Aiming high already

The girls are both doing well this week: the EFG has come home with some excellent exam results, excellent because they show that she is making good progress and is exceeding her current targets. The YFG is sitting on the kitchen floor doing practice papers for Y6 SATS, although she is only Y5 at the moment. She is making a few mistakes, but she has the jist of it, and is doing OK so I hope that by the end of Y6, she'll be doing better. I'm proud of the pair of them.

As for me, I am getting the jitters over this exam on Sunday. I am already an Assistant Coach, and this next exam is to be a Coach. It is quite a bit harder, and the way that the exams are being re-written this year means that I can't defer the exam until I feel more ready for it, so if I don't do the exam because I don't think I am ready, I will have to do the whole course again, and if I give it a go and fail, well, hey, I'll have to do the whole course again - so I may as well give it a go and just do my best. If I do pass, well, what a bonus that will be. I have to say that I am aiming to pass, and I hope I do!!! I have nothing to lose! I still have some lesson plans to write for the logbook, so I'm not done yet. I have sent my apologies for the school board meeting tomorrow night as I really need to be at home, reading up and revising stuff for this.

We picked a pound of strawberries yesterday afternoon - and ate them all for tea. I am so pleased to have our own strawberry patch, and we are loving the fruit - so much nicer fresh off the plant than from a shop somewhere. The variety is called Cambridge Favourite, I think. The hens are laying less eggs as more of them are going broody but I just don't have enough coops to put them all in to let them have chicks so they are just going to have to go off the idea smartish. It means that at the moment, about 24 hens are only producing between 6 and 8 eggs a day which is pathetic, really!

The eggs are in the incubator, and I just keep turning them every eight hours, and counting the days on the calendar. They should hatch at the end of the month so we are quite excited about that. A man came today to sort out a problem with the oil boiler, and he saw some of the quail eggs in the utility room so we got chatting and it turns out that he has incubators as well - but his biggest one is full of 1300 pheasant eggs which he rears for the local estate's shoot! 1300 puts my measly 10 eggs in the shade!