Each wet morning, Havana has been walking down to school hand-in-hand with her cousins here in Cymgwrach, south wales. The village name means Valley of the Witches and the public school uniform emblem is a witch on broomstick.
The school seems well funded with small class sizes and warm staff. Saint David's Day was cancelled last week due to heavy snow and so yesterday all the kids dressed up in their traditional welsh costumes for school, including the teachers.
We have four adults and five kids aged 1 to 7 packed into a 3-bedroom terraced house this week. Havana naturally loves it. She is magnetically drawn into the collective self-discipline and chaos of the existing community of kids. She loves sitting to the table for meals with her cousins, but has also slightly overcome her fear of TV, unable to resist the gravitational pull of her young kin.
Last night was bath night, which was a high energy event, but not as crazy as the potential inherent. Havana stood on the weigh scales and announced some sequence of incoherent numbers to everyone,as she does, then walked over to 3-year old Robbie, hugged him circumferentially and announced that she wanted to `scale him' next. He was saved only by the proverbial shortness of attention spans.
