I have just had the craziest, busiest 2-3 weeks I can remember for a long time. And the silly thing is I can't really put my finger on why. I just feel like I've had a list of 100 things each day that I absolutely had to remember, and do, and follow up, and it's been extremely hard keeping up with it all. I hardly seem to have had time to sit down for days!

So therefore I can't remember much of what we've been up to. I know that Jade and I have covered how to put things in alphabetical order, we've done some number place work (is that what you call it? when you're doing units, tens, hundreds etc?), she's done double column addition with carrying, and some more stuff about common nouns and proper nouns from First Language Lessons for the Well-Trained Mind. She's made a 'bus' from a huge box that our new car towbar came in; Jade and Shannon have both made fairy gardens in seed trays, and Jade's gained her Disability Awareness badge at Brownies. I know we've had several significant conversations too, including micro-climates, centrifugal force, right angles, 90-degree and 180-degree turns (which she's had great fun practising while marching), and about the current state of the economy.

Shannon has been alternately utterly charming and completely impossible. She is so affectionate I can't be angry with her for long, when she gazes deeply into my eyes, strokes my cheek and says "I love you, Mum". She'll go far, that girl! She is still annoyingly rigid in her 4-year old thinking, though, and trying to dissuade her from her established pattern of doing certain things is a recipe for grey hair and high blood pressure! I continue to be astonished at the polar opposite characters that my 2 daughters have. Jade will not speak to anybody outside the family whereas Shannon winds down the car windows to wave and shout hi at random pedestrians; Jade still cannot be left anywhere without a parent present but Shannon this week was saying how much she loves to go places on her own without anyone else in the family being there (e.g. to a friend's house, and to playschool); Shannon is mostly very amenable to discipline, whereas Jade, well let's just say she's still very much a work-in-progress! We love them both dearly, of course, but just shake our heads at how we got these chalk-and-cheese girls!

We got a new(ish) car last weekend - a Citroen Xsara Picasso to replace the clapped-out old Subaru Estate. I'm pleased to have a manual car again, whereas DH prefers automatics. It's bright red, and has been christened "Ruby". The girls love her, especially the little tables they get in front of them in the back seats.

And we're off on a week's holiday tomorrow - to stay in a converted railway carriage in a village near Scarborough. DH's Dad has recently gone into a care home and we are going to visit him there for the first time, and Bill needs to help his sister sort out the stuff in his old house. We've also wanted a holiday in Yorkshire for a long time to enable us to get to see stuff in York and elsewhere.

Jade is making nice progress in her SM therapy now. We have started 'sliding-in' the teenage assistant at Brownies, and in only 4 short sessions Jade has been able to talk out loud with this other person sitting right next to her. I just really want to fast forward over the next six months or year, because I am so excited about the progress she is making and I want it to hurry up and be done!