One word? When seven would do…

This year Home Education has been hugely challenged for me. As have many other aspects of my personal life but way back when this was a Home Ed blog and I have other places to explore or talk about the rest of it should I choose to do so ;-).

We’ve now been official for just over a year – Davies would be a half term into year one having already done reception year. And actually many of the children he and I consider his peers are of year two age as indeed Davies would be if he’d been born just 14 days earlier. Scarlett also hit the age where we *could* have used nursery – we decided against that, as explained elsewhere recently but tbh it was something of a no-brainer if we were to continue with Home Ed anyway.

So this year we have gone through the financial implications of Home Education – which I know exist for the vast majority of Home Educators but we have had a very real financial crisis, which could easily have been totally avoided by me going back to work, even with the associated childcare costs. But that was never something we ever really considered.

This year I have watched some of my early inspirations for Home Education choose school for their children instead. I have observed people with older children seriously consider school as the answer to various parenting, behaviour and educational issues. I have seen the very people who sold me the idea of autonomy turn to workbooks, curriculums, structure, measurement. I have similarly felt the weight of responsibility for selling others the idea of Home Education and feeling instrumental in their choices.

I have felt the external pressure of what a child of Davies’ age should and would and could be doing if he were in school. I have watched him fall short of others’ expectations in some areas – even very recently his peers.

I have defended Home Education and very specifically Autonomy. I have been pissed off at it’s misconception of ‘doing nothing’ whilst personally, internally struggling with the secret idea that maybe it is just an excuse for doing nothing.

I have resented the time I spend with my children, I have considered them a cross to bear, I have felt their very voices crashing on my ears and wanted to just yell at them to ‘shut up, shut up and go away!’. I have held them close and wished that they would never grow up, never get any older, never spent nor want to spend a single second out of my sight. I have enjoyed and revelled in their increasing independance, I have spent worrying minutes searching for them when imagining them lost. This has been an overhang I imagine of parenting in general, made all the more vivid by the prolonged contact and intensity of the relationship of the Stay at Home Mother, the Home Educator.

This week marks a first year anniversary for me, for us and ironically we stand now on the edge of a prospect of change. A small change in terms of our day to day lives but a large change in all sorts of other areas. One I am still trying to compute, as I suspect are Davies and Scarlett. One which probably accounts for some of our current unease and questionning. One which I think might just have a touch of kill or cure about it.

In one month I will start working. Part time, just a day and a half a week – but actually that’s quite massive – that’s over a fifth of the time the children and I usually spend pretty much exclusively in each others’ company. It is going to involve them spending time – once a week a whole entire day, in the company of someone else. Someone else will be wiping bottoms, making sandwiches, pouring drinks, kissing better, entertaining, remonstrating, negotiating, mediating, supervising, overseeing, (gasp!) educating my children. Someone else will be giving me an account of their day, someone else will be giving the yes or no to their requests.

This is a good thing. It is a healthy thing, it is a normal thing. But it is not something we are used to, currently it is not something we are comfortable with. I told the children today (admittedly while I was berating them for something) that if this doesn’t work out, if the people who have agreed to look after them while I work are not happy with the arrangement then actually rather than me giving up the job being the first option, we may well consider school. I don’t know how true that is, I don’t know how I will manage regardless of how they get on. Hell, I don’t think their own father gets it right with them sometimes and he is probably a better parent than I am ;-). But it’s time and I’m trying bloody hard to give them as much confidence and acceptance about it as I can whilst secretly lying awake at night over it myself. And yes I do know that’s weird!

Which brings me back to my whole autonomy thing. I really believe in autonomy. I really, truly, really do. I think children should follow their interests. I am amazingly proud of both my children but specifically Davies as a really good example of a fantastic Autonomously Home Educated child – I think he shows massive positives to far outweigh the negatives of not having been guided or coerced in his education so far. I know it is far too early to tell but I utterly stand by no one having the power or authority to determine what is important for a child to learn other than the child themselves. I see the role of an autonomously educating parents to use their increased awareness and ability to offer wider information and ideas and activities to assist and aid the child in learning more about the things they are interested in. For me, Davies is living proof – so far – of the leave it alone approach. If ever a child has developed passions and gone all out to learn all he can about associated information surrounding those passions it’s Davies. I’ve heard so many parents tell me that they or their children ‘saw this and thought of Davies’ in relation to various things. I never fret about his attention span or concentration, his ability to retain knowledge or put information in context, his crossover of interests into other areas or his utter passion for something which captures his imagination. It is therefore inconceivable that when the mood takes him to read, write, add, subtract and divide he will not enter into it with the same zest and zealour – so surely the right thing to do is to wait and be ready for his cue.

I spoke to various parents of various children following various approaches in the last week or so. All of them seem to be working for the various families and I would have no criticism for any of them. But I do know that unless something has relevance to Davies, unless it means something to him, unless he feels there is something to be gained from it then it holds no appeal for him at all. As such reading the Bob books, or doing a work book with double vowel sounds or knowing what 4 plus 4 is on demand are all beyond him. Reading ‘Start’ ‘Quit’ or ‘Save Game’ are all utterly within his reach now though, picking up a DS which he has never held before in his life and becoming very quickly able to use it, knowing that his Halloween top had ‘stay up late’ written on it and counting to 49 today on the swing when I said he could stay on it for as long as he could keep counting all came very easily though.

But I have come to realise that along with everything else that this year has brought I have developed something of an apathy towards the children. I love them, I want to be with them, I 100% believe in Home Education – if I didn’t do all those things then this would have been the year when dramatic things could have come about – most certainly including school. But actually I have stopped enjoying Home Education this year, I have started to resent pretty much everyone and everything which has prevented me from doing what I want to do when I want to do it. And the fact that actually the things I want to do are not things I could be doing even if I’d never had children let alone Home Educated them has carried no weight But last week I woke up to that. I enjoyed not only being with my children, but with other peoples’ as well. I got great pleasure from talking to children, sharing conversations with them, answering their questions, showing them things and passing on knowledge. I fell in love with it all over again. It is no small coincidence that I had Ady with me all week and on tap playmates for the children meaning that actually I didn’t really get involved with the practical side of parenting all week. I didn’t wipe a single bottom, I didn’t make a single breakfast and I didn’t deal with a single tantrum. But actually I probably did more Home Education away from Home than I’ve done in ages.

So this week I have made a pledge. I have told the children that every day we are at home I will give them an hour each to do whatever they want to do. I have been very guilty of ‘laters’, ‘not nows’ and ‘maybe tomorrows’ – and as much as I know that I will die of boredom if I surrender myself to playdoh, finger painting, pretending to be Totty I also know that if I guide them towards the things that I like to spend my time doing, towards the things which I already know they will enjoy doing then that is the way to take them to the next level. If we focus on following up the questions they ask at inappropriate times, the ideas of things to make five minutes before bedtime, reading the books we gather by the armful from the library and all too often return unread then we will get back our time spent in each others company loving being together. They will continue to be inspired and excited by new ideas, I will feel like we have gained something from spending time together and I will hopefully go off to work for that day and a half and enjoy the novelty of missing them all the while knowing they are in good hands and will be enjoying our time apart as well as the prospect of our times together.

Well that’s the plan anyway 😉

Tried really hard to be all accessible and available for the children today and I managed it a bit.

We built a lego house together and chatted a bit about how to build stronger walls by staggering the blocks instead of building one on top of another.

I managed to book Tarly’s birthday party at the now ‘usual’ Goddard party venue, she dictated her guest list and we made a start on making invites. We looked at various bits and pieces on ebay to get ideas for party activities. Davies cut out some paper princesses and coloured them in – he also managed to snip his finger with the scissors 🙄

They then started to get involved in some game or another so I took myself upstairs for half an hours peace and quiet and laid on the bed with a book – and fell asleep! 😳 Only dozing but I felt really crap when I woke up. I’ve never been able to ‘nap’ and even when the children were tiny babies I never had the little sleeps when they sleep that everyone recommends. Unless I am going to sleep for a good couple of hours (i.e. a night!) I just feel worse for having a bit of sleep than if I didn’t bother at all.

Managed to rouse myself to cook some soup for the childrens’ tea. Ady got home in time for Davies and I to go to Badgers. Davies didn’t really want to go tonight and Ady was quite happy to ‘let him off’ but I insisted as we’ve missed the last two weeks and I think he needed some time to go and join in with the group anyway. So I sat and read in the car for an hour under the interior light while he had a great time. They had a Halloween party with just loads of running around games and there was some sort of ‘bring a friend’ thing going on which Davies seems to think is going to be a more regular feature – in which case we need to line up lots of visits from everyone for Mondays please so he can parade his friends at Badgers as special guest appearances ;-). He came out clutching a cup full of sweets he’d won and explaining how he’d chosen purple ones for me, blue for Ady and yellow for Tarly to bring home and share – I love that about my children, when Tarly had stitches in her chin and got stickers for being brave she chose the dinosaur ones to share with Davies :-). He declared Badgers ‘brilliant!’ tonight so me pulling rank was a good move. 🙂

My tooth is still playing up – I was almost in tears with the pain when we got back from Badgers but I’ve taken some painkillers and poked at it with a cotton wool bud to get some yuk out of it and it’s ok again at the moment. Sorry TMI 😳 Fortunately unlike the last time I was in floor pacing levels of pain and torture I am able to turn to the bottle of brandy for medicinal purposes if needs be at 3am so I am comforting myself with that thought and intend to take a couple more painkillers and get an early night pretty soon. I’m determined to catch that extra hours sleep at some point this week 😉

We needed more kiddie drugs today (along with some grown up ones) so I did a bit of a stock up bulk purchase including some Evening Primrose Oil tablets for me (I’ll keep you updated on progress with that – I am slightly sceptical with the same level of belief I reserve for arnica really, but it’s worth a go). At the pharmacy counter I went to ask for Medised and realised that is for under sixes – so I proudly bought the over six version. As the over six I was purchasing it for wailed into my leg because I’d refused to buy him a fifteen quid Shaun the sheep hot water bottle cover :roll:. Lovely to reach this new era of maturity!

Davies suddenly started fading fast as we were about to leave Chris and Helen’s on Saturday and spent the whole journey home coughing. I may have mentioned previously that I find a cough slightly irritating :roll:, we got home, they had a bath and something to eat and he was asleep really quickly. He woke really early on Sunday (and I always get confused trying to decide if it’s early or late when the clocks leap backwards or forwards but it was still dark and Ady and I didn’t intend getting up) but sat and played with his X box which he has missed terribly while we’ve been away, despite regular goes on the DSs which were at camp belonging to various children.

Yesterday we had a really quiet day at home, the children stayed in their pjs all day, only getting out of them at bedtime to put clean ones on to go back to bed in. I went and did the food shop for the month and cooked a lovely roast, I also made a start on the holiday washing (cos admit it, that’s been on your minds 😉 ) and unpacked the last few things from the week away. The children mostly watched films, played x box or played with the geomags which were the other thing they missed while we were away.

At bedtime last night Tarly developed the cough which meant she had a really fitful night’s sleep. Davies woke early from a bad dream and although better with the coughing is clearly really generally crap with the cold and a weeks sleep-lag. And I have been having twinges from my last remaining wisdom tooth (I only had 3, two of them were taken out when Davies was tiny and the last one is still only partially errupted and is doing some more pushing through the gum at the moment which bloody hurts – my jaw and cheek really ache and have that tender tooth-achey sort of feeling. Oh and I have the sore throat and blocked up nose suggesting I am getting the cold too.

So a merry bunch of folk are we – not! 🙁

In the interests of not spreading our germs, inflicting others with our grumpy company and me not being arsed to drive over to Brighton we’ve decided not to go to Home Ed group today. It’s a friend’s birthday tomorrow so we need to walk to the post office to send a card to Ireland for her and I really need to start sorting out this shoebox swap thingie. Davies is doing a make a clock kit he got for his birthday, Tarly is rummaging through the lego and I am promising myself and them I will spend a while on the laptop this morning and then do stuff with them today.

Last year we did a christmas card list through my blog, so that we can still do the whole making cards for friends thing without having to make 100 or so for people we don’t actually know!

I think I probably still have the addresses somewhere but if anyone else either wants to join in or wants to get the addresses from last year (so just the people who read my blog basically, which will likely have various duplicates from the Early Years list) leave a comment 🙂

I mentioned last week that I am thinking about another camp in March / April. If anyone is interested please let me know – or come and join the yahoo group Nic Camps . Location and dates to be decided but an initial shout of interest would be good. 🙂

First of all many thanks everyone for adhering to the vow of silence I swore you all to before we left 😆

We’ve been away having hired a youth hostel for four nights in Yorkshire to have a Halloween camp. We stopped over night at Babs’ on the way up to celebrate Ben’s fifth birthday, I got to see Kirsty’s new house and Babs regaled us all with an impromptu piano performance (and no, it’s not stopped being funny yet! 😉 ) .

Monday we left fairly early to get to the youth hostel, look round the nearby area and get the food shopping in for the week. Ady and I had the same brainwave simultaneously when spotting a Tesco delivery van that we should have just done an internet shop a couple of weeks ago and scheduled it to arrive an hour after we were due to, but next time eh?

The youth hostel is / was lovely. Quite the nicest I’ve ever been in, but as that one took my quota to the grand total of three I guess I am not the very most reliable source of youth hostel reveiwers ever ;-). A really nice big living area, a good sized kitchen (with dishwasher 🙂 ) and really nice rooms all with sinks and individual bedside lights. Helmsley is lovely too, I do like Yorkshire and despite being rather more of a touristy town than a slice of real Yorkshire living it was very nice with the shops just a few minutes walk away. We had a large garden area complete with several apple trees which we made full use of, sending several children out apple collecting with carrier bags which we turned into a crumble and used for apple bobbing too.

I won’t bother doing a daily account but Ady, the children and I had a fab week. It was lovely to spend time with some of our favourite adults and children. It felt like a relaxing, happy, comfortable week with loads of communal living, lots of people doing what they did best and adding it to the group mix, a constant supply of children to play with and adults to chat to with added peace and quiet to sit and read or wander round the town as and when we felt the need. We had lovely late nights sitting up with friends, we filled the recycling box twice over, there was Jenga tournaments to end all Jenga tournaments, there was conga-ing, Anthony read us our rights and the bathroom facilities were suberb ;-).

We had a Halloween party on the last day, which was pretty much as child led as it gets. We’d brought along the bin liner full of stuff which had been dismantled from our Halloween party last year and just bunged in the garage. The children fell upon it and with very little help decorated the hostel beautifully. They collected apples for apple bobbing, Tilda helped with cooking and food preparation, Poppy, Anna and Tilda made potions and concoctions of party drinks and named them, Poppy came up with various party games using the bits and pieces from last year as props. It was pretty damn near perfect I reckon.

Did I mention we had mulled wine? 🙂

I won’t be mentioning the playdoh or the couscous naturally! 😉

Loads of pictures on flickr which I’m sure sum it up and I’ll look forward to reading others’ accounts of the week too. But thanks to all who came along and made it a fab week. 🙂

On the way home we had another overnight stop, this time with The Beans, which is always a winner with all of us. We barely saw any of the children, to the point of all getting a lovely lie in this morning while we listened to the children all playing really happily together. I do love Chris and Helen’s, it’s relaxed, there is wine and tea, the children love it there and we even got to bring fish into their house from The Chippery. 🙂

We got home around 6pm this evening – already dark and dark even earlier tomorrow of course. Davies fell asleep as his head hit the pillow, Tarly, who had had a restorative nap on the way home in the car was rather later to sleep but we have a quiet day at home planned for tomorrow before launching straight back into real life again on Monday. 🙂

Alex – 5 today!!

Have a lovely day darling, looking forward to spending it with you,

Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx

Ben 🙂 Have a lovely 5th birthday – look forward to celebrating it with you! Lots of love, Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx

newsflash.

Davies appears to have actually, finally, really and truly, no kidding, seriously, at last, can’t quite believe it’s true…..

grown.

His age 4-5 years trousers are finally a little on the short side.

Which is good, if for no other reason than Tarly is about big enough to be wearing them! 😆

The car alarm still rings. David is looking somewhat crazed with hair sticking out in all directions, bags under his eyes you could pack clothes for a week away for a family of four in and a demented look in his eyes. The policeman neighbour is sporting ear plugs and muttering about ‘having contacts to sort it out’. We don’t much care actually because a) all our bedrooms are on the other side of our house and actually you really can’t hear it – well you can’t after sufficient wine anyway and b) we’re going away tomorrow and by the time we come back again either Carolyn and Owen will have returned and with one simple click of a button on the car key have disabled the alarm, or the neighbours will have finally been pushed over the brink, formed a bounty hunter style gang complete with bandanas and torn vests and either smashed the car in with bricks, picked it up (it’s only a wee sports car don’t forget) and carried it off to another location or snipped the cable underneath with cable cutters or the battery will have run out on the bloody thing.

This morning I mostly pottered including reading a couple of stories to Tarly and looking at the illustrations in some of our lovelier story books, Davies played with the animation software Ali got for his birthday then we walked into town to return some library books where we bumped into Lucy. We had a browse in the charity shops. Tarly got a free cuddly toy from a charity shop desperate to unload some of their excess of cuddly toys 🙄 because we’re desperate for more of those in our house. Ady got a Blue Peter jigsaw from the 70s for 50p which he used to have as a boy and do with his Dad and then we went to the sweet shop which still sells penny sweets you put into a tub individually (probably containing 47 traces of human urine, bird flu and child’s snot) – which was the same sweet shop me and Frazer used to spend our 20pence pocket money in, probably using the same tubs actually, some 25 years ago. So nostalgia all round this morning :-).

We walked home laughing at Tarly and her odd ways and at one point Ady and I ended up infront of the children. We get to walk holding hands now after 6 years of pushing pushchairs, carrying children or holding hands with them and it’s rather lovely – hey next summer maybe they’ll even be eating whole ice creams ;-). Anyway, we were walking along infront of them and stopped to turn and look at them – our lovely crazy boy, shouting and finding something to draw everyone’s attention to every three paces, our lovely messy girl with her scruffy hair, short skirt and great big sparkly boots, insisting she’s not doing everything we can clearly see she is doing right there. Both of them happy, inquisitive, loving life and as wild, free and individual as all children really should be. Was a lovely moment. 🙂 And it happened just as we arrived back at our house, having been speculating that it would have been pretty much right about this time of year in 1993 that we first came and saw this house. There’s something about walking up the path to the front door when the trees and bushes are in the same state of turning autumnal colours as they were back then and the grass is all green and squishy underfoot and the sun is dappling shadows on the same places on the walls as it was that time of year that makes me feel that this really is the house we were supposed to be living in. It’s not huge, it’s not grand, but we knew when we walked in the front door for the very first time it was ours and it was where we were supposed to be. Who knows if we’ll be here this time next year, but it was nice to feel how much we’d moved on at the same time as keeping still somehow.

This afternoon I’ve been to Tescos while Ady and the children ate popcorn and watched films – cos they truly aren’t filmed out even this week 😯 then I did loads of baking (chocolate brownies, chocolate gingerbread, banana loaf) while Ady cleaned out both cars, mowed the lawns and dug out a bin liner full of Halloween-y stuff from last years party ready to pack. The children made birthday cards for the friends they will be spending birthdays with next week.

Tonight I’ve packed everything in a super organised manner with a bag to take into Babs’ tomorrow containing just overnight stuff rather than hulking our whole weeks worth of stuff in, done route finders and generally prepared for a week away.

Looking forward to seeing those of you we will be with or visiting along the way – I’ll be back next weekend.

I can’t quite believe this story.

and I didn’t even tick the nail varnish remover answer!!

You’re a Wild Drunk

You can get enough drink. Seriously, you’ll just go puke and start pounding them back again!

but whether or not you’ll want to post the results is another thing….

For anyone who doesn’t already know / isn’t already coming, a bunch of us will be staying Monday to Friday at Helmsley Youth Hostel. We have a day trip out planned on Tuesday but are planning to do plenty of sitting round chatting on Wednesday and preparing for and having a Halloween party on Thursday. If anyone is local enough to pop over for the day during the week please let me know in advance and we’d love to see you. 🙂

In which clearly I am pre-menstrual. Yesterday my tolerance for friends, family, pets, the world in general and actually even inanimate objects was fairly low. Today it has further plummeted.

I saw a car sticker yesterday which said ‘tested negative for patience’ and it made me smile. Today it would have made me nod in empathy.

I signed up for the Home School Shoe Box Swap scheme which is one of those ideas which I think is probably excellent in theory and utterly stupid in practise for me as it is simply adding yet another thing to do to an already rather teeteringly full job list. So of course with that firmly bunged down my list of things as something to think about when we get back from Halloween camp I have managed to be paired up with the most enthusiastic swapper ever. On the plus side I think she may well be a great character for fictional writing inspiration 😉 but she is bombarding me with emails and then emailing to check I got her earlier email and then emailing to apologise for emailing me so much and then emailing me to thank me for reassuring her that she is not annoying me by emailing me so much. Clearly I need to match make her with David and Doreen the Thank you neighbours – it would be the perfect international friendship.

Oh and talking of neighbours – Carolyn and Owen our opposite neighbours (they are semi attached to Don and Maureen the retired neighbours on the corner who work as dinner supervisors and bring us cartons of juice and raisins and next door to David and Doreen (and sometimes Jeanette) the Thank you neighbours, who are semi attached to the policeman and the nurse who keep funny hours – he’s friendly, she’s less so and they in turn are next to the newer sexy builder neighbour who is redoing his drive -are you still with me?) who none of the neighbours really know that well. They have his and hers sports cars and both work long hours and have no children and go on lots of holidays and have a cleaner and he supports Chelsea and at least one of them smokes judging by the colour of their nets 😆 Well we think Carolyn and Owen are on holiday this week as Owen’s car hasn’t been there all week but today at about 11am Carolyn’s car alarm started going off and is still going off now. This started as a minor annoyance. It is now probably cause for taking to the car with my Dad’s sledgehammer if he’d not taken it home with him last night when they came round for dinner.

And talking of my parents they really annoyed me last night too, not with anything specific, just by being here really. And they both nagged me about not talking to my Granny lately who had been nagging them about not hearing from me. Because of course she can’t contact me and it’s not as if I’m busy with a life or anything is it.

And talking of busy lives…. you get the picture.

Nic. Not the best company to be in today :-).

So my plan was to do some playroom clearing today as that is a fairly regular once a month activity. I get all PMTy, rant lots about living in a shit tip and how no one ever does anything around here but me (not true!) and set to tipping everything in the playroom onto the floor, clearing a bin bag or so out of it, putting it all back away again and feel much better. But I also wanted to do some baking this morning and I’d said I’d make some playdoh and we’d run out of vegetable oil for the playdoh which meant we had to go out (in the pouring rain, naturally) to get the oil. So by the time everyone was dressed and we’d been out and come back I didn’t have enough time to do both and as I had to make the playdoh – well I didn’t have to but I wanted to – and would be in the kitchen anyway I thought I’d just do the baking. So I made snickerdoodles, which I accidentally put peppermint essence in instead of vanilla (you can’t taste it fortunately, and they do leave your breath minty fresh!) and some flapjacks, which by some fluke didn’t burn or anything and look lovely, although on tasting we’ll probably find that in a comedy twist Ady had refilled the syrup tin with varnish or something and they are actually toxic. Tomorrow’s arrangements to see Chris and Julie have been cancelled so tomorrow is now a free day to do more baking (I’m planning chocolate brownies, chocolate gingerbread, banana cakes and maybe some savoury stuff, perhaps cheese scones?), tidy the playroom if I’m still in the right mood for it and pack up ready to leave Sunday morning for Babs’.

So the children fell out with each other, screamed and shouted – oh how infectious is a grouch, even more so than a smile. I ranted and threatened, you can probably picture it all just reading about it. Lucy and Rebecca came round and Rebecca really happily came in and played while Lucy popped home to drop Richard back so that was a massive step forward. Lucy came back, we had lunch, tidied away the geomags and got out the playdoh. It was a bit sticky – unsurprisingly given how the day was going, but the children all made fairly creative things before we all got bored and suggested a trip to the park. Lucy collected Richard and we had a nice enough half hour or so at the park with reduced whinging (mostly mine I think actually :oops:) before heading back to Lucy’s for tea. The children all disappeared and appeared to be playing nicely, although there were rather too many puddles on the floor and soggy clothes for us to be altogether pleased at the peace :roll:.

We’re home again now, the car alarm is still going off (or is that just the ringing in my ears?), peace is restored with some enforced quiet watching of Discover kids while I rant here and their tea is cooking.

But you know what, it’s Friday, Ady should be home any moment and I’m barely an hour away from opening the wine – things can only get better!