One word? When seven would do…

We had lots happening this weekend and me and the children were still pretty tired from London on Friday, so with me falling asleep on the sofa last night while pretending to watch Hot Fuzz I didn’t get round to blogging.

Yesterday was Big Monthly Food Shop day so I wrote the month’s menu and shopping list and we headed off to Tescos. It was heaving in there so not the best shopping experience but we did get everything from there we needed and well under budget. We’re trying really hard to only use supermarkets for things like tinned and dried food, which it is undeniably cheaper for, whether or not we like their ethics. We are then buying locally and from small suppliers like the butcher or the greengrocer. We’ve come a long way from spending £150 a week at the supermarket on our food shopping and it’s one of the achievements finances-wise that I am most proud of. We also pledged yesterday to try and start feeding the children more of what we eat, with them either having the same food as us cooked earlier, or leftovers the following day, so even if they don’t eat chicken in the same incarnation as us eg curry or stir fry they will at least have a chicken based dinner that night. It is easier in the winter to pull this off as lots of our dinners are slow cooker style meals which can easily be ready by the childrens’ teatime and still ready for us later in the evening.

We only had time for me to run in and grab my work keys and name badge before heading back out again as we’d been into town to the bank to pay a load of ebay cheques in before going to Tescos, so me and the children dropped into the butchers to leave our shopping list with him (Ady stayed in the car listening to football :)) before they dropped me and work and went home to put all the shopping away (most of which I have relocated back to it’s ‘proper’ home today :roll:). I had a nice afternoon at work, I had teabreak with Tom, the 17 year old Saturday assistant and we traded ‘wildest party I’ve ever been to’ stories. Understandably I won (well I do have an additional 16 years on him :shock:) and he told me about his uni applications. He’s a pretty cool lad actually, very individual and very sure of not necessarily where he’s going, but definitely the experiences he wants to have along the way. If I were his Mum, I’d be pretty proud of him :), and having met his Mum I know she is!

We’d been planning to head over to Ali &J’s after I finished work but a hushed phonecall to Ali which I took in the staff loo rearranged that for today instead, so we came home for X Factor viewing, pizza dinner and having watched Hot Fuzz win a movie award we decided to watch the dvd again but I fell asleep on the sofa having peaked early with wine before dinner was ready. 😳

This morning we headed off out to the last car boot sale of the season early and found it very quiet – both with buyers and sellers. I got various clothes for Scarlett including several fleeces as she seems to get them grubby enough for a wash after just one wear so I decided to stockpile a few more, and in colours other than pink :roll:. I’ve been back in my DMs since Friday but the kids wore their crocs again today before both deciding it’s time for closed in shoes again having got dew in their shoes walking round the grass before 9am. We got a few books there but nothing else and none of us could be bothered to go to the PYO so we came home for lunch.

Over to Ali and J and their two houses (limited period only!) for Ady to do some Ady Machining on their lounge carpet. I did a bit of window cleaning, flash wiping of paintwork and some flouncing about at cobwebs with a feather duster, but was probably slightly less use than Ady 😆 The children all played in the garden of whichever house we were in at the time and we had a couple of tea breaks. We left there and with renewed enthusiasm for all things house related decided to sort out our playroom properly over the next few weeks. There is stuff in the kids’ bedrooms which doesn’t get played with because it is tucked away and the big units in our playroom which housed baby and toddler toys well do a less effective job with the toys they play with now. The plan is to shelf the walls and get everything down to an accessible level for the children, take the chiller out of the understairs cupboard and into the garage freeing up storage space for hoovers and Ady machines in the cupboard and to bring in a table from the garage to go in the corner with a laptop set up in there so they can have a computer to play games and access the internet on. We’ve also got a spare tv, video and dvd player to be set up in there for them. They’ve agreed to having a good sort out of their outgrown toys and we’ve been talking about Christmas presents and they would both like a DS for Christmas. That suits us as we’d probably spend about that much on them each anyway and it means no more clutter. I’ve resisted the lure of DSs for ages as they’ve never really been that bothered about gaming and while they like the novelty of playing with their friends’ when they see them it’s not something either of them have ever asked for when questionned about Christmas or birthday presents. We’re planning to gradually get rid of bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks before dismantling the units and getting them out in a couple of weekends time. I love de-cluttering :).

We had lots of shouting (mine) and tears (their’s) at bedtime due to everyone being tired and fractious (and I include myself in that :oops:) but it all got made up before they went to sleep. I’m about to have a bath and then roast beef for dinner and then it’s straight back into the bedlam that is our normal week starting again tomorrow. Proabably wouldn’t have it any other way ;).

We headed off to London today. We used to go up fairly regularly for a while but it petered off last year with just one or two visits and this year I don’t think we’ve been at all. Actually I’d conclude from today that Davies and Scarlett are in a period of requiring two adults for maximum enjoyment of such things. When they were small I was quite fiercely indpendent and able to do everything, on my own with them, and woe betide anyone who suggested it might be a bit tricky. I have many an anecdote of nightmare trips to London with a toddler, a pushchair and a preschooler but I was never really daunted by it. Now I am finding that whilst it is not challenging logistically it would just be a more productive and enjoyable trip all round if D&S had an adult each to go round with. Neither of them are reading, or close enough to it to make sense of the signs around exhibits, but they are both old enough to want to know more, except that they are also individual enough to want to look at different things, close enough in age to want the same level of interaction with someone else and far apart enough to want different levels of it at the same time. Just like Legoland was tricky on my own simply because they both wanted to go on everything but both needed an adult accompanying them, today was tricky because they both wanted to know all about the things they saw but needed someone constantly chatting to them about it. Definitely a small window of this though between having Scarlett in the pushchair or content to wander along following Davies’ lead and zoning in and out of what I said to him while counting her own toes or people watching or being happy with a rice cake shoved in the pushchair while doing active ‘stuff’ with Davies and having two independant children who can go off and read the signs and do stuff themselves though, I should probably savour it while it lasts ;).

After a very organised start, which even left me time to chat online on an international level 😉 we set off for the station. It was a brisk and enjoyable walk, which was my first indication that this was going to be a differnt sort of experience to two years ago really. We chattered all the way, recalling things we’d seen before, observing stuff and generally feeling like people who like to be together rather than a babysitter. We arrived just as Lucy and The Rs were coming out of the ticket office which meant I could leave D&S with them and dash across to the cashpoint. There was now a queue at the ticket office but luckily Lucy had already bought her ticket and was able to find the same one on the self service vending ticket machine so we got that and dashed back across the crossing to our side of the platform to catch the train.

We sat all but together – we were opposite a lovely lady who complimented Davies in his drawing (he’d brought a small pad and pencil and set to drawing a train) and smiled a lot at Scarlett, while Lucy and The Rs were across the carriage opposite a trio of older people who were getting off at Gatwick to fly off on holiday. We moved across to sit opposite them when they got off. Train journeys previously to London have always been without company and usually pretty stressfree as we look out of the window, play games and chatter. It was slightly different with company and Davies and Scarlett were louder and less well behaved than I would have liked, but I suspect that was much more my issue than theirs :?:.

We arrived at Victoria, cut across to the tube station and aside from one small false turning had a very smooth journey the two tube stops to the museum. The children got to see a busker, which we had only been talking about the other day when Mr Bean does a bit of busking in the film we watched last weekend, so I was able to give them 10p each to go and throw in his violin case. It’s a longish walk from the underground to the overground at South Ken. but we arrived pretty much dead on agreed meeting time with the rest of the people coming, entered the museum and headed to the loos. Julie rang me while we were in there to say they were three stops away on a bus so we arranged to lurk in the foyer to meet them. Lucy and The Rs headed off, Davies and Scarlett very happily completed a giant jigsaw of the iguanadon in the foyer and we waited for Julie and co to arrive.

We didn’t have long to wait and once we’d greeted them Davies and Scarlett were very keen to head off to the Human Biology bit as they’d seen a picture of the giant baby advertised on one of the interactive touch screens around the place and wanted to go and see that first. So we headed off there, looked at various baby-making exhibits, which tied in rather nicely with all the books we’ve been reading lately about reproduction, puberty and so on. We then decided we were quite hungry too so headed off to the picnic area to join the others for lunch. That was a fairly speedy affair for us – I don’t really see the point of travelling for 2 hours to get to London to sit for an hour eating in an underground area that could be anywhere – and as I’d already decided not to put pressure on us to see more than we could manage I let D&S decide where to go to next. They both wanted to see the bugs and insects so we went there next, which as it was next to the picnic area the others joined us at.

We looked at lots of interesting stuff about bees, termites, spiders, crabs, ants (including the classic leafcutter ants carrying leaf bits along a log and into their nest display) oh and a very graphic exhibit about flies and how they munge up food to eat by vomiting on it (I recall there used to be a poster in our science lab at school with all but the identical wording on it actually). We then moved on as I was very aware of the differing levels of interest and pace between Davies and Scarlett, let alone adding another 5 adults and 6 children to the mix.

We went to the dinosaurs, which has gotten even better since last we were there 3 years ago with a couple of excellent animatronic dinosaurs there now, which captivated D&S for ages. :). We decided to wander a bit after that and went upstairs to look at various things before coming downstairs to look at the mammals. There are pics on flickr but as I struggled with the flash and getting the camera to take the amazing shots I could see with my eyes but not get it to replicate I won’t post any in this.

Scarlett had flagged rather by this point, although she could be rallied it was all but impossible without compromising Davies’ experience although I managed a bit :). We moved onto mammals which they both loved. Julie and Co had by now started to head for home, so I spoke to Lucy and we decided to also make a move. I was really cross to have missed the volcanoes and earthquake area as I recall it from before but had been convinced that had been at the Science Museum, not the Nat. History one (although I’m not at all sure why 🙄 at self). A trip to the gift shop which netted us a set of jacks each – D’s are dinosaurs and S’s are sharks. D has been after a set of jacks for ages so that’s good. 🙂

Back again to the tube, where we arrived on the platform at almost the split second the next train did, so we squashed on. The children loved the tube, Scarlett liked the dare-devilnness of not holding on to the bar until the last minute 😆 :roll:. Back to Victoria and as there was no direct train listed yet we decided to go to Brighton on the fast train and catch a connection back to Lancing from there. There were no seats to be had on the train but actually that was fine. We stood for the first couple of stops, the train thinned out and Lucy and The Rs got seats but me, D and S were very happy with all the legroom afforded by sitting in the gap between carriages and we played a few rousing games of ‘on saturday I went to the supermaket and I bought’ memory games. We had a shortish wait at Brighton before getting on the train home.

Ady was waiting for us at the station whereupon I rather slumped and we had unpleasant episodes from tired mother and daughter 🙁 All quickly made up though and they were both asleep pretty early by their standards. It was a good day, made me resolve to get back up to London more frequently again and enjoy some of the stuff like that which just doesn’t happen at home without that sort of stimulus.

For me all day. Which means I don’t really know what went on at home. I know the geomags and the toy cars were played with. I know that in the afternoon Davies and Scarlett created a zoo. I know this because I was greeted at the gate with a sign saying ‘soo’ made by Davies and taken on a guided tour of said zoo. This included a hand built ‘waterfall’ in the garden, a row of chairs for ‘visitors’ and some real live chickens 😆 (one of which pecked Davies today, rather sealing its’ fate as next for the table, if we only had a table of course :lol:). Then inside to Tarly’s bedroom which had a variety of soft toy animals and a toy laptop on the bed as ‘Tarly’s office space’. In the playroom there were more soft toy and plastic animals and then upstairs in Davies’ room were yet more, including a monkey house where toy monkeys hung off a dalek put there for decoration and climbing fun for monkeys :lol:. I love their imagination, creativity, inventiveness and attention to detail. 🙂

My day was fine, filled with chatter with workmates and borrowers. And I’ve been scheduled for my first Baby Rhyme Time session next Friday so will be practising lots of nursery rhymes for the next week :).

I beat Ady home by about half an hour so the children were sitting down to tea when he arrived home. We sat and chatted while the children disappeared off to play again. I popped off to get picnic food for tomorrow and then we sat down with dinner and watched Build a new life in the country, which was about a couple who sold up, bought a derelict house and land in Ireland and with limited budget renovated the house and started the road to self sufficiency, with no mortgage, no debts and no need to work. It was an excellent show and I thought the family were really inspiring with their passion and belief in their dream, not to mention their committment to it through the rough patches. Very interesting watch :).

We were all up quite early this morning and breakfast was an easily organised affair as I’d picked up some reduced croissants at the supermarket last night – two almond and two chocolate. I’d have put money on Ady and Davies wanting the chocolate ones, I prefer almond and Scarlett usually has whatever I’m having, but Ady had scoffed an almond one, Scarlett wanted chocolate which left Davies with the choice of one of each remaining and he chose almond. So I had chocolate, and marvelled at everyone doing the opposite of what I’d expected (although Scarlett was indeed delighted that I had chocolate too so her and I had the same 🙂 ).

We were just getting organised to go out when Lucy texted to ask if we wanted to go conker hunting. I really wanted to get Scarlett shod today as the rest of the week is busy and it’s really too cold for crocs with holes in now, so I texted back to say we’d be ready to meet in an hour after we’d dashed off shoe shopping part II. I put a second load of washing on and we headed out. We tried Matalan – nothing, Asda – nothing and Brantano – nothing. All a dire selection of black school shoes, tarty Bratz style boots with high heels (high heels! For a four year old!!! 😯 And a tree climbing, clamering on playground equipment, splashing in muddy puddles, scrambling over rocks at the beach, running as fast as the wind four year old at that – she’d knacker her ankles by age six!) or sparkly party shoes. So we gave up and went to the park instead. Lucy confessed she’d lured me to the park with promises of conker hunting knowing the park would be an outright
‘no’ but actually as we arrived first and saw the park was totally empty I was quite up for a play there instead. I sat in the giant sink plunger style swing watching my children from afar pondering the fact that finally they are the optimum age for enjoying playgrounds. They can go on everything without help, get up, get down and propel themselves. The sun was shining which it’s done very little of all summer, and yet this is when they should be closeted away in a classroom instead – something is surely wrong there?!

Lucy and The Rs joined us and with only mimimal amounts of helping we had a lovely time with Lucy and I going on most stuff – with varying levels of hilarious results. Three out of four children having a whale of a time on the zip wire, Davies showing off his fairly newly acquired swinging skills and Scarlett getting a bit of time just her and I in the middle of it all, sitting on the roundabout chatting. :). Rebecca was due at her Nanny’s and the other children were getting hungry so we decamped from there, with a brief period of conker discovery as we walked across the park back to the car. Davies did various mathsy stuff with the 13 conkers he’d collected. He’s doing lots of that lately, all very practical stuff like telling the time or relating it to money – he told me the other day that 50p and 50p was one pound, which is clearly nothing amazing for a child a couple of years his junior but is not something Ive ever told him, so is a self discovered bit of maths, which has gotta be the best sort :). We also had a chat about singulars and plurals yesterday which I forgot to mention with him asking if ‘one pound’ and ‘a pound’ were the same thing, ditto ‘one hour’ and ‘an hour’ and why we had two names for describing them. I explained that we don’t tend to use the prefix ‘one’ so much as an and a, but we do use numbers when it is more than one: eg there is a dog, or there are two dogs. We also talked about the term ‘couple’ for describing two or three of something. All very low key ways of everyday stuff that just seems to come up and get dealt with at the time, but when I put it all together I realise is his way of getting every bit of information he needs from our day to day lives to build up the knowledge he wants / needs.

Home for lunch, the children played with the chickens while I hung some washing out and then Lucy and Richard arrived. It was a changed dynamic without Rebecca and poor Richard didn’t seem to come off well from it really. The four of them rub along together pretty well and I think the siblings, age gaps, gender mix gets bridged across the way, but taking one child out of the mix meant the whole thing folded rather with Davies and Scarlett a bit reluctant to bring their games down to Richard’s level and possibly seeing him as something of a responsibility rather than a playmate :(. Lucy and I did get to finish our chat though, while I sat and wrapped a load of my ebay parcels ready for the post office.

Lucy and Richard left and Davies and Scarlett fell straight into a game. I’d spoken to Ady – who passed his screen test with flying colours, got really good feedback, complimented on his ‘Paul Newman eyes’ and has his first appearance next weekend 🙂 🙂 🙂 – and he was on his way home so Scarlett and I decided to wait for him to get back so we could take his car and leave Davies behind with him for the next phase in our shoe shopping. On the way over we talked about what sort of shoes she wanted and she agreed she would like boots and red ones if possible. The first shop we tried was Peacocks – a cheapy shop which has often come up trumps in the past for things we’ve failed to find anywhere else. Sure enough there were a pair of lovely dark red, knee high boots with no heel and easy for Scarlett to manage herself zips. 🙂 She ran around the shop in them to practise and decided they were perfect. 🙂 Also in there were fake croc wellies for a fiver a pair 🙂 so I got her and Davies a pair of those each ready for our upcoming Autumn and Winter Walks ;).

On the way home I gave Scarlett the phone and got her to talk to Ady to ask him to get dinner on for the children as Davies had to be at Badgers. He passed the phone over to Davies and the two of them chatted away for ages. Really nice to hear them so pleased to talk to each other :). Once home I quickly wrapped a couple more parcels that had been paid for since this morning and then dashed off to the post office to get them on their way. I was cutting it fine for Badgers really but I didn’t want to spend all of my lunch hour tomorrow in the post office and the one in Lancing town is always packed with queues. Back to collect Davies and off again to Badgers.

I whizzed round to Lidls for a few bits including a particular cereal they both adore which I’ve only ever found in Lidls and then sat in the car reading my book and eating chocolate limes until he came out again. Just like at Beavers he is now one of the middle sized children as the bigger ones have moved on and smaller ones have joined. Scarlett will start there in December, which will be great, there are a couple of other sibling sets at Badgers including the boy and girl who came to Davies’ birthday party and both D&S are looking forward to her being there. :).

Home again to make quiche, wrestle children to bed (and persuade said children that once in bed sleeping rather than looking at Mr Men books would be a good idea – I swear that child is teaching himself to read with sessions in his bedroom every night :lol:) and organising a courier online for one of the bigger ebay sales, giving feedback and general ebay admin. I’ve made nearly £100 from last weeks flurry of listing so I’m very pleased with that. 🙂

Tomorrow I’m working and Friday we’re off to London for the day to the Natural History Museum with various HE friends, so a busy end to the week lined up.

Made about sixty quid on all my ebay listings, that’ll pay for Davies’ Legoland birthday treat visit in a couple of weeks :).

We now have two definite crowers aka Sunday dinners here. Still holding out hope that Freddie is a hen though and doing daily egg searches. Punzel (who is on the most borrowed time) did a bit of a runner today – the children chased him over the low wall and onto the grass verge outside our house. I went flying out there, followed by Lucy and all four children and ended up herding him into the next door neighbours garden before finally coaxing him to jump back over the wall. We had traffic stopped to watch and it nearly caused an accident with someone not looking where they were going, but I guess two women, four children and a runaway cockerel beside a normal suburban street probably was something of a spectacle really :lol:.

I had a small list of stuff to do this morning, with the aim of getting back home for lunch time and a planned visit from Lucy and The Rs in the afternoon. My car was desperate for petrol. Actually it’s been desperate for petrol since about last Tuesday but I didn’t get paid til yesterday. I was not even sure it would make it a mile along the road to where there is a supermarket, petrol station and retail park, it was that low. Both the children needed winter shoes and we needed a few bits of food shopping. Perfectly planned to do altogether. I got several loads of washing washed and we headed off about 11am. First of all the petrol station was shut, for refurbishment 🙁 then there were no shoes even remotely suitable for either child :(. They are both in big enough sizes to only have a selection of black school shoes to choose from and neither of them want black shoes. In Scarlett’s case there is the alternative of glittery party type shoes which are equally unsuitable for day to day wear given their shiny, skinny soles and stiff, heel rubbing egdes – plenty of time for her to suffer pain for the sake of gorgeous shoes when she’s older if that’s what she’s inclined to do.

So, stopping to bung a tenners worth of petrol in the very overpriced little garage we headed off to the next retail park along where M&S nestles side by side with Tescos and McDonalds. No shoes in Tesco (only more sparkles or black boots with heels for S and a selection of trainers with either Spiderman or The Simpsons on for D :roll:), no shoes in M&S and last I checked McDs aren’t giving away shoes with Happy Meals. So we decided to pop into town instead.

Davies found a pair of really quite nice, velcro fastening brown boots which look good and only cost £7.99 in the first shop we tried but we didn’t find anything for Scarlett at all :(. I think boots are the best option for her as they go with skirts or trousers and negate the need for socks or tights, both of which she loathes. She’s had boots for the last two winters and they seem to be the most sensible footwear for her. She does have a yearning for something red though. I’d buy her DMs but I’m not spending 30 odd quid on shoes she could grow out of in a couple of weeks. We’ll go and look at Asda and Matalan tomorrow and hopefully find some. Whilst in town we got some cakes from the bakery for lunch. We came home via the CoOp which has both a shoeshop and a clothing shop concession in it and had no further luck with shoes but did get them both socks and super snuggly pjs that they were both in need of (Scarlett reckons she’ll ‘try’ and wear socks but at the very least does need them for soft play places and trying on shoes :lol:). They both love to snuggle into fleecy pjs even in warm weather and all last years winter pjs were actually from the winter before so at 2 pairs for £6 it was a good deal to get them a couple of pairs each.

We came home and I hung all the washing out and the children spent ages in the back garden on ‘a nature hunt’ together while we waited for Lucy and The Rs to arrive. The children all went out into the garden and aside from the chicken rescue incident seemed to get on well, having all missed each other after a week apart. Lucy and I chatted and then bit the bullet and cut her many years worth of growth plait off. Pictures on flickr. 🙂 The plait went from being part of Lucy to a lump of dead hair very quickly and we both felt a bit squeamish towards it, although the children thought it was hilarious. Ady came home and noticed it straight away (bless him, he is so well trained 😉 ).

Davies and I went to his swimming lesson. On the way we talked about Beavers last night and he wanted to know why I thought some of the boys were unruly, once he’d satisfied himself with my definition of unruly. I shared with him my theory that after being dictated to what to learn and sitting at a desk for six hours most of them were probably fed up of being told what to do and just wanted to run around and shout. He agreed and I explained that my strong feelings against curriculums and prescribed learning were one of my chief motivators for Home Education. I tend not to say too much anti-school to him but clearly I don’t big it up any either. I do talk about my own school days, mostly in a positive light as part of a recalling childhood context to them but obviously they have friends who do go to school so they have developed their own ideas of what it might be like. Davies had grasped the whole sitting down bit already and seemed pretty amazed at the very notion but tonight was the first time he realised that the stuff children learn at school isn’t what they have shown an interest in themselves, it’s what someone else has decided they should know. He was horrified and thought it was no wonder the rest of the beavers didn’t want to listen to any more educational stuff and that they are probably sat down with pens and paper at a table and not allowed to draw whatever the mood takes them to draw. I guess the very concept of formal learning to someone who has never experienced anything like it would be very very strange. He did say that at Badgers and Beavers they sometimes sit down and learn stuff but that he always found that ‘really interesting, but that must be because me and Scarlett do all our running around and and being crazy at home in the day when everyone else is at school!’ :lol:.

Swimming went really well. He seems to be getting better each week and still he is really enjoying it. The instructor praised him for really trying and I can see that he really is putting his all into it and it is starting to pay off. 🙂 A marked improvement even from last week. On the way to the swimming pool it had started raining heavily having been threatening it for hours. I remarked to Davies about the smell of wet pavements and we stood inhaling that scent for a while. I love the smell of wet pavements. 🙂

I dropped Davies home and popped out for the food supplies we never did manage to get earlier. Then when I got home Ady popped out for some drink supplies ;). He has his screen test at QVC tomorrow morning so has been practising his schpiel all evening with me firing questions at him like a pretend caller. He’s wearing blue just like Joan (Rivers) told him too and I’m sure he’ll be ace at it.

Yesterday was an early start with us leaving the house just after 8am (and yes, as far as I’m concerned that is early! I’ve done my share of being at work for 7am in years gone by, now I consider being out of bed before 8am to be extreme!). My parents pulled out of their road to follow us as we drove by and we convoyed over to where Ady works. West Sussex Growers Association were having one of their open days with lots of nurseries in the area participating by opening up their sites for the public to walk round and see inside. Ady had agreed to be onsite for the morning at Roundstone as he had done copious amounts of risk assessments prior to the event and wanted to ensure his dictats would be carried out. The nursery was operational, although some machines were not in use due to safety concerns and lots of it had been zoned off with no public access. My parents, who I don’t think have ever really grasped that Ady’s job has moved on from the Garden Centre Manager role he had at B&Q when we were first together, seemed suitably impressed that he is a senior member of management in such a huge operation and is the H&S manager for the site we were at and a further 2, equally enormous sites. I’ve seen it all before but I was still proud :). Ady gave us the whole guided tour and we ducked under fences to see the whole thing which was great for the kids too as they now have a good idea of where the plants Daddy brings home have come from and the sheer magnitude of machinery and production that goes on there. I also enjoyed catching up with one of my favourite of Ady’s colleagues ;).

We left there and my parents treated us to lunch at a pub on the way home. Sadly the lunch was crap. Mine was all but inedible so I sent it back, everyone else ate theirs but it was really poor quality – glad we weren’t paying for it! Two large glasses of wine made me more mellow than usual though and we had roast Rhonda to look forward to in the evening anyway! We came home for coffee and I sat on the floor playing with Davies and geomags and Scarlett and Polly Pockets while Ady stuffed Rhonda. My parents stayed awhile before heading off. Davies and Scarlett had a bath and then we all sat down to dinner and watched Mr Bean’s Holiday, which we thought was pretty good. Rhonda was nice too 😆

Today – I worked from 9-5, a shift I owed a colleague from when she worked my Friday shift when we were at Kessingland (pah! Kessingland!). My Mum, who had got here by the skin of her teeth on Friday morning and blamed traffic rang me at ten to nine to say she was stuck in traffic again. She lives a mile away!!! 🙄 so I had to ring work to say I’d be late too. She was here just after 9 and I was at work by 10 past but I was really pissed off with her over it. Her having the children at all seems to be made into this big production and happens so infrequently that I’d really hoped she could have made more of an effort on one of the rare occasions she does have them. Ah well.

Work was fine, quite busy and it’s so nice to feel I know what I’m doing most of the time. I’ve been in a bit of a daydream today for various reasons (all good :)) so that made it go quicker. Lucy and The Rs came in so I had a bit of a chat to them for a while and generally enjoyed being there although for some reason it felt like a long day away from D&S. I got home just after 5pm, Ady had been home since lunchtime and had fed them tea and got Davies ready for Beavers. Scarlett was in the nightdress she’s been wearing when I left and apparently had refused to get dressed all day insisting she had a cold and couldn’t possibly wear clothes. 😆 Davies’ beavers were meeting at the park today instead of the church hall and had asked for helper parents. Ady had been going to go – we’ve both been CRB checked but he tends to do Beavers as it’s nice for him to spend the time with Davies. But Davies requested I go as he’d had all afternoon with Ady and really missed me.

What a shambles the Beavers is then. The children are with only a couple of exceptions really unpleasant, wild, rude, disrespectful children. They spent the whole hour ignoring what the adults said, phyiscally laying into each other, shouting and just being really vile. As we have probably acknowledged before I don’t really do big groups of children with masses of tolerance but these kids were awful :(. First we played a game where they split into 3 groups of 3 boys and tied their scarf round their eyes as a blindold one boy at a time. The other two in the team led him to one of the many trees in the park and he got to feel it, then was led away and had his blindfold taken off and had to go and work out which tree he’d been feeling. One of the worst behaved boys there, M, was noticing all sorts of things when prompted, such as cobwebs, and numbers of little branches coming off the tree, but then suddenly lost interest and just started yelling and kicking the other boys instead. Then we walked up the hill a bit and were supposed to listen to see what we could hear and identify whether it was man-made, like traffic etc. or nature, like birds calling, wind blowing through leaves etc. You can imagine that we heard very little. Back down the hill again for a few running around games but even those degenerated into the most rowdy boys being yelled at by the Beaver leaders. They tried to play a game of chinese whispers but it was intentionally ruined by the boys deliberately changing the whisper to ‘smelly pants’ or similar each time. Oh it was dreadful! I chatted a bit to Davies and one other little boy who was really interesting and wanted to talk. We looked at the sycamore leaves and talked about why they are like helicopters, why some things like lampposts stay in one place all the time and what might happen if they didn’t.

We finished up on a big pile of woodchip which is presumably either waste from the park about to be collected, or has been delivered ready to be used somewhere in the park. The lads played on it and one of the most unpleasant children threw a load in the face of one of the other boys, causing huge amounts of tears and upset and gagging. Little git. His mum turned up, smoking her roll up, with a younger sibling in tow (no older than 3) who proceeded to join in with the chucking of woodchips while she held court boasting about her child’s bad behaviour in school and how they can’t control him either. Very sad 🙁 I asked Davies if he really enjoys it and gets anything out of it but he insists he does and I don’t think he was particularly protected by my presence but certainly doesn’t seem to get picked on by the rough boys, neither does he seem to participate. Beaver leader is now added to my fantasy list of jobs to wish on people I hate though, a far cry from the organised calm and no shouting environment at Badgers each week.

Davies and I whizzed over to Asda after Beavers for various bits and pieces including an item from this years Tickled Pink range (clothes sold for breast cancer charities, which I always buy something from each year). This year I got a t shirt for Ady and a set of pjs / lounging clothes for me instead of a top as I now have about 5 of them in my wardrobe so thought pjs would get more use for slobbing around the house in. We’ve watched a prettty good film tonight which even Ady stayed up to see and now it really is very late so I’m off to bed.

Today, after the chicken drama detailed in the post below I made cheese scones and the children made birthday cards for Jack and Maisie. Scarlett drew a picture of Spirit the horse for Maisie’s and Davies drew a collection of dinosaurs for Jack’s. Tarly was able to write all the letters in ‘Maisie’ with me just telling her the names of the letters – A, I, S and E are all in her name, she know’s M from Mummy (and McDonalds :oops:) and I from ‘Davies’. Davies can now very rapidly write any letters I call out to him and spelt ‘to’ ‘happy’ and ‘love’ by himself. Once we’d done the ‘To Jack’ and ‘To Maisie’ bits inside they both just wrote ‘happy birthday, love’ and their own name followed by the cards being passed round the rest of us to write our names in. I was really surprised (although I shouldn’t be really, if I didn’t think it would work then I shouldn’t be doing autonomy!) that Scarlett knew most of the letters when I called them out and the ones she didn’t Davies showed her his and she copied those. Her writing is actually very neat, she can do as tidy and small as Davies without much effort. Davies enjoys writing but he likes to copy, it’s rare he will want to go to the effort of working out how to spell something, I guess the day it all clicks and stops being ‘an effort’ will be the day he suddenly starts doing it :).

We all got in the car and headed over to Lewes to collect Ali (with debate on the way about which of her two houses that would be from :)) and then Ady and the children dropped Ali and I (and the cheese scones) off at our Writers Retreat day. It’s the third one I have attended (thank you Ali 🙂 xx) and I can really feel progress being made. I am getting more able to cast off my life and focus on writing, while accepting that huge chunks of whatever I write will be autobiographical and working with that rather than against it. I got some great inspiration for working with that in new ways and the exercises pulled together lots of thinking I’ve been doing anyway. It’s a really supportive, safe environment where I feel able to cast out ideas and get honest, unbiased feedback without people’s personal feelings clouding their responses. There were three people (plus Ali of course) there that had been at previous ones – including the teacher and one new attendee who was a very interesting person too, so lots of chatting was done aswell as writing. I did a piece of writing at the end which I was pleased with and will probably work on some more and got some positive, constructive feedback on that too which was great. 🙂

Ady and the children picked us up, we dropped Ali home (at a different house to the one we’d collected her from :)) and came home via Asda for a few bits for dinner. Some X factor watching, late dinner for the children followed by even later dinner for us.

Ady, Davies and Scarlett had been to Jack and Maisie’s fifth birthday party over at their house today. Ady has pictures but his camera battery is flat so I can’t download them tonight but they had a good time apparently. It feels odd that they all got on with something without me but Ady said all the other party attendees were most envious of me being at a writing day :).

And now, because it’s been a fairly emotionally draining day, even if most of it has been positive, I’m off to bed!

A relaxed start to the day with Davies playing with some blocks while Scarlett put all sorts of clips and bows in my hair and we all watched cbbc together. Then we had a last minute rush to get out of the house on time to meet Julie, Jack and Maisie at the PYO farm. I wrote down a thank you note for Davies to copy while I hung some washing out and Scarlett tidied up. We were late but so were they and we pulled into the carpark right behind them.

The PYO farm we use is a pretty big one, open right through from June to October with a massive variety of fruit and vegetables available through the seasons. The weather has been pretty cold with showers of rain today so we pretty much had the place to ourselves and the tractor ran just for us, which delighted the children 🙂

We picked apples, sweetcorn and Julie got a big bag of butternut squash which the kids helped to pick. We also found a marrow that had already been picked. I was slightly fretful that Davies may decide to get all emotionally attached to one of them but he seemed perfectly capable of seeing them as just vegetables today after last night’s sweet potato debacle, so that was a relief.

Further tractor riding and then we went on to the local gardens which is just down the road and we’ve not been to for ages but is always good for the children to run around and use up some energy. By now the weather was really not very nice, but Highdown is fairly sheltered which made it even more ideal.

There were some children’s trail sheets which presumably was a school summer holidays activity and led you round the gardens spotting letetrs A-J with information about the places the letters were hidden along with little mini-quests too. When we arrived I went off to use the loos there and Davies tutted and said ‘you always need the loo when we come here’, to which I replied ‘yes, I just have this Pavlovian reflex to the place in my bladder!’ which of course then needed full explanation about dogs, saliva, bells and hunger, all infront of a very interested gaggle of elderly people walking up an appetite before having lunch in the tea rooms there – education everywhere! 😆

So we trekked round finding the alphabet clues and spotting things like lily pads, dragonflies, water snails, the tree planted by Queen Mary and bamboo – D and S delighted to both spot the bamboo and tell us all that pandas eat bamboo before we’d even identified it as bamboo eaten by pandas on the sheets :). We ended up in an area with some huge trees that the children can go inside the shade of as a ‘camp’ with conveniently located benches for grown ups so we sat there awhile chatting while the children played and then Scarlett took a tumble and hurt her leg, the rest of us were getting hungry and the rain was setting in so we decided it was home time.

We came home for crumpets for lunch, I drank about four cups of tea and the children played together all afternoon. Scarlett and I made some flapjacks and then they had an early tea of sausage and mash followed by lots of flapjacks :). It all feels very much like the summer was a long time ago here, which I am quite happy about as I love Autumn and being out and about walking today made me look forward to our walks in the woods and wet and windy seaside walks to come. Way back last year I liked the idea of some sort of nature volunteering as a family and I’ve been looking into that again. It seems that it is mostly for secondary school age children upwards that bigger organisations are looking for volunteers but I’m sure we can find somewhere where we can get involved in some sort of outside in nature type stuff.

I’ve got firefox and have been using sage but actually it seems crap lately, struggling with feeds from some blogs and simply not picking up new posts on others. Anyone got any recommendations of anything better? That’s very easy to use 🙂

Had a really good morning at work; it was four of us there, Yvonne (Lancing Library’s boss), Frankie (my favourite workmate), Sarah (the stereotypical library worker) and me. Lots of laughs and lots of catching up as I’ve not seen any of them for a while as they all happened to be on annual leave for the week before I was off last week so plenty to talk about. Frankie – who is the world’s nosiest co-worker – had been checking out the most recent batch of books coming in for me about self-sufficiency, self building and eco houses and so we chatted about that for a while and I showed her the pictures of Simon Dale’s house and explained about having emailed to offer our building help next spring / summer at the latest project. She really surprised me by saying her and her husband are hankering after some lifestyle changes at the moment too and feeling life is too short to work to pay a mortgage and that be your biggest achievement. Her two older children (she has four) are by her first husband though so she needs to stay fairly local but they’ve looked into buying land and self building. She reassured me that I hadn’t got her totally wrong by saying the Simon Dale house looked nice but she thought it might be home to too many spiders though :lol:.

I spent some time on the enquiry desk and joined someone to the library, searched for films made based on Danielle Steel books and dealt with someone who’s new puppy had chewed up a crime novel. I also did an online survey of West Sussex County Council workers about our workplaces and how valued we feel. Ady called in at about 1130am as he’d gone out without a front door key and the morning went really quickly. At 1pm just as we were about to close we had a sudden flurry of people with lengthy reasons for visiting though including a man with twins who both had their legs crossed and desperate looks on their faces asking for the loo, a bloke with pages and pages of photocopying, someone bringing back a book and taking out another three and then the phone rang with someone wanting to renew books that were already 2 weeks overdue with loads of fines and then trying to work out whether it would be cheaper to renew a dvd and pay for another week’s hire charge or just pay the fines for a few more days. And all this happened after we’d closed all but one computer down so we were dealing with it all falling over each other and writing things down on scraps of paper :roll:.

I got home and Ady dashed back out again to do some more stores. I made some lunch for me, which the children pinched most of off me – they were eating weetabix with milk and sugar (sugar!!! I never add sugar to anything except baking, don’t want them to start that idea!) for lunch :roll:. Scarlett has gotten into playing with the pretend food this week so there were various plates of odd combinations of plastic foodstuff on plastic plates scattered round and the teapot filled with water which she was pouring into plastic teacups and bowls. Davies was playing with his Wallace and Gromit playhouses. I asked him if he wanted to paint his dalek shakermaker and he tried to mix up gold according to the key on the box (red and yellow? yep, it merely made orange) but failed so we took it outside and sprayed it with the gold paint I’d used on the papier mache one then he added black detail and scratches to make a damaged Dalek Thay.

I listed a couple more bits on ebay and persuaded the children to stick one of the growing pile of dvds from work on so I can try and take some back. They chose The Lasy Mimzy which seemed a bit slow to start but during the middle captured all of our attention and we ended up all cuddled up together watching it which was nice. They were both quite clingy this afternoon, I don’t think they’d behaved particularly well for Ady this morning as I’m sure their proclamations of how much they’d missed me were spurred on by something, which probably means he’d been cross with them. After late dinners the last two nights and with Badgers an even later finish I fed them an early tea (Tarly had soup, how Autumnal is that? :)) and Ady arrived home in time to stay with Tarly who I believe had a long solitary bath while I took Davies to Badgers.

In the car we had a really interesting conversation about water. Davies wanted to know how water from pipes underground travels up into our taps so we talked about pressure and energy transferance, with him showing a really good understanding of the concept. I explained that a general term for the sort of stuff we were talking about was science and a slightly more specific one was physics although there was more to it than simply energy and movement. Then we talked about inanimate and animate objects, with some examples and how energy can be transfered to inanimate objects from something else to make them move although they can’t move in their own right. Then we got onto tides on the sea, gravity, the moon and all sorts of other stuff – it was a really good conversation with him articulating stuff in a really good way, demonstrating he really understood stuff we’ve talked about before. We were slightly early for Badgers so sat chatting in the car watching one of the helpers in the window talking on her mobile phone. I asked Davies what her name was and he said he didn’t know. The other two are called Julie and Jan so I said she probably was called something beginning with J to keep the pattern and decided Jemima would suit her. Davies thought this was hilarious and dared me to call her Jemima, so when I dropped him off I did indeed call out ‘bye Davies, bye Jemima’ which left him giggling (and her no doubt wondering just what sort of a loon that Davies’ mummy is! :lol:). I sat in the car and read over half of a book on feminism which was interesting, if a bit essay like with lots of referencing other things. I remember my sociology essays being criticised for being too colloquial and not scientific enough so clearly that’s a bias I have towards a certain way and prefer to read as well as write like. I understand why that’s tricky in social sciences though, it’s just clearly not how I process information.

I collected Davies who still seemed in good spirits and we headed to Sainsburys where I needed a couple of things for dinner tonight – potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots and bacon, and some milk and catfood. I had a fiver in my pocket which I could do with keeping as we’re meeting Julie, Jack and Maisie at PYO tomorrow and had checked the bank account to see there was £11 in the account so thought I’d use my debit card to pay. Davies took a fancy to a skinny sweet potato (I’d selected a fat one) and managed to sneak it round to the milk before I realised he still had it, so we walked back round for him to put it back. There followed a comedy sketch with him being sneaky about keeping it and me saying ‘put the sweet potato down, move slowly away from the sweet potato, keep your hands where I can see them’ and him playing along while a couple of people smiled at us. Davies then managed to wedge it under his chin so he could indeed keep his hands up but when I said ‘now seriously, come on, put it down and lets get the rest of our shopping’ he started to cry 😯 real, drippy down his nose tears and great proper sobs. 🙁 No idea at all where that came from but he managed to pull himself together a couple of times and then dissolved again :roll:. I couldn’t quite believe that the child I was having such intelligent conversations with barely an hour beforehand was now crying over what even could correctly identify as an inanimate object but he was inconsolable. I managed to pack with one hand while holding a small child dressed as in his Badger uniform with a very peaked cap that kept poking me in the face while the checkout girl wanted to tell me all about her niece. Whilst in the queue I’d been explaining that I didn’t have money to buy the sweet potato and that crying and making a fuss is never going to work as a way to get things. I explained that I had a list of things I wanted but there was no point in standing in Sainsburys and crying over them as that behaviour wouldn’t get me them. Davies recovered enough to ask for my list and so I said it would start with a bigger house to which he said ‘well they don’t sell them in Sainsburys so there would be no point, not like they sell sweet potatoes (lower lip quiver)’ so I said ‘okay then, I wouldn’t stand in an estate agents where they do sell bigger houses and cry and expect them to say ‘Oh ok, you can have one, just stop crying’. The checkout girl had found this exchange amusing and wanted to share with me the funny things her niece says. And then my card got declined :(. So I left the shopping and said I’d pop to the cash point assuming it was some problem with the card as it’s a new replacement one. And I know I have nearly £11 in there as I checked earlier and the bill is only £7. So I take my still weeping child to the cashpoint and discover that although there is £11 in there £6 of it is an uncleared cheque. Argh.

At that point I decided to take Davies home where he could regale Ady with tales of woe regarding the sweet potato so I dropped him off home and unable to face the embarrasment of returning to Sainsburys (maybe I should have tried the crying thing and seen if they just gave me the shopping actually, she seemed to like the idea) I went to go to one of the two little supermarkets in Lancing. The railway crossing gates were down so I drove to the one this side of the gates, selected my vegetables and realised they had no bacon. So put the veg back and waited for the gates to open before going to the other supermarket, getting all I needed, managing to keep it under the amount of cleared funds in the bank so I could use the card, sat and waited for the gates to open again and finally got home. And you know what? I changed my mind altogether about the sweet potatoes and we didn’t have any, fat or thin.

Ady decided to take both children to work with him this morning to be sure of being back for Badgers later. Ady taking one or both children off was always part of the MasterPlan moving forward. We like the idea that they get a good idea of what our jobs involve (and they both reckon they can already do mine, knowing how to discharge and issue books with the beeping trigger gun although putting books back on shelves seems to be beyond them at home so I’m not sure they’re ready to move up to doing that professionally just yet 😉 ), hopefully see us getting something out of what we both do aside from just payment and of course out there in the Big Wide World there are Educational Opportunities Around Every Corner. Particularly in Ady’s which involves lots of driving, SatNav assistance, geography, different cultures (he drives through London a lot, it’s very different to looking out of car windows in Sussex looking out of them in London). The places Ady drives to and the reasons for driving there are pretty varied too with Health & Safety, QVC Superstardom, Merchandising, Selling and Going Round To Kick Some Retail Ass all up there on his job spec in pretty equal measures.

So they were off, left at 8am, which left me in an empty house with a whole 45 minutes before I need to leave for work. So I’ve come here to blog, to ward off crazy notions of dreadful things that might happen to wipe out my whole family when they are off somewhere without me, I’ve chatted to the chickens a bit, drunk some tea and now I think I’ll head off to work, where I will arrive a good ten minutes earlier than normal – and therefore a good five minutes before I am even supposed to be there (I always scramble in at the last minute, sitting in a staff room before I have to be at work seems mental when I could be home a few minutes longer waving to children out of windows or kissing them goodbye one last time). It seems very odd not to be pulling a clinging child off my leg or answer last minute requests for cereal or be taking a front door key off my keyring to give someone, or, or something so I’m just going to do that here instead if you don’t mind. See you all later, have a good morning, be good, love you, bye!

What a blah day today was 🙁 I got loads done – sorted out piles of washing (everything in the house is clean now, it all just needs putting away) – realised today it was too cold on the concrete patio to be pegging out washing in bare feet – oh the season is achangin’. And I listed 35 items on ebay – piles of outgrown clothes from D&S’s bedrooms. There is more, oh so much more to list but that’s a good start. Am rather pleased with myself for marketing a load of S’s summer dresses as ‘party dresses’ which will hopefully sell for the Christmas season – or maybe people will see through my cunning marketing ploy and not bid for them :lol:. We’d planned to do a car boot sale this month but all our weekends filled up so I’m determined to ebay or freecycle all our junk. Realised that there are plenty of smaller than D&S children coming to NicCamps in November so will take any unsold bits there for first grabs from friends and freecycle anything left after that. We’ve got a pushchair and 2 Britax carseats cluttering up a large area in the back of our Narniaesque wardrobes which I want to get rid of too and several bin bags full of clothes, including lots of coats which should sell well, in the garage.

So I mostly ebayed and did various other bits on line. The whole photo of the plane crash thing has gone quiet now. We are expecting two payments for use of the photos which will go straight to RAFA. The whole episode has just been horrible, from a personal family point of view to the fact someone died in the first place. I think I’ve been in delayed shock from the whole thing today as I’ve been on the verge of tears most of the day and very short and snappy with the children, feeling like I’ve had some sort of personal loss. Anyway, I don’t want to dwell on the whole thing any longer and am very aware that whatever the effects have been on me and mine it is nothing compared to the grief the pilots family will be feeling so I’ll shut up about it now.

Davies and Scarlett mostly occupied themselves. They played with Betty Spaghetty (although amusingly they were making her play out a Doctor Who game :lol:), looked at a couple of educational toys catalogues that arrived in the post this morning, did some drawing, played with foam blocks, danced to Crazy Frog music, sat and politely pretended to be interested when I made them sit through Queen’s Greatest Hits so they could see quite what it is about the Crazy Frog version of ‘We are the champions’ that makes me wince (although I did feel like a real proper grown up moaning about them having ‘ruined a great original’ – I like Queen) and we looked up Freddy Mercury on wikipedia and talked about how old he was when he died, how long ago it was (1991, can you believe that?! :shock:), what illness he had (somehow Aids has come up before with Davies, not sure if it was in relation to Freddy Mercury or someone else famous now but he remembered my previous explanation) and how old he’d have been now. They played Tomb of Doom and I helped Davies made a dalek shaker maker. He has got to take in cardboard boxes to Badgers tomorrow as they are making 3d models of their bedrooms so I told him he needs to make a model dalek just like in his bedroom at home (bet that gets them talking at Badgers, although of course two of them were at the party so have already seen it!) and we decided the Shakermaker one would be ideal. We’ve also been singing this song lots as seen on youtube (it’s just soo catchy!). They played outside for a while too but it was just too cold to stay out for long, which scuppered my plan of a walk really too as it just wasn’t appealing enough to persuade me to wrap up.

Freddie the saved from the jaws of the fox chicken seems ok, a bit subdued and not totally ‘right’ though so I wonder if s/he sustained injuries we can’t see, or whether it’s just in shock. Will see how it fares over the next few days. We’ve shut them away more securely tonight so hopefully if the fox does return it will just keep walking tonight.

I took Davies to his swimming lesson tonight. He tried really hard but is easily the least able in the group I would say, he really concentrates and does what he’s told but his body just doesn’t seem to be designed for swimming! He is utterly confident at being in the water though so at least that is not holding him back. I am sure that more practise would help so it’s something we really must try and build in for him to get but needs to be one to one, so either leaving Scarlett at home with one of us, or bringing her with us and both Ady and I going. Will have to see what we can sort out. I have total sympathy with him though, I remember being told to concentrate on the same ceiling as he is looking at while trying to swim on his back 20 odd years ago and finding it every bit as impossible as he seems to. He looks forward to the lesson each week though and I guess some progress is being made even if it feels very slow. Dinner for the children seems to get later all the time with it being really tough feeding them tea before Beavers, Badgers and Swimming three nights of the week so I can see them edging closer to eating with us and us bringing our dinner times forward. Not sure how that would work out in practise but it’s something to think about in the not too distant future.

Back to work tomorrow which I’m rather looking forward to, I missed being there last week and Ady is home with D&S (I’m only working the morning) and debating whether to take them both off to work with him in the morning so he’s back for Badgers or just take Scarlett in the afternoon and then it doesn’t matter if they’re back for Badgers. It’s all very complicated working round these early evening clubs and stuff.

I emailed David Albert, the author of And The Skylark Sings With Me to let him know how much I’d gotten out of reading his book and to thank him for his inspirational, challenging and thought provoking read. I had an email back from him today to thank me for my message, to let me know that his older daughter is now 19 and about to graduate from university, his younger daughter is 17 and about to head off to uni and he sent me a couple of attachments – one a photo of his younger daughter, aged 16, in Egypt and a piece of writing about where they are now in their life journey.

I won’t recreate it here, but if anyone has read the book or is interested I’ll happily email it to you. What an amazing, inspiring family they are. 🙂

We have this chicken called Freddie, s/he is big and extremely noisy.

Last night at about 1am Ady woke me to tell me there was a fox circling the chicken run – he’d heard a big commotion out there and looked out the window to see it there pacing up and down but couldn’t find anything to put on to go there (‘local man involved in tragedy photo controversy arrested for indecent exposure involving poultry – read all about it!’). By the time he’d dragged a dressing gown on and got outside there had been squawking and thudding and Freddie was lying on it’s back softly clucking round the side while the fox went back for the next one.

Ady and the fox eyed each other up before the fox ran straight into a bit of fence (very dented upon inspection this morning) before managing to scramble up a wall and escape. Ady picked Freddie up, fully expecting him/her to be very mauled and at death’s door and brought it inside. I’d arrived downstairs by this time (although without contact lenses so could only really make out a lump of feathers) but after some stroking and a bit of an inspection up Freddie hopped, clucked a bit, wandered round the lounge looking like it remembered being there but had always pictured it as much larger 😆 before Ady decided it should probably go back out to it’s coop again.

He had a quick look around the garden incase more had been dragged out of the coop already but none were apparent so we went back to bed. This morning they are all present and correct and Freddie seems fine. We’ll do a bit more fox proofing to the run today as I imagine the fox will be back again. It’s all go here.

When I was little my Mum used to buy presents for Frazer and I at Christmas and birthdays and wrap them up and pretend they were from our Grandad – her Dad, Frank. This was because from being an unreliable and rather crap father to her he had continued in a similar vein and was an unreliable and rather crap grandad to us. We weren’t harmed by this – a grandparent is not usually as essential a person to a child as a parent (I say not usually because of course there are plenty of cases where this is not true, but we didn’t feel hard done by as a result of not having him around being a runner for number one grandfather awards) but my Mum struggled with it and tried to compensate for it. He did turn up himself occassionally, always with armfuls of chocolate bars he’d stopped at the nearby sweet shop to buy and as I have later learnt, because he wanted something from my parents but we always called him ‘Frank’ and he was a bit of a curiosity really, and usually welcome because of the chocolate ;).

Anyway, when I was six ‘Frank’ gave me a skipping rope for my birthday. It was green handled and the handles had something in them that made them rattle. It was shiny, unlike any other skipping rope I’d seen any of my friends with and I can picture it to this day. This is back in the day when children were allowed to bring skipping ropes to school, you know for skipping with in the playground. Back before health and safety would forbid it incase of incidents of people getting sued for skipping related accidents, let alone the potential for six year olds to strangle each other or tie up their teacher and go looting the tuck shops in inner city schools! So I took it to school with me. At breaktime I skipped with it – I have a clear mental image of me in my long white socks skipping with my rattly handled skipping rope. I put it in the corridor in my bag on my peg and when I went out at lunchtime it wasn’t there anymore.

I don’t recall all the events after that. Presumably I reported it lost to a teacher or my Mum or someone. What I do very clearly remember is that the next day someone else was playing with a remarkably similar green rattle handled skipping rope in the playground. I’m not sure if I asked them, or my Mum did, or if a teacher did but I recall the child insisting it was theirs. I’m not sure how it got ironed out but I recall the skipping rope was returned to me and the ‘perp’ had to stand up in assembly and apologise. Bizarely I don’t recall the name of the child, or even what they looked like, but I do still remember very vividly that knowledge that someone had something of mine and wasn’t going to give it back easily.

Today at MM we had lots of new faces, possibly too many in some ways as it rather unbalanced the dynamic, although I am enjoying feeling like a real member there, someone who belongs and can have a shared ‘past’ with other members even if it’s just a ‘do you remember back in June when we did X?’. It’s a fairly diverse group of people but in the last week I’ve been struck by how much online debates between members of the egroup have really felt like a community. It’s nice. 🙂 We had a bit of a ‘session’ today where we talked a bit about the group and how it works to the newcommers, answered some questions and chatted about stuff we’d like to do moving forward. I had a couple of chats with 3 of the new ‘mums’ and a couple of chats with other people too which was nice, I like getting to know people below the surface layer and finding out more about who they are as individual people as well as parents who home educated their children – and there are some interesting people at MMs. :).

About halfway through Davies flew into the main room with a barely controlled air of despair about him, which immediately was unleashed as soon as he threw himself on me with heaving sobs. He had lost his sonic screwdriver :(. We went outside and cast about for it with me assuring him it would be there ‘somewhere’ and couldn’t possibly have gone anywhere. He was playing a game where he would throw himself to the ground and then his gaggle of girl mates would try and revive him – he had quite a posse of them bringing him flowers and trying to ‘make him happy’ (ooh er, should probably deal with that – if only for their future expectations of men’s wants :lol:) in the words of one of them. So I assumed it had fallen out of his pocket during one of his dramatic falls to the ground. It was not immediately visible so I enlisted the help of a couple of nearby parents and children and M (another mum) and I chanced upon one of the new lads brandishing a sonic screwdriver. Which he insisted he’d bought from the charity shop next door. 🙁

It was all sorted out, thanks to a very on the ball mother who dealt with the whole issue with tact and understanding for her own son while ensuring Davies and I were both placated (not that it took much, the return of the screwdriver was more than sufficient) and chased it up with me afterwards out of earshot of all the children. I was very admiring of her parenting and general conduct over the whole issue and made sure to tell her so. But for those few moments when it was fairly apparent that the screwdriver he was holding was the one Davies had unwrapped as a birthday gift barely a week before and we were all pretty powerless to do anything about it was a flash back moment for sure to my own seven year old self and that rattly green handled skipping rope. Although I should probably clarify very clearly that it had not been taken from Davies so was not alike in that respect.

We dropped Ali and Freya home and came home to chase chickens round the garden for a while. We’re pretty sure we have a crower in the crowd, which given they all look so bloody alike would mean that they are all potential crowers and not potential layers which is a bit of a bugger. We’ve spoken to the children at length about this prospect and I think we are all agreed that we eat the cockerels. They (and infact I) don’t want to see the process from clucking to cooking but Ady is capable of that side of things if needs be. If we do have a cockerdoodledoo then I think it had very limited mornings of crowing before it says goodbye as I so don’t want to piss our neighbours off with something we’re not keeping anyway. We’ll have to see what developes over the next week or so. Davies is slightly apprehensive about them now, Ady has running daily battles with Rhonda, they all seem scared of me and run whenever I get close unless I’ve got food in which case maximum respect is offered. Scarlett is so the boss of those chickens though – she totally ‘rules the roost’ and is able to pick them up, berate them, chase them all in for the night and everything. She is the chicken whisperer :lol:.

Once home I was able to give full attention to the issue Chris had alerted me to of Ady’s photos splashed all over the internet credited with someone else’s name. Now Ady and I had agonised over the whole sending to the bbc / flickring photos in the first place. Possibly in the cold light of day we might have made different decisions about what we did with photos but taking them in the first place had been at the urging of a police officer, our first port of call was to contact the police to say we had photos (which they have been in touch with us over today to say air investigation units will be touch and could we please keep the photos safe for their inspection) and then we responded to the bbc call for photos before flickring them. The motivation behind flickring was the same as me twittering to say ‘omg a plane has just come down in the field next to us’ – the same reason I blog or talk to people, it’s a natural human reaction to share experiences, to talk about them, to involve others for their reassurance, feedback, comfort, empathy, whatever. I can’t really defend it or justify it but can say hand on heart there was no ulterior motive or cold heartedness going on, just an overwhelming urge to share and talk about what we’d experienced.

So today we learnt that photos had been taken off our flickr stream, almost immediately, and touted round various places by a freelance photographer, as his own work, for money. So far our local paper and Sky news have removed the credit to the imposter and I have emailed a couple of other places. It would appear that the person in question is one of life’s less nice individuals with a bit of a history of not so pleasant doings. This is one of those unhappy situations where there are no winners, it is off the back of a tragic accident where someone died, our own family’s sad experience of being on hand to record it and perhaps foolishly sharing what we’d seen only for someone else to try and profiteer from it. I know I can be naiive about just how sick and horrible people can be but this has really brought home to me the depths some people will stoop to to make money. We’re being sent a fee from the local paper for the photos – which will go straight to the RAFA charity which Shoreham Air show runs in aid of so there is at least some glimmer of a positive act in all this but the whole episode has been turned from a tragic loss of human life to a seedy example of the twisted side of specific human’s lives.

On more cheerier notes – because sometime over the last three days we have managed to laugh and smile, honest, Davies had a great time at Beavers tonight. They made youghurt pot bird seed feeders and bird spotting charts. We hung the bird feeder straight up on the tree in the garden. I think it was the first time I’d been properly personally spoken to by the Beaver leader who made a point of seeking me out to tell me what a great time Davies had had there today. Next week is a meet up at the local park for them which Ady is going to go along and attend at, Davies seems really pleased to be back into his groups routine although he never really says a lot about what goes on he is always hailed by the other lads coming and going and clearly gets something out of it.

Tomorrow is a rare quiet day at home for us, with just swimming lessons in the evening. We still have plenty of birthday gifts to fully explore, I have mountains of laundry and other home-based stuff to be getting on with and if the weather is ok (and maybe even if it isn’t) I think we might head out for a walk somewhere too. Ady had a 15 hour day today visiting Glee leaving before 6am and not getting back til nearly 9pm which he could probably have done without. Hoping for a less eventful rest of the week really.

We popped along to the car boot sale this morning. A got a few bits, some t shirts for Davies, couple of videos and a Wallace and Gromit cd rom with some games on it, but it was a very quiet week there and rain threatened all morning.

Once home I made popcorn and we all had that for lunch before Ady and the children all wandered outside. I had felt like I should do *something* but failed utterly to do anything other than sit infront of the laptop. Davies played his W&G games and then my parents turned up on their way home from a day out for an hour or so.

Davies and Scarlett had a bath with the gellibaff (thanks again for that Helen 😉 – and your ‘dealer’!) – what curious stuff that is, a bit like the crystals you get when a disposable nappy tears open were left around but the kids had a great time with it, although the claims on the box of it dissolving away were a bit ambitious – I had to shower them both down before they got out of the bath as they were still totally gellied up 😆

My parents left, we had roast dinner (Davies is soo adventurous with his eating nowadays, I really must make more of an effort to give him different stuff. Scarlett remains true to form and fills her yorkshire puddings with mashed potato, turns her nose up at carrots that are cooked ‘I only like them RAW’ and nibbled the tiniest bit of lamb before declaring she didn’t like it 🙄 that child is a walking anti-Atkins advert with her carbolicious eating habits), the children went to bed. Tomorrow is Monday again already and back into the rounds of various clubs and commitments – just looked through my diary and I don’t think we have a free weekend now until well into November so I guess we won’t be testing that Outwell out this year after all (unless the seasons really do go crazy) but we’ve been looking at this website this afternoon and I’m going to contact them about the possibility of staying there to help build with children around for next year so plenty of exciting times to look forward to. 🙂

It’s been a funny few weeks. Lots going on with lots of it being the sorts of things which throw me off into periods of introspection, questionning, challenging and reevaluating. I’ve been involved in a long and wearying online debate about whether Home Education is indeed a lifestyle choice or simply an educational alternative; I’ve had a few real life chats with people – a couple of whom are childless and therefore have no corner to defend and both asked intelligent questions and saw many positives without me having to spell them out to them; equally I’ve had a couple of real life conversations with people who either have children at school or are teachers themselves so are coming at the debate from an immediate defensive point of view (as I imagine I was too). I’ve been super-sensitive too to lots of generalisations which have been winding me up – more on that later. We are currently debating and thinking and talking through all sorts of life choices and future plans and I’m suddenly more aware than ever of the ‘forever-ness’ our choices have consequences and effects on not just us, but our children too. They have dreams and ideals and it feels only right to be taking their opinions into consideration at this time when we are likely laying down foundations for our lives, maybe for the rest of our lives. I finished that book I’ve been talking about a lot ‘And The Skylark Sings With Me’ and that has given me acres of thought fodder, plenty of which I’m still ploughing through even though I’ve closed the last page on the book. And finally in a week when one of my children would have been starting school and the other turned seven I suddenly feel like parenting has stepped up a gear; in my own, in theirs and in other people’s eyes.

I’ve often said that I don’t much care what other people think of me. There are very few choices or actions I’ve made in my life that I am not happy enough with to defend and justify and rarely, if ever, do I feel the need to do that anyway. I’ve always been of the opinion that you should accept people for who they are and if being around them has a positive effect on you then you should be around them more and if their company brings out negatives in you then you should avoid them. I expect other people to follow the same discipline with regard to me and that if there are things I do, say, look like, act like or stand for that irritate or annoy them to avoid me and not get irritated or annoyed rather than feel the need to let me know about it. Until it comes to my children that is. Then I become hyper-senstive to everything that is said, thought or implied about them. I want to defend them, protect them and change any bad thoughts people have about them. This is not a reaction to anyone saying anything bad about Davies or Scarlett by the way, simply me doing lots of thinking.

One of my big things about parenthood is that I wanted to celebrate my children as individuals; as the people they are rather than what I, or others, expect them to be. To give them the freedom to grow into their potential, to be happy and fulfilled adults. To get what they want out of live and to spend their time doing things that they love. That is something I have strived for as an adult, and despite some stumbles and occassional wrong turnings along the way, most days I would say I achieve that. I can’t think of anyone I would rather share my life with than the friends and family I currently do. I would not have made any different choices in pretty much any areas and while we are not currently on track for where we’d like to be we are on track for making the next lot of plans to get there. I am proud of being different to ‘most’ people, of treading our own path, of looking at life through different eyes and deciding what is important to us and chasing that dream rather than sticking with one track and following it blindly through life, only to reach the other end and realise that it hadn’t been at all what you wanted after all. I hear too many older people – my own parents included muttering about ‘if I had my time over again…’ and a list of all the things they would and wouldn’t do, they wish they had seen and been and way too many if only’s. I think a lot of that setting us on a certain path takes place in childhood, with the expectations put on us by our parents, our peers, our schooling. I hope to allow Davies and Scarlett the freedom to have never had these shackles in the first place rather than have to break free of them along the way.

The veering away from deciding on their behalf what is important for them is a very big part of why we Home Educate, why we do it in an autonomous manner and why we have not pushed reading, writing, languages, musical instruments and many of the other things which sometimes get asked of me when I describe our educational approach. I have no idea whether this is right or wrong really. Most of the time I believe it to be right. I know that the things they do focus on and have passion for are not necessarily the areas that we have had a bias towards. I knew nothing about dinosaurs, film making or indeed many of the things that my children hold near encyclopedic knowledge on. But I have managed to answer questions, research and facilitate furthering their and my own knowledge, sort out field trips or find others who do know answers for them. There are things which I can see they have taken on as a result of direct exposure to them from me, but there are others which I couldn’t pinpoint their initial spark of interest in. Ironically in following Davies along his path so far I have rediscovered many lost by the wayside passions of my own such as art but I can’t think of anything they have wanted to know more about and I’ve not managed to help them in their quests. I imagine this will become more frequent in years to come and I look forward to the myriad of things they will drag me along with them to experience as we go.

But as a result of holding my lifestyle and choices up for scrutiny rather too many times in the last couple of weeks and not always articulating myself very clearly, or being tired, or defensive, or busy or simply not in the mood I have come away from a few conversations feeling a twinge of uncertainty, a glimmer of worry or simply not quite so brave or convinced or confident as normal of our choices. Ive long been aware that this is a big choice I’m making for Davies and Scarlett – first to Home Educate in the first place – to choose not to use school. This marks them out as different – for life. Likely one of the first pieces of personal information they will give about themselves to new people they meet will be that they were Home Educated and the older they get the more common this will get – already at least once a week or so Davies deals with this question, he is known at Badgers and Beavers as ‘the one who doesn’t go to school’. Will they grow to resent that choice made for them? I know the choice will be theirs to attend school in the future if they decide they want to but watching the children gathered at Davies’ party and later at my house and then comparing them to the children at the party who do go to school, and indeed when I watch the children at Badgers or Beavers or the park I am often struck by some sort of inate difference between Home Ed and schooled kids. This shouldn’t be surprising given how much of an influence I believe school has on a child and of course I perceive this difference to be positive, wonderful, proof of the pudding. But will my children? Will society?

Something that resonated with me very much in the Skylark book was a chapter about ‘typical children’ and how there is no such thing. In just the way there is no typical adult or even human, there is no such creature as the typical child who’s needs can be broadly met with a general provision. I struggle daily with some show of prejudice or stereotypying of people by gender or age – I have a real issue with phrases such as ‘being a boy’ or ‘what boys do’. I only have experience of one son but that is sufficient to tell me that he alone disproves many sweeping statements of what boys are like. I have seen more boisterousness, aggression, desire for rough play and all of the ‘slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails’ type nonsense demonstrated by my own daughter than by my son, let alone the daughters of friends. Similarly while Scarlett may well fit neatly into the pink and sparkly princess mould that she was ‘born to fill’ she also strikes out daily in her own one child feminist crusade blasting myths about what little girls are supposed to do and like and be.

I also get irritated by ‘terrible twos’ and other such age-specific categorisations of behaviour. I was shocked when my second child showed what were deemed to be ‘classic examples of what all two year olds do’ because my first two year old had never done so. He never acted like a 3 year old, 4 year old, 5 year old or 6 year old very often either. He always acted like Davies though. And when Scarlett is being difficult I don’t think for one minute it’s because she’s four, I think it’s because she’s Scarlett and this is her way of acting or reacting to what’s going on around her. I think writing it off as merely down to age or gender is doing that individual a great disservice. It may have a bearing on it, just the same as my hormones may make me react with less patience or indeed rational behaviour towards something the day before my period starts but that doesn’t excuse or explain it 100%. I have always loathed the intimation that I have a temper because of my hair colour; as though it undermines what ever it is that has caused my loss of temper and I try very hard not to do the same dismissing of my children’s emotions or characters by writing them off as merely down to them being a 4 year old girl or a 7 year old boy.

This is a post about not very much really, a collection of thoughts I’ve had swirling around and wanted to commit to a page. It records how I’m feeling just now and I may well come back to it and add more. I feel in something of a state of flux just now, wanting to ensure I am not missing opportunities for the children, while still maintaining that fragile balance of allowing them to find their own way. A bit of quite observation coupled with chatting to some close friends has reminded me of some of the amazing things about Davies and Scarlett which make them uniquely them and I’ve been thinking of ways to help them open out some new opportunities to assist them in learning more about the things that inspire them. So I guess it’s a bit of a watch this space, a lot of getting things down so I can reflect and read back myself next time I have a wobble about what we’re doing and just how crazy we really are and the need to dump some of this out of my head so I can get on with focussing about something else for a while instead. Cos you know, us red headed, female, 30 somethings, we need to be thinking about just the 17 things at any given time. Any more and we might just lose our tempers! 😉

I’m thinking of organising a Spring 2008 NicCamps in Wales. I’d really like to visit the Centre for Alternative Technology and I think as yet Davies and Scarlett are too young to get enough out of a visit to their ecocabins to justify the cost so a NicCamp nearby with a day visit to CAT seems like a good idea.

Borth hostel looks nice enough, well located for other stuff although there are a couple of other hostels near enough to do a day trip from too. I’ve emailed them for price and availability for four night stays throughout March 2008. It is only a 33 bed hostel so numbers would be limited but I’m assuming not so many people will be up for Melrose and NicCamps just a few weeks apart anyway. If I end up oversubscribed I will be setting up a complicated system probably involving bribery, cash gifts, perhaps some sort of drinking game style sports day event and a points system based on how much I like you and your offspring or spouses to decide who gets to come – sort of like Big Brother, but nastier :lol:.

So anyone interested? 😉