Big cats before bedtime

Dd has suddenly announced that she wants to do a cat lapbook. It's half an hour till bedtime and yet I should make the most of this opportunity. I find a fab free lapbook on homeschoolshare here but no, she doesn't want that one. She wants pictures of cats.

What sort of cats? I ask.

Cat cats. Any cats. I don't know. She says.


I am trying to keep the last of my colour printer ink and do not want to spend the next half hour of my life trying to get pictures to print out in the right colour. I am too tight to buy the proper ink for our printer, but our printer doesn't like any other ink and with the cheap ink loves to turn perfectly natural shades into fluorescent pink out of protest. Life is just too short.

I move on enchanted learning, which fortunately has plenty of pictures of cats to colour in (here) . Dd usually hates colouring in. Well, perhaps hate is too strong a word, but she simply doesn't do colouring in. But she appears keen to colour in the - rather strange - outlines of cats that enchanted learning provides. (and they are strange - some of them are exactly the same outline, just different colouring instructions for the different species).

She wanders off to the next room with an outline of a panther or something and a brown pencil. I suspect the snow leopard may end up orange and purple, but such is the way of the spirited child.

And this gets me doing more time-wasting on the internet. I find National Geographic had a Big Cats week. I missed it, and besides, Freeview doesn't do National Geographic, but there are still resources online left here. It seems to late to start viewing videos, but I do anyway.

Who would have guessed that I'd spend New Year's Eve sober (so far) and watching conservation films about hyenas. This is what children do to you. Be warned.

Joy. Oh joy. Only a Siberian tiger and an Abyssinian cat to go before I can open the wine.