One word? When seven would do…

This morning I was a vision of efficiency (despite not getting up til nearly 9am :oops:) and got loads and loads of washing done and hung out. It pretty much all dried too except a few bits which I have hanging over radiators to air so that was good. And of course I know how you’ve all been pining for blogging of my laundry. 😆

My Granny arrived dead on time at 10am and having made her token sarcastic comment of the day (the children rushed to her and gave her hugs and kisses but she couldn’t help but say ‘well I’m surprised they remember me, it’s been so long!’. We last saw her on Davies’ birthday, 2 months ago 🙄 and yes I did put her straight!) settled on the sofa to look at photos of ‘what you’ve been up to since I last saw you’ including Davies’ birthday party ‘what these are all Davies’ friends and they all came to his party?!’ allowing me to say smugly ‘yes, sort of puts the worries of a poor home educated child with no socialisation or friends into perspective doesn’t it rather?’ ;-), various walks in the woods for the last month or so and of course Halloween camp. And actually you know when I look at those pictures myself, and when I think about the events and the effort that I put into them and the amazing amount the children got out of them that does indeed put all my personal doubts about whether I do enough into perspective too.

All of that allowed me to get on with more washing and then as I was actually lacking much in the way of food and had my Mum and Lucy, R & R coming ‘for lunch’ I decided I’d make a cake. Lucy had texted to ask what to bring and I’d mentioned a couple of things I didn’t have for her to bring along. I had four very ripe bananas so decided to make a banana loaf and got halfway into mixing the ingredients before realising I didn’t have any eggs. Ady was upstairs anyway and Davies was engrossed in looking at ohotos so I asked Tarly if she wanted to walk round the shop with me (knowing full well she would and that she would be far too much of a handful to leave with my Granny even with Ady upstairs when he was trying to work) so her and I put our shoes and coats on to walk round the shop. My Mum arrived just as we were leaving, laden down with all sorts of lunch type food (french bread, posh cheese and ham, chocolate eclairs and fancy crisps :)). Tarly and I had a lovely wander round the shop together, talking about all sorts of things on the way there and back including her asking me why she had to walk on the inside. I explained about how if a car came up on the pavement then it would be better if it hit me first rather than her (which was the same explanation my Dad gave me when I asked him why he always swapped sides if we crossed the road so I was on the inside – he still does it even now if we walk along a road together) and she thought, nodded and agreed ‘good idea, because if a car came up and was going to crash into you then I could save you Mummy’ which earned her a spontaneous hug :). We got back to find Granny, Mum and Davies all playing snakes and ladders very happily so Tarly came and helped me finish off the banana loaf. She is an ace assistant actually as she is more than happy to do all the stuff I’d really rather not like greasing cake tins, mashing bananas etc. She was just starting to get cross with me about something when I saw Lucy coming up the path so I sent her to answer the door and quickly shoved the banana cake in the oven.

Rebecca settled straight into the snakes and ladders game with my Mum and Davies, Lucy and I hid in the kitchen and the playroom and Granny left. Ady came down to join us for lunch and then headed off. We then had something of a board games fest with Kerplunk, Buckaroo during which I had a slight sense of humour failure about a scuffle to ‘tidy up’ from children who normally can’t be persuaded to do anything of the sort 😆 There was lots of swapping over between the various children and various adults available. We had chocolate eclairs which Tarly very ably cut in half and Davies counted how many plates we’d need for and one my usual streetlight ed interludes when the lamppost at the front of our house (so that’s not the one one recently knocked down at the side of the house lamppost story followers 😉 ) which has been on in the day and off at night had a lamppost maintenance van pull up alongside and a man come out to fix. We observed how it was on even though it was daytime and that was not right, we watched the man get out and open the panel with his screwdriver, I believe an exchange of smiles or waves took place between the man and his screwdriver and the four small noses pressed up against the window and the light went off. And then the man got back in his van and drove away again.

There was also aminor educational moment when Davies was pondering why his remote control Herbie car (as mentioned as the inspiration for Em’s current remote control reconditioning projects over on Title for Life just now) which is running low on batteries had the wheels spinning when he held it upside down but was labouring to turn the wheels at all when on the floor. I got him to run on the spot then lie on his back and move his legs to run in the air, to slap his hands into the air and to slap his hands into the wall and finally to stand with his palms pushed against the doorframes and against nothing and asked which was easier. We talked a tiny bit about resistance (as much as it is feasible to do with an excited six year old who has a little group of smaller children behind them also trying to push their palms against the doorframe :lol:) and why it is easier for Herbie’s wheels to spin in the air than it is to spin on the floor when they are both meeting resistance and also to spin would require moving along the floor too.

Finally we got out the marble runs. We have a plastic and a wooden set and my Mum and Davies were struggling with the wooden one (which is just really a series of wooden blocks) so I showed them a basic set up and explained about how you start at the base and work backwards in terms of the marbles route. I made one which predictably got knocked over by Scarlett dashing about and having listened to the theory begind it and with lots of testing along the way Davies actually constructed a better one than I’d made. I also showed him how to slant pieces and create greater drops to make the marble run faster, so he incorporated some of that too. He made a short film about it on the camera but I have not uploaded it yet and his current plan is to spend tomorrow making a short film with animation and plasticine which I feel might be a very ambitious project so I’ll save the marble run film for another time.

Mum left and Lucy and I did some princess puzzle making with Scarlett and Rebecca, some toy cars were got out and I got all my washing in before it started to rain but Scarlett had had enough of being a hostess (and actually now I think about it she had rather excelled herself earlier in the day fetching drinks for everyone and being very solicitous about ensuring they were drinking them, including getting a drink of milk for Richard who a) doesn’t really drink milk and b)used the very last of the defrosted milk which meant further offers of tea or coffee were made with hopes people would say no :lol:) and didn’t really want anyone else to play with / touch / even look at anything which belonged to her.

Lucy left and Davies and Scarlett fell straight into a really cheery game using the marble run and the toy cars playing really nicely together. Ady arrived home bearing a new dvd recorder to replace the one which died last night and he’d spent most of this morning negotiating with Asda to replace – it was out of guarantee but was only about 18 months old so clearly ‘not fit for it’s purpose’ which was what he’d spent about an hour saying to someone at Asda’s Head Office on the phone finally reaching someone who agreed at the store. So that was installed and cables sorted and the children celebrated by watching Were Rabbit while they ate their dinner.

I took Tarly to bed with her requisite three stories and excelled myself with a rather lovely pork and peanut stir fry including (gasp!) more vegetables as inspired by the wonderful Hugh last night.

Also meant to blog but was only reminded today of a converstion I had with the children about gravity, weight on different planets and things falling, whether size of planet made a difference to gravitational pull and the importance of an atmosphere. We talked about that on the way to Lucy’s from our walk on Wednesday. Partially a rehash of conversations we’ve had before, partially one of those conversations when a child tests out a theory they’ve been pondering by stating it as fact to see whether they are right or you correct them and partially a question and answer session. Love those sorts of chats.

For some reason it’s felt like a long week.

We were super efficient this morning, packing a picnic, getting dressed in suitable attired, collecting together our parcels, heading to the post office via the cashpoint and getting all the parcels sent then arriving at Lucy’s pretty much dead on time. 10am 😯

Of course that did involve me being a total cow to Davies about his ineptitude at getting his shoes or coat on and asking him why he had to be so pathetic, which made him cry 🙁 I didn’t apologise because he was being pathetic but I did feel like a bully which wasn’t so nice. 😳 Luckily he has his father’s forgiving nature and within about ten minutes he’d forgotten it and so had I.

We headed off over to Paradise Park where the children were delighted to be and ran off ahead in fits of excitement at all the various things to look at. It has been a while since we’ve been there and every time they seem to spot something new or focus on a different area of it but I would certainly attribute our regular trips there to all sorts of bits and pieces of knowledge my two have picked up about our planet, weather, dinosaurs and evolution. Today Davies asked why the Neanderthal man’s face looked like a monkey, so that was a good observation. He also hung back to ask me about a cracked road which there was a picture of from the San Andreas fault so we talked about that.

There is a Santa there every weekend from now until Christmas in a grotto area and they have at least six Santa’s positioned around the place in various ho-ho-ho poses, so borrowing Lucy’s camera I took a couple of snaps of D&S for this year’s Christmas card :). They all threw pennies in the waterfall, dashed round the outdoor dinosaurs bit as it was rainy and horrid and then we spent ages in the indoor play bit eating lunch and turning down requests for pennies to go in the amusements. Eventually we agreed that it was indeed too horrid a day to spend any time outside so we headed home again. Lucy had invited us to her house to play but we gave the children the casting vote and it was decided to come back here instead.

There were geomags, a world map puzzle, toenail painting, plastic peg and block and stacking cups play on offer and a bit of a to-do about some chocolate spread sandwiches but eventually they all seemed to settle into doing something albeit none of the four children together and Lucy and I managed a bit of chatting. Then Ady arrived home early which meant I could run them home without needing to drag out Colin or drag out my children.

Once home again the children had tea, I got our dinner in the oven (a rather lovely mix of sausages, red wine and a load of root vegetables I’d not managed to fit in the beef stew earlier in the week all roasted in the oven with oil and herbs and garlic. Get me with all my veg this week!) and the children had a mental half hour dancing to Christmas songs in the playroom. I think this is the first year Scarlett has *really* got an inkling what it’s all about, I reckon Christmas Eve will be a very exciting day here this year :). Bedtime stories for Tarly, Davies laid in bed playing with some action figures (which I remember doing with a Miss Piggy and a Kermit the frog before I was old enough to lie in bed reading books) and Ady is cursing and swearing at the dvd player / recorder which seems to have developed some sort of selective approach to which dvds it will play :roll:.

Tomorrow I have my Mum and Granny here but Lucy may well come and dilute the genes a bit and sometimes having the pair of them here together, distracted by the children is sufficient for me to slope off and do something else anyway. And then the weekend, the glorious weekend which by a series of events we have nothing planned for. Hurrah! 🙂

Now this made me laugh! 😆

It’s got it all. Ridiculously early Christmas anticipation, a song by Paul and Linda, excessive sentimentality and fairly shoddy camera work. Everything about The Goddards designed to make you cringe. If I get drunk enough I’ll even film my own rendition tonight in a super screechy voice 😆

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Now I *thought* I had the dentist this morning. Infact I am still fairly convinced I was supposed to have the dentist this morning. I’m sure when I was there two weeks ago she sent me away with a prescription for ABs, a form to take to the hospital to get my Xray done and an appointment for two weeks time. Which was today. But when I arrived the receptionist looked at me all puzzled and said ‘are you sure it’s today?’ checked my name on her computer and said ‘no, it’s next Wednesday at 9.30am’, so I came away again. I’ve not bothered to check the appointment card as I imagine it does indeed have next Wednesday’s date on it, what I think happened was that somehow the appointment got booked for 3 weeks time instead of 2. Which is not a serious problem as I am now pain free anyway.

All of which meant I was well on track to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie at Highdown Gardens on time. But I sat around til the very last minute before going to sort out a picnic to take and then Ali rang. So I made a picnic while talking to her and while I was talking to her she was talking to Freya and while she was talking to Freya I was talking to Davies and Scarlett. I do like phone chatting :).

We arrived a mere ten minutes late, which almost qualifies as prompt for us really 😉 and they had only just got there anyway. Another HE contact from Activeo was there too. I’ve met her a few times, the first when Scarlett and her daughter Maddie were both tiny and subsequently a few times since, she now has a second daughter Jessie who is nearly 2. We’ve always gotten on well the few times we’ve met before and this time we really clicked and as we’re not bothering to renew our Activeo membership (along with our EO membership, our HEAS subscription and my subs to Home Education Journal actually) next year I said to her at the end that we really should get together again.

We had our usual good time walking round the gardens, went back to the car park for lunch which we ate on a couple of picnic benches there, it was warm enough but pretty windy. Then Julie trekked off round a corner with Jack, Maisie, Davies and Scarlett and I was left chatting to Elaine for about half an hour. We covered all sorts of topics and I bonded with Maddie by virtue of letting her play with my camera and take loads pictures of the grass! 🙂 So much so that she walked the rest of the day holding my hand when we went back in for another walk round – very irregular :lol:. I was really pleased at my two heading off with Julie actually as she is one of the people who will be occassionally child minding them when I start work and although they adore her it was nice to see them happily wandering off with her under their own steam.

I got a couple of nice shots of them in the gardens:
Not at all sure you’d correctly identify which were the two sets of siblings here, particularly given one set is twins, but I guess those Goddard genes are strong 🙂

This one just sums them all up so well!

We left there around 2.30pm and we’d been invited to pop round to Lucy’s so we did so. On the way I made full use of the hands free function on my new phone headphones which I was very impressed with talking to Ady about his (ongoing saga of the) new company car 🙄 Had as much of a catch up with Lucy as the children would allow (Tarly found their copy of The Gruffalo so I *had* to read that to her, followed by another two books as she insists on always having stories in threes), but we have got tomorrow together so I’m sure all the many things we meant to say to each other will get covered then. 🙂

Ady had beaten us home, got the lounge tidied up, run a bath and got the kids’ dinner cooking so they stripped off their muddy jeans and leapt in the bath, then had dinner and are now in bed.

I had a phonecall back from the St John’s Ambulance as I’d left a message with them to try and find the nearest Badger group for Davies in the new year and it happened to be going there tonight so she went and got the Badger leader for me to talk direct to. It is on Wednesdays and is in town, but not too far away, it is a later start and finish time which actually probably suits us better and as it is held at the County HQ building I imagine it will be very well run. She has about 13 in the group, the youngest being another 6yo boy and has already had a phonecall today from one of the other mothers from the Lancing group signing her two children up for that one from January so there will be at least two familiar faces for Davies, which is good. So that’s a relief :). Also he should get into swimming lessons from January too which is more than enough extra curricular activities per week in my opinion :lol:.

A not a lot day today. My throat is still sore but marginally better than it was yesterday so hopefully it will clear up on it’s own. I’ve had several bad throats over the years which have lingered to antibiotics stage and I’d really rather not have another dose only ten days after the last lot. Back to the dentist tomorrow for a check up on those xrays so I hope my throat is improved even more in the morning otherwise sitting with my mouth open wide is likely to be painful 🙁 and my glands are all up in my neck and throat which is very tender and hurty to touch.

So we have had a quiet day. Davies played x box in the morning, Tarly helped me peel and chop some veg for a beef stew for dinner until she had a big strop about wanting to eat ‘all’ the carrot now raw and unchopped :roll:. She did take herself off to deal with it though rather than just staying and yelling at me and returned calmer a while later to request a ‘little bit of carrot instead’. So that is progress.

I’ve been playing with the walkman bit of my new phone. I had this idea that I might quite like a MP3 player for Christmas / my birthday from Ady /my parents but actually I have no need for one now I have this phone. I had done some very complicated (to me) procedure of ripping and burning or some other such terms I feel faintly self conscious using a load of tracks off various cds last night, putting them onto my laptop and then connecting the phone to the laptop and dragging them into a folder on the phone, but it said the memory was full after only about 20 songs which seemed odd given the sony website claims it can hold 100 tracks or something. So I spent some time educating myself about formats and sizes and eventually found a way to redo it so that all the tracks were much ‘smaller’, deleted all the ones from last night off the laptop and the phone and started again. It now has about 60 tracks on it. I’ve also been playing with the headphones that came with it and worked out they double as a handsfree set which will be really handy in the car as I’m often having to pass my phone to Davies to answer if it rings while I’m driving and he’s a rubbish secretary! 😆 Makes me wonder quite why they did the hard sell on a handsfree kit at half price when I ordered the phone thought 🙄 All very soothing and calming anyway all that sorting and ripping and burning, I like tasks like that. I can’t wait to write Christmas cards for that same feeling of mindless repetitiveness. 😆

I’d made soup for lunch yesterday (did I blog that? Can’t remember and can’t be bothered to go and read and check) – cheese and bacon and I made a pumpkin one to have today which just needed warming and some milk adding to it. I thought it was ‘ok’ the children didn’t like it at all. I’m really trying to get better at eating the odd veg myself and also trying to increase the menu that the children eat. They won’t be eating with us for a few years yet – they eat at 5pm normally and we don’t eat til about 9pm so it wouldn’t even be easy to meet in the middle and besides which we don’t have a table for us all to eat round together anyway, but it would be nice if they ate the same sort of food as us at least, so I’m working on giving them what we’re having later if it’s feasible or cooking enough for them to have it the following day if not. It’s going OK so far, they are both really good at trying things at least even if the majority of it get’s a no after they’ve tried it. So I thought lunchtime soups would be a good move, cheap, healthy, wholesome, I eat lunch with them anyway so it’s a nice eating together meal. Trouble is I’m struggling to get over the ‘well this is just a load of pureed vegetables, yuck!’ feeling myself so I’m sure they’re finding it doubly hard :lol:. Davies did eat his stew at teatime though which was good.

This afternoon I planned to walk to the post office but as rain looked set in for the day this morning we drove there speedily this morning instead to get some parcels sent. I’ve sold a load more stuff on ebay ending today and loved the last five minutes hitting refresh on the ‘myebay’ page and seeing the selling total double 🙂

We watched a film over lunch which led to watching another one after that and it was Wallace and Gromit. Davies wanted xbox again but I insisted that he do something else instead so he went and got the floam out. I have surrupticiously been chucking the floam as it goes hard and loses it’s colour and we were down to four out of the original eight tubs so they split that between them and I encouraged them to make something to go hard rather than play with it and put it back in the tub. Davies did loads of colour mixing and made (you guessed it!) Wallace and Gromit which are now drying out on the windowsill.

That done they decided to make various props and spent about an hour and a half acting out Were Rabbit while watching it on screen. Should have videoed them actually, it was amusing and they were pretty good at it. Scarlett was being Wallace and lying there at the end while Davies was being Gromit and waving cheese under her nose to rouse her. Then they danced like crazy people to the music. The end of the film has a sort of compilation of the incidental music through the film, each piece has a name which is mostly just relating to the scene it is from. They are on the OST we got for Davies’ party and he has remembered all the names and was saying them as it went through the overture bit, and changing his dancing style accordingly. 😆

I forgot to blog that he is quite into his counting at the moment and can fairly reliably count up to 100 now and recognises the patterns in the 10s going up etc. And of course once you can count up to 100 you can count up to 999 really so I imagine it won’t be long before he realises that. I mentioned a while back that I think some of his recent interest in things like reading and numbers is peer pressure. Not peer pressure as in anyone has been teasing him or making him feel stupid, just that he has started to realise that other children he considers his equals are doing this sort of stuff and that actually although he has always considered he ‘can’t do it’ when he tries he finds that he can after all. I want him to get to these places under his own steam, because he wants to and because it is important to him, but I’m quite grateful for the odd nudge along the way if it is a nudge towards him deciding he wants to do something rather than making him feel inferior for not being able to. And of course anything which Davies does Tarly wants to do too so my prediction that many things will be learnt together for them seems apt to come true too, which is great :).

Finally today Davies did some drawing so he’s had a very productive day.

Tarly had another strop about not wanting her dinner and then a further one at not being allowed yoghurt for pudding when Davies had one but calmed down eventually and we just had a lovely half an hour of bedtime story reading snuggled up together.

I’ve got a really sore throat today. It started yesterday in the car but I put it down to the aircon, lots of coughing, oh and the yelling at The Gruffalo. But no, it’s gotten worse today and my glands are up a bit too. I’ve got Alison-itis clearly. 🙁

So having given Davies and Scarlett the choice of going to group or not today (they were both tired) and had both of them assure me they do really like group but actually just wanted to stay home today instead we did just that.

Davies played Xbox for most of the morning, Tarly played with geomags and I sat putting off various things I could have gone and done in favour of sitting on the sofa drinking tea, which I think is probably an equally important past time!

Tarly and I made soup for lunch. Cheese and crispy bacon, which we’d got from a soup recipe book at my Mum’s at the weekend and happened to have all the ingredients for in the kitchen already. Tarly did some garlic chopping, potato peeling and chopping and some cheese grating. We had the soup with some of those part bake rolls and I thought it was lovely. Tarly hated it and Davies only liked the bacon so sat picking that out :roll:. At least they tried it though.

I made a pumpkin soup from the same book which is ready to be heated for lunch tomorrow.

Tarly and I did some of a workbook she’d pulled off the shelf at the weekend. It’s one on numbers and is patronisingly bad and repetitive so we didn’t get very far before she was bored and lost interest and wanted me to do the copying numbers which I explained was a waste of time as I already knew how to write numbers. That led to me explaining how I had indeed gone to school when I was a child which I’m not sure Tarly had quite realised before. She is adamant she doesn’t want to go ever but it’s something she’s never had any sort of good press about before and given how much she wants to be like me in every way I wonder if that little nugget of information may well come back up at some point. Davies was doing that ‘I’m not actually looking at your workbook but I have noticed it in passing and could easily answer all the questions if I so chose to do so’ type thing where he was muttering the answers from across the other side of the room and even offered to come over and help a couple of times. 😆 He was playing with some foam blocks at the time and making cubes and other 3d objects and then testing the stabilty and weightbearingness with plastic toys balanced on them.

My new phone arrived about 3pm so I sat playing with that while the children went off to play in Davies’ bedroom. I had been sitting there gearing myself up to doing something with them – I have some window glass paint which we’ve agreed to paint our landing window with and a couple of other things I was considering breaking open to do with the children but it seemed crazy to tear them away from their game so I left them to it.

Ady got home and I took Davies to Badgers. They were learning about braile today and Davies came out with his name written in braile and a good basic understanding of how it all works. The parents were called in at the end to be told that the unit is likely to close before Christmas due to lack of volunteers to be an assistant leader. There was lots of ‘unless one of you could step in’ type insinuating all of which I kept out of. Lisa has asked me before if I’d consider it and quite aside from the fact I would loathe spending my precious hour of freedom a week doing kiddy stuff like painting with a load of children the whole reason we take Davies to Badgers is so he gets that time away from me each week. It would rather defeat the object really if I was there with him. I could feel other eyes on me as everyone knows I just sit in my car outside for the hour so technically I *could* go in and be the assistant leader. They will give us details of other local groups, I think there is one not too far from us in Worthing but I don’t know which day of the week it is or what time – clearly if it clashes with a work day for me then it will have to be ruled out. It’s a real shame, Davies has loved Badgers and Tarly was already looking forward to going when she is 5, I love the age mix there and the informative style of the sessions. Fingers crossed that we find a nearby group on the right day.

And with that I’m about to go to bed and try and sleep off my beastly throat.

in last night’s post how fab Barbara’s hair looks. You will all remember her as having very long, very straight hair, it is now all short and flippy and whooshy. Looks lovely 🙂

There’s no such thing as an easy 200 mile journey home. 🙁

Today we met up with Babs and co (sounds like a 70s dance troup from TOTP :lol:), Kirsty, Marcus & Alex, Stella, Rich & Pies, Katy, Bob & tribe and Karen, Dom & family at Nottingham Theatre Royal for a Tall Stories production of The Gruffalo.. It was a postponed birthday treat for Ben which originally had been part of an invitation to spend the whole weekend with Babs and Chris which for various reasons (which were categorically NOT the threat of only offering pulses or vegetables for dinner on Saturday night or any aroma of bodily fluids at Babs’ house 😉 ) we didn’t manage so we went up for the show only today.

This probably was a slightly loony idea actually – it’s all but 200 miles door to door from ours to Nottingham, which was a lovely straightforward 3 hours trip on the way but due to road works on pretty much every motorway linking the north and the south managed to be a five hour journey on the way home. We got in at 10pm, the children were asleep but roused enough to change into pjs before snuggling back to sleep, we’ve had a very late dinner of chicken I’d bunged in the slow cooker served with potato gratin I’d prepared and just had to chuck in the oven.

But it was worth it :-). I was up with the children this morning so 6.30am saw us cuddled up on the sofa with our copy of The Gruffalo reading away and looking at the pictures. Davies adores live shows of any description and this was a particularly excellent example of loads of audience participation, just the right length at around an hour and with plenty of opportunity for shouting, wriggling in your seat or waving your hands in the air to relieve any boredom. It was very similar in style to Pumpkin Soup which we went and saw this time last year. If we had the money I’d definitely send Davies along to one of those drama groups with the word ‘stage’ in their name somewhere as I think he’d like the smell of the greasepaint and the performing, judging by his working the audience as warm up boy at Kessingland this year. And of course he projects wonderfully ;-). I think I’ll settle for giving him lots of opportunity to be a luvvie at home for now. 😆

We had a row of four infront of Kirsty’s row of three so we swapped and put the children together and the adults behind. Well we tried to. 🙄 Actually we had most of one half of the left stalls between us I think so there was lots of swapping about but Davies and Marcus sat together for the duration and really enjoyed it. Scarlett and Alex swapped about between laps and seats but also seemed to enjoy participating and both D and S loved being able to join in from memory from this morning’s reading of the story.

I loved all the calling and waving that the group of children were doing to each other and was particularly tickled by Davies and Kit Deep-End finding themselves stood next to each other after the show;
K: Hello Davies
D: Hello. Good show wasn’t it Kit?

Get them with their post theatre chit-chat! 😆

We left fairly speedily hoping to repeat our 3 hour drive home again but it was not to be.

Tomorrow we’ve got MM, Badgers, my new phone is due to arrive and inbetween all that I have plans for barious blogpost and a whole load of sitting around drinking tea.

16 + 5 + 7 + 16 =

and please show your working out.

A fairly laid back Saturday here. I had a long lie in – which I’d like to think was well deserved, but given the lateness of my night was certainly needed! 😉

Ady did some room rearranging with Davies in his bedroom. A lego catalogue had come in the post this morning which Davies spent ages poring over it and then went and got the lego out. He spent ages building a wall, and telling me how he was staggering the bricks to make it strong. The lego is a mixture of the lego Frazer and I had as children and stuff people have bought Davies and Scarlett over the years. I don’t really recall Frazer doing much with the lego when we were children, he was more into his Action Men and toy cars but I recall spending hours building stuff – I always started with a plan in my head of what I was about to build and it rarely turned out anything like it but I loved the sense of achievement of building things from small pieces. Clearly the fact my Dad is / was a builder played no small part in my interest.

After lunch we went up the downs to where Dad collects logs. It is a small area which a bloke who does landscape gardening and lumberjacking takes his chopped down trees and plants and periodically burns them off, so Dad has been going there for years as whatever Dad takes away is just less for the guy to burn. Why on earth he doesn’t chop them into smaller pieces himself and sell logs I don’t know, but still. Dad’s chainsaw is out of action so we went up there with an axe. The children wandered around finding pieces of wood, identifying plants such as holly, mistletoe (definitely going up there to gather lovely Christmas decorations). I did lots of clambering around on log piles while Ady wielded his axe! I was telling Ady how it was always me who went off log collecting with my Dad when I was little. I have a mentally drafted blog post about my parents which I’ll save further sentimentalising about for 😉 Alison, you’ll be wanting to avoid that one! 😉

We dropped the logs home, I called into Sainsburys for fruit and veg for next week (yes, I do buy veg, I just don’t eat much of it 😉 ) and then we went to see my Dad for a couple of hours.

This month money is very tight. The sort of tight that Simply Red would sing about being too tight to mention. The sort of tight that people used to try and get their jeans by sitting in hot baths wearing them. The sort of tight that sad divorcees in their fourties wear who suddenly get their hair bleached and head off to nightclubs in leopard print garments having spent 20 years married to Nigel and being the dutiful wife until Nigel ran off with his secretary (who is always called something like Nikki or Jenni or Sandi) and dance to the latest tunes with an ‘I’ve still got it and what’s more I remember this song the first time round’ air about them.

Anyway today was (hopefully) the apex of all the tightness. I’d transferred money from paypal into our bank account to cover direct debits, I had a bill which needed paying at the post office in cash with a deadline of today and my car was on the red for petrol. In my purse I had three pound coins and I knew we had nearly six pounds worth of change we’ve been chucking in an old coffee tin. But it was all in five pence, two pence and one pence pieces. Not something I could feasibly pay for petrol with.

So my Dad had agreed to give me *some* money. Today. If I went over there.

I also had plans to go visit a local-ish woods with a Home Ed group. This meant being at Ali’s house at 10am.

So my plan was: head out to nearest cash point closely followed by nearest petrol station. Now this is tricky because nearest cash point is in the opposite direction to nearest petrol station. So I was doing all sorts of mathematical calculations to work out the optimum route for getting cash and petrol before my car died. And we can’t afford breakdown cover any more so that would be a nightmare situation, probably involving me and two children walking miles (one of them barefoot and coatless) to the petrol station where we’d fill up as many recepticles as we’d found along the way being in no position to purchase a petrol can with fuel before walking back to the car to fill it with £3.27 worth of petrol paid for in coppers.

So I had my route planned. I was ready. I had children dressed in appropriate clothes for walking in the woods with a spare change of going to collect petrol clothes stashed in the back of the car. This was all done without tantrums. It was still 8 something am. All that was left to do was copy down instructions for how to get to said wood via Ali’s house and pack a picnic. Then later after we’d been to the woods I was going to dash to my Dad’s for the money to pay the bill and then go to the post office, taking the payment slip I was pretty sure was in my car somewhere and pay the bills.

Then the phone rang.

Once I used to view the ringing phone as an opportunity waiting to reach fruition, a friends calling to say ‘hi’. Then I used to view it as the enemy, the creditors waiting to say ‘are you able to make a payment today?’ and then it went all silent. But suddenly it was ringing. Echoing through the house just like on those horror films where the babysitter gets spooky calls and when she calls to report it and they are traced it is found to have come from within the house….

It was my Dad. His van wouldn’t start. Could I go over and give him a tow? Now Dad lives with Mum. Ok she wasn’t there but he has rung me before while she has even been there sat next to him for a tow. Also my brother, my 30 year old grown man of a brother with his own car was there today. But no, he rings me. And you know what? I take this as a compliment. I take it as a compliment because on various seperate occassions he has expressed his utter lack of faith in their ability to help him with anything. So the fact he rings me (and my Dad, like me, hates asking for help) and is prepared to drag his grandchildren out at the same time makes me feel that for once Dad recognises that I am the best person for the job. And that makes me feel good. 🙂

So I abandon the making lunch for me idea, chuck together some sandwiches for the children and load everyone into the car. And then remember the petrol plan. So I come back in the house, find the pin number for my cash card and revise my plan to get cash followed by petrol this time going in the opposite direction to Ali’s and to my Dad’s instead (yep, final destination had had a bearing on the calculation to that point). So I decided on the cash machine at the shop round the corner and the petrol station slightly out of my way but probably the best. I needed to get it on the way as towing uses more petrol than normal driving and if ever I didn’t want to prove my Dad’s confidence in me wrong it was when I was towing him and I was after borrowing money off him!

But the shop round the corner had a big sign to say they are closed for revamping until next week!

We managed to get to Sainsburys, get cash out and go and purchase petrol – all without a single trauma.

And then we arrived at Dad’s. Where I pushed his van out of the drive and into position strategically placed behind mine, attatched the tow ropes and got ready for the off. I’d expected to tow him all the way to the garage but it bump started after just a few yards. We are on call for it tomorrow and Monday morning with a following him to the garage on Sunday morning and bringing him home. I followed Dad to the garage, checked he was OK to stay there and bid him goodbye. As we went to leave he thrust the money in my hand. 🙂

Which meant I could now go to the post office and pay the bill before I went to collect Ali. Which would mean I wouldn’t need to worry about getting back from the woods early. So we popped home for me to collect the paying in slip which I hoped was in the tin where all the loose change was. It wasn’t. So I dug through all the paperwork until I found another payment slip. Then we dashed to the post office and paid that. Then we dashed home again to pick up my camera. Then we went round the block before dashing home again to drop off the post which included things like passwords for the ‘government gateway’ website so I didn’t want to leave in my car.

And that was all before 9.30am.

We drove over to Ali’s listening to Alanis Morrisette very loudly. I love her rage :), collected Ali and Freya and headed over to Wilderness Woods. We were not only slightly early for the meeting time we were also meeting a group of Home Educators so obviously we had a good half an hour to kill ;-). There was a nice wooden playpark which had a zip wire so we played there. Davies went on his first zip wire last year at Centerparcs and loved it but was very cautious – this time although he hadn’t mastered the leaping onto it as it went and needed helping on he loved it. 🙂 I did do a video clip but stupidly turned the camera on it’s side so the whole vid clip is on it’s side and sort of looses something :roll:.

We then assembled ourselves infront of the woman giving us the guided walk. She reminded me a lot of one of the teachers I had at school, very proper, very knowledgable about her topic but also very brisk and efficient and not taken to dallying and veering off topics. We looked at mole hills and other evidence of woodland creatures, evergreen and disiduous trees, the fruit, seeds and leaves of various trees and plants including sweet chestnuts, holly, pine, learnt about coppicing and I learnt that there is no difference between a toadstool and a mushroom, they are just different names for the same things, but there are loads of varieties of them. The kids had a great time although we were rather hurried along and I think we probably missed out on lots of opportunities to let them roam and ask their own questions instead of following an agenda. Very different to our walk in the woods earlier this week… I really liked it there though and they have a fab schedule of events including some survival days for children which I’d love to take Davies along to maybe in the spring. We talked about going again in the Spring to note changes. Also I think I’d take the children back into the woods for more walking and exploring again after the guided bit as we paid for admittance and didn’t really get to make full use of that. After lunch we headed back into the playpark and Davies had loads more goes on the zip wire. Tarly couldn’t be persuaded as she thought it was ‘too scary’. Scarlett? 😯 I did clamber up to check just how scary it looked from the top and was persuaded by Davies to have a go myself. Despite my fears of breaking the zipwire it was fine – not up to Eden standards of zipwire but pretty good fun :-).

We dropped Ali and Freya off in Lewes (mad, mad Lewes!) and came home for the usual – geomags and xbox play. If we had ‘normals’ in our house, those would be them ;). Ady was home early-ish, the kids had tea, we lit a fire and they stayed up slightly later than normal while we all chatted and laughed. Can’t remember what she was doing but I know Tarly had us in stitches for ages. Bedtimes are definitely getting more fluid here, partially I happily confess due to my realisation that if they go to bed later eventually their body clocks will kick in and they’ll start to wake later in the morning – not worked yet, but I life in hope!

We had dinner, I drank ever such a lot and spent ages chatting with some online friends before finally staggering to bed very late indeed.

Major NHS shake up plan delayed. Consultation on a major shake-up of NHS services across Surrey and Sussex has been delayed until next year.

I’m getting a new phone delivered on Monday! 🙂

I last did the free handset upgrade thing on my birthday and currently have a very cute pink flip phone. You can normally upgrade after a year so I was sort of looking forward to birthday upgrades every year but they wrote to me yesterday to say I could have an early upgrade if I wanted. I set my telephone advisor on the case and he informed me today that I wanted to be getting the one linked to above. So I’ve just rung to ask if I can have that one on the free upgrade and they said ‘certainly. Oh and have double minutes for the duration of the contract, which as I sometimes go over on my minutes in a very chatty month means I’ll potentially save money! 🙂

And yes, I do know that really frugal people don’t have mobile phones in the first place :oops:.

was to see this playpark empty! It’s been full of school children and then the mums and tots brigade ever since it was put up earlier this year. Not that they have any less rights to be there of course 😉 but it was still rather lovely to pull up outside the park to meet Lucy and Em and find not only had they not arrived yet, neither had anyone else!

We’d had a lovely morning so far. I’d had a lie in while they played xbox, Tarly had come to wake me and request she could play with the geomags again so she sat with me while I got dressed and we came downstairs and I got the geomags out again. There was some altercation while I was hanging the washing out so I got them to turn the xbox off and we started watching Wonderpets, a new Nick Jr show. They liked it so much we turned over to Nickjr2 and watched the next one too. Then we started to flick through the channels and found Words and Pictures so we watched that. It was all about Magic E (which actually I am beginning to wonder if they all are! All the ones I remember from childhood about Wordy and Dark Towers all had lots going on with magic e too) – so Davies got really into that and was pointing at the TV and joining in. Then he wrote ‘see’ with some geomags to demonstrate something – and took a photo of it

Then he made an ‘o’ and a ‘n’ to show me something he and Ady were doing with the bath letters last night, demonstrating how they say ‘on’ and ‘no’ depending on which order you put them. And he took photos of that too.

I then told him he could spell a word using ‘s’ ‘o’ and ‘n’ so he did and spelt it out. I explained it was not sun as in the sun in the sky but son as in what he is to me. Tarly listened and piped up with ‘yes, Davies is your son and I am your moon’ which made me have to cuddle her instantly and in many ways is rather accurate and very deep ;-).

Meanwhile I successfully got Tarly into clothes including pants, vest, skirt, top, boots and cardigan. All matching and weather appropriate and all with good grace and a minimum of fuss (which is not to say it was easy, oh nosireebob! But we did it 🙂 ). And then into her car seat too – again with the level of negotiation normally reserved for talking down a hostage situation or suicide bomber but without bloodshed or even tears :-). And that sort of shaped the day really, there were many potential meltdowns but we either averted them altogether or dealt with them accordingly, feeling really quite proud of both of us and very pleased that a sort of side benefit of how things are going is a more affectionate and loving relationship between us at the moment too. It’s moved into more of a ‘Scarlett is struggling with some things at the moment but I’m helping her to cope with them’ instead of the previous giving her a hard time about things she is already having trouble with.

So we got to the park, probably only ten minutes before Lucy and Em arrived. But it was empty, which meant that for the first time I shrugged my coat off and had a go on all the fab stuff I’ve been itching to play on since we first went there. 😆 And I only fell off once, although it is shaping up to be a good bruise 🙄 all of which delighted the children – both the joining in and the falling off I suspect ;-). I guess we were there about an hour with all of us pushing children on swings, coordinating various combinations of the five older children on the seesaw / swing / roundabout thingy and playing with our shadows.

Lucy is about three days behind me with her cold and was clearly feeling rough (well held out Luce and thanks for all the hospitality 🙂 x) but had us all back to hers for lunch, play and chat. The children ate (and scattered a bit around the lounge), Davies enjoyed being the focus for four girls and I was most amused at one point to see at least three out of the four of them vying for his attention and calling him to see something or other 😆 Davies and Rei were loving each others’ company as usual and were unintentionally quite exclusive in their games but they all required a minimum of intervention and after various jigsaws and books they headed off outside to play. There was all sorts of crazy to the casual observer but clearly very organised and perfectly sensible to them games, plenty of shrieking and a whole load of running around. At one point five children sounded like a whole playgroundful even through the glass doors. It was a lovely afternoon, all three of us really enjoyed it. 🙂

We finally left just after they children had dug up a bone. Which we’d spent time trying to identify deciding it was some sort of small mammal and suggested lots of possibilities (but not badgers obviously. BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT REAL!!! :lol:) until the children brought in another one. And another. Oh and another. It was definitely some sort of leg bone, probably a thigh bone we decided. And then they started bringing in ribs. Eventually we had enough bones to reassemble either a whole new breed of small mammal with eight legs and multiple ribs, or lots of legged, ribbed but nothing else animals. Or of course they maybe just discovered where the bones from barbecued chicken drumsticks and racks of ribs had been chucked in summers gone by…. 😳 All very Home Ed though and we were amused to see the 5 of them standing around holding the bones against their bodies and trying to decide which part of the body they might be from.

Home for dinner, they both helped Ady light the fire (Tarly loves does it and it makes me laugh to see her like Cinderella brushing the ashes into the grate :lol:) and were in bed fast asleep exhausted nice and early.

Claudia!

Have a lovely 6th birthday darling!

Lots of love, Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx

This morning was lovely. We snuggled on the sofa together and watched various things including whatever was channel 5 (perky Australian people singing songs with lyrics designed for far older audiences than those in the studio dancing along with them – no not The Wiggles!) and then a film of Tarly’s choosing. She chose Barbie Swan Lake, which fluffy pinkness and true love conquers all aside (don’t know where she gets those tendancies 😉 ) has nice music 😉 Tarly can recognise and identify Swan Lake and Nutcracker as a result of the dreadful Barbie videos which I guess is no bad thing, actually I must dig out the classical music cds we used to listen to in the car for the next time we have a longish journey as we used to enjoy them (majors for minors, that sort of thing). Davies played with the marble run which Tarly gradually started to play with too and we all snuggled back up again for the very last bit of the film. Lots of intricate and complicated marble run building going on with plenty of experiments and testing happening to create satisfactory results. I’ve put the geomags away for a while, partially in response to the arguments and squabbling that always happens when one of them wants to use a certain colour rod that the other one has got all of (we have silver, blue, white, green and red, not in equal amounts) and partially to encourage useage of other toys. I suggested the stickle bricks or the marble run today and it was a good idea.

Davies then wanted half an hour or so on the xbox so he got dressed and then played with that while I started what I was anticipating tricky negotiation procedures to get Tarly dressed. Not so this morning! 🙂 She came upstairs with me while I got dressed and played with my jewelry and tried on all my old watches, rings and necklaces from my ‘precious but never worn’ box. She loves listening to the stories attached to the bits and pieces, and getting me to try on all the very dangling, large and outrageous earrings that live in the box. 😆 We talked about what we were doing today, what sort of clothes she should wear, what sort of clothes I was wearing and she picked out her pants and vest (vests have created rows before so this was good), I chose some old jeans and gave her the choice of three jumpers which meant she would need a fleece or a coat. She decided she’d rather not wear a coat or fleece but volunteered to wear a top under her jumper instead (because I had 3 layers on – she counted my bra as one! she was quite happy to have the same).. She got cross with the jumper she was wearing after a few minutes so we just swapped it over for a different one, which she happily put on and was fine in all day. We also had a possible run in averted over her hair, which was hideously tangled and needed either brushing or tying back – she chose tying back and was happy aslong as she got to choose the hair band to do it with. She then came and spread the chocolate spread in her own sandwiches to take with us. Understood why she couldn’t pout the kettle to make my chai latte to take in a flask as I let her put her hand on the outside of the jug I was making it in which was hand hot but not burning and enough to demonstrate why she could get hurt by it.

So we were away, without even a wobble on time with her happily getting into her seat with only a murmur about not liking it and looking forward to getting a new one soon. 🙂 On the way to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie the children decided it was ‘opposites day’ and so I became ‘Daddy’ while ‘Mummy’ was at work, they became each other and we were driving backwards to come home rather than forwards to go out. I got bored of that before they did so turned the music up a bit and we all sang along to ‘every time we say goodbye’ which is a song I’ve sung both of them to sleep with many a time.

We arrived only shortly after Julie and set straight off on our walk. We were at the woods which is a NT area in Slindon and somewhere we go to a lot. The children all set off really happily, exploring all sorts of things, clambering around on trees, ducking through gaps in the hedges, collecting leaves, acorns, chestnuts etc and generally enjoying being out and about. It was lovely. 🙂 We worked our way up to the duckpond where the worlds most aloof ducks live. They cast a disdainful eye over all offerings and don’t even bother to come close to check out whatever you toss in the water to them, the best you can hope for is a bit of a quack, but even that seems done in a sarcastic way :lol:. Julie wanted to visit the Top House which is a famous place selling pumpkins and other similar vegetables so we worked our way along there. We stopped to look at a WW1 memorial for the men from Slindon who’d died in that war and to investigate a sun dial, which was not working as it was cloudy, but I explained the workings of to an ever increasingly disinterested party of children 🙄 and then we went into the church yard. Julie and I spent ages reading out the grave stones at the childrens’ request, Tarly swung on a lamppost and mentioned how much she missed the one from outside our house (see, it’s not just me who gets sentimental about inanimate objects and buildings!)
and I stopped to take a picture of a gravestone of a woman called ‘Nellie Pink’ insisting to Julie that I’d sung a song about Nellie the pink when I was at school. I’ve since googled and realised it was actually a song about Lily the Pink and been singing it ever since. I also had a flashback to being at junior school (so I’d have been 7 or maybe 8) and making up a verse about a girl called Sarah Moss in our class (Sarah Moss, thinks she’s the boss, and she bosses us around, so we gave her medicinal compound and now she never makes a sound!) – so I guess I’ve been doing that for longer than I remembered!

Amazingly the church was open so we all went inside, put the lights on and had a good old explore. I was amazed at how much Davies and even Scarlett remembered from the last time we went in a church back in the summer, talking about prayer cushions, the altar, the pews etc quite confidently and cooing over the stained glass windows. We turned the lights back off, signed the visitor book and went back on our way.

We then arrived at the Pumpkin House and it was amazing. Basically just someone’s garden but with the most fantastic displays of all sorts of pumpkins and other vegetables. There was a big area of carved pumpkins, some of which were so beautifully done and a couple of giant pumpkins and marrows which Davies was thrilled with as there are ‘prize pumpkins’ and ‘prize marrows’ in W&G Were Rabbit film and xbox game.

We worked our way back to the carpark and sat and had our lunch. On the way, inspired by Gill, I’d collected armfuls of firewood to put in my car and after lunch Julie and I gathered a load more filling my car while Davies put on a ‘Funny Show’ for Scarlett, Maisie and Jack which mostly seemed to involve standing on a log and doing lots of slapstick clown type routines but kept them all enthralled and in hysterics.

Then we headed back into the woods for some more walking and exploring. We’d found a sort of ‘camp’ built in a dug out crater, which I think was probably the area where an uprooted tree had once been made with loads of long twigs to create a wig-wam style structure last time we were there and couldn’t quite recall where it was. So the children led the way, Julie and I followed along behind having a very deep chat about religion, and we found it again.
So we lingered there awhile and the children added a bit to the structure and played in it before it finally started to drizzle and get darker and we decided it was time to head back (collecting more firewood as we went).

On a whim we called in to see my Dad on the way home and Frazer happened to be off today so he was there too. The children disappeared into his room and found his full size TV which is hooked up to an Xbox with all sorts of mad car chase games so that kept them entertained for a while. They also played on the piano and generally badgered Frazer. Dad and Frazer popped out for half an hour while we were there to collect Dad’s van so we watched Charlie and Lola while they were gone and then left shortly after that.

I told them on the way home that we are going to start trying to be more varied in their menu choices. My plan is for them to eat similar food to us, either earlier than us if feasible or the leftover version the following day. Whilst we are years away from eating at the same time as the children – and actually as we don’t have a dining room or indeed a table to eat at together anyway we are still a way away from a round the dinner table type situation from both a frugal and healthier food point of view, not to mention the hassle of cooking two entirely different meals I am keen to widen their scope a little. The deal is they try everything I put on their plates – if they hate it then fine, they don’t need to eat it and we’ll make a sandwich or some fruit for their dinner instead that night but I do at least expect them to try. Tonight we were having toad in the hole which is hardly exotic or untried anyway so I did them sausages, mash and sweetcorn. Tarly liked it all and ate loads of mash, Davies hated the sweetcorn, thought the mash was ‘ok’ but scoffed all the sausages. They have both had all those foods before but it was a good start and an encouraging beginning that they didn’t both just hate everything. Tomorrow we’ve got shepherds pie (okay then cottage pie 😉 ) so I’ll make a little one for them to try when I’m putting ours together. I was describing it to Davies earlier and he can’t quite get his head round a pie without pastry though – I didn’t attempt to get into any heavy conversations about how pies can exist without pastry this time – I’ve learnt my lesson there ;-).

Bath and hairbrush for Tarly all actioned by Ady while I got dinner on and they were both very peacefully asleep having done loads of everything today and had a really good day.

I have also noticed and was saying to Julie that despite the increased episodes with Tarly this week – today being a lovely and very welcome exception – I have noticed that the general times are lovelier – she is super affectionate at the moment and spent lots of the walk today either holding my hand or running off to play with the others and then popping back to bring me something she’d found, show me something or just have a quick cuddle and tell me she loved me. I am feeling far less like we are carrying all the rows over and just waiting for the next clash and far more like they episodes are complete and seperate episodes which we deal with and put behind us having either conceded or defeated or compromised and got over. This is good. 🙂 Today has been good. 🙂

Last week – or was it the week before I wrote this post, I think I said at the time that as I was feeling very crap at the time it might well not say precisely what I actually wanted to articulate but I wanted to get at least some of it out and that post was the result. Re-reading it this morning I can read between my lines and know that what I was really posting about being fed up with was motherhood. Now I don’t know if everyone feels like this from time to time, I imagine they do, I bloody well hope they do. I think motherhood is probably very similar to (a happy) marriage (or indeed long term, committed relationships 😉 ) in as much as whilst you spend the vast majority of the time very happy and revelling in the security, companionship, passion, shared history etc of that relationship there are times, sometimes only brief when it becomes constricting, it can make you feel trapped to be so tied to someone else, it is tiring to have to consider someone else, meet needs other than your own, live in the gilded cage. I guess that is true of pretty much all relationships – we could choose never to form any and live like hermits but we’d miss out on all the great stuff about having people around us. I often wax lyrical on the joys of having siblings, how the positives outweigh the negatives but that there are indeed negatives attached. I also think that if I’d never had children my life would be far less rich but because I’d never known the joys of having children I perhaps wouldn’t have missed them and would be bound up in the positives of not having children – more money, more time, less responsibility, less guilt, more freedom etc. Very base level but exploring all that wasn’t actually the reason for this post.

Where I was coming from was explaining that actually that post was not really about Home Education, it was about my own tiredness with being at home with small children. And how Home Education can compound that and also means you seem to lose the right to complain about it. I’ve been reading a blog this morning which is defending working mothers, saying how they are not less of a mother if they choose to work, choose to use childcare, do not take great pleasure in surrendering themselves to childcare and housework and it’s the same thing really. It seems to be that once we have made a choice, particularly if it is a contensious or ‘against the norm’ one then we need to shut up and put up about it, complaining about the challenges and the difficult days is not acceptable when you made the choice in the first place. If you choose to work and use childcare then it’s your own bloody fault when your kids end up delinquent, if you choose to stay at home then you’ve no one to blame but yourself when you get empty nest syndrome and are totally unemployable at 40 something because you came out of the workplace, if you choose to eshew the perfectly acceptable, free, state education then what the hell are you doing complaining about it when you have no money from losing a second salary, having no time to yourself or getting fed up with being around small children from time to time.

I think it makes things stronger if you question and challenge them, I enjoy sitting sometimes thinking about what life would be like if I wasn’t with Ady, I speculate on different possibilities at various life crossroads, I ponder some of the choices I’ve made and whether life would have been better if I’d made different decisions along the way. The answer is unfailingly always that I am actually very happy with what I have, I am great at counting my blessings, I am a generally very content person. If I was not then I would set about making the changes to make me happy again. Clearly when you have children unless you are prepared to walk away from them (which I know plenty of people, including Ady’s own mother, have done) if it is parenthood which is making you unhappy then you have something of a dilema. This was not the case for me, but certainly the ‘nothing but Home Educator’ was becoming not enough for me and I have managed to recognise it and take appropriate steps to deal with that. The easy answer would have been to stop Home Educating but actually that was not the issue at all, although the amount of time spent with the children and our lifestyle because we Home Educate was compounding a problem.

This has turned into yet another of my posts where I started it in my head, got half of it written in draft and have since been out for a whole day, come back, having talked about it to a real life person and worked through some of what I was going to say already so I’ll stop here otherwise it will be even more disjointed than it might already be. But all I really wanted to say was that actually I love Home Education, it is totally what I want to do for my children and with my children. I believe in it and it is only this faith in it which has meant I have continued. I guess what I was trying to say was that Home Ed for us this past year has been an against all odds type of situation – along with some ‘brave and honest’ (as someone said having read it) and rather brutal account of how I sometimes feel about parenthood.

hanging over me got sorted today.

I finally got that bloody HSShoeBoxSwap thing done and posted. Phew 🙂

Davies and I worked together to make a couple of posters, one telling our swapees – who live in Florida – all about us, how old Davies and Scarlett are, where we live and what our nearest towns and cities are, how far we are from London, which part of the UK we live in etc. We drew a Union Jack and a St George’s cross flag and Davies coloured them in. Then he drew a picture of him doing something he loves (that’d be playing Wallace and Gromit x box then), a picture of our house (which had remarkable levels of detail which he explained to me but will obviously go right over the heads of our swapees) and a picture of London including the London Eye, Big Ben, the hotel we stayed in last time we went to London and lots of pigeons 🙂

We then had a long and protracted working out how to spell ‘London’ so he could label it which lead to me asking him how to spell ‘Nic’ which appears to me to be a nice easy phonetic word. It took a while though 🙄 but we got there. He did make me laugh when I tried to say ‘Lon don’ to make it sound phonetic and he said ‘oh that’s how you’d say London with a Scottish accent!’ 😆

Then Davies and I went into town. Ady was working from home so Tarly was able to stay with him which averted another row and as the plea bargain to allow that was that she got dressed before I went we managed to get past that too. Davies brought a penny he’d found in the garden and was asking me what he could spend it on. We went to the library to return several books and gather armfuls of leaflets about local attractions to send to the swapees, then we posted some letters and then we went to the newsagents where I got them to dig me out a couple of sticks of rock, we got a postcard and I showed Davies the penny sweets. He, predictably chose one and then selected another one for Tarly so I agreed to buy them both (hey even our budget this month stretches to that 😉 ) and he got to keep his penny. Then we went next door to the small supermarket to buy some potatoes, onions and carrots. While we were queuing he noted that the potatoes had the same union jack flag on them as he’d coloured in this morning and asked if that meant they were from England. So we double backed into the shop again after paying and spent about ten minutes going round the whole fruit and veg section spotting flags and talking about which countries the various produce had come from and why perhaps it would be from there – we talked about things like oranges coming from Spain where it is sunny and the more exotic fruits coming from hotter countries – and some pink lady apples which had come all the way from Australia 😯 I know we had various other conversations all of which have since left my mind, but as Davies amazed me earlier today by recalling details of something I don’t even remember telling him but he insists I did I guess he probably does so it doesn’t matter. 🙂

We came home and I completed the box, Ady had dug out some photos of us and various touristy places around the UK so I wrote on the back of all of them, stuck some teabags in the parcel and nipped back out to the post office to send it on it’s way. Hurrah! I think it’s a great idea and I’m sure the children will love getting the parcel back from Amercia but I think the idea of it would be far better if the children were a bit older and were doing more of it themselves – or we’d been matched with closer aged swapees – which is no criticism of the poor woman who runs the list which suddenly imploded a month or so ago as a result of lots of ‘publicity’ about the project on various lists. We won’t do it again for a while but I think we may well come back to it when time, money and possibly interest and inclination from the children is more available.

Not entirely sure where this afternoon went. I did lots of washing, Tarly helped. She now knows how to load and unload the machine, which programme to turn it to, where the powder goes etc. It does sometimes concern me that she is so very stereotypical in her choices and interests and that the childrens’ strongest role models are a stay at home mother and an out to work father, but Ady does loads of housework and cooking and they are aware that I once worked, that I sometimes have work to do from home and that I will be working again soon, so hopefully we don’t have the balance tipped too much in one direction. They played with geomags and the wooden blocks, I finally listed some stuff which has been cluttering the playroom on ebay and Davies did more XBoxing.

Oh and Davies and I had a very interesting conversation today about Heaven and Hell. I was explaining that to believe in good you have to also believe in evil otherwise there can be no good. And trying to further explain it that for something to exist it must have an opposite otherwise the state is simply the norm rather than a state. As in if there is no night then there can be no day, if there is no cold then there can be no hot – one requires the other simply to validate it’s being. I think I explained it so he got it – it was a rather complicated issue (which could not exist without the existance of simple issues 😉 ) and I’ve a feeling I started to veer into territory which was way over and above what he was asking about anyway, but hey, it’s all good brain exercise ;-).