Dinner

Since Thursday is the new Friday (though this week Friday is the new Friday too) it is occasionally a fancy dinner night. It's the only night apart from weekends that we know we will all be here in time for a proper dinner to be put on the table. So tonight foie gras on brioche with last year's frozen figs and banyuls sauce, followed by mussels and chips. And three types of wine...

Thursday is also the new Friday as, with 'teaching' out of the way for another week, I feel somewhat liberated. Today went rather well, as it happens, with some review of previous material, the days of the week and, as a reward for the littlest kids, miming whatever animal you want (but you have to know how to say it in English). One kid chose something I didn't hear properly. It turned out to be God. And then we were back in the whole philosophical debate about whether people were animals or not (in a Catholic school in a secular country I have to tread carefully here). Happily it turned out that he meant Poseidon rather than, you know, the Catholic God, so we could just agree that he was an moist angry man with an oversized fork and definitely not an animal. Phew.

Tomorrow the kids who want to are having a day of reflection with the local priest to mark the Easter season, including the stations of the cross and so on. Those who choose not will have a philosophical debate with the teachers on the subject of forgiveness and remorse. I'm just hoping that means CarbBoy won't have to recite his poem, which is at best half learnt.

The lunchtime session with the big kids was on Hound Dog (I did a careful study of all the Elvis songs and picked the one with the fewest words by far). So we had an interesting chat about 'ain't' - which, and I'd never thought about this before, can stand in for a lot of proper grammar. The kids asked (to TallGirl's horror) for me to show them an Elvis dance. I'm not sure that's done my hips any good. And though my credibility with the kids is heightened (for being a good sport, I think), TallGirl may never speak to me again. She says if I do my 'Walk like an Egyptian' dance she will run away. Oh, so tempting my dear....

Once school was all done (with the exciting first swimming lesson of the year - and CarbBoy is in the middle group which is an advance for him and TallGirl somehow came second in the whole school) the kids played outside. Until, that is, CarbBoy decided to open his light sabre with it the wrong way up... resulting in a very red swollen eye and half his eyelashes falling out. I reassured him, as I applied ice, that I was sure Luke Skywalker must have done this a hundred times until he got the hang of it. He seemed oddly unreassured.

Tomorrow is normally not a proper Friday since I usually have to go and pick TallGirl up from basketball at 9ish, but it is cancelled for this particular Friday, so we are all going out to a scary medieval concert given by our neighbour who - it turns out - has a myspace page AND is on spotify. I think that pretty much makes him as famous as Elvis. Though from what I can see my hip action may not be much use for his psalter 'beat'.