"Am I living in a box, am I living in a cardboard box?"

Well, it feels like it I must say and it's got so bad now that we have to stare at boxes when eating at the kitchen table which means our latest game at lunch time is ... do you know the correct order of the rooms listed on the boxes (with eyes closed, naturally). Sad to say I do, luckily K and B aren't quite there. Good for memory building I guess! So, when hearing the 80's song "am I living in a box" on the radio the other morning when driving home from dropping P off at work, it sparked a lot of laughter!

We're feeling very unsettled at the mo. and it's getting worse each day. Living out of boxes is not fun, especially when you're trying to get some kind of teaching done! I was so pleased with myself for packing these boxes so well, but now I take all that back. Filling gaps in boxes with odds and sods is not good at all when it means you can't find anything. First problem: got the lawn mower (in the shed), can't for the life of me locate the lead, therefore the grass it getting longer and longer each day (I'll need to invest in a sheep soon). Second problem: have dug out the bundle of everyday work books and projects for us to continue with work wise, but I can't find all the decent paper for them to write anything up on (only scrap which looks like ... well scrap really). Also, I can only find four pencils which are getting a little blunt now and no pencil sharpeners/rubbers either - total disaster. There are many other problems but I won't bore you anymore!

There is one biggish problem that's looming. I'm running a session with another mum on Tudors in a couple of weeks. It was my idea as a recap to two fabulous Tudor sessions run last year in order for the children to remember stuff before a visit to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Having problems thinking of interesting and different activities for the children to do and not being able to locate materials needed for anything I have come up with is putting me in a seriously bad mood! So, we have decided to do a Tudor puppet show. K, B and I did this before when running a session on the Commonwealth and it seemed to go down well so we thought we'd try it again. Having found the craft box and glue (yippee) we made puppets of the Tudor family, Henry VII, VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. K made Edward VI who resembles Hyacinth Bucket from the TV programme! The puppets look brilliant actually and it's given us something to work towards which is much needed.

Not much else has happened here really. We've done maths every day and some literacy too - looking at similes and metaphors which has kept us busy. We started by reading the beautiful Daffodils poem by Wordsworth and working out all the similes and mataphors used in this. We then proceeded on to writing our own poetry and finally we described a make believe person passing the details on to someone else to try and draw by using the description only! Very funny but wonderful use of words came out from us all in this game.

On the house front our new buyer has revisited us with 4 prospective tennants in tow! We've also had the valuation done on Friday, so hoping we'll hear something about how we're progressing by the end of next week.

My mum sent me details of the Daily Mail's free 3 month Family Rail Card pass - you can send up for it here - can't be bad.

Finally, K decided to do the cooking tonight and chose this Chicken Korma recipe from Sainsbury's website. Absolutely lovely - it certainly hit the spot - she's definitely got a talent for cooking fine food.