In which we went to Disneyland

Woh, survived that! Our first holiday as a family unit and after a dodgy start (lost passport, late leaving, engineering on the Tube, general grumpiness all round, not to mention a fit of completely theatrical histrionics when A got on the Eurostar with the tickets and the security bod wouldn't let Hannah and me on...."no need to cry, love, " he said, waving us through in the nick of time. but it worked, I thought, wondering really what lesson my daughter might have learnt from that!!!! I spent a long time when she was a toddler teaching her that crying and stomping got her nowhere!)

anyway, Hannah tried out her French on some real french people...who could have been more appreciative of her efforts and managed without language showing real concern and consideration for a frightened child who had lost her mother.

On the trains to and fro and in the parks she made friends easily and it was lovely to see her social confidence back. So much for school being the place for learning social skills....Hannah seems to have unlearnt most of the lovely social skills she had before she started.

so now we are home and back in the swing of normal life. Of course for children who do go to school it is half term so we took the opportunity to catch up with one of her closest friends from her former class, who has really missed her. I'm really pleased we're keeping in touch, J is a lovely girl and she and Hannah seemed to play very peacefully together.

this morning was supposed to be a La Leche League meeting at which I would have expected H's best friend to be present but no one came. Still, planning the meeting gave H an opportunity to reflect about sharing and be open to letting others play with her toys...was very pleased with where we got to in the end. Back home and Hannah said she wanted to make a Sleeping Beauty puppet and a prince for her little cousin. there's been some tension between them recently and Hannah wanted to make up for being grumpy. So we now have two beautifully crafted characters made from the inner tube of kitchen rolls, dressed in tissue paper, faces cut out of cardboard and coloured, tissue paper hair, tin foil crowns and the prince also has a tinfoil sword and shield, all decorated with glitter and sequins. Bliss to have a whole free afternoon where we have time to do stuff like that.