs not tummies, that men can't have babies because they don't have wombs and that babies are (generally) born through a woman's vagina (thats where your period comes from isn't it mummy?).

We also cut our way through a jungle to get home, and talked about alligators and crocodiles (starting with 'see you later alligator, in a while crocodile') and decided that we need to find out the differences between them (I think this may be an internet task as I don't think we have an adequate book).

Now at home, A has skyped to say he is going to be late again (at this rate the earliest he'll be home is 10pm :( ) I'm hoping that the amount of work he is doing will mean that his fixed hour contract will finish mid-March so we'll have a couple of weeks with him at home before his next contract starts, but just occasionally I would like a bit of help at bedtime, and I know M misses him.

Let M stay up until 8pm, because Flat Stanley was the CBeebies bedtime story. I bought the book for him a while back and we haven't quite gotten through it yet, but he was listening spellbound to the version on tv, I guess because its a somewhat shortened version.
He's now leafing through See Inside Castles, which I'm guessing I'll have to remove from his face in a few minutes as he is so tired. Well, thats the plan anyway!

So that's how its done!

I had one of those 'ohhhhh' moments this morning.

7.30am and M is leafing through his favourite book, the Playmobil catalogue :rolleyes. He'd previously spotted a baby guinea pig looking for its parents on our balcony, and we'd talked about being in front or behind something.
He then saw a guinea pig in the catalogue, but turns out it was a wild boar. Then looking at the zoo scene, questions came to me (do crocodiles lay eggs? whats the difference between a crocodile and an alligator?) and after some swift googling we had the answers.
Then on to the dinosaurs page (did dinosaurs live at the same time as people? M knew the answer to that one) and we tried to identify the different dinosaurs in the catalogue (ignoring the names at the bottom of the page). A bit of a chat about fossils, and then Lazytown came on, so obviously that was all chat over!

I just see that sort of exchange as being typical of our daily stuff. I'd love it if it was like that. I'll probably still have to make sure there are workbooks and 'educational stuff' around (cos thats the way I am!) but I realise that I need to be able to step back and accept that chatting can be just as informative, and M can chat for Switzerland so we should be okay there.

On more specific stuff, M seems to have more of an interest in letters and words just lately. Previously he was really into numbers and just wanted to count things, but in the last week or so he is trying to spell out words. Can be quite funny to listen to as on occasions he completely makes it up ('dinosaur' becomes 'big T-rex in the forest', but with all the syllables drawn out) but he shocked me by reading the word 'act' on a fruit bar wrapper. And his name is getting written on everything. Sometimes written from left to right, sometimes from right to left. Makes me wonder if he has some left handed tendencies (both me and A are lefties) but I don't know enough about the subject to know whether I'm just talking codswallop!

I made a mistake by ordering the Opitec catalogue and I'm also browsing the Yellow Moon and ETAHomeschool sites. Liking the look of the number balance, pattern blocks and cuisenaire rods. Not that I am maths obsessed though, you understand........