Thursday, I don’t care about you

We went to Lucy’s this morning. Davies and Scarlett enjoyed exploring all the new toys Richard and Rebecca had had for Christmas while Lucy and I chatted. One of the (many) topics of conversation that came up was school and how HE children being ‘school curious’ is probably a totally natural and normal thing. I recall being ten or so and every kids tv programme or book I read was about school, best friends and first interest in boys, parties, sleepovers etc. Even the happiest HE child must be swayed by that whole other world which other children their age inhabit and spend most of their waking hours at. Even if I’d known about HE when I was a child, even though I didn’t particularly enjoy school I doubt I’d have wanted to have been Home Educated simply because I couldn’t imagine not being at school. I assume that for a Home Educated child, being different is an everyday part of their life and they must ponder what it would be like to join the rest of the world for a while. My favourite TV show was Grange Hill, my favourite books were the Malory Towers series – I reckon I’d have been pretty desperate to get to school and grab some of the promised action. 😆 I think the whole friendship thing is possibly something girls are more likely to fret over too. I recall so wanting to have a Best Friend when I was younger, someone to share secrets and make up with, whereas my brother and indeed Ady so he tells me, simply had a pack of mates they hung around with. They might have had a best friend but really it was being part of a team or gang that was more important. Very generalised I know but even from watching Davies & Scarlett I already notice that Scarlett tends to pair up with one other child to play whereas Davies is happy running round with loads of other children. Home Ed for us has always been about the children, not me. It suits us as a family but only because it has shaped our lives since we started out, if it was no longer part of our lives then family life would take on a different shape. I always think that if I’d never had children I wouldn’t have missed them because all of the positives about not being a parent would have compensated for what I didn’t even know I was missing. I think school vs HE would be the same sort of thing really. There obviously are benefits to school and that would be what we focussed on if the children ended up there.

All that said, I can’t see it happening here any time soon, it would have to 100% come from the children and at the moment I can’t think of much other than idle curiosity which would sway them. Lucy and I concluded that it is definitely the better way to approach it to have tried HE and decided school might be an interesting option for a confident, happy 10 year old than to send a 4 or 5 year old with the option of HE later if school didn’t work out though. And then carried on drinking tea and chatting while the children played. 😆

I’d arranged to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie at Highdown this afternoon with the possibility of Lucy, Richard or Rebecca or two or three of them joining us. In the end just Rebecca came along but unfortunately once there she decided she was missing Lucy and ended up a bit teary. We rang Lucy so she could talk to her and then as she seemed OK but just a bit subdued we carried on. Davies, Scarlett, Maisie and Jack were all really enjoying being there. They played for ages setting up some sort of complicated assault course to race round and then did a show based on ‘four little men in a flying saucer’ which they’d seen on TV this morning. Julie and I sat on a bench and chatted, Rebecca sat on my lap and dozed a bit. The children wanted to move on again so we walked a bit further before finding another bench so they could play in some trees.

We’d arranged to meet Lucy at Sainsburys but as we were working our way back to the carpark Scarlett disappeared. Her and Maisie ‘got lost’ last time we were at Highdown and had been hiding rather than lost but as she was alone it didn’t occur to me that she might be doing the same so there was a frantic five minutes of calling her before she finally answered from out of a bush right next to where she’d disappeared 🙄 must read her the boy who cried wolf. 😆 We drove back listening to Tumble Tots Action Songs which Davies suggested Rebecca might like (Tarly suggested War of The Worlds which was slightly less suitable I thought :lol:) and met Lucy in Sainsburys car park. She kindly offered to have all the children in her car while I dashed round Sainsburys which was great as I did it in record time and felt very smug when I barely recognised my friend Rachel who I’d not seen for a few months and was looking very very thin and quite drawn and dealing with her son in school uniform and her toddler daughter throwing a spectacular supermarket tantrum and was able to smile, say hi and ‘I’ll leave you to it’ before swinging off with my basket! 🙂 It transpires that Rebecca was actually feeling poorly and by the time I got back to Lucy’s car she was crying with pain of earache so I hope it had not been too traumatic for her and that the next time she spends time with us without Lucy it is happier for her.

We came home and I got out some foam letters which I’d covertly picked up in the Wizard store earlier when we popped in to get birthday presents for Liam and Lily, who’s birthday party we’re going to on Sunday. Davies has been really into his writing and spelling this week and Tarly has started spotting letters from her name everywhere so I thought maybe some letter tiles to play with would be good. These were a quid each and are foam puzzle pieces with push out letters and numbers. I would have got just one set but it occured to me that Scarlett wouldn’t even be able to spell her name without a second set for the second ‘t’ so I got them one each. As they opened them I suggested they try to find the letters from their names. Davies did his, then said that was excellent as his name has six letters and six foam squares would make a cube, so proceeded to do that. Scarlett shocked me by gathering the letters and spelling her name straight away. 🙂 (Davies lent her his t). Then she looked at Davies cube and said ‘three of the letters in Davies’ name are in my name too’ and pointed to the S, A and E. Then even more staggeringly they both tidied them all up ready for dinner. They put A Close Shave on while they ate and then I suggested Henry’s Cat which I used to love when I was a child and they both like now. While it was on and they were watching I googled it and happened upon the official Henry’s Cat website and then followed links to this totally excellent site by Stan Hayward who created Henry’s Cat. HC was one of the first characters I learnt to draw (did you know his face is made of the letters Miiow?) when I was probably not much older than Davies and that site looks fantastic for Davies to spend some time looking at. I then followed further links to Stan’s blog which is worth reading for various nuggets of film and animation related tidbits. I was so impressed that I emailed him and he’s emailed back already so I’m feeling quite starstruck at exchanging emails with HC creator 🙂 and he says he’s looking to make the makemovies site even more child friendly soon too with a large animation database to be added. Ady’s leaving his laptop here tomorrow so I can just set Davies up on it and let him explore to his heart’s content. 🙂 I’ve also found some other software which should let us make the length of each frame on our animations shorter so the movements are more fluid between shots.

I’ve been thinking about the structure of our weeks moving forward. We have MM on Monday, I am working alternate Wednesday and Thursdays and every other Friday which only leaves Tuesday definitely free each week so I am determined to make that the day we spend time doing stuff together. That means no sitting behind my laptop all day and actually planning a few options in advance of things to do even if it’s just cuddling up with a film, reading a pile of books or stuff like doing some animations with Davies or some other crafts with Tarly. The children adore their time spent playing together and I’m never going to intrude on that but they are starting to get to the age where plenty of the things they’d enjoy doing are things I’d like to spend time doing too so just for that one dedicated day a week I’m going to try and claim their time and let them claim mine. Tomorrow I’m only working in the afternoon so I can do some stuff with them in the morning too.

I had a message on the answerphone today from the local Beavers group saying there is a space for Davies now available on a Monday evening. I first rang about Beavers when I found out about Badgers way back this time last year and as the two were on the same evening and Badgers came up first I never gave Beavers much more thought. But now Badgers is on a Wednesday it would make sense to give Beavers a go too – it is held in the church hall literally around the corner which aside from being convenient to get to will also mean that all the attendees are fairly local too. It would be great for Davies to get to know some same age children who live really local and from working for The Scout Association for a while a few years ago I know a well group scout group can be an excellent thing to belong to. He’s not super keen on first mentioning, but I’m going to ring back and see if we can go along on Monday and see what it’s all about so he at least knows what he’s refusing the chance to try. And I guess that brings this post back full circle, so it must be time for bed ;).