Covid dribbles

The weather has been unhelpfully dismal - cold and dull and rainy much of the time, which doesn't exactly raise the spirits. However, the children make up for it. Big Granddaughter (7), had an alarmingly tenuous grasp of simple arithmetic at the beginning of this lockdown and Daughter 1, Son-in-Law 1 and I have been working on it on and off, with considerable success, I think. We're not sure what the problem was, since she's a generally bright child who reads and writes very well with a keen appreciation of puns and so on. I suspect that she's just suffered from two long periods of no school. Her teachers didn't see a problem, but we definitely did - she kept just making wild guesses at the answers, which never goes well. Anyway, I feel she's made great progress. They're now on holiday for a week but when they were here this afternoon I got her to do a couple of (well, four) sums, just to keep her hand in, which she did without difficulty. 

And then she sloshed around with food colouring and flour. She seemed to enjoy it. 

Then she iced cakes.

Meanwhile, her brother played with Brio. He makes highly complicated layouts, names all the stations on the route and makes the train announcements as he runs the trains along the tracks. He can amuse himself for a long time. 

It does tend to take over the house. 

A new development - I think influenced by his sister - is to add the trees and animals. This is Shy Sheep.

And this is The Fat-Nosed Cow, who likes to graze in forests.

And the rest of the time I'm making slow progress with sorting and labelling all the photos. My lovely mum would have been 99 this year, which is too old really. And my lovely granny would have been 126, which is obviously much too old. But looking at photos of them in their prime, or at least prime-ish, does make me wistful. Wouldn't it be wonderful to see them again? 

The virus figures of new infections are going down at last, but the hospitals are still very full of Covid patients, obviously people who were infected some time ago. The early school years are probably going to go back to school on February 22, which is much earlier than we expected, and which will include Big Granddaughter and indeed, I think, Medium Granddaughter (to nursery) up north. I think this is a good thing, though in fact I feel we may be doing rather better, educationally, for Biggest than the school was doing... . Not really surprising - I wouldn't like to have to teach 29 seven-year-olds. One-to-one is much easier! I hope she's ok with going back to school while her brother stays at home... .

And so life dribbles on.