The one and only Tearoom, to be sure , it is.

[UniS]

To pinch an intro from the very first one and only tea room thread. in 2009.

The tea room is now officially open, serving hot chocolate, tea, freshly-squeezed orange juice and a range of home-baked muffins. Tablecloths and crockery are charmingly mismatched antiques (no Cath Kidston here). We overlook an attractive although somewhat overgrown garden, with a distant view of rolling countryside.

Everyone is welcome but house rules dictate that anyone indulging in fisticuffs will be ejected.

Please come in.

2011
We seem to have fetched up in Ireland, this place looks remarkably like a pub,There is even a guiness barrel over there. The NMBs are all sporting shamrocks. The mirror ball is here, but I leave teh rest of the unpacking to someone else.

Thanks

Are you from Mexico originally Catita or have you moved there from here?

Catita - would your DH ever consider leaving Mexico? or just not an option?

I'm a proud born English northerner, educated in Scotland and exiled here since 1999. It seems just too long to go without bacon, sausage, tattie scones and the like (wait! I've had this nostalgia already on this thread.... )

It's not really a viable option since Mr. H's English is a bit basic. Plus the fact that both of us are academics in the exact same field with few openings in the UK.
At the moment we're voluntary refugees with options. I think we would only return to the UK if things got so bad that we were prepared to abandon everything including morgages and the like to get away.

Wow must've been quite a culture shock. We should club together and send you care packages!

Thumb, no I didn't know that about the strike-outs, I thought that only worked with bolding. But now I'll know, so thank you very much!

You're brave reading the Ragged Bits thread, most people go [boak] and [cringe] and when they read any of it. You should pop in occasionally, with your background I imagine you'd have a lot of useful advice.

NurseSunshine, I mailed Catita packages of gingernuts when she was pregnant with Gatita. Couldn't stand the idea of someone so far from home feeling ill and missing their favourite biscuit.

I love the name "babynurse"... because hey, she's a baby and she nurses :o
Jack nursed like a little tank. I had comedy boobs. Uneven ones depending on which one he'd vacuumed last. :o
He was 7 lbs 7 oz at birth on a Weds, dropped to 6 lbs 10 oz by the Saturday, and by his two week check-up was 8 lbs 4 oz. And then 12 lbs at his six week check-up. He was soooo chubby his rolls had rolls. We called the little creases at his wrists his fat bracelets :o

Nyaaaw scrummy baby fat!

RL is very very busy atm so haven't read back very far.

Mistle, (this is genuine not sarcastic teacher talk) have you heard of any techniques for getting children to write numbers round the right way? I have several children in my class who still don't do it and really have no strategies. And, to be fair to the teacher, it is a very tall order to be expected to be all singing, all dancing, dynamic, exciting and interesting to every child in the class all the time ... and cover the activities which the curriculum dictates we must cover. And have a home life with husband, children and aged parents as well (this is the bit which often gets left out).

I. Want. A. Tangle.

Seriously, my fingers are just itching to have a fiddle after looking at that Amazon page of lovely tangles.

Mistle and Serpent, I've only just realised that DD no longer reverses any numbers. I hate it when this happens - I get on her case about something she's struggling with, or some bad behaviour, and then she quietly learns the new skill or drops the bad behaviour, and I don't notice. :( Poor kid. Obviously I notice the showstoppers like riding her bike without stabilisers, or tying her shoes, but little things like no longer writing 3 the wrong way round 95% of the time, I don't notice.

Sigh.

Anyway, I have finished my exam marking for this sitting so am haaaaaaapy ... I am resisting wine as yet agan I scoffed my entire Graze box in one day, and there may have been some completely unnecessary cookies as well (oatmeal and raisin though - healthy).

NurseS, even a whopper baby is still a little baby to most of us here as we have hulking great children. Who are cool, cos they talk and ride bikes and knit and stuff, but they don't have chubby thighs any more, dammit.

SCout- have you seen these duck quack whistles 12 for 3 quid!

DCMB - I put suncream on Small Bean at the weekend and suddenly realised that he had proper 'little boy' legs instead of toddler legs IYSWIM. Felt a bit somehow.

yeah, boy has boy legs, not baby legs or even toddler legs. Now he's all scabby knees and random bruises and muscles. ( and hair- blond and fine, but hairy legs at 5!)

ds has really grown into boy body, and is all muscle, not cute podgy babyness

UniS - if it's any consolation, miniThumb has had hairy legs since he was 2. Very fine and blond, but very definitely there! He also has proper little boy legs, bruises and all now.

miniThumb has a new favourite film, Gnomeo and Juliet. For some reason he strongly identifies with the frog in it and has already learnt her part, pretty much - especially where she skips around saying "your love is dooooomed, your love is dead, your loves is doooooomed, your love is dead..." It's very funny

I am still not sure if miniThumb is left or right handed. He tends towards using his right hand to draw etc. but is very awkward, especially doing circles - he goes the "wrong" way, iykwim - and although he's not really any less awkward with his left hand, his circles are better. Not sure whether I'm being all PFB about it or whether I should encourage him to use his left hand more or just leave him to it.

How old were your DC when they were able to recognise numbers? And letters?

Kittenito can do his vowels and count to ten in Spanish and English. He's three and a bit and very keen. Butvthey do teach him it all at nursery. I got him some magnetic letters and numbers a couple pf weeks ago because he wanted to write his name. He can't hold a pencil and isn't keen on tracing.
NurseS: Jacksmania did indeed send me ginger biscuits when I was pregnant. I will be forever grateful as they were lovely and practically the only thing I could stomach for quite a few weekss. She is a star.s

One way to teach which way round letters and numbers go is to buy 3-D letters and numbers from a toy manufacturer e.g. foam ones, so children can feel the shape of the letter. Then they learn to put in the right way round and draw round that shape a lot so their brain can calculate the feel and look at the same time. Works for some.

's available.

Hm, letters and numbers ...

DD knew her numbers at 3 or so, could count to 20 (but tended to miss ... 14, I think). She didn't really get letters though, and would identify a letter as 'a number' (although obviously an unfamiliar number she didn't know yet!) She could recognise her name before starting school - I tested her once with a word of a similar length and starting with the same latter, and she had no idea what it was. Good that she really DID recognise her name, but she had no idea of the individual letters, as she couldn't even guess, or tell me the starting sound. She could sing the alphabet, of course, thanks to US television shows. :o

She only really settled on being righthanded shortly before starting school (we're both righthanded, but FIL and BIL are lefthanded, so it seemed a possibility).

When she started learning to write at school she formed a lot of letters in the most awkward ways possible - I didn't even know you COULD write a 'd' that way. She reversed the numbers 3 and 5 through the first term of Year 2, I think.

I will let you know tomorrow how she's doing now ... reports come home! But FWIW her reading age is about 2.5 years above her chronological age.

mc was reading Captain Underpants fairly competantly last night - I was helping on difficult words (not that many) as he was tired. He doesn't think of it as 'reading' when its his book and not a school one. I have no idea what age its supposed to be, but its a lot more difficult than school ones and has 'normal' sized font.

He gest 2 and 5 and sometimes 3 and 9 reversed.

He gets K reversed too which is a bit worrying given he forms it correctly, just goes backwards. B and D I can understand - as I can q and p. He could write his name when he went to school nursery - so probably before then too - at 3.5 - but it was quite often mirror writing so most people didn't see what he'd written.

I'm afraid I might have screwed up his L / R handedness - he used to grab for things with his left hand as a baby and I used to give them to him in his right hand. Although once he started using both I didn't carry on...

We're going to do a diary project ourselves this holiday - we're going to have a ring binder and he's going to stick some pictures in or things in or draw a picture and write what he's done that day. Again, I don't think that he'll think of that as 'work' or 'homework'.

Everyone was going in with presents for teachers etc today. We didn't. I'm not feeling particularly guilty.

Morn...er Afternoon All!

LCT back at nursery today and I've been going non-stop since, including three calls to Tax Credit people as I kept mislaying pieces of paperwork! BTW, I actually had my P45 the whole time, just found it in an odd place, but former employer sent me a new one anyway. Don't think I'll tell them.

LCT being transitioned to Toddler Room this week and next. sniff Oh and he is definitely a boy and not a baby any more. Still a bit of a toddler, but mostly just a little boy in terms of body and actions. sniff

What shall I have for lunch? ?

Soup and lewd rolls do you Tee?

I was always happy for mc to 'go up a room' at nursery - he was almost always ready for it several months before the actual move - the only one that was different was going from babies to 'under the sea' which was effectively mobile babies... but it didn't take him long to move from there into Tweenies....

Last days as a year one today.

And I'm very jealous over the chubby babies. I even had to get extra poppers added onto his naturebabies wraps so that the waist would go small enough - although you wouldn't believe that now

Well, I've gotten far enough to put a lewd roll in the oven to defrost. Now what to have with it?

Serp, make sure you have all P45s, P60s and who knows what else to hand!!

Oh, Serpent - step away from the primary ed board on here - it's full of people who couldn't do your job if they tried, telling you how to do it. Ignore them and get on with being the good teacher that you know you are. :)

Soup and lewd rolls sound like a good plan to me.
Off to Henley Festival later at the request of clients. Apparently our consultant for the business will also be there, but balancing a candlelit dinner in a wooden canoe on the Thames. This deserves a photo, I think...