Julie's Boggle

In the UK, the school / college term that runs from Christmas until Easter, is known as the Spring Term.  Puts a nice positive spin on the term that begins just after the middle of winter!

Jonathan’s school term started on the 3rd of January, and after a week back he seemed to be getting into his stride.  He’s not complaining about how long the days are (like he was this time last term), and aside from his, er, lively personality, which keeps the teachers on their toes, he seems quite interested and engaged most days.

The college students, on the other hand, only start back for their Spring Term tomorrow, having had a full month-plus off.  This generous block of time is slightly illusory though, because for many of them the assignments for next term are all front-loaded (i.e. due in the first few weeks back) so they’ve been having to commit significant chunks of “holiday” to writing essays.  Tom is no exception with 4 assignments due in the first two weeks (then another 4 due, 4 weeks later), and he’s been back in his office at college since Jonathan went back to school.

The holidays have been enjoyable but there are perks to college going back.  Personally, the biggest one is the free meal provision which tends to cut down our grocery bill as well as cooking effort!   By June last year, our weekly schedule (charted in some detail here in November 2010) had been extended to include as many as 4 evening meals in college a week!

Unfortunately, with the whole school bedtime thing, we’ve had to scale back to just Friday night, but nevertheless, it does make Fridays feel more special! Of course Tom still gets all his lunches there, and we all get up super-early twice a week to rush in for breakfast.

Our schedule is also expanding this term to include a weekly half-hour swimming lesson for Jon, and a separate Mums-and-baby weekly swimming lesson for Jessica and me.  So overall, while Spring is making its slow but steady progress to Durham, our respective Spring Term activities have us all going full speed from the outset!

I have to admit, even if I say so myself, that I’m very pleased with Jessica’s updated fringe (above right).  It’s been driving me a little crazy for ages now but cutting it is such a performance that I’ve been putting it off for weeks.  I strongly debated trying to get her to a hairdresser’s but I’ve yet to find one with the special gift of dealing with children in Durham (except for the barber who does Jonathan!) and without that, dealing with a wriggly under-2 is just too painful to watch!

In the end, I did my familiar trick of getting her into her high-chair with a pile of potential distractions nearby and attacked her thick fringe with my home-hairdresser scissors.  Jess was, as usual, unimpressed and despite my wetting the hair, soon had little bits all over her face and (somehow) stuck to her tongue.  At this stage she started to gripe and swat the scissors away and it was just luck that I’d managed to get enough off, and roughly feathered, and in a straight enough line, to leave it be.  Whew!