Boy vs Quail....

....(1-0)

Reduced to blipping dinner tonight. Today was mostly a day of failing to sleep (with the night disturbed by crippling stomach cramps from worries about which house to buy, and the morning by children shouting and refusing to allow me to sleep) and, on the plus side, some very successful schooling.

Conor's reading seems to have taken a huge leap forward overnight, and Katherine managed a Year 6 (one year ahead of her) SAT exam without too much fuss. I originally started looking at the SAT papers not to be mean and make her sit exams, but to check the level we are teaching to. Mr B has taken over Katherine's maths and geometry tuition, and over the past few weeks has rattled through triangles, Pythagorean theory, fractions (adding, equivalence), area of shapes, decimals and, today, circles (area, circumference). I think he might have just jumped ahead a wee bit and wanted to check what a 10/11 year old might be expected to know.

No wonder she's sleeping well with all that brain work.

Today we understand from our estate agent that the French buyers will finally sign the contract to buy our house. Nothing has changed for the past two weeks, so there's no guarantee that this is true, but I think dangling the threat of our eager English purchasers has resulted in some action. We picked up from our notaire (after much obfuscating and a long 10 minutes of being ignored by the secretary) a copy of the contract we have to sign, so that we could check and translate it before we have to sign it. In the signing meeting the agreement is just read out, so to have a written copy in advance is extremely helpful for my limited French. It also means I can find out all the juicy details about our purchasers' lives as all divorces (there are so many!) are listed, as are their financial means.

Of course there are many errors, which we will endeavour to correct tomorrow.

Dinner, since you ask, was quail, chips, french beans and fizz. And it was all quite delicious. I used to be vegetarian, and Mr B knows I have a limited tolerance for tearing apart small creatures in order to eat them. So we don't have something like quail often. But the kids, as you can see, enjoy the Tudor tearing at flesh eating experience. To be honest, the only reason I tolerate this kind of food is that I can see that it is illogical to eat meat only if it is packaged in amorphous, sealed packages, far removed from the shape of the beast it comes from. Oh, and it is just so yummy.

That said, if I have to tear another small creature apart soon for dinner, I might revert.

Sausages tomorrow.