I was not pleased with another 5am start.  By 7am I handed the baby to Fred and went back to bed.  By 9am I was in the kitchen with the other adults getting our coffee fix.  I was tired and grumpy and I think I did not inspire Helen and Christopher to go for a third.

As it was Monday, it was back to the pre-school activity programme.  As I was grumpy, I suggested that somebody else facilitate the activities.  There were no takers and so after I had had my coffee and my general attitude had improved, I decided to take on the job.  I can see the value in preparation when it comes to dealing with pre-schoolers.  It didn’t work to google ‘paper crafts’ while the three girls looked over my shoulders and pointed out what paper crafts they would like to do.  We ended up deciding on a snake.  It was a nice paper craft and we even had googly eyes, but the problem was that I ended up making all of the paper crafts for the morning as it was a little bit beyond the girls’ skillset.  I suppose I could have let them draw the faces for the snakes but I didn’t want them ruining my paper craft.

After I had made three snakes with googly eyes I was done with the pre-school activity programme.  Caleb then appeared and said he also wanted a snake, so I had to make one more.  I was pretty good at paper craft snakes by then.

After lunch, Fred made a big deal about how he was cleaning the kitchen and I reminded myself to make more of a big deal when I do housework too.  We then went downstairs for some “downtime”.  When we were done with that, Fred put on his running clothes and went for a run in the garden.

I discovered 3D animals on Google.  You can search for an animal on Google from your phone, select view in 3D and then the fun part is that you can place the 3D animal in front of you using your phone.  This means that you can take ridiculous photos of your children with these animals.  The four year olds were pretty concerned about our safety after I showed them the photo I had just snapped of them with a 3D tiger in the background.

That got me through a good part of the afternoon and I didn’t even notice that we skipped snack time.  I then felt inspired to create a treasure hunt for the children which was great fun for them because basically they will do anything for some sugar.

It was then time for the story challenge.  The theme was “Goal”.  The stories were received well, yet again Caleb said mine was the worst.  We are going to put them all on a PDF and post them to my blog, so if you care to, you can download them and judge for yourself.

For supper, Fred made us burgers with the most delicious homemade BBQ sauce.

It is worth mentioning that we made it through the entire day without resorting to any screen time for the children.  It apparently made Caleb smug though, as when Daba sat down in front of his laptop after supper to do some work, he said, “Daba, you should really get less screen time.”