Chinese Torture

Tried Mo out on 20mg of Equasym yesterday. He managed to swallow them whole (cunningly dipped in yoghurt) - hooray! I'm not very good at swallowing pills either - it's amazing how alike we are physically - well, not that amazing I suppose. It does seem to have some effect - we did an hour of maths, an hour of French and an hour of English yesterday. Normally, he can only manage half an hour of each and no more than 2 out of the 3 and each session is peppered with plaintive requests to know whether the time is up yet. And he remembered most of his capital letters and punctuation too without prompting. I suppose simply being able to concentrate for a much longer period of time at one go is bound to help his schoolwork. Seems to have no side effects either - one of the more common ones is appetite suppression - but we went out to dim sum with Little Sister, Quasi-Sister and an Oceanographer that QS found washed up on a beach somewhere on the south coast, and he ate vast amounts of everything. Afterwards, went down to Trespass in Covent Garden and bought myself a waterproof parka for our Snowdonian adventure.

Spent an hour torturing Larry with Chinese in the afternoon. I don't know why she doesn't enjoy it - it's such fun thinking up ways to remember the characters. Yesterday we had the story of the woodcutter who went out into the woods very early to cut down a TREE to make a TABLE and on the way he saw a little BIRD flying above the rising SUN. And the next day he sent his son to cut down a TREE to make a CHAIR. And he said to his son, are you sure you are BIG enough? And the son said, Dad, of course I CAN. Now, I don't know about her, but after all that, the way to write table and chair are now indelibly engraved in my mind.