One word? When seven would do…

I signed up for the word of the day email on www.dictionary.com yesterday and today’s word is enervate – which is pretty much how I feel, drained and feeble 🙂 So that was handy!

My back is better still today but not totally normal. Scarlett slept through again last night which somehow serves to make me feel more tired than if she hadn’t…not at all sure how that one works out other than I feel like I have spent a night not properly asleep just waiting for her to wake, whereas if she wakes then goes back to sleep I seem to relax into a better sleep – that all sounds total crap but I think I know what I mean!

Ady has been leaving home by 7am and kids have been waking up with him at 6ish which means when he leaves I have to get up – I don’t like any time before about 8.30am really so I come and sit grumpily on the sofa with my laptop and drip feed myself tea until I feel ready to start the day. Which seems to mean that although we have been up for three hours it is never before 10am that we get dressed!

Scarlett did a wee on her potty this morning, which I think was a first, so hurrah for that 🙂

Yesterday I had a fit about the kids still having morning and evening milk from baby bottles and made them choose new cups from Tescos – which has meant they have both drunk a small amount last night and this morning to the soundtrack of them complaining and me reasoning that they are not babies anymore. I’m torn between being totally unworried about it not mattering anyway and being more important that they are still both drinking a pint of milk a day or deciding that the time has come for them to stop drinking out of bottles and the milk not being drunk anymore if a natural side effect and not mattering. Hmmm, think I might go back to bottles again tonight…

We’ve been to soft play today which is always successful, I get to sit and chat to Julie while the kids wear themselves out running round with their cousins and ticking off PE, socialising and families boxes 🙂 Today Davies and Scarlett made friends with another brother and sister who were there (girl about D’s age, boy a couple of years older) and were running round together and going down the big slide all holding hands – very cute 🙂 After lunch in the cafe we went back in for a last play and we ended up having a ball fight with the kids which ended in a tickle fight and was good fun (although probably not great for my back!). I quite like soft play places when there are not many children there 🙂

The kids are currently doing magic painting which always keeps them quiet with minimum mess to be cleared up afterwards. Feels like we have not done anything remotely educational this week and next week is already full with socialising every day, definitely focusing on the mixing and mingling and networking skills instead of the three rs at the moment 🙂

Need to pack tonight ready for the weekend away up north. It’s always nice to see Miranda, and we will be seeing Lynda too which the kids are looking forward to, but I just know it will be a manic weekend with too much packed into it, bad nights with the kids in strange beds and the long car journey at either end. This might be my last blog ’til next week, so have a good weekend all.

Apathy about various things here currently. The election, blogging, you get the picture. It’s not that I don’t care, more that there is always something else going on at the time to take attention away from it all!

Anyway, back to the point. Yesterday Frazer stayed with us for a while after the rescue operation with the spare key which was nice. He is *so* good with the kids – they adore him and he has endless patience and time for them. So they clambered all over him demanding books, attention and so on for a couple of hours. Which put paid to any plans I had for the rest of the day but was nice just the same. Before their tea Davies and I spent about an hour on educationcity doing all the science stuff for reception and year 1. He amazed me in consistently getting 100% on everything – stuff we have never particularly focused on such as light sources, plants, bits of the human body, life cycles for frogs, which animals would be the parent of which young and so on. He really enjoyed it too – I am still torn about educationcity really – they have extended my trial and I know I can fudge their security with a variety of email addresses and postcodes so I am inclined not to bother subscribing as it is pricey and I sort of feel that once he has exhausted the games he won’t bother with it again. Might see next year when Tarly is of an age to get use from it too.

We used it again for an hour or so tonight and he has now finished all the science bits, is very able on the maths and english for reception (which is what he would be) but less so on the maths and english for year one. He seems to be content to sit for hours soaking up ‘facts’ and general knowledge type stuff but when he actually needs to think instead of regurgitate nuggets of information he gets all fidgety and is not so sure he can do it so seems to rather not risk trying. Need to find a way to make numbers and letters fact instead of formulas for him – maybe it’s time to ease off the phonics and blending and go more with the recognising actual words; similarly perhaps parrot fashion type numbers would work well for him – maybe I should add some Merry style timestables around the walls 🙂

So today we had WAG local group again. We have been the nomadic home ed group of the south coast, wandering from location to location always in search of our one true home, desperate to put our camels out to pasture so to speak 🙂 Although I remain cautious and do not want to count chickens, put eggs in a singular woven carrier or similar I think we may just have found a home! The place is an arts centre attached to the local youth group premises – local council run and connexions attached etc. It is a detached building with a largish hall with a stage at one end, a small kitchen area and a couple of toilets, it has a lawned area outside which is enclosed so safe for the littlies and suitable for ball games and so on. Today was a bit mad as we were not there prior to start time to get anything set up so there was an element of kids running wild, but as of next week I can arrive first, will have my own key and can get the place set up. Several of the adults were very enthused by the space and were coming up with some great ideas which makes me feel very positive – and takes the pressure off a little too 🙂 Now we’ve found the right venue I can start to market it a bit and build up some regular attendees.

And that’s it really. My back is better today that it was yesterday but still quite twingey – I was supposed to be going to Portsmouth for a home ed meet up tomorrow but have cancelled as it would be a two hour round trip in the car and I don’t think that is wise (although the five hour trip up north on Friday night and then same trip home again on Sunday is probably not such a cunning plan either!) so Julie and I are going to soft play instead with the understanding that she has to rescue any trapped children at the top of the slide as I won’t be capable 🙂

Ooh and the last thing – I’ve started reading that book Joyce blogged about – My Sister’s Keeper. I only opened it tonight but I’m already hooked. It’s very powerful and throws open the gates for all sorts of thinking. Still not sure where I am going to end up sympathising really – if I find a side to fall down on. Think it might be one of those haunting reads that stay with you a while.

cos the alternative option would involve some sort of criminal conviction for child abuse 🙂 And probably do even less for the public image of HE than an article in The Observer with children in their pjs playing X box instead of lapbooks on the life cycle of a frog 🙂

I have a bad back today. I am hoping it is a combined effects of the last week’s activities (carting a child round Legoland, sleeping in a bunk bed, throwing up in an energetic manner, walking miles along pebbly beaches, carting a different child round a nursery for a horticultural open day, and sleeping in an odd position in bed last night for a record 8 hours unbroken sleep 🙂 ) type ailment as opposed to anything more sinister or medical attention requiring. Anyway, we went to the library this morning to return some books, borrow some more, a quick peep in the bookshop resulting in a couple of Dr Seuss style work book type publications. Upon our return I was really stiff having struggled to drive, do my seatbelt and particularly reverse the car back into the drive. I managed to drop the car/house keys as I was getting Davies out of the car. I asked him to pick them up for me and he ran up to the front door with them.

As I was getting Scarlett and the books out of the car I heard him fiddling with the letterbox and the thought went through my mind before being dismissed as him not being *that* silly.

WRONG!!!

I would say several facts aided his current state of still being alive, they were:

I had my mobile phone with me,
my brother happened to be at home,
his home is a mere five minute drive away from our home,
there is a spare key to our house at his home,
he brought it straight round,
the sun was shining,
my back would have made physical violence slightly ineffective as I was incapable of chasing him, pinning him down or swinging my arm back before walloping him with it,

oh and of course I don’t agree with corporal punishment anyway 🙂

This morning was a very blustery day – just the sort for a hunny based adventure involving riding around in upturned umbrellas, hanging off helium balloons and other such Hundred Acre wood type jaunts. Good for drying washing too 🙂 I had planned a lot of not much for today, but felt the need to get out the house so loaded the kids into the car and went into town.

For once, Worthing town centre was quite pleasant to be in – the sun was shining, the sea was an attractive shade of bluey green as opposed to grey and there appeared to be rather fewer teen mothers pushing their tantrumming toddlers round New Look while puffing cigarettes smoke into their faces.

We did a quick circuit of The Works (got the two books Jax posted about, both of which I had previously looked at when Ady was with me, and a Learning Fundamentals folder book and a couple of dot to dot books for Davies and some finger crayons for Scarlett.), MVC for some Dr Seuss dvds – it has continued to be a popular theme here for a while so I thought I’d check the price of the Mike Myers Cat in the Hat film and found a double box dvd pack with several of the books cartoons on it – have just watched them both and they have proved very popular here, so that was a good investment.

Scarlett is being really really two today. She had a bad night so is very tired and cross, everything is annoying her, Davies is making it worse by deliberately winding her up. I think I might be glad when their bedtime arrives today!

What else? Had a nice day yesterday although Scarlett was quite testing then too. I went off to do the food shopping in the morning and then we went to Chris and Julie’s in the afternoon. Scarlett is taking a while to totally recover from the cp and is still being nagged a lot not to pick the scabs which in turn makes her grumpy, her sleeping has been appauling since she was poorly so she is perpetually tired by lunchtime which is then too late for her to sleep, then she goes to bed really early and is awake again for most of the middle of the night. Sigh!

Tomorrow we have nothing specific planned although I have at least two people I should ring to arrange meet ups with which I might try and achieve later. I got an email from educationcity to say they were going to cut off my trial as I had not subscribed unless I had not had a chance to trial it properly in which case I could extend it by a further 5 days – so I have 🙂 Might see if I can engage Davies on that for a while tomorrow and try and have some one to one with Scarlett on something like puzzles or books to try and calm it all back down again.

Right, off to tidy up a bit rather than yell at the kids for distracting me while I try to blog…

I was going to blog about how I made a complete show of myself by getting wildly drunk on an empty stomach last night only to eat a takeaway and redecorate the bathroom with it again very quickly afterwards. I was also going to mention how I then proceeded to repeat the performance in the bed, which I was sharing with Scarlett. But I think I will leave further more graphic descriptions of that and suffice to say my face was red, my head was pounding and my poor husband spent the best part of an hour with disinfectant and was at the local launderette first thing this morning with a load of bedding 🙁

That aside – and I have done all the appropriate apologising and thanking to relevant parties most of today, we had a lovely time! Scarlett was asleep by the time we arrived there last night, Davies stayed up long enough to thoroughly charm Rob and Penny and then went straight to sleep when I took him to bed. We had a lovely evening catching up, chatting about HE, talking about Rob’s job and generally having a nice mix of sensible interesting conversations combined with utter drunken silliness – the sort of atmosphere one could get drunk in very easily without realising quite how much you were putting away!

After the wobbly start to the morning I girded my loins (or whatever the relevant phrase would be), managed to keep my second cup of tea down (the first didn’t quite manage to!) and we set off for a walk along the beach, some playing in the one tiny patch of sand we found, some typical bloke behaviour of stone skimming competitions, enjoying being with the children and exercising those calf and thigh muscles by walking a long long way on very pebbly beach 🙂 We had a lovely lunch during which the children behaved impecably and then we went on a speed boat for a harbour tour involving peering at all the huge places round the marina with private moorings for their boats which cost three times what our house is worth, appealing lifestyle that, albeit a materialistic and possibly quite shallow one 😉

We then walked back through the development to their apartment, had some tea and lazed around chatting for a bit before getting Scarlett into her pyjamas so she could fall asleep on the way home and coming home. Penny – who has two sons slightly younger than me and a granddaughter about Scarlett’s age was really impressed and taken with Davies. She could not believe how articulate and confident he was. He was talking to Rob and Penny about all sorts of things and as usual really shone in adult company. I was very proud of both the kids today, but particularly Davies – he was a credit to us 🙂 (just as well considering how much I had let us all down!)

Anyway, Davies took *forever* to get to sleep, I even let him come downstairs and watch a bit of Dr Who which was an error as he went back up to bed and promptly declared himself scared that aliens would come and would not go to sleep unless I stayed in the room – oops! Scarlett woke at about 10pm after nearly 5 hours sleep and I am currently sat on her bedroom floor trying to persuade her back to sleep – about to swap with Ady and go to bed for a couple of hours while he sits on her bedroom floor before swapping back again if she’s still not asleep! Feel quite delicate still but I’m sure I’ll feel fine in the morning!

Tomorrow we have a lazy morning planned trying to tidy up the playroom has been mentioned as a possibility and then we are over to Chris and Julie’s in the afternoon. I think next week is fairly quiet at the beginning – which seems to be working well for us so I might plan some sort of edcuational activity along the lines of last week’s solar system art – quite like the idea of a lapbook, but as Davies’ only suggestion has been ‘The Incredibles’ which does not hugely inspire me and will therefore probably not inspire him if I can’t come up with good ideas on what to do I probably need to come up with a few choices and let him decide from some I have already got some ideas for.

Kids played with Lego all morning (which justified spending that 15 quid in the shop on our way out to me anyway!), had lunch with the last two slices of bread in the house and were hustled out to get to TT2 with a few minutes to spare.

Davies sat and played with his LeapPad while I took Scarlett in. She did amazingly well actually – she is very physically able, much more so than Davies which coupled with having no fear makes TT a little tame for her really :-), but she enjoyed it, coped fairly well with the structure and turn taking. It was only when the lady who runs it commented on how much I had seemed to be enjoying it too that I realised it had been really nice to spend a whole hour totally focused on Scarlett actually. 🙂 She started to wobble a bit towards the very end when they are supposed to rejoin a big circle and sit down, sing Happy Birthday to anyone who’s having a birthday that week and finally get a well done sticker each. She really was not up for it and I decided to leave it while she was happy instead of wrecking it all for the last five minutes. Julie (lady who runs it) said that perhaps I should have stuck it out as the sticker would have really made it for her but frankly knowing Scarlett she couldn’t actually care less about some as obviously bribing as a sticker 😉 Anyway I signed her up for a term and she is pretty up for it having talked to her about it a couple of times on the way home. Davies did really well with his lavishing praise of a big brother on her too which helped!

Davies then ran around yelling being the ring leader of his group as they waited to go in and was then the first child through the doors yelling ‘hooray, it’s time to go in!!!’ when they opened them. Wow! What a difference this has made. Whether it was simply the right time for him to do something like that, whether I can credit TT2 with the change in him or maybe it’s just a combination of the two. Whatever it thrills me to see him so at home and comfortable in a situation that he ran crying from the first time we tried it.

We’re staying out tonight – one of Ady’s oldest friends (they shared digs together about 22 years ago (when I was 8 or 9 as I shall be reminding them again tonight 😉 ) is staying in Eastbourne for a week with his girlfriend – who we have not met before. It is some sort of company flat / perk of her job and looking at the website of the marina development where it is it looks quite posh so we are all going. We last saw Rob when he came down from Liverpool where he was living at the time and stayed with us for a few days so he could come to our wedding reception. Shortly afterwards he changed life direction completely, left his job which was well paid but he hated to take a poorly paid job he felt passionate about, moved to Northants and started living with Penny. We meanwhile have had two children so I’m guessing we will have plenty of catching up to do. Rob is very ‘deep’, has spent a lot of time travelling and is a real considered thinker. He was in awe of us for even having children in the first place (in a genuine, well I’ve considered it and decided it’s too big a deal for me to do type of way) and when Ady mentioned recently about HE he was fascinated and really interested in the idea, so I imagine that will be on the conversation list too 🙂 Better brush up on my Free Range Ed handbook and Ed Phil eh!

Once upon a time
I thought I’d write a rhyme
A rhyme about some children
And those children, they are mine

I want to do it this way
To prove it can be done
A rhyme with heartfelt sentiment
and an added bit of fun

I read a poem recently
about how children make you feel
about what they mean to you
emotions that are real

You go through many stages
as your children change and grow
looking back it happens really fast
though at the time it seemed so slow

A blue line on a testing stick
was how it became true for me
a few weeks later a hospital scan
a grainy image I could barely see

My stomach grew, my ankles swelled
I had heartburn, urine infection trouble
My back ached, I couldn’t sleep
my walk became a waddle

The birth was fine, I expected pain
then thrust into my arms
a wailing bundle, bright blue eyes
grasping fingers were his charms

I spent six weeks in a mindless haze
return to normality was my ambition
a further six weeks passed me by
‘normal’ changed it’s definition

Those early days remain a blur
sleep was not a feature
crying, feeding, changing, winding
this helpless, tiny creature

Just as I reached breaking point
I could not do this any more
he looked into my eyes and smiled at me
I knew what it was all for

As one year passed I turned around
and wondered where all my time had gone
His first word came ‘Hello’ he said
I knew I’d spent time on my son

At 18 months he began to walk
Another blue line came on a test
I wondered how I’d love another
when I already had the best

Nine months on and once again
I held a newborn at my breast
I loved her as much as I did my son
I’d passed that scary test

When she was 18 months old or so
and began to throw tantrums too
she looked me one day and said
‘Mummy, I love you’

They test me every single day
they push me further towards the brink
then one single simple little act
make me stop and smile and think

A daisy from the garden picked for me
a big wet kiss, a squeezy hug
crayon on the wallpaper, handprints on the TV
shampoo and powder on my rug

A picture of Mummy with mad orange hair
glitter on the carpet all the time
are we there yet? from the back of the car
A small hand clutching mine

Do children give you wings then?
Well I have to say probably not
but then why have kids just to get wings
when wings come with caffinated pop

Children bring a lot of things,
laughter, noise and mess
love and tears and worry
great joy and great distress

children have brought my life extremes
but of this I have no doubt
all things considered and weighed up
I’d rather not be without

Oh, it’s been a long day!

Started with being fully dressed with coats and shoes on, picnic and three changes of clothing for each child packed and car loaded with all available seats all before 9am. Jenny and crew arrived and off we set.

Don’t like driving the car fulled loaded, it does not have much poke at the best of times so with 7 people it was quite painful trying to build up enough speed to overtake anyone on the motorways. Was also conscious of wiping out two families in one go with a wrong move which never helps to ease and relax one’s driving 🙂 Scarlett had a short lived tantrum about the fact a relative stranger was sat in between her and Davies and promptly fell asleep, Davies had a look of pure joy when he realised said relative stranger was now all his and got her to read every single book in the car to him 🙂 (thanks Emma!)

Midway there Jenny took a call on my phone to say there was some hitch with the tickets and they were not letting people in until the whole group of 51 had arrived. I nearly turned the car round and came home and sent the kids to school – the second time in 24 hours I would have been responsible for people standing around as a result of something I had thought I had organised. I then fumed all the way there about how the total of my booking was nearly £400 and if they wanted to get awkward about me bringing them that sort of business then I would speak to the manager about it. We arrived and I rang Alison to find they had got in just fine, as did we so I had no need to vent to anyone in the end!

Ellen – from our local group rang Jenny to say she had just arrived with her brood so Jenny stayed to wait for her and me and the kids went on ahead to catch up The Portico and Layla. At any one point there seemed to be at least three children not wanting to go in the same direction as the rest of the group (two of these were mine most of the time) and by the time we caught up with June who I was looking forward to meeting for the first time having known her ‘virtually’ for about 4 years both of my two were in tears, straining in opposite directions and refusing to budge. So much for putting my aura of controlled, calm, able mother across eh!? We managed little more than a grimace of general understanding above the wailing, Scarlett who usually loves babies was not even interested in the gorgeous Calixa and on we went.

In the meantime Scarlett had fallen over (I think that was fall over # 2 in a days total of 7) and was crying about that – I asked her if she needed to go to hospital (yes I am that mother who uses sarcasm on her children which is way over and above their heads or understanding but serves to make me feel better!) and that became her chant for the next ten minutes ‘I wannn go ‘ospikal’. Davies refused to go on the driving school with Ernest and C so eventually when the joint wailing and fighting over a packet of Monster Munch became too much to inflict on any one any longer we went off to the boats. Deciding that we were probably better on our own for a bit as I would not get a chance to talk to grown ups and the ages mixes were such that either we would be stood waiting for other children, or they would be stood waiting for us we wandered round for a bit just the three of us. We went on a few rides, watched the excellent show, bought some lego keyrings, ate some popcorn and drank hot chocolate and then I managed to lose both children 🙂

You know I often fantasise about it (and had infact threatened them both earlier that morning with being broken down for parts and sold on ebay) but when you are standing, childless and trying to impart just the right level of ‘get here now if you can hear me you little buggers’ into your tone as you call for them without falling into complete ‘oh my God my babies have been kidnapped from under my very nose and even now have been smuggled out of Legoland wearing disguises and are halfway to a Pedophile hideout in a car boot’ hysteria. I had written my mobile phone number on Davies’ arm in ink earlier with instructions to find a Legoland employee, tell them his name and show them his arm if he got mislaid, but to lose both of them, and not even be sure they were still together (although assuming that worse case scenario they would be worth more as a matching pair!!!) I was a woman on the brink!! I fought through the bloody rope ladders and pull yourself up by a string climbing bits, bashing small children in the head with my loaded up picnic containing bag as I went and finally spotted Davies. I yelled at him to stay where he was and then spotted Tarly somewhere else. I gathered them both together and under the evil stares of all the parents who had seen me shouting for my lost children and now realised just how small and helpless they must have been slunk away to a safe spot to give them tearful cuddles. Neither had realised they were lost (a relief I suppose!) but taking no chances I whizzed them back to where Alison, Chris and Layla were and leaving Tarly in Layla’s capable hands took Davies on the water wheel thing.

I then sat with Chris for a bit while Davies, Ernest and Scarlett did some pre school bonding (which always involves running round, yelling and chasing any available wildlife – in this case pigeons!) which was nice 🙂 Then we left them to watch the show and went back to meet up with Jenny and crew for the homeward journey.

Have to mention to anyone who has not seen her lately how AMAZING Layla is looking – lost loads of weight. Felt very unhealthy next to such low carb detoxing folk such as her and The Portico 😉

The drive home was fine – Emma did amazing work keeping Scarlett awake all the way home (thanks again!), Ady had for once gotten home at a decent time and was waiting having tidied up and got some dinner on for the kids (which they didn’t touch but you can bet if it hadn’t been there they would have wanted it!).

It was a good day really – in retrospect I should have either brought along another adult, left a child behind or at least brought the pushchair as I did spend quite a lot of the day carrying Tarly. The losing the kids bit was a hairy five minutes but meeting up with bloggers, however briefly is always lovely.

May try and do another one either just before school summer holidays or just after Autumn term starts – would probably get Ady to come and stay in Windsor and do something else on the second day too – any suggestions local folk?

The other thing which occured to me yesterday was that having been envious of the amount of MPs in Sheffield we are starting to build up quite crew here in Sussex actually – there is me, Jenny, Ros, Ali from the blogring, and Lisa from MP too – which is reassuring and a nice little community to be a part of 🙂