One word? When seven would do…

None of the above!

Alison and children arrived (very) late on Monday night. Ady had already gone up to bed and I’d already drunk plenty of wine to keep me awake while listening to all the music videos I linked to (and maybe done some dancing round the lounge too :lol:). Davies and Scarlett hadn’t gone to sleep until about 10.30pm, because they have always slept in their own rooms which since we’ve been back in Sussex have been on opposite ends of the house on different levels they don’t disturb each other once they’ve gone to their rooms regardless of whether they are asleep yet. But they love the idea of sleepovers and often ask to sleep in each others’ rooms which we almost always say no to. I think I’m going to start letting them do it a bit more though as they are so giddy when they are allowed to that it takes them bloody hours to get to sleep :roll:.

The evening finishing and the next morning starting are something of a blur, possibly because there weren’t many hours between the two 😳 😆 so Tuesday was a quietish day marked with a walk to the post office en masse in the middle and some baking of snickerdoodles helped by a changing conveyor belt of helpers at various points. Davies and Lije were not really removed from the X box all day but Davies was loving having someone to play his W&G with and between them with Davies’ familiarity of the game and Lije’s superior control skills they got way further than he’s ever got before so that was nice. 🙂 The dual controls on that game mean you work together rather than in competition with each other. There was also a play put on for us by all the children except Tarly which was most entertaining and amusing, particularly Davies’ reluctance to complete the Happily Ever After by getting married :lol:.

In the early evening Ady and I went off to give blood. When we arrived at the hall we both confessed to actually being slightly nervous as it was a first time for both of us. We were both called into seperate booths for initial finger prick testing and a clarification of the answers on our forms about drug use and sexual history which might put us at risk of diseases. The doctor who saw me was a real comedian, but in a very deadpan manner with a straight face throughout. He asked me to read the questions again to be sure my answers were all as I’d indicated and then said ‘I draw your attention in particular to question 4 – have you ever had sex with someone for drugs or money?’ – that also includes sleeping with pensioners in exchange for Argos gift vouchers’ – I looked at him and he said ‘well we are in Worthing!’. I asked if it also included Ratners coupons and he assured me that was OK and didn’t count! 😆 Which meant that when my drop of blood floated at the top of the test tube instead of ‘sinking like a bullet’ as it was supposed to we both looked a bit concerned. This meant that I had to have a further test to ensure I wasn’t anaemic. At which point I confess to fretting about the volume of alcohol I’d consumed in the previous 24 hours 😳 I got called into the next booth where the next doctor spent ages checking my veins before drawing more blood from my right arm to test some more. He said my iron levels needed to be 125 or something and mine was 126 so I was ok but only just (all went rather over my head but it was nothing to do with the Ratners vouchers or the dry white wine!). Ady and I got called to the beds for the blood-draining at the same time but while his went all smoothly mine was not to be. The guy struggled to find a vein and when he did stick the needle in it really hurt, like REALLY hurt, right down my lower arm with a real tugging feeling. I seriously don’t think I could have managed it for 10-15 minutes. He called over another two nurses and then said to be ‘does that hurt?’ and I admitted it did, so he took the needle out again. He said the vein was very deep and he might have caught a nerve or something. They couldn’t use the other arm because I’d already had the retest from that one so they are calling me back again in a couple of weeks. My arm really ached last night but is fine today, so no lasting damage. 🙂 I’ll probably take the children next time, I reckon they’d find it really interesting.

The children – specifically Tarly and Lulah took forever to go to sleep and Alison and I were almost early to bed ourselves. Almost :lol:.

Today we had a plan to go to the local park and meet up with Lucy but in the end Lucy just came here with Richard and Rebecca. It’s been a really nice day with Davies and Lije playing pretty much non stop X box, Tarly and Lulah holed up in Tarly’s bedroom for hours and all of the others playing various games. Alison cut my hair (under much pressure – it looks lovely but was a trim rather than a restyle) and then did Tilda’s too and inbetween we managed lots of chatting.

A lovely visit, as always. 🙂

The children conked out fairly quickly (unsurprisingly!) and I think I’m heading for bed pretty soon too. More socialising happening in the next couple of days before a quiet weekend.

I simply can’t work out how to get ‘free’ music so I’m satisfying my clompy DM footed meander down memory lane with youtube 🙂

Stevie Nicks – Rooms on Fire

James – Sit Down

EMF – Unbelievable

KLF – 3am Eternal – this one takes me back so quick I lose my breath!

KLF – Justified and Ancient – has it’s own story and makes me smile

Arrested Development – Tennessee

Ace of Base – All that she wants

Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby alright stop, collaborate and LISTEN!

Simply Red – For your babies

Mr Big – To be with you

En Vogue – My Lovin’

Alright stop.

Hammertime!

and anyone get this?

sunny day sweeping the clouds away…

because it is cocking up my template I’ll blog about today now. Also because we have house guests arriving later and I have not remotely prepared for them so I’ll not get the chance to blog later.

I didn’t do a lot this morning, mainly because I got up really late (I wasn’t actually asleep, I was in the middle of a very interesting dream that I wanted to know the end of and trying to get back to sleep to get back into it but the children kept coming and hassling me to get up so in the end I gave in and got up!). They had three bowls of cereal each – we’ve had a poor selection of cereal and I’d been food shopping yesterday and stocked up again so they were celebrating! 😆

We went to group which was good. They both did some sticking of leaves onto paper which is The Law for Home Educated children at this time of year 😆 They did plenty of running around pretending to be Wallace and Gromit which at MM has the added surrealty of joining in a Dr Who game which somehow seems to effortlessly integrate Wallace and Gromit. 😆 They also did some of the (banned by me) clambering up and down a wall with railings with a big drop on one side, Tarly doing so in bare feet. 🙄 I like group a lot but I am still struggling with my own ‘what will people think’ feelings about large amounts of Home Ed children all together and as it is situated next to a school which has it’s lunchhour in the playground coinciding with group I am very aware of my bare foot, non coat wearing offspring running around dicing with death climbing up walls and messing with things like broken glass and old tins while brandishing hockey sticks in full view of the dinner ladies! My issue I know but I remain convinced that it will one day be one of my children splashed across the Daily Mail to illsutrate just why all children really should be in school :lol:. So the kids got the full lecture on social services and how I am failing in my role as their protector and carer if I don’t prevent them from doing things which could injure them, particularly in full view of people who might report us! It is such a double standard really as if I’m honest if the area was not overlooked then I probably wouldn’t have such issues with it and I hate that about myself.

I had a nice time anyway. Ali brought bath bomb making stuff so I made one of those and heckled her while she showed other people how to do it 😆 and made some paper planes – oh and thank you Allie, I was called ‘Nic’ all day :-).

We came home, I wrapped several kids’ dvds I’ve sold on ebay and we walked to the post office to send them. Chatted with David (thank you neighbour) on the way, talked about crossing roads and looked at all the many flowers which are still in full bloom even though I’m sure they are out of season to be so. Davies and Scarlett had several ‘races’ to various points and I noticed something again which I realised last week which is that Scarlett is actually easily on a par with Davies and is probably faster than him, certainly over short distances. No idea which one of them this reflects on, or indeed if they should be much difference between their speed at their age but interesting anyway.

They were indeed well behaved in the post office so got their choice of sweets – Tarly chose a 5 pence pack of fizzy things, Davies chose a 31p pack of Tooty Fruity sweets which I told him I used to have when I was little along with the Tooty Mintys which they also used to make. I didn’t tell him about the time I ate a whole pack of Tooty Fruitys (which were definitely in bigger packets when I was small) and promptly threw them all back up again in a very pretty pile of vomit incase it put him off them. I can only have been about Tarly’s age but I recall my Mum’s horror to this day! 😆

Since we’ve been home I’ve further disturbed their eating for the day by giving them a late and large lunch and then a bowl full of fruit each for tea just now. They are playing with geomags and trying to compose myself to go and sort out sleeping arrangements and tidy away various things in the playroom ready for a houseful for the next couple of days.

Way back when I first started to think about Home Education I spent lots of money amassing the various ‘tools’ I thought I’d require in order to do it properly. These included some things which have indeed proved useful – a laminator, a subscription to enchanted learning, a blog ;), membership to all the various yahoo groups and so on. Also included were the rather more expensive things, many of which have simply never been used. We do indeed have posters of the times table on our playroom wall, we have several jigsaw puzzles depicting maps of the UK and the world. We have a whole bookcase shelf crammed with workbooks. I’m not saying these will never get used, I’m not saying they were a complete waste of money, but I certainly was foolish if I thought that without them I would be unable to Home Educate.

One of the things I very quickly realised about Davies is that he simply doesn’t learn stuff the same as I do, or the same way as Scarlett. And none of us learn like Ady does! Ady is currently studying and revising and learning as much as he can about Health and Safety for a qualification he is working towards next year. It appears to be a quite academic type of exam with lots of essay style questions and whilst you do need to have an understanding of what you are talking about a great expanse of it is simply remembering facts and quoting the correct wording of great lumps of text. I imagine it is rather similar to a law qualfication in that there are aspects which are open to interpretation but you need to be 100% clear on what is written before you can start interpreting it.

Watching Ady try and cram as much of this information into his head as possible has reminded me of my own time spent revising for GCSEs and A levels back at school. I have a pretty good memory, specifically for things with numbers in – I can recall lots of phone numbers, birthdays, the five lines we used to do in the National Lottery when it first started. I also remember song lyrics and poems very easily. I have never got the hang of that memory trick where you associate things with something else to remember them though. But you know so much of the stuff I have filled my mind with on a temporary basis has been with the sole purpose of proving I can really. I have a GCSE in French, but the other day I couldn’t remember what the French word of ‘eye’ was. I have a GCSE in History but although the period we covered for the last two years was the Tudors and the Stuarts I couldn’t possibly tell you anything more about Henry VIII than I have recently learnt with the children from the Horrible Histories song. I have GCSEs in Science for which I learnt the chemical symbols from the periodic table – I could probably rustle up a few on demand but not the whole lot. For my A level in Government and Political Studies I could rattle off every post war election, who won and who was the leader of the opposition – I couldn’t tell you that information now.

I could however probably still recite chunks of the poem from James and the Giant Peach that we covered when I was 11, I could sit and rewrite all but from memory the essay that passed me my A Level Sociology (Marx claimed that ‘religion was the opiate of the masses’, discuss.). I could still recite the poem I wrote about every single one of my junior school teachers when I left the school aged 11.

What stuck, what was meaningful, were the things that inspired me, that I created myself, or that I have used in everyday life since. Reading, writing and arithmatic are things I use every single day in some capacity. I dropped Home Economics, cookery, music, textiles and PE in favour of Electronics when I reached 14. I do still know how to wire a plug, change a fuse and what a two gang, one way switch is but I don’t recall the last time I ever used those skills. Cooking, singing, dancing and even sewing are things I quite often do on some sort of daily basis nowadays though.

If I had to define the most useful lesson I ever learnt at school it was how to deal with people. And that was a very hard lesson – it took me the entire 11 years I was there and actually it was only in coming away from it and analysing it and then going to sixth form and trying a different approach that I cracked it anyway. Frankly I’ve come a hell of a long way from being 16 and leaving school in every single area and a lot of the ‘good work’ I’ve done was merely undoing what I’d learnt at school in many areas.

Anyway, learning styles :).

I think it is pretty much accepted that people learn things in different ways, we’ve all done enough of those blogthings and quizilla quizzes about whether our brains are left or right handed etc to know that we are all quite different. We all have different things that come easily to us, things that drive us etc. I won’t sit and list all the various skills and ‘things’ that all of my readers have but suffice to say I could choose something about every one of you that would be way beyond me and similarly I imagine I can do at least one thing that every one of you couldn’t too. Part of that is education, part of it is effort, part of it is natural skill and talent but I suspect a larger part is just our hardwiring – what makes us who we are. And I think how we learn is a big part of that too.

In that very unscientific post about how you’d process that maths question just in our little group we had several different answers. For people who don’t ‘get’ maths learning things like times tables is a tremendous help – you can learn by rote that 8 x 8 is 64 without visualising the numbers at all and if you are blessed with a photographic memory then maths is not beyond your reach even if you never really get the concept of ‘playing with numbers’. In that post I talked about being able to work out 80% of something as that would be the price less staff discount for most of the retail outlets I worked in over the years. I didn’t actually work it out by calculating 80%, I worked out 10%, doubled it and subtracted it from the total. Similarly if I had to work out 5% of something I would do it by working out 10% and halving it. I remember some maths concepts just made perfect sense to me at school – percentages, ratios, fractions, algebra were all pretty straightforward because I saw them as problem solving sort of questions. Things like long division and long multiplication were trickier because it was all about the numbers and not about a concept – does that make sense? There seemed to be a logic puzzle aspect to something like fractions and those questions like ‘Johnny has twice as many apples as Mary, Mary has half the amount that Fred does and Fred has one more than Susan. If all the apples together add up to 22 how many does each person have?’ (by the way that is not a real question, I have no idea if it would work out to whole apples each and might come back and try later and edit it :lol:) made far more sense to me and were also something I would enjoy trying to work out.

Autonomy allows children to play with numbers, maths is an area which I never fret about for the children. They can see at a glance if one of them has more sweets than the other, can divide a plate of sandwiches between six of them equally and will quite often sit pondering before saying to me ‘5 and 5 and 5 and 5 is 20’. In workbook world it would probably be more important that Scarlett could recognise numbers up to 10 written down and maybe even write them herself than counting any higher that that. Actually I don’t think she’d recognise the number 8 written down but she can all but count to 20.

So if we agree that we process information in different ways, we recall it in different ways then it stands to reason that we learn it in the first place in different ways. Some people have a knack for training, for identifying what it is that will make an idea or a concept or some information click for someone, how to make them ‘get it’. I’ve done a lot of training sessions (as both trainer and trainee) and some people respond really quickly to the whiteboard, teacher at the front, calling out ideas, being prompted and maybe having a summary or a handout given at the end about ‘what we’ve learnt’. Some people loathe that style of training and would rather learn on the job, out on the floor, doing the job as they learn. For others sessions like role play, watching films to demonstrate the training, examples and anecdotes and case studies are more powerful training tools. Some people require a personal aspect, something to empathise or identify with, something that resonates with them personally. I ‘good’ trainer will develop the knack of finding out which method works best for each individual and work on targetting their training accordingly.

I think there are two ways of getting a qualification in something. One is the total recall method, cramming as much information into your brain as possible and regurgitating it on demand. The other is actually understanding the subject. And understanding it to such a degree that any question posed about it would be one you could answer. And then I think in life generally we rely on a combination. Reading is a bit like that. You could learn whole words, rely on being able to recognise them without spelling them out – which is how we read once we are fluent at it, but we combine that with some knowledge of phonics or letter sounds so that when we come across a new word we are able to decode it – but added to that it needs to be a word we have in our vocabulary anyway. One of the words on that reading age list that several people had their children do recently was ‘poignant’ I believe (someone told me, I never looked at it 😉 ). Now if you didn’t know the word then you would be unlikely to work out what it said, whereas if it was a word you already knew then you’d be in a much better position to have a stab at guessing it. I had come across the name Hermione in books years ago (Jilly Cooper actually!) but never knew how it was pronounced until the Harry Potter films came out and I heard people saying the name and suddenly realised ‘oh that must be how you are supposed to say that Herm y one name’.

So with Maths you could do it by simply reciting times tables or you could truly ‘get’ what the numbers mean, you could visualise them as balls or cakes or whatever and have a mental image of what those numbers might ‘look like’.

There has been a thread on a yahoo group recently about the periodic table – I used to know quite a bit of that by memory but never actually understood it – that would have been a far better way of learning it I reckon, to have actually understood it.

Little kids constantly ask ‘why’ – I think that is because they start off with the learning style of making sense of something first, really trying to understand it. We seem keen to stamp that out of them though and by age 7 you rarely hear a child ask ‘why’, their lose their skill for lateral thinking, their wonder at how things happen and worse than that they lose that delightful ability of cross referencing everything back to everything else. They are pushed into only thinking about one thing at a time, categorising everything into curriculum headings, exercising only one area of their development at a time. Today I told the children that if they were really well behaved at the post office and didn’t touch ‘anything’ (it is crammed with all sorts of aladdins cave type goodies all very precariously balanced on the shelves and we have frequently brought piles cascading down by poking at interesting looking things!) I would buy them some sweets. Tarly wanted to know how that could happen when her feet would be touching the floor. Now she is not four yet, she was not being cheeky or clever, she simply hasn’t done the early years stuff about the senses and been shown the picture to demonstrate touch as being something we do with our fingers and hands. She has learnt some stuff about gravity and being pulled to touch the Earth at some contact point and that’s how she relates it. Scarlett can still listen with her eyes, taste with her nose and hear with her fingertips – hope she always can. 🙂

So maybe there aren’t learning styles, maybe we’re all hardwired to learn through experience but somewhere along the way we lose the right to learn what we want when we want and have it all prescribed to us in hour sized chunks under seperate headings and drip fed to us over 11 years. But think back to how you revised for the last exam you took? Did you sit listening to heavy rock music in your pit of a bedroom while reading and rereading? Did you hang upside down in complete silence with your eyes shut perfecting total recall? Did you develop some clever mnemonic for it, set it to a song, equate every bit of information with a step along a familiar journey? Did you write and rewrite it with different coloured pens as part of a timetabled study guide? Or did you just really, really love what you were learning about, still hold that knowledge today and just understood it because it meant something to you?

Anybody? And if you get that one will you get this?
‘Your purple prose just gives you away’.

I drove past my old sixth form college on Friday and pointed it out to Davies and Scarlett. Now I can’t pretend for one moment that I did the whole sixth form thing properly, like so many things in life it was all a bit of an anticlimax really. But the promise, oh the promise of it was huge. I was going from an all girls school with very strict uniform, teachers and halls and classrooms I was tired of to a mixed sixth form, to wear whatever I liked, study exciting subjects like Sociology and Politics and reinvent myself to whomever I decided to be. I had a part time job which I loved and brought me in plenty of cash for buying DMs and little skirts, snakebite and black and for a few short months I utterly revelled in being 17, skinny, loud, interesting, opinionated and a very different person. It didn’t last of course, but that year or so that I toyed with what being a ‘proper student’ might have been about remains a treasured memory of my past. I did all sorts of crazy things, some of which had long lasting far reaching effects into my life still today but it was my first real taste of freedom and the very chance to cock it all up was what mattered most I reckon.

I had a very definite style, it was fairly deliberate and possibly not a million miles away from the rest of the crowd but it felt individual, I wore my jeans ripped – all the way up to the thigh, I wouldn’t do that now but I’m kinda glad I once had the thighs to do such things :lol:, my eyeliner thick, my jumpers big and baggy, my DMs clumpy and my bags and folders clutched under my arm were decorated with my own colourful artwork. I drove a bright yellow mini with a stereo that was not fixed to the dashboard and had to be held onto when I went round a corner otherwise it would come unwired! It used to regularly stop at traffic lights and I was dead proud that I knew how to open the boot and get it started again.

Today I happened to be wearing ripped jeans (this time they are ripped becuase I have genuinely worn a hole in one knee and show very little flesh, none of it deliberately), my green DMs and a very big baggy jumper, I caught a glimpse of myself in the shop window at Tescos where I went food shopping and thought ‘blimey I look young’ and I felt young, a bit like I shouldn’t really be out doing something as grown up as food shopping all by myself. And then on the way home the song which the post title lyrics came from was on the radio, so I turned it up super loud, sang along at the top of my voice and reminded myself of a very Happy Christmas filled with college parties, drinking my snakebite, blowing the train fare home from Brighton on another pint of it and ringing my Dad to get him out of bed to come fetch me and my mate instead. Ah, the glorious irresponsibility of it all!

Anyway. 🙂

Today, when I have not been locked in past memories of a time long since gone by, we have had a Very Nice Sunday. It was my turn to get up this morning and Tarly was on top form awake by 6am ish. We did sofa snuggling and watched Little Bear together (I like Little Bear, it reminds me of innocent cartoons of my childhood) and then Davies got up. Tarly spent ages playing on the Barbie website on Ady’s laptop. She’d been playing it yesterday and is actually very proficient at all sorts of computer-y type stuff. She needed to keep typing her name in at the start of each game so I wrote her name out for her in capitals and by the end of it she was barely looking at the bit of paper – and was (rightfully) very proud of that. 🙂 Davies really made me laugh by saying to her ‘but you could just hit a few random keys and press enter if you wanted’ to which she made me laugh even more with her reply ‘No Davies, they need to know EXACTLY who is playing the game. If I did that then they wouldn’t know it was me!’. I set Davies up on my old laptop with his animation software and they both spent most of the day playing on the laptops. Davies graduated to Cat in the Hat (which I have the xbox version of for him for Christmas) and then Zoombinis – he has totally cracked Zoombinis now, the logic and everything is within his grasp and Scarlett loves to sit and watch. He is continuing to play with numbers a lot and getting progressively larger in the numbers he is playing with so that is great. 🙂

I knew todays food shop for the month was going to be a mammoth one so I set off early and arrived at Tescos shortly after it opened. Our local Tesco is having a massive refurbishment and must be getting on for two and a half times it’s previous size. It is still not finished but is already vastly improved in the range of food it is selling. We eat a lot of Chinese and Indian style food and they now have a fab range of authentic (and cheap!) bits and bobs to go with that. 🙂 I realised when I was not even half way round that I simply wasn’t going to fit everything in one trolley so I did half the store, went through the till and paid, loaded it all into the car and then went back in again and did the second half! We’re totally fooded up now and I got a few more bits and pieces for Christmas and birthday collected together too. 🙂 I also carried out our vow made watching Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s latest show to go organic / free range wherever possible for meat. It clearly added a few quid to the bill, which on one hand we can’t really afford but as it probably was only the equivalent of a couple of bottles of wine each month I reckon we can go without that instead. I am not remotely fussed about organic vegetables but I did come to the conclusion that while I am always going to eat meat I would rather feel it had not been quite such a shite life for the animal before it died so I could eat it. I’m still faintly dubious about the real difference guaranteed other than paying double but chicken particularly is one of our staple foods and some of the footage on the Hugh show was enough to convince me to go for free range organic, so we have. 🙂

When I got home (with comedy loaded up car with shopping filling the boot, the back seats and the passenger seat too) Mum was there having been dropped over by Frazer to collect her car from last night. Ady and I took the best part of an hour to unload the car and put all the shopping away so she entertained the children while we did so. She left.

Davies was occupied with Zoombinis so Tarly and I got out the plastic glasses for her party. I had this idea that it would be nice to have plastic goblets to drink from and that we could decorate them so I wrote each child’s name on one with a gold pen and Tarly stuck fake jewels and glitter on them. I think they look fab :). I also showed her some of the activities I’ve got planned for the party and we talked again about who is coming. She is so looking forward to it and actually so am I – can’t believe my baby is going to be FOUR!

Ady was cooking roast beef so we had that around 2pm altogether then had a lazy afternoon. I listed a few more bits and pieces on ebay after a very successful auction of various outgrown kids dvds ended yesterday netting me about 4 times what I’d hoped for in total. The stuff I listed today could go either way really, but at least it is less clutter round the house again which can only be a good thing.

I’m gearing up for a last week of freedom this week. I have plans every day and then next week will be manic with me starting work on Tuesday, Tarly’s birthday Wednesday, working Thursday and her party on Saturday -can’t wait. 🙂

Friday – The children and I had been out and about all week or having people over so I deliberately kept Friday free for some time at home. Ady ended up working from home as his car spent the morning in the garage having some work done to it. I took him to the garage to collect it mid morning and we shot over to Toys R Us as Tarly is being very indecisive about just what she wants for her birthday / Christmas and can’t seem to decide between baby dolls and baby doll stuff and the leap into Barbie World. She does already have an amount of ‘baby’ doll stuff and tbh doesn’t really seem to get a lot of play value out of it so despite my own personal aversion to all things Barbie I can see this would be a better way forward. (Also there is loads of second hand Barbie stuff around at car boot sales and charity shops so it will be an easy set of stuff to add to.)

Ady and Davies walked round together looking at various things while Tarly and I looked at the Barbies, the babies, the Sylvanian Families (which she sort of liked the idea of but didn’t sway her from either of the Barbies and Babies) and various other bits and pieces. We’ve spent the rest of the weekend talking about it and looking at things online and I reckon we’ve decided on Barbie now – it’s the thought of a Barbie horse which finally tipped the balance :lol:.

I really enjoyed that half an hour or so with her, she was quite literally like a child in a toy shop, filled with delight and wonder at all the stuff crammed on the shelves. Scarlett has always been very undemanding about things like toys – from a very early age she was able to accept ‘not now, maybe for your birthday’ as an answer to a request for something – and not once in the whole Barbie vs Baby debate has she simply said that she wants both, she understands it is a choice between the two. I was quite shocked at the realism of the baby doll toys actually – they are a million miles away from the ones I played with not 30 years ago. I recall desperately wanting a baby doll called ‘Bella’ from the Argos catalogue for the Christmas before I was 7 or 8 and being so thrilled when I got it. There was a particular smell about baby dolls back then and I was instantly transported back 25 years or so when we were looking at them in Toys R Us as they still have that exact same smell. But now they do way more that take water through their mouths, pass it through enough tubing inside to cause a few minutes delay before emptying it into a toy nappy, close their eyes when you lie them down and maybe say ‘Mama’ if you have a really pricey one. For under fifteen quid you could get one that when you held it’s hand yawned, closed it’s eyes, made contented sucking noises and little newborn baby gurgles. Amazing!

We came home for lunch and spent much of the afternoon making another animation. This time of a geomag figure dancing – you can see that over on Davies’ blog. Ady went off to give Jim a lift to Butlins and after we’d made the film the children played with the geomags.

Ady came home and I popped out. I had some ebay parcels to send and a few things I wanted to do in the local town. I didn’t manage to get any of the things I was aiming to find so added them to my list of things to do on Saturday instead. After the children had gone to bed I rang my Mum to arrange for her and I to go out on Saturday for various bits of shopping and she ended up getting in her car and coming over to talk about it instead (she only lives a mile away).

Yesterday was the day we’d earmarked for going shopping for various bits and pieces for Scarlett’s party, her birthday and some Christmas shopping. We’ve pretty much sorted the children’s presents already with a few last minute bits still left to get but Mum wanted to get a birthday present for Tarly from Frazer (my brother – who at 30 still doesn’t do his own shopping :roll:), a little gift for Davies on Tarly’s birthday from her, Christmas presents for both children from Frazer. We got a dvd each for the children for Scarlett’s birthday (always a winner for presents for our children, films) and more geomags for Christmas (hurrah! Got the pastel ones for Tarly and some new black and orange ones for Davies). I got some pretty party shoes for Tarly to go with her Princess dress ready for her party and a pair of Christmassy pjs each for the children. We started a tradition years ago that on Christmas Eve they each get one gift – which they don’t seem to have worked out yet but is always pjs to put on there and then. I also got several pairs of trousers for Davies who has finally grown enough for all his trousers to be too short now – Mum put some money towards them as she insisted I bought the slightly more expensive than value brand ones so she paid the difference! 🙂

We came home, bringing food for lunch and Dad arrived over at our house for the afternoon too. Dad, Ady and the children were playing a rousing game of ‘Crackers’ – a fairly antique Wallace and Gromit board game Ady found in a charity shop for D’s birthday. It’s a fairly mental game with loads of crazy tasks to carry out so they all seemed to be enjoying that.

Then Mum and I headed back out again for party supplies for Tarly’s birthday party. We got everything on my list and a few extras, all at bargain prices from the pound store so that was very pleasing too. 🙂

Came home again and Davies had decorated and arranged the playroom to put on a show so we all went and watched that – it made up for in style what it lacked in substance and was heavily reliant on lots of audience participation but give that boy a (toy) microphone and he’s ready to charm the crowd! 😆 The children had a bath supervised by my Mum, who was then allowed to brush Scarlett’s hair :shock:. The children went to bed, Dad and I went out to get fish and chips for dinner and we had a really nice evening.

I had a glimpse today of what it might be like to teach. It was a nice enough half hour given I relaxed a long way from what I had planned to do and went with the flow but of course teachers wouldn’t get luxuries like that, and they’d have way more than three children of mixed abilities and interests to deal with at once.

This morning Davies xboxed while Tarly played with Tap a shape. This has easily won ‘toy of the week’ here this week. Sometimes they do seem to fixate on one thing for a while before losing interest again. The tap a shape is a cork board with a little hammer and pins and a variety of wooden shapes with holes in the middle. You attach them to the cork board using the hammer and pins to make patterns and pictures. It was a cheap Christmas present about 2 years ago and goes through periods of being played with loads by one or both of the children. I bunged some pizza dough ingredients in the breadmaker. We turned the Xbox off at 10.30am and I put ClassTV on, every so often we watch it and it usually grabs their attention. It was Numbertime and as Davies is currently into playing with numbers and counting in a big way and Tarly loves anything to do with ‘pennies’ it caught them both for a good half hour. I hung several loads of washing out (which promptly got rained on for most of the day :roll:) and we headed off to Lucy’s.

We’d planned last night to do pizza with the children for lunch so we sat round the little table in their kitchen with a ball of dough each, shaped it (Davies’ was ‘Gromit shaped’ while Rebecca and Tarly went for the more conventional circular choices), spread it with ketchup, sprinkled it with grated cheese and the girls added some chopped up ham to theirs, cooked it and ate it. I tried to talk to them about the ingredients in the dough and what part of the baking each one played – the important one being yeast, but it didn’t quite work out that way 😆 and there lies why I am an autonomous educator really! Rebecca and Davies were really quick and efficient and their pizzas went in first, Tarly was a bit more into the idea of playing with the dough and making pretty shapes until I explained that it was sort of like the plate for our pizza but we could eat it, it was to hold all the ingredients on together and keep them in one place while we cooked it and ate it. That seemed to do the trick and she was happy to roll it out then. She is pretty handy at spreading things having done a lot of peanut butter, marmite and chocolate spread on toast type activities and hers and mine went in next. Davies ate over half of his which was rather surprising as he was insisting he didn’t like it, Tarly picked all the ham off hers and then all the cheese, Rebecca and Richard ate all theirs. 🙂

They played nicely, if noisily for the afternoon and did drawing, running around, we read some stories and ate some flapjack. It was nice :).

Our friend Jim, who lives in Ireland is over this weekend for a stay at Butlins with some mates so he came over last night to catch up with us before heading to Butlins today. We had a great night talking about old times, catching up on each others lifes now, lining up loads of empty bottles along the fireplace and laughing. We played our usual game of flicking between the music channels on Sky and guessing the song title, artist and year with additional bonus points for facts like album title etc and it was a really, really nice evening.

I’ve got me, Ali, Helen, Merry, Sally (can you email me your address Sally please), Kirsty – anyone else?

Happy 10th Birthday to Poppy Portico! Have a wonderful day, love from Ady, Nic, Davies & Scarlett xxx

I had the dentist first thing this morning for the check up on my wisdom tooth and review of the xray from the hospital. Lucy came and sat in the house with all the children while I dashed across the road to the dentists – love being walking distance from the docs and the dentist, it’s fab :). She was happy with the way the tooth is looking now, all the infection has cleared but it is still not fully erupted so will require further monitoring. The surgeon is at the dentists once a month so she is planning to show him my xray and get his opinion on further action if any. But she did notice that while my teeth are pretty healthy my gums are not. My Mum suffered really bad gum disease whilst pregnant with me and never really recovered, to the point that they receeded so badly she actually lost all her top teeth a couple of years back. The teeth were all in fantastic condition still but the gums couldn’t hold them. Dentists have always kept a close eye on my gums as I think it can be a hereditry thing and sure enough mine are not good and worsened with both pregnancies. My teeth also stain really badly (due to all the wine and tea mostly :oops:) and when we used a private dentist I actually went 6 monthly to the dentist and 6 monthly to the hygienist to keep them in check and she suggested I start going to them 3 monthly to keep an eye on the health and condition of my gums. Then told me that today would be free and if I could manage to come back again within the next two weeks she do a scale and polish for me free too all under the banner of what I paid a couple of weeks ago – which was £15.50 and will have covered three appointments, a scale and polish and an xray at the hospital. I dread to think what that would have run into at my private dentists but it would have been more than I spent on a months food shopping nowadays for sure. Hurrah for the NHS (on this occassion!).

Julie, Jack and Maisie arrived and we headed over to the local park for about an hour. Davies and Scarlett really enjoyed it, I’m not so sure the other children did quite so much :(. Davies had been watching dead leaves blow about in the wind and decided to do ‘a science experiment’ to see if enough leaves would carry his weight in the wind. He knew he needed to collect loads because he is heavy so he got a good sized handful, climbed up a climbing frame and waited until a gust of wind came and then holding the leaves aloft jumped to see if he’d be carried. He’d already said he didn’t think it would work but he wanted to test it. He then tried again by collecting more and climbing slightly higher on a different climbing frame but this time I had to stand beneath and catch him if the wind didn’t. I really loved how he knew it wasn’t going to work but wanted to test it to prove it. We talked about what might work and decided something like a sheet would maybe work for longer in a far stronger wind, we talked about how parachutes work when used from higher up where the wind is stronger. They then went and played on a skatepark style couple of concrete ramps for a bit. Davies was still in rather a boisterous mood from last night playing with Liam and was a bit too ‘mean boy’ a couple of times but hard as that is to witness it is also somehow reassuring given how I once spent a period of time worrying that he simply didn’t know how to play like a child or be all rowdy like other boys – no such fears nowadays!

Lucy left us to call in at her parents while Julie and I came back for lunch. I enforced a ban on playing in bedrooms to combat the ‘every room in the house is trashed’ issues from last time and Scarlett & Maisie dressed up as fairies and then princesses and playing with My Little Ponies while Davies and Jack played with some cars and some dinosaurs – with plenty of crossovers between the two games. Then we got out the wooden train track and a very elaborate collaborative track was built spanning most of the downstairs of the house. Lucy, Rebecca and Richard arrived in the middle of that and managed to find space to sit among the track and helped with the building too. Julie, Lucy and I managed some chatting about the future of Home Ed in the UK, parenting, politics and society, the welfare state and just who is responsible for what and who really should be. Ah such interesting and powerful stuff.

Julie, Jack and Maisie headed off, Lucy, Richard and Rebecca stayed awhile longer. There was more dressing up, some tidying up, some bead threading for Tarly and Rebecca and more chat. Pretty much my perfect sort of day really. There was education – obvious and not so obvious, socialising and running around for the children and plenty of sitting, drinking tea and putting the world to rights for me with my friends. Bliss 🙂

And now, dinner, not cooked by me and Torchwood. Oh and I’m drinking snowballs and pretending to be 17 which is always fun too!

I would have donned a bee outfit and been all stripey black and yellow with all the busyness I buzzed with. But of course that would be mad, who knows in advance what the day is going to pan out like? What if I’d worn a stripey outfit and a pair of those bouncy shapes on springs attached to a headband to look like bees antenna and then all the engagements that kept me so busy had been cancelled at the last minute? What then eh? I’d have looked pretty bloody silly wearing yellow which is so not my colour wouldn’t I? 😆

Ady’s car is doing all sorts of funny things with lights lit up on the dashboard indicating it’s imminent death so it is at the garage (another of those times we are truly pleased to be running a company car rather than caring at all about the potential cost of fixing it.) and he worked from home this morning before taking my car to go to college this afternoon.

First thing this morning Davies and I made another film – details of that over on monstermovies to save me going over it again. Then came the saga of the BT man which had us occupied for ages. They also watched The Christmas Carol on dvd which spawned several conversations. After making the film Davies and Scarlett got engrossed in one of their games. It involved a pile of cuddly toys, the foam blocks, some foam beads, the toy scales and a calculator. Oh, and lots of shouting :lol:.

We had lunch, I made some flapjacks inspired by them at MM yesterday, Ady went off to college and Lucy and Rebecca arrived. For some reason the three of them didn’t manage to play together although they all played together in various twosomes but by the end Davies and Scarlett were both getting rowdier and squabbling with each other so I sent them both to their rooms to calm down a bit while I finally finished a conversation with Lucy and said goodbye to her. We had Mel, Liam and Lily coming after school for a play and tea and I needed them to just calm down a bit before they arrived otherwise it would have been utter bedlam. They did indeed calm down and were playing quite happily with the pretend food and the till when they got here.

A variety of playing went on including dressing up, running around and generally being very noisy while Mel and I endeavoured to chat. The children were all fed and disappeared off to play again, with them finally leaving about ten minutes before I needed to leave for book group.

Book group was good tonight, I was introduced to the couple of staff working as the newest member of the team. There were only six of us tonight and only three of us had even finished the book (I was not one of them :oops:) but it was a really nice meeting with lots of general chatter. We’ve got an interesting looking book for this month and have chosen two short books to read in December, one of which is ‘The five people you meet in Heaven’ which I read earlier this year and all but one of us have read already but agreed would be a book we’d like to discuss, the second is ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ which I am also looking forward to reading.

We live along a fairly busy road. It links the A27 (which runs along the south coast and turns into the M27 at various points) with the A259 which is the actual coast road. It is used daily by all the emergency services, has the sea at one end as well as a large industrial estate and is a major bus route too.

Our lounge has two very large windows, one of which looks out over this road. Our house is set up off the road so the window is about 20 foot above the road level and slightly back. This enables us to watch everything going on outside without being looked in at. From my usual seat on the (newly mended) sofa I can see the road, the south downs, rooftops and a very large chunk of sky. That is probably what I most missed about this house when we lived in Manchester – the lack of sky.

Anyway as a self-confessed people watcher and nosy neighbour I love sitting and observing what goes on outside.

This morning a BT van pulled up and parked on the grass verge on the corner of our road. Out got BT man in his fluorescent jacket and working boots, cordoned off an area around a BT manhole’ lifted the lid and prepared to start work. I called the children over to watch incase it was something interesting going on (we get loads of educational mileage from watching streetlamp lightbulbs being changed, roads being resurfaced, windows being cleaned etc out of our window). He walked along the road a little and then walked back to his van. Then he appeared to realise he’d stood in dog poo. He did the little dog poo on my workboot shimmy of walking along the grass dragging his contaminated boot, then he pulled up a clump of grass and wiped his boot, then he walked to the kerb and scraped his boot. None of this seemed to be sorting his boot out so he started digging around in his van for something suitable to aid his plight.

He dug out a rag and wiped rather ineffectually with that. It didn’t seem to help so he found some wipes. The wipes were either inferior or the packet wasn’t properly opened, or they had dried out. Or they were of that advertised ‘pop up’ variety where they are supposed to ‘self feed’ with the next one instantly available but the pop up ness wasn’t working. I’m sure anyone who used baby wipes to clean their child’s bottom over an open and full nappy whilst holding their child’s legs out of the mess using the one handed two bottles of beer holding technique can sympathise with this. We’ve all been there – shitty nappy and baby arse, no free hands, crap wipes which won’t come out of the packet or run out mid clean up.

So he dug out a screwdriver from his van. But he didn’t want to sully the screwdriver by actually letting it touch the dog poo, oh no! So he laid a wipe over the poo and then used the screwdriver through the wipe to remove the poo from the deep grooves in the sole of his boot, which might have worked if the wipes had been any good. But they weren’t, as previously mentioned. So he ended up with poo on the screwdriver and also on his hand where the rubbish wipe got scraped along by the screwdriver and stuck to his hand. He eventually used the screwdriver direct (having presumably decided that it was already covered in poo) and then settled for wiping his hands, the screwdriver and his shoe with a final wipe. Then he looked down and realised he’d just dropped all his used wipes on the floor and would need to pick them up. So he performed a rather impressive manouvere with one final wipe gathering all the poo covered ones up and bundling them into a black sack in his van. I couldn’t hear his muttering but I could see his lips moving and imagine what he might be saying.

For some reason he then decided to move his van off the verge. Except he couldn’t. Lots of rain recently has made the ground very soft and his wheels were stuck. He did lots of high revving and wheel spinning, churning up the grass and creating a big trench around his wheel. The gardener working in an opposite neighbours house stopped work to lean on his spade and watch the episode unfolding. If he could have seen me, tucked behind my window out of sight, he’d have caught my eye and smiled. BT van got out of his van, slamming the door behind him, opened the side door and got out a green mat he’d been using to kneel on. He tucked it as far under the stuck wheel as it would go and tried to reverse out again creating more noise and a lot more mud. And only actually succeeding in digging his wheel deeper into the mud. Oh and trashing his mat. He could probably have gone forwards actually but he’d positioned his van in such a way that he was very close to the streetlamp at the front and a telegraph pole at the back so he was restricted to reversing out at the exact same angle as he’d driven in.

He got again, slammed the door again and chucked his ripped mat back in the van. Then he got out a shovel. He made eye contact with the gardener across the road, who looked flustered and started gardening again. Then he dug a big hole around his wheel. By this point I’d called Ady to come and watch too, mostly because even I could tell that digging a bigger hole around a hole that was already stopping him from getting his wheel out was an unlikely solution to his problem. Ady watched to see if this would work, of course it didn’t, before going to get dressed and see if he could offer any assistance.

While Ady was off getting dressed the BT man decided that getting his van out was clearly beyond him so he got a phone out and looked like he was making a phonecall for assistance. Ady reappeared, dressed, and went out to talk to him. And came back to get his mobile phone as BT man’s phone battery was dead. He said he couldn’t accept any other help from Ady such as pushing him out, giving him a tow or even supplying a plank of wood to drive out along as it contravened Health & Safety and if Ady or his belongings were injured or damaged as a result of help he’d accepted then Ady might sue him. So Ady came back indoors again.

BT man then did whatever work it was he had to do in the BT hole. A bigger BT truck came along, blocked the road off, attached a rope to the truck and the van and effortlessly pulled him out. He stood around a while chatting with original BT man and smoking before heading off on his way with a cheery wave and a toot of his horn, presumably to continue his good work saving stranded BT men in distress all around the south coast. He towed BT man’s van out of sight (unless I went and looked from another window in the house which I couldn’t be bothered to do – assuming the saga was over). He reappeared, collected up his tools and his red and white stripey blocking off hole fencing and went out of sight again. I thought that was the end to the episode but he was to leave us with one final laugh.

As he pulled out of our road and drove away we noticed that he had left the sliding side door of his van wide open. Teetering on the edge of the van, ready to fall out at any moment were an assortment of tools, his ripped and very muddy green mat and the unsecured bag crammed with all of the dog poo smeared wipes. Wonder how far along the road he got before the whole lot fell out and he had to get out and pick them all up, starting the whole getting his hands cleaned up saga all over again….

For some (very obscure) reason I must have been on a mailing list for UKLifeLeague. I simply cannot imagine why. But I had an email from them yesterday saying that they are now encouraging all their members to at least consider Home Schooling for their children.

I think this is possibly the worst piece of spam I have ever had…

Well certainly not in Lancing any more anyway! 😆

Off to MM Home Ed group today. Both the children had a good time there. I’d asked them not to go outside today and they stayed indoors and found plenty to do instead which was good. Davies and Freya played together for ages while Tarly did a drawing with a load of foam stickers on it using lots of blues, greens and turquoises, then the three of them played together, with other children joining in making a really big wooden train track. There was also some game involving all of them being Wallace, Gromit and Gromit 2 which had them using up lots of energy too. 🙂 I had some good chats with some of the grown ups and drank lots of tea, which always makes for a good day in my opinion!

Before we’d left Davies had been playing X box and Tarly had been playing with sticklebricks so they started to continue where they’d left off but then they plugged the second xbox controller in and they played together for a while. Davies was really quite patient with her until she got bored and started messing about. I’ve got her a couple of Xbox games for her birthday / Christmas so she might start to get into it, but I don’t think she’ll have the patience for it for a while yet really.

The library rang me to arrange a starting date and give me my rota for over Christmas. They pro rata the bank holidays over your working hours so I’m doing lots of half days and 3 hour shifts for the couple of weeks over Christmas which breaks me in very gently 🙂 Looking forward to it now.

Dad came over to sit with Tarly as Ady had been delayed at work while I took Davies to Badgers. Unfortunately we arrived only to be told that it was the last Badgers and due to there not being enough adults there it was cancelled for tonight as well. The poor Leader was really tearful 🙁 They are having a Christmas party in a couple of weeks as a final goodbye. I said that we have got Davies signed up to start at the Worthing branch in January and they had lots of reassuring things to say about that group so that is positive, but a shame it didn’t work out in Lancing. She gave them all a bag of sweets to bring home and gave Davies an extra one for Scarlett and invited her to the Christmas party too.

Back home Dad stayed a while, Ady arrived home and I finally decided to do something about our sofas. We have loose covers on them which have really bad rips and tears on the arms. They have gotten suddenly even worse and just make the room look so shabby. They really irritated me and served as a constant reminder to Ady about our financial situation. Whilst I wouldn’t claim to be massively houseproud I was very conscious of the sofas. I’d looked into new loose covers but they cost almost as much as the sofas themselves. Ros suggested ages ago cutting material from the backs on the covers to use to sew on the arms so tonight I did it. And I can’t believe the difference it’s made 🙂 so hurrah, hurrah and thrice hurrah! 🙂

Two people have called me ‘Nikki’ today. One of them is someone I will probably never see again so that’s fine, but the other one is someone I see pretty much weekly. I HATE the name Nikki, quite aside from it not being my name (I answer mostly and most happily to Nic although I accept Nicola when people are being stern :lol:) I really don’t like it anyway. I’ve known Nikki’s in the past and it just conjours up an image of someone else. But for some reason it’s really tricky to tell someone not to call you Nikki when it is a shortened version of your name. And of course the longer you let it go on the harder it gets.

We had a neighbour who thought Ady was called Andy for years. It went on so long in the end we simply couldn’t correct him. We used to sign Christmas cards from Andy and everything otherwise he wouldn’t know who they were from.

But hey it could be worse – someone I was with today started talking to a mother about her daughter only to be corrected with ‘ah, yes, he’s a boy!’ 😆

This post has been in draft form for about 3 weeks along with several others which were even older. I’ve deleted them as they were either so unfinished it was not worth continuing with them, so outdated they were irrelevant or I had rewritten them in some other form already. This one could very well still be something of a work in progress but having written it I am pressing publish anyway in the vague hope that there is something in here somewhere which was a point I had hoped to make when I started the post in the first place!

My Mum asked me once what I thought the secret of a happy marriage was. She doesn’t consider herself to have a happy marriage to my Dad (and I don’t think anyone, Dad included would argue with her there!). I said ‘tolerance’. Tolerance and acceptance. It’s about knowing the other person’s faults and foibles, accepting them as part of that person and loving them anyway. Clearly there needs to be way more about that person that you think is fantastic than you think is bloody annoying and aslong as the good outweighs the bad then you’re away. 🙂 My Mum’s complaints about my Dad are always about the things ‘she can’t make him do’ which would be the same complaints she would make about anyone she struggles with.

I have been documenting my recent journey with Scarlett and realised that what has changed has been my attitude towards her. I am not viewing her as a challenge to my parenting anymore, I am viewing her as having a rough time with lots of struggles to control her emotions and deal with things that life throws at her (such things as getting dressed, wearing shoes, being in a car seat) and viewing my role as supporting her through that, making her path that much easier, helping her deal with the things she cannot change and find ways to change the things she can. Tolerance of who Scarlett is, how she acts and her sometimes irrational to me but very real and serious to her feelings seems to be really helping.

This is actually quite a tough thing to pull off. For me it seems faintly ridiculous to accept that having to wear a coat is worthy of tears for Scarlett. I struggle to understand why Ady feels so gutted when Portsmouth lose a football game. I get really angry when Scarlett yet again doesn’t want to tidy up the toys that she has played with even when it was only half an hour ago that I said to her if she got the toys out then she would have to tidy them up before dinner and she cheerfully agreed. I am really frustrated that Ady takes forever to leave the house because he is going round checking doors are locked, the gas is off, the fire is definitely out and then goes back in again to switch the light on incase we get back after dark. And that he is forever losing his keys, his coat, his work diary. But that is who they are, what they do, how they feel.

There are not many things I actively want to ‘teach’ my children, but respect, tolerance and acceptance of the views and beliefs of others are on that limited list. It’s an interesting concept though tolerance, because it’s one thing to exercise tolerance of who someone is, the areas of themselves which they cannot change, but it can be quite another to have the same tolerance for their choices, their views and their lifestyles. I have been questioning how we exercise that when those views are very different or even in direct contrast to our own. Because actually if you believe something with passion and you really consider your views The Truth then actually by definition you think other views are wrong.

I have a friend who is deeply religious. They say they don’t judge me for not holding those same views and I’m sure they don’t actively judge me, but actually by believing that it is only from having God in your heart and praying to Him and living in the way He dictates that you will get into Heaven then they also believe that people like me, who might lead a good life and not harm others will still go to hell anyway. As will my unbaptised children. To not believe that, to have even a chink of doubt about it would be to question their own beliefs. And before anyone jumps on me for that, that is specifically what that friend said rather than my interpretation of everyone who holds a religious belief.

Similarly if we don’t believe in any spiritual higher being, if we think that all there is is us, here, now and when we’re dead that is the end of it, then surely we must by definition believe that the believers are deluded. That they are wasting their lives hoping and praying to something which is a creation of man’s own mind. That every move they make motivated by their belief is one they needn’t bother with, that the wars and deaths in the name of religion are wasted foolish ones, that acts of kindness or charity in the name of the church are actually only done so the giver feels good and those living off the church continue to do so.

And then what about abortion? Surely you either support the woman’s right to choose or you don’t? Surely you can’t choose whether it’s OK for someone to abort if the pregnancy was a result of rape or underage sex but not OK if the baby would have been born to affluent, married parents who simply decided the time was not right. If we agree that women have the right to choose then surely in doing so we waive any judgement over how she makes that decision and what her motivation is.

And education? Surely if one follows an autonomous route, if we eshew the very idea of a curriculum and wasting time on learning things which may never be needed in ‘real life’ then by definition we think the people who send their children to school, or who even follow some sort of structure whereby a child is being bribed to sit and work through workbooks or do some ‘work’ before they can play are stunting their children, taking away their autonomy, their right to spend their time on their passions.

And those who follow a curriculum, who send their children to school must think that the approach of parents who don’t follow any structure, who allow their children to develop passions and interests in their own time, who have children who cannot read far older than is the accepted norm, who don’t teach their children times tables are in some way neglecting them, are setting them up to fail, are giving them enough rope to hang themselves.

But we don’t do we? Or if we do we don’t say so. Or maybe we don’t even know we do. I, and most the parents I know practice religious and racial tolerance and teach our children to do the same, I support any parent who educates their child in any way no matter how different to how I am aiming to educate my own. I would not consider someone who used ‘the naughty step’ as a bad parent even though I know full well that such an approach would not suit either me or my children.

I think where we go wrong is in deciding that we found the one true path, that everyone needs to come round to our way of thinking. I cringe at listening to mothers who slate the choices of other mothers. The working mothers who love their careers and use full time childcare from the earliest opportunity to enable them to return to work and sneer at the mothers who choose to stay home with their children, downtrodden, disempowered, relying on someone else to be the breadwinner. Those same mothers who sneer back at the ‘career bitches’ while smugly knowing they are the one’s doing the real work, tending house, raising children. Surely we should be supporting each others’ rights to choose? Surely we should be celebrating the opportunity to do either or?

And us Home Educators? We should be celebrating the freedom that we (currently) have to choose which path to tread, standing shoulder to shoulder (once we’ve finished our normals round the kitchen table starting promptly at 9am or roused ourselves out of bed sometime around 11am, played on the xbox for an hour or so and finally gotten dressed in time for lunch) and not squabbling among ourselves.

Over the years, particularly since becoming a parent I have had many, many, many of my views and beliefs and ideas challenged and changed. Does that mean that they were not genuine in the first place? No, I don’t think so. I don’t even think it closes some of them off from me returning to them at some future time. I certainly don’t think supporting other people’s rights to different views dilutes my own, but I am very aware that despite outward tolerance I am still silently, privately judging others and their choices and I think we all do the same. I have undergone fairly spectacular U turns in various areas of my life and somehow I have managed to persuade those around me that I was right when I was doing things one way, but I am continuing to be right now even though I am doing them completely differently! So the tolerance I am hoping to pass onto my children is more of an openminded one, a questionning approach certainly, an acceptance that it is from those who have different views to our own from whom we can learn the most, that it is far more valuable to have our ideas challenged than agreed with. That it is in enjoying the differences between ourselves and others which provides the most richness can be gained from life and our relationships within it.

Alys! Have a lovely second birthday with lots of love from Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx

Where is everyone? My sage feeds are all staying grey rather than going black and bold 🙁

We continued in our productiveness today. Davies spent hours playing with the plasticine while Tarly played with the till and the pretend food with their games occassionally crossing over to play together. Tarly also spent ages playing with a tape measure and they both did some drawing.

Ady cooked a roast dinner at lunchtime so we all sat and ate that then this afternoon Ady and I pulled out everything from the cupboard under the stairs. We got one bin liner full of stuff to throw out, one full of clothes I’ve listed on ebay at least twice without selling so are destined for the charity shop in the morning, a load more stuff ready to list on ebay this week and the rest all neatly stacked back in the cupboard again. Ready to be filled with more crap no doubt :lol:.

It’s been a nice lazy family weekend, we had nowhere we were supposed to be, all the things we’d promised the children we’d get done we managed to do. It’s been good. 🙂

And now I’ve got a headache! 😆

I showed Davies his snail animation this morning and he was really pleased with it. He wanted to do something different and actually animate a character. He had rather ambitious ideas about something like morphing one character into another which I managed to talk him down from explaining just how long such a project might take. He’s not given up on the idea by any means but has decided to do a little bit of work on something like that at a time. 😆 So we decided to make a character waving as a first try.

He made the character – a little plasticine man. We did make a ‘making of’ film with him talking me through the process of making the character and also we had a few out-takes which he thought would make another good ‘dvd extra’ 😆 Then we talked about making a background and used a big bit of card that he drew a carpet and some wallpaper on to create a lounge. He made a plasticine sofa with a black cat to sit on it and had already been making a small train with a train track so that got added in too.

This time he did all the moving of the character and I just sat and held the camera with him telling me when to take each shot. Then I sat and made the finished film.

I was talking to Davies about how I blog to show people his films and suggested that he might like to have his own blog for his films (mostly to stop cluttering up mine :lol:), he really liked that idea so we talked about how I don’t use his real name when I talk about him online and I refer to him as ‘Monster’ which is a nickname we use anyway. So I suggested we call his films ‘Monster Movies’ and call his blog the same. He really liked that idea so I set him up on creating a logo while I set up a blog and a youtube account for him. I wrote out ‘Monster Movies’ for him and he very ably copied it saying each letter as he went then turning to the paper and writing them rather than copying the letters he was copying the spelling, which is a move forward too. 🙂

After much tweaking with the format on the blog I managed to get it looking about how I wanted it. Things like adding pictures and text into sidebars is not beyond me as such but it very much trial and error rather than actual knowledge. So it may well still be something of a work in progress but here it is so far with a link to today’s waving film. I was planning to embed the films but it cocks up the blog template and despite trying to change the size I’ve drawn a blank with it, so linking will have to do, until I next have a couple of hours free to spend time playing about with it again.

This morning was a lazy one, filled with not a lot Some watching TV and films, lots of sitting around drinking tea and the children with some sort of sixth sense suddenly decided to play with the pretend food and ELC electronic till and pretend money that I’ve been eyeing up with a view to ebaying :roll:. They were taking it in turns to be customers and messing about with prices etc. I could have stepped in and made it all educational I suppose but a) they were playing and that always seems like a really crap time to wade in and say to camera ‘hey boys and girls how much change would we get from our one pound coin if we bought those bananas at 29 pence and that tin of cat for for 14 pence?’ and b) I couldn’t be bothered ;). Davies did some messing about with his toy scales and balanced numbers like 8 & 9 with 10 & 7 showing some level of understanding about both the fact that the must add up to the same and the whole one less than that must be one more than that type stuff. I read Tarly a couple of stories that she brought me and it was just a nice laid back morning.

After lunch we were slightly delayed by Davies remembering that I’d promised to do some animation with him so I told him to make some plasticine models for us to animate later. He sat and made a really good Shaun the sheep, which was excellent as a model but not suitable for animating. Scarlett sat and made a really good model of me. She said it was what she was going to make, she spent ages choosing the hair and clothes colours and called me over to look at it. It is certainly the first clearly recognisable thing she’s made out of plasticine, so hurrah for Tarly 🙂

Then we went out. We needed more logs for the fire so we went up the downs to our log collecting place and found loads of perfect ones cut up nice and small for us by the log man. Davies had brought his wellies so he went gathering smaller logs and I tossed some over near the car for him to load in the boot. Ady tried to teach me to use the axe but I confess to being slightly scared of it which is preventing me from using it remotely effectively (cos let’s face it, it’s not as though I don’t have enough weight to get behind it! :lol:) but I’ll keep trying. I also managed to clamber up a log pile reaching for that ever elusive perfect bit of wood just out of reach and tumbled down again getting big grazes and bruises on my shins for my trouble. 🙁 Ah well, war wounds worth sporting I reckon 🙂

We headed over to Dad’s for an hour or so where Davies spent ages playing on the piano. He came to tell me he’d mastered the correct fingers for the scales and he was actually quite close. I think if we had the money Davies would be signed up for piano lessons, drama lessons and probably at least another two or three things at the moment. I can’t decide whether it’s a good or bad thing that we don’t and he isn’t… I showed him some scales and left him to it. We came home via Sainsburys where I seemed to buy loads (the food for the rest of next week with money cadged from Dad) but didn’t even spend a tenner :). Once home Davies and I discussed animation again and I explained how a simple plastcine figure would be best for a first go, it needed to be something easy to manipulate with one or two basic moves. He struggled to get to grips with that as he had in mind a total recreation of the 90 minute feature film of the Were Rabbit but finally settled on making a snail. Rather than animate the figure we decided to use the figure in an animation and he came up with the idea of his trail making something, I came up with the idea of it spelling his name (oh bad autonomous educator sneakily getting in writing practise :oops:). It was actually not as lengthy to produce the film below as I’d have expected despite it having over 100 frames. Slightly predicatably he didn’t find the rather painstaking editing process as interesting as the initial modelling and moving stuff so I’m guessing his future career doesn’t lie in fine tuning type work 😆

He hasn’t actually seen the finished film yet as he got engrossed in eating dinner and watching ‘you’ve been framed’ while I was putting it together so he’ll get a special screening in the morning. I’m sure he’ll be pleased with it and it will inspire him to greater things and maybe start to hone which area of the whole thing he is actually most interested in.

My CRB check for the library job came back this morning so I’m anticipating a phonecall from them on Monday to arrange a start date which is all very exciting and as I have a vague plan to get up and watch meteor showers in six hours time I think that will be the point where I bid you all goodnight. Goodnight 🙂