So, we’re at the end of week 9 of lockdown. The easing of some restrictions hasn’t benefited Ellen so far. Her weekly activities are still closed, as are the shops she likes going to; HMV and the Disney Store (hooray!). A few McDonalds have opened for take-away and we did make a 30 mile round trip to our nearest one, but the whole thing was so time consuming, and raised Richard’s blood pressure so dangerously high, that we won’t be attempting it again any time soon!
The day centres are doing a sterling job of dropping round ‘activity’ packs for their service users to do at home. These consist of things like word searches, colouring, sequin art and sunflower and veg seeds to grow. We also received a pack with everything we needed to make a sock monkey, although sadly neither my nor Ellen’s sewing skills were even remotely up to scratch and I was much too embarrassed to post a picture of the result onto the facebook group.
Can you tell what it is yet?
We have had zoom sessions of craft, cooking and karaoke. These have been hit and miss, as Ellen just gets up and leaves when she’s bored, which can be after either 5 minutes or 20 – we have not yet got to the goodbyes. Ellen usually enjoys watching (not participating in) karaoke and I had high hopes for this session. After two songs however, Ellen had still refused to look up from her sequin art, or answer when she was asked what song she’d like to have next. Then my phone rang and as I took the call in another room, Ellen stormed in with my laptop, closed it in front of me with a ‘humph’! and flounced out.
This week, we were sent everything we needed for a tea-party picnic. There were ingredients to make hedgehog bread rolls and carrot cake muffins. We had bunting to decorate and assemble and some games including ‘pin the tea-cup on the saucer’ and ‘teapot bingo’. Ellen reluctantly helped make the food and the bunting, (after all it wasn’t burgers or chocolate cake) and she also hates eating outside. In the end she was lured to the patio with the promise of having her face painted. Basic Heffalump was the one deemed to be best at playing bingo, and so face painted she joined in with a bit more gusto. Half the bingo pieces blew away in the wind and Ellen cheated at ‘pin the teacup’ by blatantly looking which all added to the tea-party’s ‘Mad Hatter’s’ charm.
Basic Heffalump the bingo caller
If anyone’s interested, the only M&S seedlings that germinated and lived from the planting in Week 1 were radishes which have now been moved to the veg plot. Six seedlings apparently equals six radishes, which doesn’t seem a great return on the watering investment so far. Maybe we’ll have better luck with the sunflowers, although I hope by the time they’re flowering Ellen’s timetable will have returned to some sort of normality, else we won’t be acting when we have our next Mad Hatter’s tea party.
ellensdays 