This was May...

So another month gone...and that 40th birthday is getting closer...
Here is what we did this month:

Birthday !!!
At the beginning of the month Little Acorn celebrated her 3rd birthday and got SO many new toys including a playhouse and a slide.
Nanny and Grandad Bill came up to spend the day with us.
We all had a very lovely day.

A few days later LA had a party and Sophie, Joseph, Scarlet, Libby and Morgan came. We played pass the parcel and musical bumps and had another fantastic day.
Then the next week we went to Josephs party, and we had fun on the bouncy castle.

Farm Park












We spent a very sunny day at the Farm Park. Looking at and feeding all the lambs, goats, ponies and ducks. And playing on the playground too...

Sticking and Gluing
We've done lots of sticking and gluing (as usual), and painting, and cooking and drawing and playing.




And finally,
LA ended the month, calm and happy, after her disastrous liaison with Aspartame yesterday.

And as parents we have made the decision not to send LA to school next year, and to look seriously at the possibility of HE following that.
For me, it was a huge relief and a very big scary decision, but having made it, I also end the month calm and happy.

Peace returns

Peace has returned to the Acorn abode. After 24 hours of disruption - tears, tantrums, shrieking, crying, sobbing, nightmares, clinging to Mum, laughing which dissolves into tears and speechtofasttocomprehend, we are kicking back and relaxing.

I think I may have finally convinced Rich that LA has a problem with aspartame...although, please don't hold your breath, he is a man and as such will probably require further proof before he is totally convinced. Big and middle acorn need no further proof, I don't think they will be trying to smuggle in sweeties for LA anytime soon.

LA is now playing happily with water, pouring and splashing and smiling.

Middle Acorn has got a job at the local chippy. She seems to be enjoying it. I am very proud, as she has dyscalculia and really struggles with numbers - but she's managing to work the till and work out the change.

Big Acorn has been revising all day for his Biology AS on Monday, his "worse" subject, then its History on Wednesday and its all over for another year.
Phew!

Stickers, Aspartame and Hair

We went into Leicester today. I hadn't been in since Christmas, I hate cities. We went in search of stickers, plain old stickers in different shapes and colours that you can make a picture out of.
Could we find them? No hope. Every other thing you can imagine in a sticker - but squares, triangles and circles? Nowhere. If anyone knows where I can get some from - please let me know!!!

Then we went to Subways for lunch. Rich decided that it would be a good idea to let Little Acorn have some fizzy drink, I negotiated the cola to lemonade - but I knew I should just have put my foot down and said NO! We have had a distressed manic little girl all afternoon.
She appears to have several "foods" that she cannot eat - all of them contain dodgy chemicals. Aspartame is particularly bad - it always makes her mood miserable and her behaviour hyper.
Food additives and colourings seem to have the same effect. When kindly Nanny slips her some sweeties, we have dreadful trouble.
Its not usually an issue, because we don't really eat food with additives in at home.

Then we went to the hairdressers, LA has only ever been once before and found the whole thing very exciting - unfortunately at that point in time it was too much for her and she flung herself on the floor and threw a full scale tantrum the moment we walked in - her first tantrum ever.

Eventually she had her haircut and while we waited for her big brother to have his cut, she ran round and round and round the hairdressers, shouting. She was calmed down by a long extended cuddle, which seemed to remind her that she was safe and we played "i-spy" for 30 minutes.

When we got home, she threw her dinner across the table and went to sit alone on the hall. She let me join her and we talked about how she was feeling angry and sad and confused, and how she was running around and getting very angry. We talked about fizzy drinks and sweeties and how they made her feel this way and how we would try to avoid them in the future and be like Sporticus and eat Sports Candy.

I suspect we are in for a long long night...