Tuesday 11th August

Wow a moment of peacefulness - Seren is asleep, Luke is out with Morgan, I have done a general tidy up, put on a load of washing.  I could get to like this washing thing - the machine does everything it is told - well hello isn't that what machines do except we tell them the wrong things!! John and I have not used our machine since we moved to ST - its now gathering dust and more and more of John's gun loading and wood working stuff ( nearly said debris!!)  We have this theory that it is more effective financially and certainly more efficient in terms of our time (I pointedly say our!!) to take it to the wishee washee in the village and Monica and her mates do a great job! So I have also rather obsessively made granny droppings of all the plastic bags - i.e. folded them into small squares. So called because when  Fay my sister visited her grown up children;s homes, she always compulsively folded up the bags and they knew she had been there as she had left granny droppings!!!

Anyway to continue - I have also cooked up some sweet potatoes and carrots to moulee and then pop them in the smart ice tray Mel has especially for babies food. We have been pretty busy - Mel prefers to make Morgan and Seren's meals so she was very busy this weekend cooking up beef stew, bolog. sauce, broccoli and cauli and white cheese sauce, mango, apples, So the deep freeze doeth overflow - excellent. We, as in the adults, tend to fix our own meals - helping ourselves from the well stocked pantry cupboard and freezer.

So Morgan has her orientation day at her new school tomorrow. She is going with Luke and Mel to meet the other new children in her class. The school is called Namsam International Kindergarten (NIK). She is in the Pre-kindergarten 3 class which has 14 children in it and an American teacher called Mrs Lauren Walker. Amazingly enough there are two South African children in the class! Am not sure from the names what nationalities the rest are but it looks like a regular united nations!! She is there from 9 - 3 pm. They serve a hot lunch - the items on the menu look pretty western.

Luke left at about 8.30 to go to the super market only to discover that they open at 10, so he went off to a park, then popped back here for a moment before setting off again. The idea is to get Morgan tired enough to sleep at midday so that she goes down early enough this evening and so wakes up rested and ready for her big day!! She knows she is not going back to her old school but is not that interested in the new one - seems reluctant to hear about it or talk too much about it - I am sure though all will be absolutely fine once she sees the other children. She is a very sociable young lady!!

The school is not a Montessori school although Mel tells me it is run on Montessori lines - I guess allowing for children to work at their own pace and hopefully to choose for themselves the activity they would like to do.  It is run along the lines of the British Baccaluareate system. Morgan is quite something though as besides having excellent language skills, she can recognise numbers from 1 - 20 and more. Last night she asked for two more one stories, holding her two fore fingers up as she asked. Then she said a 2 and a 1 is 21!! So she can also recognise more than 20. She also knows quite a few of her sounds, to, as we say in Montessori the third period, that is, she can tell you what it is, if you ask her - what is this, rather than the second period in which one asks the child to show you the 'a'.....Anyway enough - suffice to say she is very ready for the challenge and stimulation of school again.

I am going to post this as the little lady with the clock inside her is due to wake up any moment!!!