Thursday

While I try to think of a good title for this entry I'll tell you about my day. To start with we had an exciting new visitor to the bird table - a squirrel! Saw him standing up on the top of the wall trying to nibble into the peanuts - the boys were very excited. I tried to get a photo, but he was off and running before I got organised!

I then had one of my ears washed out at the doctors and can hear again from it - hurrah! I seem to have a recurring issue with wax build-up in my ears. I think I could lessen the impact if I was consistent about putting a few drops of olive oil in every week, but I get complacent and think I don't need it, and then by the time I realise things are going too far...things have got too far! The last time this happened I had to go to the hospital for the ENT nurses to vacuum everything out, but it appears that my GP surgery is now permitted to do it again - apparently a spate of people suing when they had follow on ear infections or problems with their ear drums resulted in a blanket ban on the procedure locally. But it all went well and now I realise just how loud my children are! I'm almost tempted to go and ask for the wax to be put back in! They're just so shrill and Zachary seems to shout all the time.

I'm afraid I had a bit of a break-down just before dinner - I had my hands in raw sausage meat and had Leo by my legs doing some low level complaining about some slight he'd just suffered at Zachary's hands. I could cope with this, but then Zachary sat himself on the floor behind Leo and kept shifting himself backwards to bang into Leo's legs. Leo did not like this, Zachary would not stop (despite my persistent asking) and it all erupted in some kind of banshee wail/scream/rage from Leo, together with Zachary complaining that he 'wanted to keep doing it'. I lost my cool and shouted 'just shut up!' at them both! Fortunately it all calmed down after that.

Then just before bed, we watched an episode of X-Men. The boys usually have a 20 minute episode of something after their baths as a wind down before bed and we've been using this as an opportunity to expand their Marvel superhero education which was ably started with Super Hero Squad. They have now worked their way through season 1 of the late 70's Spiderwoman cartoons, a season of Spiderman and his Amazing Friends (Iceman and Firestar) and we're now on the 1990's X-Men cartoons. Brilliant. Sadly, we may now have watched too many - sitting watching the opening credits, I had Zachary on my right singing along to the theme tune and Leo on my left shouting out the (correct) names of each X-Man as they appeared. Enjoy!