Another week, another Sunday. How time flies. This past week has passed in the blink of an eye, mainly because my husband (a teacher) has been on half-term holiday, and so it’s been a little break from our normal life. I didn’t bother to plan like usual; instead I classify all of this time as family time and we just enjoy it as we please. For us, that meant trips to the sandpark, gymnastics and pony riding, amongst other things.
Of course, now it’s back to reality – although thankfully, reality isn’t really that different. The main difference is that it’s me on my own again. One thing that I really enjoyed about having my husband around this week was how his play with Bella was so different than mine. He showed me that she was really interested in throwing (and in fact has a great underarm throw!), and while she often seems to mix up blue and red (which made me think that she wasn’t quite into colours yet), she adored running around trying to find objects that matched in colour.
So what’s the plan for this week?
The main aim is to get back in the routine of just being the two of us, and one of the main things that defines it for me is Bengali. We’re going to go back to the mornings of late: lazing about in bed reading books in Bengali, and I’m going to really make a point of noting down when I slip back into English and which phrases I’m lacking. Bella doesn’t get frustrated at all when I speak it now, which is great, and she understands an awful lot of what I say. It’s clear to me that the limiting factor is me, so I need to step things up. Thankfully my mum will be visiting us every week in March, so I plan to ask her to only speak Bengali too.
Other than that, my foci for this week are music and art. I’m going to remember to put music on regularly (we’re loving the Maestro Classics series), play the bells at least once a day, and think about how to integrate our playsilks into music. We’re also going to draw using a different medium every day (watercolours, tempura paint, crayons, colouring pencils, markers). For some reason, we didn’t do any art this week and it makes me a bit sad. Obviously, if Bella asks to use a certain tool then we’ll use that – but I kind of want to remind her of all the different options that exist. She does use the chalkboard on her easel most days, though!
In addition, I’m going to be thinking about Sensorial a bit this week. We have a set of mini knobbed cylinders arriving, and I’m keen to make up a couple more mystery bags. Bella’s also clearly in a sensitive phase for matching (a blog post with more info to come soon), so I’d like to keep a matching activity available to her at all times, as well as playing matching games with her.