Oh my goodness. I can’t believe it has been more than a month since I last posted. Nearly two months really. I have been buried under a vast amount of work from which I am only now managing to emerge. So much for my end of summer optimism that, when Niccolo resumed school, I’d be able to blog, craft and be otherwise free.

Instead, I got more work, more work and even more work. Which is good for my finances, but not so good for my sanity. So my strategic decision is to try and keep the workload lighter and manageable until the New Year. This will give me time to make all the Christmas presents (I am already panicking), reduce my stress levels beyond red alert, and hopefully give some shape to my still nebulous plans for this blog and my crafty business.

And look after the kids, of course. The only non-work-related thing I have done over the course of the last two months has been to after-school Niccolo. I have been experimenting massively to try and nurture his curiosity, encourage his budding reading skills and generally keep him busy. The end result is my very own literature-based afterschooling curriculum, which mixes elements of Five in a row, Sonlight, Charlotte Mason and Old Fashioned Christian Education with some crafts and lots of hands on activities thrown in. And if you have no idea of what I am talking about, is probably because you don’t have a child of schooling age.

So far, so good. Niccolo seems to enjoy it, although he doesn’t much like the copyright-free books I am getting off the Internet (which on the other hand I like because they are free, thus allowing me to cover virtually any topic he expresses an interest in at zero cost).  His reading is progressing apace, he seems to have a good grasp of basic arithmetic (he figured that two plus three equals five, and is genuinely obsessed with comparing sizes—of countries in particular) and his general knowledge of the world is expanding to a point that I consider almost scary—just a few days ago, after reading a story where a house goes up in smoke, he enquired about the levels of fire resistance of various materials. He started off with the obvious ones—wood, metal, cement—and ended up with: ‘How about carbon fibre?’

And he is definitely using his brain. He was trying to determine the biggest of numbers and, when I explained to him that numbers are infinite, he thought for a while then decreed that “so numbers come back where they begin—like a circle which doesn’t begin or doesn’t end.” For a four year old, it is not too bad a way to represent the concept of infinity.

Alas, his behaviour isn’t improving to the same degree. He is still headstrong and argumentative, although introducing a basic star chart seems to have made him ever so slightly more compliant. I console myself thinking he will make a good lawyer some day…

Meanwhile, Caterina has dramatically improved her gross motor skills—to the point that she is now a danger to herself. She has learned to propel herself on the baby chair (by pushing against the floor with her feet) and figured that if she grabs the side of her cradle with both hands, she can lift herself up. Both cradle and baby chair have quickly been retired after she took these exploits to an extreme and tried to get out of them head first.

Gosh I don’t think I have ever worked so much in my entire life. Day and night, night and day, trying to bring myself ahead, and all for the sake of a few days off next week. We are heading to Paris and Eurodisney, and I most definitely will not be able to do anything there. A few nights, while I was working on my laptop in bed, words dancing in my head, Caterina sleeping in her cradle next to me, I wondered whether it was worth all this effort.

But you know what? I think it will. Nicco is so excited at the idea of going to Paris. We have read a few Madeleine’s stories, re-read Laurence Anholt’s Degas and the Little Dancer, planned to see it (and Mona Lisa) at the Louvre, and talked about the chocolate shops and ice cream parlours we’ll hit.

Faced with this, what does it matter if I am tired, sleepy and headachy? After all, it’s nothing a good croissant can’t cure.

Three days without the children. I had plans, great plans. I would finish off all the articles due this week, bring myself ahead with the stuff due next week, lay the ground for my pet business project and even enter a couple of crafting challenges.

Ha. I should have known better. The commute, which I had forgotten all about in the last few months, turned my short consultancy day in the office into ten good hours out and about. Add to this errands to run, the laundry that was piling up and needed doing, shopping for groceries, catching up with the post, going to the bank…and I have barely had time to finish the pieces due in this week.

Which means that next week I’ll have to work on whatever pieces are due, and that my pet project and crafting remain a chimera.

Oh well, at least I got to snap a fuzzy but lovely picture of Caterina trying to figure out where her mummy’s voice was coming from (the answer is IChat, but she wouldn’t understand).

Caterina and her papa