Drive, drink and drill

On Monday afternoon I was on Guides transport and so Brendon ended up having a whole lot of other errands to do as our beef was ready to be collected this afternoon (45 min away). He picked the younger two girls up once he was done with work and then headed off. The other big item on the "to do" list was picking up the baby's car chair. It's common to just hire these first baby seats in NZ and Rachel was just amazed at how small the head cushion is. It's made her a little bit more excited about meeting this tiny baby brother of hers.

Brendon was out for 3 hours and I was so pleased to hear how good the younger girls had been. They only got home and had dinner at 6:30 - a good hour and a half later than normal.

On Tuesday Maureen came for my 38 week visit. She brought my blood results from last week and although my Ferritin and Haemoglobin are both up a bit (and well within a safe range) my Platelets have dropped just below the ideal range.

There was nothing she could suggest specifically to do to help get these levels up but after some research on-line I found some suggestions were

The girls sorting out our
family vitamins for
the next 3 weeks.

Vitamin C supplements (which I already take), Flax seed oil (which I happened to have in the fridge) and berries (and I had a bag of frozen berries in the freezer). So this week I have started having a berry and flax seed smoothie (with kiwi fruit and banana included) for morning tea. Hopefully my levels will come up. She will test again on Monday next week.

Otherwise it's been a quiet week. Both ballet girls are so excited every week about their practice as they are working on their end-of-year production - "The Wizard of Oz".

On Thursday I downloaded a free trial version of Reflex Math and the older girls are so enjoying it. It's basically a Math drill programme where it custom builds the drills (in games) for each student. So Ruth is just starting on basic addition while Rachel is working on getting her Multiplication quicker. It was so funny to hear Rachel ask Brendon to wake her up early on Friday morning so that she can get her other work done quickly and have time to "play" on Reflex.