Normal

A very normal day. So what does that mean?
I started today with painting the banisters. I’ve been doing various painting jobs for weeks. I took last week off as it has become so boring, but boring jobs still have to be done. I can’t manage more than an hour or so a day, and its best done first thing while the children are still sleeping. After that a few housework jobs, then the children woke and needed feeding, dressing. The boys read and played psp.
Then we go into the morning. U wants audio books, then to be read to. I read to the boys. Having recently finished books, we are going back to the history of Salah-ed-Din, which we had taken a break from. Today we read an interesting account of how copper pots full of highly flammable substances were used to hurl at siege towers and set them alight. Attempts were made by the crusaders to prevent the siege towers from being set alight by draping them in hides soaked in vinegar, and this was successful against the technology of flammable substances Salah-ed-Din’s army had with it. Many failed attempts were made to set fire to the towers until a new man from Damascus came forward with his own “recipe” for “fire pots”. With these he demolished three huge towers within a few hours. Clearly this is a heavily biased account, but all accounts are biased and the details are fascinating.
After that, as the time for Hajj is close insh’Allah, we read from Goodword’s “Tell Me About Hajj”. Reading a few pages a day will make a good revision, insh’Allah. It’s nice that we are learning about the life of Ibrahim (as) at the moment too, so enjoying these two sides to the same “story”. Alhamdulillah. I didn’t plan it to be that way!
Also this morning the boys and Ia made posters to illustrate the mountain environment, showing the different types of plant life to be found at different heights of the mountain, learning about the “snow line” and “tree line”. By this time it was already time for Zuhr (kids get up late) and time for the boys to do their Quran, from the book and the computer.
In the afternoon the boys wrote a story. R’s was really good, maashallah, J’s was slapdash. Ia did some handwriting practice and read a phonics reader. U set up a toy picnic and a car in the living room. I’ve abandoned that room for now. It’s a dump for whatever I don’t know what to do with! I shouldn’t use the word “living room” to describe it, “cat’s living room” would be better, as it contains the “cat’s chair”. U also played with sand, magnet letters and coloured.
Today’s maths for the boys was fractions revision. Then in science we began looking at the hot and cold topic, just an introduction. Once again we finished off activities in the evening, in between the cooking and the baking.
I’m keeping things very light for Ia just now while she is interested in beginning to read.
So, a normal day, with its good and its not so good. Alhamdulillah.