You know your son is lego mad when...

he gets you up at 5:30am because he wants to finish the project he was working on!! You can imagine my response. We waited until the more decent hour of 6am to come down so he could finish the sub that is part of the aqua raiders crab crusher set. He got it yesterday, having saved up for it and spent the evening doing it. He paid for it mostly in small coins and you should have seen the face of the woman in the toyshop-talk about sucking on lemons!!! Guess not everyone who works in a toyshop has a sense of humor. Luckily he didn't notice as he was so focused on the lego. He has been talking of nothing else for the past few days and it has been driving me crazy. Now he has the whole aqua raiders set so I suspect the afternoon will be spent setting it up in the bathtub. Shame the weather is not nice enough for the paddling pool.

A fairly quiet week so far, lots of normals and a few mystery jobs thrown in to spice it up. We are just starting to do multiplication and sam is really getting the hang of times tables. We have only done 2s and 3s so far but he gets the concept and provided you don't ask them out of order he knows all the answers. He tends to add up in his head to get from one to the other so if you ask him out of sequence it really throws him. His is slowly memorising the answers though and I quiz him when he least expects it. He is good natured about it and thinks it is one big game which is perfect. On the language front we have finished our first latin book and are waiting for the next ones to arrive. In the meantime we will use my latin book from my course. We have also started learning a few norwegian words in preparation for our trip. So far we can ask for breakfast and how much something costs-all the important things!

Today sam has a new friend coming to play-we met him last week on the arboritum trip and sam has talked of nothing else since. He is 6 and like sam has never been to school, he also likes all the same things so hopefully the two will get on. If the weather is nice we will go out bug hunting if not we will stay here and the boys can mess up sam's room.

On a dog front Miko is blowing her coat for the first time and there are fur tumbleweeds everywhere. It comes out by the handfull-anyone fance an akita scarf and matching mittens??? I have been manning the phone line for www.jawt.co.uk ( the akita rescue trust we got the monsters from) this week and am astounded at the numbers of calls from people wanting to rehome their dogs. For every 1 call from someone who wants to adopt there are 5 from someone who needs to rehome. The main reason for rehoming seems to be a breakdown in relationship necessitating the partner who was at home with the dog to go out to work. Sadly I know that we won't be able to find homes for them all, but if sam had his way they would all come live here.