The weekly Round up.

This week has been horribly busy. I like 'busy' but I don't seem to have got anywhere this week. I did plan on bloggging a typical day last week ....but didn't have time - lol.

On Monday Emerald went to London on a trip with UCLAN. They were spending a few days looking around the London galleries - how I envy her! ;-)

Also on Monday Daniel, my eldest, arrived here to help me moving furniture around and sort the house out a bit. It was great to see him, but work was so busy that I didn't have much time to do 'house stuff'. The other kids enjoyed seeing Daniel, and Finn loved having someone to help him play Mario Racing :-) I forggot to take a photo of the boys on Mario - so here is Finn and Tabby instead,

On Tuesday I met a reporter for the Gazette who was doing a follow up to the awards. The photo in the paper was better than the online version - its the one below of me receiving the award.

Wednesday and Thursday I spent mainly doing admin stuff and preparing the VAT return. We really need an office system - its too chaotic to be anywhere near efficient. Daniel went home on Wednesday evening, and Emerald arrived home on Thursday followed by her boyfriend, Tom, on Friday. Daniel will be back on sunday.

I spent most of Friday at a routine hospital appointment....as the clinic was running 2.5 hours late! After spending a good part of the day there, we realised that the person we needed to see wasn't even there. So...the most of the day was wasted, and the VAT return wasn't filed on time after all.

The good news was that Dave managed to get the first part of the book to the publishers on time (friday). Its a huge achievement with over 15000 words and 200 images. YAY!

The PPSOP course (USA) is alao running this month, and a new course for GPP (Dubai) has just started.

I've also agreed to have a stand at an HSBC event in Manchester next month, and to speak at the NW Woman Ambassador lunch at the end of Febuary, both of which I am looking forward to!

Work is BUSY!

The kids school work is going well. We are trying out being more structured this year and, for us, it seems to be working. Rhowan and Harmony love 'homeschool' :-) They are reading Peter and Jane - an old ladybird series that Dave and I learnt to read with - and love it. They are making really good progress. Their maths is great, and they are learning to tell the time. On monday they made learning clocks out of paper plates. Rhowan loves history, and we watch the Victorian Farm together. I've got lots of books on this era, so she has plenty to look at.



I eventually bought netbooks for Amirah and Camilla to repace their laptops. After asking for recomendations I went for the Acer Asire One, and collected them on thursday. There's a steep learning curve ahead, as I went for the linux versions. I swapped back to a mac before Christmas and Dave has always used Macs. Its just Rhowan and Harmony using windows now - so we are nearly a microsoft free house :-) Dave managed to download Skype onto the netbooks (which wasn't easy), and the girls have rewarded him by making video calls to him at the office while he is trying to work :-)

Dave is at the office today, writing more for GPP, and I am wondering what happened to my house last week - lol. Its chaotic on a good day - I don't know a word to discribe it today!

We go away on mini holiday on Monday, so I need to do a huge amount of laundry and pack for 8 people (Emerald isn't coming with us this time as she has course work due - but Daniel is coming). We are off to our favorite mini break place - Centre Parc at Penrith. We love it because it is close (its stressful traveling with kids), its so comfortable, and there is LOADS for everyone to do.

We last went the week before Christmas, and had a great time.

This time it is Harmonys 6th birthday, and my parents are coming too. Its not often we get together, so we are all looking forward to it. Snow is forcast - it will be brilliant if it does snow while we are there. With that in mind I had to take Amirah out for a new outdoor coat (instead of her black wool 'about town' coat). WE got lucky in TKMax, and she found a really great ski jacket.

We have to take a gluten free birthday cake with us (for harmony and Tabby) - so Amirah is going to bake it and I'll decorate it. Then we have to remember to pack it!

In fact, I seem to do a lot of cooking at weekends. Today there is ten of us, tomorrow there will be eleven. When you add meat eaters, veggies and coeliacs it gets complicated.

I think its very probable that I will still be doing laundry and packing on Monday morning!

Well, time to stop blogging and start doing!