One word? When seven would do…

Up far too early this morning even with me more or less adjusted to the hour. Ady spirited the children away to spend the morning at Julie’s while I went off to work. I had been scheduled to work all day tomorrow this week but we had the ill-fated seed bomb workshop rescheduled for tomorrow afternoon so I split my shift and worked this morning and will work tomorrow morning. There, a perfect glimpse into the fascinating minutae of my life ;).

So they all departed, I got dressed and gathered books and stuff to return and contemplated Candle the cat who I really do think is on her last legs now. I suspect she has weeks rather than months left. She has been blind now for about a year and is literally skin and bone, she spends most of her time in her basket asleep and has not made it upstairs now for two weeks. She still seems happy enough sleeping next to the radiator and getting plenty of love and stroking but I think her time is drawing near. This will be a HUGE deal for the children, particularly Scarlett. My beloved cat died when I was about 8 and I remember being devastated for weeks. I have since learnt, via something my Mum said to Ady without thinking that the story I was told about her being found peacefully dead one afternoon was not strictly true and that actually I was kept out of the way while Dad did the deed (not sure by what means, I like to assume vets) before coming home with Mum and having the news broken to me. I recall sitting on my Dad’s lap sobbing ‘No, no, no’ and really struggling to come to terms with my first experience of death. Davies and Scarlett lost Malice a couple of years ago and have lost various chickens and fish over the years so it won’t be a complete shock but Candle has been around since long before they were so there will be a definite hole when the time finally comes. There most definitely won’t be any shielding from the truth though. I hope it is a case of coming downstairs one morning, or coming home from being out one day and finding her peaceful in her basket having drifted away.

I say all this and she’ll probably still be going strong this time next year 😆

I had a good morning at work, caught up with Yvonne who has been given the vastly reduced hours she requested so is very pleased. I spent some time on my ‘subversive parenting display’ – I had ordered in loads of John Holt, Alfie Kohn and similar books to display with a good selection of Home Ed titles (And the Skylark sings with me, Teach Your Own), some Idle Parent, some Continuum Concept and so on. Be interesting to see if it is frowned on, well recieved or creates chaos! One of my colleagues with young children took out Punished By Rewards though saying it looked really interesting and another was asking me about Raising Your Spirited Child in respect of her granddaughter. I think the fact Davies and Scarlett are so well known in the library and considered really ‘nice’ kids means I have given some credibility to my crazy parenting notions :).

I put the finishing touches to a report about Chatterbooks too ready for a debriefing meeting we are having tomorrow on the subject. I am keen to get my points across while protecting my personal ideas and intiatives from becomming library property. Should be an interesting meeting…

I left work and headed over to Julie’s to collect Davies and Scarlett. They had had a lovely morning getting muddy at the stables then playing with Jack, Maisie and Lorna. Julie and I had a cup of tea and a catch up and planned some more getting togethers over the next month or so. Julie is definitely someone I miss lots when I don’t see enough of her. Chris is being an arse at the moment (he does regularly) so I’ve told Ady and he is planning a Big Brother Meeting in the next few days to set him straight.

We came home and the kids had an early tea, I gathered eggs (8 today – woohoo!) and did some reading of Joyce’s book :). I plaited Scarlett’s hair and all three of us arrived at Badgers looking reluctantly smart. Julie asked outright if I thought I might one day want to be a Badger Leader and I said no, feel quite relieved to have set that record straight as I could see it steam rollering. I confessed that actually I’m not that keen on children and she was astonished and said I hid it really well. I realised I am quite fond of several of the children but it all goes back to viewing children as individuals and realising in a room full of individuals I am bound to like a few and not like a few and a room full of children is just that. Next term we are all working together on the same badge so I think that will improve things – I’ll enjoy it for the time I am there and gladly walk away when my time is done. I have arranged that it will be fine for Davies to come along too in September and he can use that time to go towards some Cadet awards too which is good for him.

We did presentation night with badges and awards handed out. Ady arrived in time to watch and then took Davies and Scarlett home while I hung on with the other leaders waiting for a parent to collect the last Badger.

Home for a couple of chapters of Humphrey before bed.

We had a couple of interesting conversations sparked by the radio today. One was from Scarlett listening to a John Lee Hooker song and asking me if all big deep voiced singers were big people. I agreed they tended to be and asked her what she thought John Lee Hooker might look like, she described all sorts of things about him including what he might be wearing. I asked what colour skin she thought he had and she was surprised to be asked as that hadn’t even factored in her imaginings. I did promise to show her some pictures of him online but forgot so must do that tomorrow.

The other was listening to some homework slot on Simon Mayo which had algebra. Davies was listening and said he didn’t understand what was going on so we talked about being able to get full answers from part answers if we tried. I explained that N (Nic) = D (Davies) + 27 which is fine if we know what D is but what if we don’t. We then said that D = S (Scarlett) +2 which is fine if we know what S is. If we then disclose that S = 7 we can turn it round to show that D= 7+2 = 9 so N= 9+27=36. Which made perfect sense to him.

Finally Davies perfectly recited his a-z today. No big deal for a 9 year old obviously but I’ve never taught him it, considering that apart from filing or using a paper dictionary actually the alphabet is pretty useless. He said having learnt the twinkle twinkle little star song on the piano he knew that ABC was the same tune so had found it in a Dr Seuss book and taught himself it as a song. Wow :). As ever I am impressed, despite myself, at how very quickly they pick things up when the time is right for them. We are currently learning months of the year having done days of the week once in a half hour car trip. Maybe we should cover something like the period table on the way to Scotland later in the year…

Tasha and I had decided as part of boycotting packaged Easter eggs we’d do some making chocolate treats this year with the kids so today was the nominated Chocolatiers Day.

We nipped into Lancing first thing to collect some cling film and paint brushes from the pound shop along with some mini eggs and arrived pretty much on time. As an aside we seem to have caught up with the rest of the UK quicker than expected and are now functioning quite happily on BST, so it seems 20 minutes each overnight suits us rather than the 10 I’d been expecting. Still think 60 is way too much to expect all in one go mind you…

Tasha and I had a quick catch up with each other; wedding news, work stuff, bitching generally, that sort of thing 😉 and then we kicked off with the chocolate making. Tasha had done an amazing job of planning and getting in supplies and while she melted the first batch of chocolate I read which was very good but did make me start to feel ethically opposed to chocolate generally what with all the air miles it contains ( clearly things like calories don’t bother me but I do have issues with air miles 😉 ).

We started with chocolate coated shredded wheat (supermarket own brand, fret not) so the kids got busy breaking up shredded wheat into the melted chocolate and syrup mix and then made little nest shapes and put mini eggs in them.

Next they made white chocolate, chocolate spread, hazelnut and final layer of white chocolate delicacies and we cleared up a little while they went off to play. Four children, chocolate and creativity makes for a fair bit of clearing up ;).

We called them back for truffle balls although Scarlett had come back early as she wasn’t keen on whatever game the boys were playing and was much more interested in the mechanics of the chocolate making in the kitchen. So we set her to work smashing up biscuits into crumbs with a rolling pin instead 🙂

Added butter and melted chocolate to the mix we gave them a lump each to roll into balls and cover with dessicated coconut, chopped nuts or chocolate sprinkles to create truffle balls.

More playing by the children in the interval of clearing up and preparing the next delights before we called them back for peppermints creams and peanut butter chocolates. The peanut butter was milk chocolate, a rolled lump of peanut butter and icing sugar mix and then another splash of milk chocolate, sort of Reeces Cups style. Scarlett later did some white chocolate drizzling on hers but she was getting all fancy by that stage :).

Peppermint creams were supposed to have been chocolate dipped but the chocolate didn’t want to melt down properly so we went for peppermint cream discs instead. The boys wandered off again while Tasha, Scarlett and I did some faffling about with them – I made some pinwheels of chocolate and mint, Tasha did some little cases filled with both and Scarlett mostly licked icing sugar off her fingers 😆 In one of the books I’d taken round with chocolate and sweet recipes it has a recipe for lemon and orange creams so we’re going to have a go at them over the next couple of days I think.

Our final piece was the mold I had taken round which we coated with cling film and the kids painted melted chocolate onto. It didn’t come out so well, not sure if it was enthusiastic kids and paintbrushes runkling the clingfilm, a complete failure on the part of the mold or a need for much thinner layers of chocolate built up but hey chocolate is chocolate so they ate the results 😆

We finished off by putting their creations artfully and tastefully (or indeed shovelling them in as Scarlett did having said ‘I just like shovelling things in’ which Tasha and I agreed could be a motto for life really) into Tasha’s fab boxes. We were infact so impressed with them that when we came home we found a book we could rip pages out of to make some more of our own.

We had some lunch – Tasha had made some very delicious sweet potatoe and butternut squash soup and then left as we had swimming to get ready for and they had Circus Skills.

Back home we had about half an hour before swimming so we had a go at making our own boxes from the brief tutorial Tasha had given me. I managed to find an old library book on fossil fuels which has created fab little boxes with lots of pictures of maps with coal mines around the world and text about alternative energies :). So we’ve managed a low packaging impact Easter on the chocolate front at least :).

Swimming was good – the last lesson of the term for Scarlett and Davies so mostly fun with inflatables and games in the pool for them while I managed my best ever 53 lengths in an hour :). I did get most cross with the gaggles of people who hang out at either end of the pool in the lane swimming area chatting though – THERE IS THE WHOLE OF THE REST OF THE POOL FOR THAT, WHY DO YOU HAVE TO USE THE 4 FOOT RESERVED FOR PEOPLE ACTUALLY SERIOUS ABOUT SWIMMING!!!! – I need to decide whether I will not bother swimming for the next 2 weeks which only gives me one session before my Swimathon of whether I’ll make a special journey to the pool in the meantime and in which case whether that will be with or without children?

Back home (with aching knees) I chopped firewood, gathered eggs, cooked the kids tea and was about to sit down when Ady arrived home so I hung out in the kitchen chatting to him instead. I spoke to Julie on the phone and the kids watched a Simpsons video Ady had got them from a charity shop. I managed to execute a system restore on the old laptop that Ady uses to beat a nasty virus it had picked up (although it is still doing a very long scan now and I suspect it is not totally fixed), had baths, didn’t like the prawn pasta Ady had cooked (but had already expected not to like so it didn’t surprise either of us), watched Richard Hammond’s Invisible World and taped Masterchef Australia.

I’m working in the morning so really need to go to bed and try and catch up that last elusive ten minutes…

We were supposed to be on a Dinosaur Walk this afternoon in Hastings but it had been postponed due to the weather leaving us with a free day. We are still 40 minutes behind the rest of the UK thanks to our 10 minute daily increments to catch up to the whole BST thing so found ourselves at nearly midday having not long breakfasted and watched most of Back to the Future III pondering what to do with our day.

After some discussion we decided to head into Worthing to continue Ady’s Second Hand Shoes Quest without him. I told Davies and Scarlett they could have £1 each to spend however they chose but gave them some guidance on spending it wisely and checking in with themselves that nothing they might later find for sale would trump what they had in their hand before making purchases. There are about 12 charity shops in the town centre so I put 2 hours parking on the car and we set off. It rained fairly solidly for the duration but we had a nice couple of hours. I got a couple of new tops, Davies got a couple of new tops and Scarlett got about six new tops (when I say new I mean new to us obviously) which she is in need of as her wardrobe consists of things she has grown out of, things she now considers too pink to wear and things that are too stained with nail varnish / paint / Scarlett’s potions to wear out in public – that child has the biggest selection of ‘alright for just playing in’ clothes ever. But no shoes for Ady 🙁

Scarlett found a soft toy eagle in one of the shops and debated spending her pound on it – it was in as new condition but she struggled with spending the whole pound in one go and even asked the woman at the counter twice how much she wanted for it :). I love her confidence in going up to the counter and chatting to the volunteers in charity shops, infact both the kids are great at this and completed all their own transactions today. We only got one ‘no school today?’ question with a very nice ‘Good for you!’ response to the Home Ed answer 🙂 Clearly no one would have been able to level any issue at my super brave, confident children working out how much money they’d have left or socialising / talking to people anyway :). Scarlett also found some random thing for sale and when I couldn’t give her an answer as to what it was she took it to the counter and asked and had several of the staff pondering over it trying to give her a reply :).

The eagle was eventually haggled for when the shop manager came out to check what Scarlett’s dilemma was and she got it for 50p, hence spending half and saving half – Davies brought his whole pound home :). We also ventured into a cheap shop as Scarlett really needed pjs – all of hers are aged 5-6years ones that Davies finally grew out of. Kids pjs don’t seem to come up in charity shops so I resorted to buying new – she found two sets of two pairs for £6 each – so 4 pairs for £12 which I thought was not too bad. We also found various tops they both liked for £2 each and I ended up with a huge bag of tops, pjs and socks for £20.

Employing both children at different times to distract the other I also bagged an X box game for Davies and a plaster mould sea life kit for Scarlett that they’d respectively spotted but had been outside their budget to give as Easter gifts.

Scarlett was then reminded of the really cool old fashioned sweetshop we use and so we decided to call into that parade of shops, which also has 3 charity shops on the way home. Charity shops merely netted a further 2 tops for Davies and 1 for Scarlett rather than any shoes for Ady but we had a very nice 15 minutes with the sweet shop owner selecting sweeties to bring home.

Not getting home until nearly 4pm we decided to go for late lunch / early tea /try and make sense of the whole clocks leaping about malarky with a HUGE meal for the kids. They watched the end of Back to the Future III and ate lots, I did laundry processing and chicken worrying and a chunk of book reading (still enjoying it J 🙂 ) and then we lit the fire and snuggled up to read some Humphrey (enjoying the latest Humphrey book – Holidays according to Humphrey, has C got it yet Mich?).

Ady came home, the kids went to bed with the intention of having them asleep within two hours (they went to bed at 7.15pm which is ridiculously early even when it wasn’t 6.15pm 48 hours ago but S was asleep by 10pm and D by 11pm which is pretty good going anyway even without the hour so it worked on some level). I cooked toad in the hole and adhered rather too closely to the Keith FFloyd style of cooking so probably need to go to bed soon as I’ll only be half an hour behind the rest of you come the morning…

We’d rather foolishly based our weekend plans around the weather forecast. Our original plan had been allotment with friends on Saturday afternoon, Sunday all day in the garden. We amended that when the weather forecast for today was dire and arranged to go to my parents for lunch instead. What actually happened was yesterday afternoon was no good prompting a last minute cancellation of allotment plans and today was fine until at least 430pm so we could have done allotmenting or gardening after all but we were at my parents instead.

I have a very clever bedside clock which works on radio waves or black magic or something and magically knows what time it is all by itself, however I never quite believe it does and so am always thrown by the spring forward / fall back clock changing-ness and whether it has indeed really changed. This meant that when I was woken at 830am by Ady and the kids being noisy I couldn’t decide it if was really 830am as in 24 hours ago it would have only been 730am or if it was actually 930am now in which case I should probably get up. I decided to risk believing in the clock and went back to sleep for another hour, eventually descending at 945am which turned out to indeed be 945am rather than 845am or even 1045am. I do like to live life on the edge ;). I have since decided a whole hour all at once is far too much to deal with and will be allowing ten minute increments over the next 6 days instead to alllow my internal body clock to adjust at a friendlier pace. Not sure what work will make of this on Wedneday when I will only be 40 minutes into this system mind you…

This morning was quite laid back with the kids watching Back to the Future that they’d started watching last night but had to turn off in favour of Earth Hour, which I know wasn’t dictating turning the TV off but I felt as many electrical things as possible should be ubplugged including TVs and laptops. We also took it in turns to shove a hen off some eggs as she is going broody and getting very cross with us for preventing her answering her calling to motherhood ;).

We then went over to my parents for lunch, taking some quiche and lemon meringue pie with us to share. My Dad and I had a very interesting and heated debate about politics, racism, law and order and more. I adore my Dad and am very like him on many levels, infact that was one of our conclusions from the debate, but he does frustrate me for not having passions or deeply held convictions. Whilst he could concede that many things were wrong or not okay there is nothing he would take up a banner and march for or protest against and whilst I don’t consider myself someone who craves campaigning in any way I certainly do hold many firmly held convictions that I would fight for if the need arose.

Scarlett, who is not used to such levels of debate didn’t really enjoy being around it which was a shame as it was all very amicable and ‘gentlemanly’ but she isn’t really used to conflict at all. A stark contrast to what I was very used to as the norm when I was her age living with my parents…

We all talked about Mum and Dad’s upcoming trip to China which they set off for in 2 weeks and are looking forward to a lot. I think they’ll have a fabulous time :). Other topics for the afternoon including beekeeping and having watched Countryfile we discussed HD (Mum and Dad have it so we observed the difference between BBC HD Countryfile and BBC1 Countryfile – quite a big difference as it turns out), free range dairy farming and the harshness of the winter this year.

Having had a really nice afternoon we came home at 7pm (which I am calling 1810). We’d already decided against roast dinner tonight as lunch at my parents is always HUGE and prohibits any sort of early dinner on the same day. Ady cooked steak and chips for the kids who were watching Back to the Future II which led to all sorts of ‘if I travelled into the future and watched myself I would keep that memory and then look for myself in the future’ type conversations which made all of our heads hurt 😆

Davies and Scarlett were late (but not as late as the clock said) to bed, we were very late (but not as late as the clock said) with our dinner. And now it’s bedtime.

I worked this morning. I spent the first hour putting up a Chatterbooks display – I’d booked the public display space and have created a display using some photographs taken during the sessions and some artwork created during the sessions by the children. I did an hour on the Enquiry Desk (most of which I spent writing up a report of the Chatterbooks sessions) and an hour on the counter.

Davies had YACs this morning and they were at Michelham Priory for the morning learning about weaving and getting their heads round warp and weft. They had an expert guest who showed them how to make linen and talked about various material and weaving type stuff, then they all made pom-poms. Davies made one and brought home a half made one to show me how it was done. Meanwhile Ady and Scarlett spent some time sitting in on the YACs session – Scarlett will probably join when she is 8 which will delight Ady as I suspect he is itching to be a parent helper and that will free him up to do so rather than having to look after Scarlett on the YACs sessions when I am working :). They all three had a look round Michelham Priory before coming home.

I beat them home and arrived just as the beautiful sunny morning turned into an afternoon filled with bursts of heavy rain showers and glorious sunshine. Which put paid to our plans to spend the afternoon at the allotment with Caz & Bid. We had a proper plan including Bid and all the kids doing some food foraging, Caz and I spreading compost and all of us cooking sausages over an open fire and the adults having a well earned bottle of beer as the sun went down.

But no.

So a real genuine rain check taken on those plans I had a cup of tea and some toast and waited for the others to arrive home.

They did and Davies showed me how to make a pom-pom, they all had lunch and then we decided to do a charity shop trawl as Ady needs some new work shoes and has been convinced that charity shops / second hand is the way forward :). We all did well (me: two tops and a scarf, Davies a WALL:E toy, a new top, Edward Scissorhands and the box set of Back to the Future 1, 2 and 3 on video, Scarlett: a soft toy, new top and Lassie ornament) except Ady who didn’t find any shoes so the search continues…

We came home and the kids had tea followed by a bath. Scarlett and I did some baking to use up the egg glut we have from a regular 3-6 eggs a day from the bantams. Two big quiches and a very large lemon meringue pie from scratch (with sweet and savoury pastries) later we don’t have an egg glut any more :). A fair few years ago I started writing recipes in an old blue notebook which is now about half-full with handwritten, ingredient splattered recipes. I’ve always had this sentimental notion that one day one of my children might want it and that it might mean something to them but kept it to myself for fear of being laughed at. Scarlett was looking through it tonight as I looked at the lemon meringue pie recipe and said to me ‘this is special. I like that it has stains from baking in it’. I told her that one say she could have it and she looked all delighted and thrilled 🙂 Oh the joy of raising similarly sentimental offspring 🙂 😉

In the middle of all this we remembered Earth Hour. Our original, post-rain plan had been to attend the walk from Brighton Pier by wind up torch. The Pier is one of the places that turns off it’s lights for the hour. If I’d not got so caught up with my baking I may well have remembered this and cajoled everyone else into it but the rain was still lashing at the windows and Davies and Scarlett were already pj’d up so we settled for turning all the lights out, the TV off and reading by candlelight and fireglow instead which felt suitably inkeeping with the ethos.

I’d got a new Humphrey book from work so we read an hours worth of that before Davies and Scarlett went off to bed and I resumed dinner for Ady and I.

I got sucked in to a Johnny Cash film that Ady was watching and thanks to quite a lot of wine am already feeling like the leaping forward of an hour has already happened.

A much needed ‘day off’ today. I’ve missed Davies and Scarlett lots having not seemed to have actually spent much time exclusively with them this week. Davies had a bad dream in the night so I woke up with him in bed beside me anyway and Scarlett came and joined us so we had a lovely half an hour all cuddled up together chatting and planning the day.

Scarlett wanted to go to the beach and Davies wanted to go to Fishbourne Roman Villa but we settled on a day mostly at home with a brief foray out for supplies in the middle.

We had breakfast and Scarlett watched an animal programme (on CBBC I think) about various animals including cabybaras which she fed on her Keeper for the Day at Drusillas. I know it was only 18 months ago but I am really pleased she still has such clear memories of that day, it gives me hope she will remember it forever, despite me not recalling much of being six. It also makes me happy to think so many other fab days the children have had will stay with them and all the amazing memories we are building for them of their childhood will remain treasured by them :).

Davies found a stash of old sketch books and pads from a year or two ago so we looked at them for a while and marvelled both at how they have both come on and how good they were already at such a young age :).

I needed to get some photos printed off I’d taken of Chatterbooks sessions for a display I’m doing tomorrow at the library of the sessions so I wanted to go to Tescos (boo hiss) to print those off on their machine. I also needed a new swimsuit as I’d chucked mine in the bin at the pool on Tuesday when I realised just how rotted from the chlorine it was. So we went over to Tesco, got swimsuit for me, photos printed off, some tea for the kids for later and several of the dvds they had for £3 each including Lassie for Scarlett, Monster House for Davies which he has been wanting on dvd ever since we saw it as a filmeducation screening in Reading about 4 years ago.

Both the kids need new season shoes – Scarlett has boots but she also has incredibly stinky feet thanks to a refusal to wear socks and non-leather shoes and Davies has DMs but nothing more lightweight so we also visited Brantano for a very lengthy shoe purchasing session. Davies got some Ben 10 trainers which replace the Ben 10 trainers we bought when we were at Shell Island last year and he got his only shoes wet in the rising tide for a tenner and he wore til they fell apart earlier this month. Scarlett got some crocs style sketchers with plenty of ventilation which she agreed to aslong as we removed all the girlie jibbitz of butterflies and jewels – she has a real anti-pink and sparkly thing going on just now, LelliKellies would be like torturing her 😆

We also called into Boots and I bought a home perm. My hair has grown really long again since hacking it off last winter and I am at the bored with it point again. I’ve been plaiting it when wet for the last week or so and wearing it wiggly with lots of compliments so decided to make it more permanent with a perm. I had lots of perms in the 80s like pretty much everyone else but have never attempted to DIY before, but the worst that could happen was I’d hate it and could then jistufy cutting it short again…

Home for popcorn and dvd watching – Monster House, then Lassie while I put all the rollers and paper in to my hair, added perm lotion, sat with my head in a plastic bag and then added the neutraliser and de-rollered it, all much to great interest from D&S. It stinks of perm lotion depsite a thorough washing out and a washing and conditioning later in the evening and is a bit on the dry side but I know my hair doesn’t take perms terribly well even when properly done so I suspect it will drop out after a few weeks. All that aside though I like it, it’s given it some texture and will stop me from getting bored with it for a few more weeks at least. And it was a good chemistry lesson for Davies and Scarlett 😆

Lassie finished and me newly poodle-esque Scarlett and I iced the cupcakes from Wednesday and made some snickerdoodles as she’d really wanted to do baking today. Davies was geomagging. Inbetween I dealt with laundry (we’ve had April-esque sunshine and showers here today so I’ve brought in nearly dry stuff to air and hung out more stuff), dealt with chickens – one of the hens thinks she might go broody, I am here to tell her she won’t! – and chopped up firewood.

I got the kids tea ready, baked all the batches of snickerdoodles, lit a fire and finally Ady came home. The kids and I finished Firework makers daughter and agreed we would like to see the theatre production locally in the summer then they went to bed. I had a very long bath while Ady sorted dinner and we watched taped Masterchef Australia slightly the worse for wear of wine as I was quite fixated on bay leaves…

Really must go to bed as I’m taking my curlyhead to work tomorrow morning.

Work all day for me today. Davies and Scarlett went out with Ady for the day and had a good day apparently. I do miss them lots on my all day at work day each week :(.

I was doing Storytime today which is the 3-5 year olds session we do each week where we read a couple of books, sing a few songs and give them some colouring in to do. There is a sort of loyalty scheme whereby they get a Storytime card stamped each time they attend and after 7 visits they get a free dvd loan voucher. I tend to do Rhyme time which is for the under twos fortnightly and just involves singing nursery rhymes and jiggling shakers for 20 minutes. I think I prefer storytime as I like reading books but the colouring and card stamping at the end always feels a bit crazed.

We had a massive turn out today of 23 children and 23 adults so it was pretty full in there with 46 bodies and me – quite an audience! I’d chosen ‘We’re going on a bear hunt’ and a rhyming book about a cranky bear as the stories and Bear Hunt went down well as it always does – Gruffalo, Very Hungry Caterpillar and Bear Hunt are Storytime staples really. So there was lots of joining in of that from adults and children, we did some singing and then I read the cranky bear story at which point some of the adults started to shuffle and hold whispered conversations. I brought them all back by shouting one of the lines from the book VERY LOUD though 😆 More singing including taking some requests from the floor – always iffy and predictably someone asked for Miss Molly had a dolly which I always get lost and flounder in the middle of. I had pre-warned them that they’d need to carry on without me if I looked confused though :). Colouring and card stamping and then I got to escape.

I wrote down the numbers in the statistic book and recovered a bit including confessing to a couple of colleagues who didn’t already know that actually I really don’t enjoy the Rhyme time and Story time aspect to my job that much. It’s funny that at work they think of me as someone who does that sort of thing whereas friends outside of work are always surprised to learn I do do that sort of thing. The real me is the one who would really rather not have snotty children clambering over me demanding row, row, row your boat ;).

I had lunch and managed to get a good haul of two tops, a cardigan and a dress in the charity shop in my lunchbreak. I also got called over by a woman selling cut flowers to tell me she used to babysit for me and Frazer when we were little (as in Davies and Scarlett age) I’d never have recognised her but did know who she was when she said her name – funny to try and mesh my memory of a 17 year old rake thin girl with the big middle aged woman she is now. She asked what I was doing, whether I was married etc and I said I was 36, married for 10 years with 2 children. She said ‘you look really happy – I noticed you walk past on your way out of the library and was sure it was you so I had to ask. You look really content’ which was lovely to hear :). I always think I have a look of concerned fretfulness on my face when I catch a glimpse of myself in shop windows but that may well hark back to being called ‘worry face’ at school when I was about Scarlett’s age and used to play ‘A gypsy came a-riding’ in the playground :lol:. So there you go, Julie, who used to look after me in the school holidays when I was little reckons I look happy :).

The afternoon dragged rather. I talked to a couple of the librarians about Chatterbooks after the event and one of the mums is on a computer course on a Thursday and came over to thank me again for running it and say how much her kids had enjoyed it. I’m writing a report up and attending a debrief session next week and it all seems to be being taken quite seriously now it has finished and was clearly a bigger thing and more of a success than they anticipated.

It was finally home time and I was home a clear 90 minutes before Ady and the kids which always feels most strange. I chopped some firewood and lit the fire, collected eggs and put the chickens away, talked to my Dad on the phone and then they came home.

I had cuddles and a catch up with them both then nipped back out again as Ady had brought home a £14 duck reduced to £3 that needed using tonight so I went out to get spring onions, cucumber and pancakes to make crispy duck while Ady got it roasting and fed Davies and Scarlett.

I’d just slipped on my old green dms and a coat over the dress and leggings I’d worn to work so was looking a bit of a state but only expected to nip into the supermarket quickly. In the end I was out for nearly an hour and tried 3 different supermarkets, failing to get Chinese pancakes in any and settling for wraps instead and desperately hoping I wouldn’t bump into anyone I knew :lol:.

I read some Firework Makers Daughter and we looked at the local paper which has covered the Mad Hatters Gala event we went to and features Davies in his fancy dress as a prize winner – can’t find an online link but will have another look tomorrow :). Nice picture though :).

I don’t know about them but I’m looking forward to not doing very much tomorrow.

I’ve been sleeping badly lately, which is really annoying as there is no reason for it. I was thinking the other day about times in my life when I have had reasons to keep me awake – not many to be fair, either due to a charmed life or a lack of letting stuff worry me, aside from non-sleeping through the night children of course. But the last week or so I have been stirring for no real reason and then struggling to get back to sleep. Last night was the same and so having gone to bed luxuriating in not having anything particular to be up for this morning I actually hear the cockerels crowing and the birds singing at dawn having been restless for quite some time before that and then falling properly asleep again for a couple of hours.

We had a nice pottering morning at home – Davies spent some time on the Xbox, Scarlett watched some animal programmes and DS’d a bit. I typed up the last two RSPC Wildlife Action Awards they have completed which just need printing off and then they can apply for their silver award. We have already done most of the first three activities out of the six required for their gold so that should all be done in the next few weeks.

I’d stumbled across Crest Science Awards when looking at Science Festivals around the UK at the weekend after the Surrey Science Circus and have been emailing with the local coordinator. There are no real provisions for individuals but I could look at running one for some local HE folk or simply pay through the nose for just Davies and Scarlett. It looks interesting enough to have value, educational enough to tick boxes and of course comes with nice certificates and recognition so would satisfy externally if the need arose, look good on Davies and Scarlett’s ‘CVs’ of education at some future point but above all else be an interesting and enjoyable exercise, much the same motivations as the WAA really.

Scarlett and I then did some baking – we made a double batch of snickerdoodles and some chocolate orange cupcakes. Scarlett did all the oven work moving things between shelves, checking they were cooked and taking them off baking sheets onto cooling racks. We ran out of time to ice the cakes but will do them tomorrow when I get in from work. The snickerdoodles were obviously delicious as the whole double batch had been consumed by children and their grandfather during the course of the afternoon! :).

We had lunch and then Dad arrived as he was staying here with Davies and Scarlett while I went off for a couple of hours training. I left them with instructions to eat plenty of food during the afternoon as their tea was going to be late and left them lots of fruit and carrots along with the snickerdoodles.

I picked up Sian from her house locally and we drove over to Chichester to the West Sussex records office. I have been before, about 2 years ago but I always say yes to any training offered, partially as it’s interesting, partially as it looks good that I am willing and partially because I get paid for my time in doing so :). It is an interesting place and one of the Archivists is Sue, Ady’s best friend Kev’s partner so it was nice to see her :).

Family History is the ‘bread and butter’ of their business which is something that has never appealed to me in the slightest to spend any of my time investigating. On my Mum’s side we’d struggle to back past my grandparents as there is all sorts of secrecy about real dates of birth and whether people were actually married at all. On my Dad’s side the Davies’ were from Wales where every second person is called Davies and they all had about 14 children and married their cousins and pretended illegitimate children of older daughters were younger children of grandparents and so on. Far too complicated to try and unravel using birth, death and marriage certificates let alone censuses. I do find all the old maps fascinating though and enjoyed looking at them. We are only the second owner from building of our house and my parents house is of a similar modern era with them being only the second owners too but I could see the interest in tracing the history of an older property.

Sian was staying in Chi so I dashed home on my own with just about enough time to collect Davies and Scarlett and thank Dad for being here before going back out again to Badgers. I was drafted downstairs tonight to help the kids finish off their photoframes and practise their puppet shows for presentation night next week. I wasn’t really in the mood for it and was very honest when Julie asked if I’d be interested in being a Badger Leader one day. My uniform has arrived (I *hate* wearing uniforms) and the wrong fleece had come with ‘Badger Leader’ on it instead of ‘Assistant Badger Leader’. I tend to have good weeks and bad weeks really – tonight I was glad next week is the last week of term and then we have two weeks off. Next term, Davies’ last, we’re all in one group doing Adventure Badger which looks quite interesting and allows for a fair bit of flexibility and working with the kids in smaller groups which is what I prefer and sometimes even enjoy ;).

Ady had arrived home and got the kids dinner ready for when we got home. They watched the end of Howard the Duck – a video Ady had brought home for them which they’d started watching yesterday. I didn’t watch it but it all seemed very surreal from the odd bits I caught.

And now I am very ready for bed.

Today’s blogpost title is brought to you by Roly Mole from The Fimbles 😆

I woke before my alarm (Scarlett had come into our bed in the night having had a bad dream and had then noisily got up and gone into Davies’ room) and listened to the sound of Davies and Scarlett chatting in Davies’ room. I couldn’t make out what they were saying but there was the companiable sound of two people who are really comfortable with each other just being together. Listening to them laughing or enjoying each others company is one of my great joys in life, knowing that I am responsible for both of them existing and that they give such pleasure to each other just warms my heart. So I was already feeling quite glowy when I poked my head round the door to say good morning and was faced with this sight 🙂

Davies has taken it upon himself to teach Scarlett to read and she is utterly compliant when it’s him that’s doing the coaching – a far cry from the resistance I meet at the mere suggestion of helping her. They were looking at some Read at Home books I bought from Book People years ago in one of my minor wobbles about resources and have sat untouched on the book shelf ever since. Davies has way more patience, kindness and other such reserves than me and there is very little Scarlett won’t do for him so it’s a bit of a win:win situation really :).

We got dressed, breakfasted and then Caz and Bid dropped Archie and Eliot off. The kids disappeared upstairs and I had a frantic half an hour having realised all the information I needed to get everyone to Book Club was on facebook and facebook was down. I had no addesses, no phone numbers or anything. I sent texts to a few people who might know address or phone number but had no joy and then remembered Julie is super organised with such information and rang her. She came up trumps with landline and mobile numbers, then someone else texted me an address and when I went online to find it on googlemaps I discovered facebook had come back up again anyway.

I loaded everyone into the car and we headed over to Mel’s for Book Club. It was very interesting listening to the conversations – for quite some while they recited huge chunks of the script from The Simpsons Movie, which put me in mind of being in the pub with blokes ‘impressing’ each other with large chunks of Monty Python sketches – maybe this is some sort of essential life skill for males? 🙂 😆 I then turned up the radio and did Popmaster which I imagine impressed everyone with my superior knowledge – my own equivalent of Monty Python I suppose… 😉 Davies sat in the front with me and acquainted himself with all the dashboard controls and the cigarette lighter.

We arrived slightly early so nipped off again to get some petrol, thus cementing once and for all in my mind where Mel’s house is for future reference. Will be able to drive straight there in future :).

Book Club was good, they’d been reading The Happy Prince and Katy read it to them again and they did some artwork inspired by that time period and talked about morals, fables, expressive words and language. They all came out with some very impressive artwork inspired by the story :). I sat and chatted to some other parents which was interesting. I was pondering slightly if we (I) am a bit too insular and self contained in Home Ed as I don’t feel any real need to be part of a Home Ed group these days, feeling the kids get sufficient structured learning from Wildlife Explorers, YACs, Badgers, swimming lessons and the odd ad hoc things we do which coupled with hanging out with mates and answering the questions that arise day to day is more than enough. But you can only listen to so many people fretting about Maths and GCSEs and whether Home Ed kids miss out on science resources in schools before you have to reassure yourself a little.

Interesting conversations though :).

I had a chat with Katy about Chatterbooks and shared some thoughts about what had worked well for me and might be a success with the Book Club and offered to be a second pair of hands if needed before spiriting off ‘my’ four. I was taking Archie and Eliot to Etudeo, the school-like resource that so many of my HE friends use and where Caz and Bid are working as teachers at the moment. It’s the first time we’ve been in the building and I was quite curious to see it really. My curiousity is satisfied that it is indeed quite school-y and whilst the people who go might be fab I can’t get away from feeling the concept is simply not for us at this stage (quite apart from being too far away, too expensive to attend and none of us wanting to commit to anything additional at the moment).

We stayed for a cup of tea and the kids had a play before we headed for home and a very late lunch. Then it was back out again for swimming. It was the penultimate lesson and we’ve missed the last two weeks. Both the kids are staying in the same groups next term but Davies got his 15m badge and Scarlett got her 10m :). I managed 48 lengths in just over 50 minutes so I was pleased with that having not been for a while. My knees are protesting now mind you.

Ady had beaten us home and got the kids some tea on so while they ate and had a bath I nipped out again to the Co Op for some bits for dinner, came home and got it cooking and then started reading The Firework Makers Daughter. We only got part way into the second chapter but are enjoying it so far :).

The kids went to bed and then Davies reappeared with a book he had made for Scarlett. He has a character he invented called ‘Day’ who is a crisp packet who lives at a landfill site. He has ‘written’ a whole series of stories about Day and the dump and other characters including a broken tv set and a sweet wrapper which are fab and Scarlett adores them so he has made Scarlett a ‘learn to read with Day’ book which has all the letters of the alphabet in it for her to learn so she can get better at reading. It is totally fab and she is thrilled with it and has gone to sleep tonight clutching it to her chest :). I suspect she will treasure it forever :).

I really do have lovely children :).

This morning was a visit to a soft play centre. Julie and I used to meet there fairly regularly when it first opened about 4 years ago and it was all new and shiny but I’ve not been for well over a year and had heard it had gone downhill, indeed the last time we went it was feeling shabby and tired. But Julie and I had arranged to meet there and put it out on the local home ed facebook group and a few other people had said they might come along including Caz and the boys as it is Eliot’s birthday today.

So, running late as usual we dashed out of the house with home made card and hastily wrapped present, and socks for Scarlett. The smell of feet, school changing rooms and general despair hit us as we opened the front door, ah the odour of soft play 😆 Twelve quid (twelve fucking quid!!!) later we joined the others and I took my cup of overpriced tea to sit down with Julie, Caz and Lou while the kids ran riot with the pack of kids for a couple of hours.

The place is in even more tired repair than when we last went and they have this big list of RULES posted up which includes things like ‘any food and drink brought onto the premises will be confiscated and returned when you leave’. You can get a paper cup with tap water for 10p and get free refills 😆 Scarlett rinsed my teacup out in the sink in the toilets and took that up and asked for tap water. I didn’t ask her to but did find her attitude very funny – ‘well you paid a lot more than 10p for it so I think that you should be able to get that cup filled up instead!’ 😆

It was a nice couple of hours despite the surroundings and expense and neither Davies or Scarlett really wanted to go, paricularly when they learnt Archie and Eliot were headed for a picnic on the beach. But Chatterbooks needed finishing so we came home for lunch and then headed out to the library.

Today was the session I had probably put the least effort into planning really as I have booked the display space from next week and wanted the children to do a display of what Chatterbooks has been about for them to put up and celebrate the sessions / explain to other library users what we’ve been doing. So I’d got in all of the books we have used in sessions so far, plenty of paper and pens and was hoping creativity would strike.

We started off with refreshments and talking about all of the sessions we’d done so far to see who could remember – I got some great feedback there from the children remembering sessions with plenty of enthusiasm. It was clear that the storytelling session had been popular, along with the film and book session. I’m really proud of that as those had been the two sessions I had put most planning effort into and had been completely my idea rather than inspired by sessions I’d read about – the storytelling one particularly had been fairly ambitious so I’m glad we pulled it off and the kids enjoyed it :).

We had cake and juice and then I read to them by popular request while they did drawings, wrote poems, copied book covers or whatever else reminded them of Chatterbooks. I was very touched to get a couple of pictures of me along with a thank you card made during the session. And a box of chocolates presented to me by some of the kids too :).

While I did all that Abi spent some time chatting to the parents and getting some feedback forms completed, then came back into the junior library and worked her way round the kids and got their answers on what they had liked and disliked. The popular answer for favourite bit was ‘biscuits!’ proving either we’d not phrased the questionnaire very well or we’d really not needed to bother laying anything else on other than free biscuits in the library – I’d definitely not bother doing refreshments again 😆

Very popular was being read to, with most of them saying they enjoyed that and the storytelling and film sessions getting several mentions too. I’ve brought home all the paperwork from the sessions and will write up a proper report for work over the next week or so – I have a proper debrief session with Important Library People in 2 weeks time.

Everyone left with a flurry of thank yous and goodbyes – I do feel like I made connections with all of the kids in some way over the 6 weeks and several of them I really clicked with and will miss although I’m not sorry not to have the regular committment and stress of the crowd control element of the sessions, I really did struggle with that at times.

I had a chat with Brenda, the chief librarian who had come in to talk about changes in hours (mine will just have a very slight shift and I will do 11.5 hours one week and 10.5 the other so still an average of 11 hours a week although the 10.5hr week is the one I work a Saturday morning in so I will lose half an hours worth of Saturday enhancement, which probably only works out to be about £1 a week so I’m not too stressed about that.

Brenda and I had a long chat about Chatterbooks and I was warmly thanked for having done it. I’ve learnt a lot, it achieved my personal aims of proving there was a need, providing that experience for Davies and Scarlett (as I am often telling them if the world doesn’t offer what you want it to, make it happen for yourself, that was about doing just that), giving me something else to add to my CV and another feather to my bow, giving me a small amount of career advancement potential and getting my name known in higher circles and meeting a need that I personally feel the library service fails to do and am quite passionate about us failing to do. I have really enjoyed vast elements of it, will take what I’ve learnt and use it and hopefully be instrumental in offering a better service at some future point to that slice of our customers.

Fully Chatterbooked out we left the library and came home for dinner, putting chickens away, getting the fire lit and finally sitting down with a large mug of tea.

We rushed through the end of The Happy Prince in preparation for tomorrow’s Book Club. Davies told me he was proud to be my son – comments like that from him are worth 400 feedback forms from anyone else :). He and I had already shared some knowing looks when the kids at Chatterbooks were talking about ‘golden time’ – as he later told Brenda ‘my whole life is ‘golden time’ :)’.

Bed for them, bath for me, Ady cooked (again). I might even try and get to bed before it’s tomorrow.

A day at home planned for today, particularly as the weather forecast proved right and it was lovely and warm and sunny. Everyone slept in and Ady did a fab cooked breakfast at about 10am which saw us through the day.

I’d brought home a Ray Mears dvd on Friday and the kids and I had watched some of the extras where he made containers from tree bark, lit fires, made drinking water safe and used an axe. Davies particularly liked the axe clips so we all watched some of those again and then Davies and I watched a 4 seasons episode where Ray Mears travels round the UK as the seasons pass and does various bushcraft things in various places.

We all went out into the garden with the plan of clearing the patio area out the back ready to put some crops in. We had a very productive day including chopping up an old rabbit hutch we used to use for the chickens which was so rotten and patched up it was only good for firewood, emptying out loads of old pots of things into the chickens area, clearing loads of rubbish, moving an old green cone and generally tidying up and clearing space.

Both the kids had a go at chopping firewood and did really well with the small axe, Davies created a whole pile of kindling for the fire for the next few nights 🙂

Scarlett installed a stepping stone path in the chicken run with some old roof tiles, Ady dug over the borders and I did a couple of runs to the tip with unfreecycleable / reusable rubbish. We put in some seed potatoes (the growing for schools ones that had been chitting indoors for a few weeks) and Ady and I assembled the mini greenhouse and got some seeds potted up and put in there. More about growing and stuff over on self-suffish for interested parties.

We also cleared the front garden a bit and have another good days work ahead next weekend to get various growing areas we’ve nominated up and running and then we’ll have plenty of stuff growing here at home as well as up at the allotment, which will be great :).

We finally came in at about 5pm just as it was getting colder, the kids had a bath as they were filthy from helping in the garden – Davies said ‘I love days like this, I feel like we really do live on a farm’ :). Ady cooked a lovely roast dinner but it ended up rather later than was ideal and the kids were very hungry by the time dinner was ready at 7pm ish.

We all watched Masterchef Australia and Come Dine with Me before packing D&S off to bed and collapsing into bath / sofa / chilling out. A really nice family weekend 🙂

It rained pretty much solidly all day long on Saturday. Someone had linked on a local list weeks ago about the Surrey Science Circus which is in Guildford, only an hour away from us. Having missed the Brighton Science Festival (expensive rather than free and on a day I was working all morning) and not managed to make Cambridge once again I thought this would be a good way of getting some science in.

We did a big family consultation about which shows to book and settled on The Bubble Show – Science Museum.
Back by popular demand! Find out the secret Science Museum bubble recipe, learn how certain materials can change the way others behave, and step inside the famous human bubble. Recommended age 5-11 (Scarlett),

Murphy’s Law. Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down – Richard Robinson.Murphy’s Law is the most important law in science – whatever CAN go wrong WILL go wrong Richard Robinson takes you on a white-knuckle ride through your own mind. We see how the senses take things in, how the mind interprets them, and how we get it regularly wrong. Recommended age – any (Ady and I) and

A light drawing workshop with light graffitti (Davies) which was already booked up so we went for the 3D sea monsters film instead as the only thing not clashing with what we’d already booked.

Predictably we managed to be late leaving home so my plan of having half an hour or so once we’d arrived to get our bearings, use the loo etc didn’t happen and instead we were running from the first car park where we’d parked and later realised wasn’t the nearest by a long way, to get to the first show, The Bubble Show, in time for the 1130am start. Which meant we dashed past the big top outside where there were various hands on activities and some goodie bags.

In the end we were there in plenty of time, the show started late anyway and we should have at least got goodie bags as we dashed past as they were all gone by the time we came back out again :(.

The Bubble Show was good, the kids and I had seen it at the Science Museum years ago although neither of them remembered it was so long ago. The guy presenting was quite the showman and loved having an audience to make do what he said so we enjoyed that. I was most entertained by the kids reactions to the desks – Scarlett looked bored and Davies (encouraged by me I have to admit) put his feet up 😆

The show had been allocated 30 minutes which given the late start time was always a bit tricky to cram in so it over-ran which meant lots of people started leaving at midday when it was supposed to end in order to get to their next show – they have at least 3 events happening at any one time and the timings are not all in line with each other as some shows are longer than others which meant there was lots of moving about and settling down issues at the beginning and end of each show. We stayed til the end of the bubbles as our next show was 15 minutes later in the room next door so we were fine.

Richard Robinson was fab, very Jasper Carrott with his observational humour but with science and fact backing up his talk. He was pitched more at the adults than the children although nothing he talked about was above them and he did a quick whizz through how humans make sense of the world using the information available to us, the information we actually filter through to our brains, how we make sense of that using our memories and emotions and how we try to make it fit what we expected to see / hear / smell. He did some optical illusions, some tricks on our ears, made a mars bar dipped in lucozade look like a poo dipped in wee and then grossed us out by eating it, did some clever sleight of hand tricks and a few political jibes about global warming. He then ran out of his time slot but said if anyone didn’t have to rush off he’d love to carry on talking and about half the audience stayed.

He did various other things including talking about toast landing butter side down and taking audience suggestions as to how we could combat it – some hilarious ones from children in the audience 😆 Then he did a trick of getting 10 kids to come and join him and all give him an object to remember. He told us about the mnemonic he uses but thanks to some of the kids either struggling to think of objects and thus putting him off or one particularly precocious child who tried to be clever and came up with ‘remember to remember to not forget’ he only managed about 6 out of the 10 (still impressive but I suspect he normally has a much higher success rate). Ady and I really enjoyed his lecture :).

We came out for some lunch then and a quick look round the hands on activities. It was pretty busy and we were all hungry so we went back into the main building and sat on the stairs with our picnic as it was still pouring with rain. We enjoyed the (probably subsidised) vending machine tea, coffee and hot chocolate rather than the expensive tea stall outside 🙂 and watched some juggling and diablo acts in the foyer. Richard Robinson came out and chatted to the juggler for a while, had a bit of a go himself and then swept off. Really liked him :).

Then it was back for our final event which was a 3d film about sea monsters. Ady and I both felt it was good but not amazing, but I suspect we have been spoilt for 3d films in the last year or two by the very good ones that have been in the cinema. This was a film following the life of a dinosaur from birth to death with the discovery of it’s fossil millions of years later. It was interesting and a good story with lots of facts along the way. Both Davies and Scarlett said it was their favourite event.

As we left (still raining) the queue for the space ball was quite short so we joined it. Davies and Scarlett both had a go and said it was excellent, indeed they seemed to really enjoy it 🙂

We had a quick look round the hands on area but it was mostly packing up and as we wanted to have a look in a camping shop on the way home we decided to call it a day. A really good event, we could definitely have made more of it too by arriving earlier and booking event tickets earlier / thinking about splitting up to see more events. I’ve joined the mailing list and will definitely go again next year.

The camping shop trip is in aid of a search for another tent. We love our Outwell and canopy for long stays of a week or more and are really happy with our cheap little tent for staying in friends’ gardens or quick overnight microcamping trips but have been thinking of something inbetween for a genuine weekender tent as the little one really is very little and has no room for trying to cook or storing anything. We are thinking specifically of Norfolk and the Green Fair weekends when we will be camping for 2 or 3 nights, based quite firmly in the tent but not really wanting to go to all the effort of putting up the Outwell, which I think I’d struggle with on my own anyway. We’re trying to decide just what we do want in terms of size and layout so wanted to have a look at some errected tents to get an idea.

We saw a couple we liked (a Vango and an Easycamp) but at £150 ish I think we need to give it a little more thought before rushing in.

Back home again via the supermarket the kids had tea and then we very foolishly let them start watching Titanic on tv. I’d not realised quite how long a film it is and only checked at about 930pm when I was expecting it to be winding up to find it was on til 1135pm. That clearly wasn’t going to happen so after some debate we flicked onto C4 where it was already an hour ahead and they skipped the hour in the middle to watch the end. It wasn’t the best film to be watching just before bed with the middle chopped out and the dead bodies bobbing about in the sea took them by surprise rather so at Davies’ request I read them a story before bed ‘to cheer us up’. We had a riotous read of Stinky Cheese Man which had everyone laughing before they headed off to bed, way later than I’d planned. Everyone was asleep very quickly and no one had dreams about shipwrecks fortunately. Ady and I got to enjoy our curry, albeit incredibly late.

A work all day day for me.

Dad was here in the morning so having made him a coffee and had a quick chat I headed off to work. James commented last weekend at how much I look like my Dad and it is something I see ever more in photos of myself these days. I also recognise many of my Dad’s traits in me (although my mother has always muttered darkly about me being ‘just like your father…’ so it must have forever been the case ;)). Yesterday as I called goodbye and shut the door behind me I could hear Davies and Dad chuckling about something and making each other laugh. Davies very much shares my sense of humour which often takes flights of fantasy in the surreal and ridiculous and I definitely get that from my Dad. Dad and I could spend hours happily engaged in making up nonsense together and Davies is heading the same way. I made me all smiley as I drove to work thinking about my father and my son sharing a laugh together and my boy taking after my Dad in some ways given my Dad is my first and will always be my biggest hero :).

But it did have me wondering quite why it pleases me to see both physical resemblance and character similarities between myself and a man in his 70s. I am now about the same age as Dad was when I was born, so still younger than my first ever memories of my Dad. I clearly recall him being 44 and dancing about in my bedroom singing ‘I’ve got the key of the door, never been 44 before!’. There is a very silly, juvenille quality to my Dad which my Mum not only doesn’t share but she doesn’t appreciate or get either. I do, and I often find myself being really very silly and revelling in it. Dad is still like that in his 70s, I hope he’s still like it in his 90s and I hope I go to my grave (in many, many years time) remaining equally childish and finding joy in small and silly things.

After I left Davies, Scarlett and Dad talked about money, with Scarlett proclaiming that you can have too much money and Dad telling her not to be so bloody stupid, of course you can’t! :lol:They had a good morning apparently with lots of interesting discussions. My Dad will never quite get his head around Home Education and still regularly tells me the kids would be far better off at school but has now come out of the closet so to speak about having HE grandchildren and is clearly revelling in who they are and the questions they ask and conversations they have with him. I’m really glad Mum has her full time job, not just because I am pleased for her but because it means it is Dad who looks after D&S once a week these days and I think all of them get so very much out of it :).

Ady came home just after lunch and was here for the afternoon. They did chicken clearing out and playroom tidying.

Meanwhile back in the world of libraries I did the banking and Baby Rhymetime preparation. If likely rota changes come about I may be doing Storytime more frequently which I am happy to do if I can drop a Rhymetime and do one storytime and one Rhymetime a month so I was training up one of the Sarahs to do Rhymetime. We went through some of the rhymes and the tunes and actions and came up with a list for the day. A slightly surreal (Davies and my Dad would have loved it) moment came when 3 other colleagues came in the office and there were five of us all demonstrating the finger movements we use for Incy Wincy Spider 😆

Tea break and then Sarah and I were on. We had 10 children and 9 adults attending and thanks to Sarah’s dodgy knees we did some standing up songs. My style is rather more slothful and I tend to sit on the floor with the kids and parents and stay there, Sarah can’t sit on her legs for 20 minutes so we got up for The Grand Old Duke of York. While we were all up it felt right to march properly so we all marched in a circle. We got up again later for ‘heads, shoulder, knees and toes’ and I did threaten to do ‘the hokey cokey’ but didn’t carry it out. It was rather more of an aerobic workout than either I or the mothers are used to though 😆

The rest of the day was pretty slow; I rang Cara for a chat about Chatterbooks feedback questionnaires which were worked on and delivered to me later in the day ready for Monday. I also thanked her for a braille book that she had sent me for Davies and Scarlett to get a closer look and feel of after the Badgers session as she thought they might be interested. They were and we have all been marvelling at what a feat reading by fingertip must be, particularly if you don’t even know what words look like anyway.

Finally it was home time – a tea time chat with Sarah who ‘celebrates’ her 25th wedding anniversary next week was rather sobering. Ady and I are 17 years together in a few months and I can honestly say hand on heart I wouldn’t want to be with anyone else, it makes me sad to imagine there are so many couples who feel trapped or constricted or indeed anything other than a feeling of jubilation at such anniversaries really.

Am I a smug bastard? 😆

Back home again – having responded to a text asking to pick up fish and chips for one child and a tin of tomato soup for the other. Children fed I read a chapter of Happy Prince before they headed off to bed. We had pizza for dinner but I had peaked rather too early with alcoholic beverages so we ended the dvd we were watching (Run, Fat Boy, Run inspired by the Eddie Izzard documentary we’d watched the night before) and went to bed Very Early Indeed.

We looked at Davies and Scarlett’s pit trap this morning to see whether they had caught any mini-beasts. They’d netted an ant and a couple of tiny wee bugs so we got out the eye-clops to try and get a better look. We couldn’t operate it properly though so gave up and returned the pit trap to it’s spot to get Ady to have a look for us later.

Then it was off to Tasha’s. Having been talking about a regular creative workshop skillswap type event we are now at the point of setting dates and arranging what we’ll be doing when. We interspersed this today with huge amounts of chatting, bitching and catching up which was most enjoyable. We barely saw the kids from when we arrived til when we left five hours later aside from throwing some food at them sometime in the middle. Vinnie is at that very charming point of finding speech and gabbling away with items of great importance to impart to anyone who will listen so I enjoyed ‘chatting’ to him too :).

Tasha and I even got out notepads and made lists of things we want to do and visits we want to arrange, all based on things Davies, Scarlett and Toby have expressed interest in. We felt most efficient providers of education ;).

Back home Scarlett was feeling rough and looking full of cold so I ran them a big bubble bath and they enjoyed a nice long soak while I got dinner on – Davies had requested shepherds pie and I made Scarlett a big plate of mashed potatoe and broccoli – two of her favourite things :).

Ady arrived home while they were still eating and he sorted out the eyeclops for us so we spent some time looking at the ant from the trap before I read another chapter of Happy Prince (this time was selfish friends, good story :)). Bedtime which was quite protracted for all; Ady had found some blank tapes and shown Davies how to record onto them using the mircophone so he was most excited about that and Scarlett has a cough which is keeping her awake. Thankfully tomorrow is a day at home for the kids while I go off to work so she’ll get some rest.

Caz, Bid, Archie and Elliot arrived at our house this morning while Davies and Scarlett were still breakfasting and indeed Scarlett was still in her pyjamas. It was only about 830am mind you, so still early for us ;).

They were here to spend the morning with Davies and Scarlett while I went off to work. They were meeting some fellow Home Educators off at a local nature reserve for the morning. I had a quick cup of tea and chat with them before dashing off leaving them here as they had another hour or so before they needed to meet the friends.

I had a good morning at work, I like Wednesdays 🙂 Although from May we will be open all day on Wednesdays as our new opening hours have finally been announced. We are currently 930-700 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, 930-100 on Wednesday and 930-500 on Saturday. The new hours will be 10-6 Monday to Friday, 10-4 on Saturdays. I don’t know yet how this will effect me but I guess it will either mean losing an hour a week or starting and finishing my shift half an hour later. Neither way is great but hopefully we’ll have new timetables drawn up soon so I will know what will be happening.

I worked on the counter first thing and got everything unpacked, then had tea, then spent an hour tidying up the Chatterbooks admin and ordering in copies of all the books we have used in sessions so far to help with next Monday which is the last session and I have planned a group display (I’ve booked the space from the following week) and some feedback from the group. I thought having all the books we’ve used might inspire some artwork /book reviews / ideas from the group for that and if all else fails I can photocopy the front covers to make the display look good :).

I spent the last hour shelving and then when there were no more books to shelve tidying up and pulling books off the shelves that need new jackets and spines reglueing.

Bid had rung to say that Eliot had fallen in the stream at the reserve so they were heading back to their flat and to join them there after work. I nipped home on the way to get changed and then had a look round their flat. It is very nice, a lovely feeling space masionette built in the bottom of a massive block of flats on the seafront. Ady and I lived in the actual block of flats when we were very first together and loved living there :). We had a cup of tea and then walked across the road to the beach.

Predictably everyone got wet playing chase the waves, but Davies and Archie moved up the beach to play with the stones while Scarlett and Eliot got crazier and waded out to sea a fair bit. It lasted a good 20 minutes before they were overcome with the cold and had had enough. So we stripped them down, wrapped them in the towels we’d brought for that very eventuality and then wandered back across the road for cocoa. I carried Scarlett which is not easy when walking up the banks of pebbles I’ll have you know!

I think we could all have happily stayed there all day as the kids settled into watching dvds together and Caz and I got our diaries out and arranged a few more get togethers but I was mindful of Badgers and getting home, fed and changed so we left just before 4pm.

Scarlett’s nose is very sore from being runny and she had clearly gotten quite cold in the sea so she wasn’t feeling great but it was far too late to cancel going to Badgers, partcularly as Cara, the Childrens Librarian was giving a talk tonight so I fed them and rallied them and off we set.

Scarlett did wobble rather for the first ten minutes but when Cara arrived both Davies and Scarlett were really pleased to be known already to the guest speaker so she perked up and was fine again for the duration of Badgers.

Cara did a good talk, it was mostly for those Badgers doing their Communication Badge and I’d asked her to talk about types of book including large print, braille, books on tape and cd aswell as non fiction to demonstrate how much books can be used to communicate information and stories. She did some reading aloud to get them to use their imagination (very similar to what I did at Chatterbooks this week) and then handed out some sheets with ‘the man walked along the street and he saw a dog’ printed at the top and four boxes to carry on the story and either draw or write what they looked like, what happened next and so on. Some of the Badgers worked in pairs, some worked alone, some threw themselves into the challenge, others really struggled and we had some very different interpretations. I loved Davies’

he had the characters coming out of the boxes and coming to life on the page, telling their own story before going back into the box again. Very, very Davies :). He just can’t stay inside that box ;).

Cara had some braille books which we all had a look and feel of and then she handed me some sheets to write your name in braille which I gave out. It was a good session although one of the more challenging girls really put my back up by being rude and just pushing it for the sake of it. Fortunately Julie had already spoken to her once tonight so I reported that she’d been difficult again and will let Julie deal with that in her own strict way without needing to get involved myself. Grr.

Back home again Ady had arrived and was cooking roast chicken which was very lovely (missed our roast on Sunday). I read the kids another chapter of The Happy Prince and other stories – tonight was The Selfish Giant. And they went to bed, Scarlett looking very much the worse for wear after a long day.

We watched a programme about Tourettes which was very interesting. Davies currently has no tics at all and hasn’t had for quite a while but he is definitely prone to them and I fully expect more in the future. I don’t think he has anything as extreme as Tourettes although he is still young enough for it to develop I guess.

Today I have been eating mostly hot cross buns. Hot from the oven freshly cooked and then later on toasted (using that revolutionary bagel setting which truly has changed my life). And reading. Lots and lots of reading.

Davies woke feeling fine but still covered in his rash on his arms, legs and cheeks. Scarlett was more rash-y today too with it on her arms and her bum and tops of her legs. I didn’t bother with antihistimine as it wasn’t bothering either of them but took the decision not to go swimming. Partially as not being sure what it is I don’t want to risk them being infectious (although of course I did take them to Chatterbooks yesterday), I didn’t want to bring the possible irritant of chemical-laden swimming pool water into the equation and I didn’t want them to feel self-conscious about being all blotchy half naked infront of other children. They were both disappointed but understanding and philosophical.

I’d brought home a dvd of Jamie and the Magic Torch so we stuck that on and I enjoyed being transported back to the 70s and early childhood. I had to collect a parcel from the post office and we needed a few grocery essentials so I nipped into Lancing to do that leaving them infront of Jamie and Wordsworth and was back within half an hour. The parcel turned out to be a letter with insufficient postage on which my irritation about was dispelled by it being my certficate proclaiming me a qualified Waste Prevention Advisor and my returned exam with a score of 97% of which I am very proud :).

Davies and Scarlett continued to watch Jamie and made several observations about it having watched several episodes. They were both on the tired and floppy side still so I was quite happy for them to have a day of doing not a lot.

Over lunch they watched Flipper – I’d got the most recent dvd from work although even that is about 15 years old and has Elijah Wood and Paul Hogan in it. They enjoyed that 🙂 I was furiously reading as I’d only really toyed with the first chapter of the book for Reading Group tonight up until yesterday so was having to read pretty much the whole 250 pages in one go today.

After lunch I took a break from the book and we looked at the folder for the Wildlife Action Awards. We’d done really well last year steaming through the bronze award and most of the silver award but I’d not written up the last couple of activities they’d completed and printed it off to send for their silver. I’ve promised to do that and we looked through the program to decide which activities they want to do to complete their gold. After some discussion they chose a final six and while I stayed inside reading they went off outside armed with a plastic tub to bury in the ground to create a pit trap to catch some bugs complete with banana bait.

We took some photos of them digging the hole to bury it and it in situ and will check it tomorrow for any bugs found for the ‘minibeasts up close’ activity. Next Davies made a chart for a ‘Save it’ activity based on saving energy and water. He came up with six things he will try and remember to do to save them and will add a tick to them each time he does so – the list includes turning off taps while cleaning teeth, turning off lights, turning off electrical equipment, opening curtains in daylight and drawing them at night, showering instead of bathing and turning the heating down. We struggle a bit with these sorts of activities to find things we can change as to be honest we are all pretty aware of and good at ensuring we are not wasting water or energy anyway but Davies does often leave his bedroom in the morning with his nighttime light on and his curtains still closed so those will be good ones to crack. Both the children were most bemused at the idea on the activity instructions of ‘give yourself a star when you do these actions. When you have ten stars you could reward yourself with a treat’ as they felt the reward would surely be having been more environmentally friendly rather than giving yourself some sweets. Yay us and our non-perpetuation of extrinsic rewards eh?! 😉

Scarlett did a chart for ‘bike, bus or walk’ which she needs to list all the journeys we make in a week and whether we could take more environmentally friendly alternatives. We drove to the library yesterday so discussed whether we could have used a different mode of transport, having ascertained that with the amount of books we took there and brought back walking would not have been an option and deduced that public transport (would have to be bus, train station is further away than the library) would have involved almost as much walking as walking would have done! It is an area we could improve on though, not public transport use so much as once you have a car and have forked out financially to do so I think public transport becomes prohibitively expensive and I do think we are good at lift sharing etc but we do rely on the car for journeys that we could conceivably walk instead. It will be an interesting chart at the end of the week anyway.

So that is 3 out of the 6 activities already begun 🙂

Scarlett made me laugh loads while we were doing it when I said ‘slash’ as I was spelling something out to Davies (open slash close). He asked what slash meant and I drew a / and said ‘like that’ to which she piped up ‘is it like that or is it that?’ which is something I am often asking her when she peppers her speech with ‘like’ 😆 😆

Davies and Scarlett did some drawing while I read some more, then I did their tea, read some more and Ady came home as I finished the book.

I went off to the library for Reading Group having finished the book not even an hour before hand but was at least able to talk about it with very fresh impressions ;). It was an enjoyable meeting and I stayed behind to help tidy up which seems to have become a habit now. I don’t mind though and it all goes down well in terms of my committment to work.

Back home for dinner and we watched Richard Hammond’s Invisible World which I thought was very good and will try and show the kids on iplayer tomorrow as I think they’ll enjoy it.

Now it must be bed o’clock.

feel free to groan at the lazy title pun.

Let’s get the rash stuff out of the way first. Both Davies and Scarlett have had unexplained rashes over the years a couple of times each. Scarlett has rather more delicate skin than Davies and has had a rash on her hands and wrists with the odd flare up on her neck / cheeks for the last week or so. I’ve been treating it with moisturising skin cream as I’ve been pretty certain it is an allergic contact reaction to oils and perfumes she has been playing with and it certainly has seemed to flare up when she’s been in contact with something chemical-y. At the weekend she had very rosy cheeks though and closer inspection showed it to be a blotchy rash of some sort rather than ruddy cheeked healthy glowing. I’d written it off as further reaction to something she’d been touching but Davies woke with a rash on one side of his face / ear yesterday so I started to wonder if it was more than that. I gave them both some anti-histimine and it seemed to clear up so I thought no more of it.

Today when I woke Davies up both his arms, his legs and his cheeks were covered in a fairly angry looking rash, quite ‘lacey’ in appearance, flat not raised and not at all itchy. His lips were not swollen (as they have been in the past, as have his ears in previous rashes) but he said his glands in his throat were a little sore. I checked his groin area and it was painfree aswell as rashfree. He did have a small rash of spot like things on the inside of his lower lip yesterday which he complained of hurting and hasn’t mentioned today though.

Scarlett still had sore hands rather than a rash but her cheeks looked rash-like. The rash on both of them was not painful or irritated and disappeared under pressure. They are both incredibly tired and have slight cold like symptoms of runny nose / cough but I’d put that down to a mad weekend rather than anything else. Davies did feel quite warm to to the touch and complained of being hot but was not running a temperature or fever.

I gave them both a dose of anti-histimine again and the rashes subsided but didn’t totally fade. Some googling and reading back on their rashes of the past leads me to conclude a possibility of slapped cheek, some sort of post viral reaction which I suspect they are both suceptible to on past experience or maybe some sort of contact or consumption allergic reaction although I can’t imagine what. In the absence of any other concerning symptoms I have ensured they had lots of fluids today, a fairly quiet day, regular antihistimine and packed them off to bed nice and early (for all the good that did, they were still awake late 🙁 ). I’m being this comprehensive as I found it a really useful record to read back on ‘rashes of the past’ on my blog this morning by the way, not because I am trying to set a new record for blogging the mundane ;).

So drugs administered, breakfast consumed, daytime attire donned we were about to set off for me to go and give blood when I looked over the form and realised that I have a really chesty cough and possibly children who do have some possibility of something infectious so actually giving blood probably wasn’t the best plan today after all. So I reappointed that for a couple of weeks time and helped Davies boot up his laptop. He got irrationally upset when it wouldn’t do what he wanted it to though so I decided he was not really in the right frame of mind for anything like that and sent them both into the playroom to ‘go and get toys to play with like children!!!’ (or yes, I know how to deal with irrational children. Behave like an irrational adult! :lol:).

Davies made some marble runs and Scarlett played with Connect 4 for a while before getting out a machine that puts jewelled rivets on material for customising clothes and things. It was a charity shop buy ages ago and had languished in the playroom so she had fun with that.

Meanwhile I made full use of having a washing machine and a nice drying outside day and got lots of laundry done. I made the dough for some hot cross buns and sorted out lunch.

Davies remembered we’d not finished the Wildlife Action Awards so we plan to have a look at that tomorrow and finish off what we need to do to complete them. I read some of the book that I need to have finished by tomorrow evening for Book Club (rolls eyes at self and homework mentality to things I actually do want to do).

We had lunch and then headed into Lancing to get some medicine (we’d used all the antihistimines) from Boots before going to the library to get set up for Chatterbooks. Scarlett particularly wasn’t up for it today and was all tired and floppy and not really in the mood which made it tricky for me. I was helped today by Brenda, who is an Operations Librarian and pretty high up and important, but also the woman I run the monthly reading group with so know very well and have done since before I worked for the library. I like her a lot and she is an ex-Childrens Librarian before she got really important and misses the contact working directly with kids. Brenda had brought along some worksheets for the session which tied in really well so we chatted a bit about what the plan for the session was and got the library set up ready.

Another full house and another two parents coming to tell us how great they think the sessions have been and thanking us (me) so much for doing them. It has been very worth it for that sort of feedback alone I guess.

Today was about books and film / tv show adaptations so 2 weeks ago I gave them all dvd and book pairings to take home and read / watch. These varied from Horrid Henry to Swallows and Amazons with some Cat in the Hat, Harry Potter and Charlottes Web inbetween. We started off by going round the circle and saying what they’d taken home, whether they’d preferred the book or the film and why. We had a good mix of both and some interesting conversations about how the book had been kept totally true to, characters added or taken away, used as a springboard to base characters and ideas on and so on. We talked about books like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory which have had more than one adaptation and how endings are changed sometimes. Davies talked about Stig of the Dump which noone else had seen / read, Scarlett talked (a little) about Cat in the Hat. We then had a couple of the group who had brought along something to share – a short story they’rd written from one and a full on car chase scene using two toy cars from another as he gave a narrative of what was happening. It was the first time that lad has spoken in the group so I was really chuffed when he asked to show that as he walked in :).

Then I read The Rascally Cake but kept it inside a folder so the group couldn’t see the illustrations and told them to really listen and try and imagine the scenes and characters. They split into various groups of their choosing – some threes, some twos and a couple working alone and we handed out some sheets to get them thinking about how they would turn the book into a movie. We had some character design sheets with some ideas of face shapes, expressions etc and a storyboard sheet with some questions designed to get them thinking about locations, characters and action scenes along with six boxes to map out scenes. We also had plain paper to draw on.

The group had about 15 minutes for that and Brenda and I worked round the room suggesting and assisting where needed. I spent some time chatting to a couple of the girls about what they imagine the scene looked and smelled like and got some great descriptions from them. We reconvened and most of the group had something they wanted to share from their characters or storyboards. Davies had done some great characters and Scarlett had rallied and done a fab storyboard based on the book but taking it outside of the scenes in the book and giving it a really good twist of an ending. Some of the others had focussed on smaller details like ingredients for the cake, some had planned the location in great detail, others had worked really hard on character development. I was really chuffed to hear two of the boys plotting to carry on working on it at home and ask their mums if they could get together to work on it more after school this week :).

The group is clearly too big for even two people to manage when we break into smaller groups and the couple of personalities who can be disruptive just need so much more bringing back into the group than I have the patience for but it was a good session and I had some great feedback :). The end was rather tainted by our resident drunkard sitting on the bench outside and yelling at the kids which had one of the girls in tears and several of them quite upset. Brenda went out and laid down the law to him though and he was quite contrite afterwards but a shame it had to happen 🙁

I had a quick debrief with Brenda before gathering ourselves up and heading for home. Having flopped quite spectacularly in the too-warm library both the kids perked up when we got home and came out to me while I was gathering the washing in. Davies said he was wanting to make a log pile construction in the chicken run so I said they could while I got their tea ready. They did a great job of adding some logs to the run to give the hens a few more places to lay eggs if they want. They have all been really noisy the last few days and we are wondering if it is due to not enough places to go and lay when the need takes them.

Ady arrived home just as I was serving up their tea. We all watched a new cbbc programme about ghosts and then I read the first story in ‘the Happy Prince’ which is the book club book for this month.

I battled with the wireless router for ages, declared it broken, went to Tescos and got a replacement and then have managed to get it working after all. Grr. Ady’s taking the other one back tomorrow. Scarlett managed to take forever to go to sleep which made me cross as we had cracked that but clearly 2 nights of sleepovers in Davies’ room followed by another late night last night was enough to have her back being wobbly again :(. Ady cooked a lovely steak dinner though 🙂

Am hoping rashes will have cleared up tomorrow so the kids can go to their swimming lessons.

Friday morning seems a long time ago. I have a feeling there might have been not very much going on in preparation for a long crazy weekend ahead. If there were any moments of sheer brilliance, demonstrations of genius or the like then sadly they have passed me by now and will remain undocmented.

Dad came over just before 1pm and we had a coffee and a chat together before I headed off to collect Caz and go over to Caroline’s for the ‘Meet the LA!’ event detailed below. He stayed with Davies and Scarlett until Ady got home a couple of hours later and apparently they had some interesting conversations about recreational drugs, police forces in the UK and US and other such things. Davies tells me it was ‘very interesting’ 😆

I collected Caz and the boys, we dropped the boys off with Bid and then over to Caroline’s. I found the afternoon to be very interesting, enjoyable in many ways, I felt proud to be part of such a diverse but open to debate and amicable disagreement community, scared of the depth of ideas so different to my own, in awe and respect of some of the other people there and reassured that certainly for now the LA are prepared to engage with us in such a forum.

I could have happily sat chatting for far longer – we stayed for about an hour after Ellie Evans left just chatting and going over some of what had been said – but Caz had to get back and I needed to get home too really, so I dropped her off at her parents and arrived home in a huge downpour of rain which was most unpleasant to be driving in as it got dark.

Ady was home and had fed the kids and started to prepare the house ready for weekend guests. I had a bath, chatted to Ady and the children about the whole meeting and then quickly committed some of it down before it all escaped me too much.

Just as I finished typing Kirsty, James, Marcus and Alex arrived and aside from the odd bit of wikipedia-ing to clarify popfacts that was me offline for the next 48 hours.

A and M went straight upstairs to Davies’ room where D&S were already allegedly ‘going to sleep’ so they joined in with that charade (eventually ceased at 2am after we’d all gone to bed too and I got fed up with the noise still coming from their room when I was trying to go to sleep as I had to be up for work in the morning.

I was equally put out when they were noisily awake again at 7am on Saturday 😆

I went off to work for the morning and left everyone else to it. Ady went to collect a washing machine (my Dad who provided our last one from a house he owns had come across another one from a similar source so we now have that and will try and replace the broken bits in the last one at some point so he can have that one back but at least we now have a working one and no pressing urgency to get it fixed).

Saturday afternoon and evening seemed to pass fairly quickly in plenty of tea drinking, pizza cooking, kids playing, adults chatting, wine o’clock and 80s pop. And lots of jokes where the punchline was ‘Lebanon’ 😆 I dimly recall watching Sesame Street too for quite a while…

Sunday started earlier than ideal when Scarlett crawled into bed with me having been up a while and just snuggled back down and went to sleep in my arms. A lovely start to Mothers Day :).

I was presented with a gorgeous painted canvas from each child which are already hanging on the lounge wall in pride of place – will photograph them tomorrow. And a pair of bright cherry red DMs which Ady had found in a charity shop, all but brand new 🙂 I heart them 🙂



He also got a grey flowered pair at the same time but they are a size too small, which he did know but as they were also new and at a bargain price he bought them anyway. My mother has now appropriated them as they are her size. I’ve made her promise to give them back as and when Scarlett grows into them though.

K, J, A and M left us and went to look at the ocean before they headed for home I believe. We went over to my parents via the seafront too as the main road was unbelievably congested. We had a nice lunch over there with my Granny and Frazer too. We then scattered about a bit with the kids and I spending some time playing on the piano – I taught Davies how to play Twinkle, twinkle and Row, row, row your boat which he picked up impressively quickly. Dad and Ady watched the football with Granny in the lounge too and my Mum sort of floated about. My Granny ended up leaving in a bit of a huff which I had no sympathy for at all but upset my Mum rather.

After some debate and persuasion from Davies and Scarlett we arranged to meet my parents at the local Harvester in an hour and nipped home to put the chickens away and get changed before going there.

We had a nice meal although D&S were pretty wiped out and then came back here for coffee. They did do their usual trick of staying far longer than we really wanted them to, especially after D&S went to bed and I finally kicked them out at 11pm when countless hints, obvious yawns and ‘well, busy day tomorrow!’ type comments had all bounced straight off them. I suspect I have not really pulled off fantastic daughter or granddaughter today but I maintained my personal standard for mothering so I’m pretty content with that.

First a disclaimer – I will write up something in the next couple of days for my public blog / facebook etc as I know there is interest generally but this is a quick brain dump for me about this afternoon. So I won’t be being cautious about what I write, changing names to protect the innocent or generally sanitising it yet. I will do so later but I’d really appreciate if you are able to read this and therefore have a password then you respect being privy to my thoughts about stuff that I want to keep private.

Today was a meeting with Ellie Evans from West Sussex LA. If you watched the Select Committee stuff you would have seen her on that. There is a thriving local group, ActivEO in the West Sussex / Hampshire area that organised a meeting with her at a members’ house to talk about how the LA can help Home Educators and how we can help them. We are not members of ActivEO although we have been in the past and lots of our friends, including Julie, are. I went along as it seemed like a safe, comfortable environment to ‘meet the enemy’ so to speak, in advance of the axe falling.

Caroline, who hosted it is a long term HEor with 4 children. She is one of the families in Free Range Education and has long been a ‘public face of Home Ed’ but only very recently been officially ‘known’ to the LA when trying to access exams for her oldest daughter. Two of her daughters were around, one of whom ended up being extremely combative to some us later. Her husband was also present.

Another couple (and two of their three children) were also there. They used school initially for the two older children and are currently also trying to access exams for their oldest. They are known.

A woman with a toddler and a pre-schooler was there. She has been researching ‘Home Schooling’ to be sure she can ‘teach her children at home’. She was keen to put across that her 4 year old can read and her toddler knows all his letters. She isn’t known but fully intends ringing the LA in September if they go ahead and Homeschool so she can register as EHE and get access to their help.

There was a Professional Home Educator there who is absolutely lovely but about as far away from me philosophically as you can get. She has 3 children and a HUGE timetable up on their kitchen wall with all their many activities. Their home is more resource stocked than a very good private school and she has a relationship with the LA dating ten years back. They are like ‘old friends’ and have lots of contact including her ringing them to tell them what topics they are covering and the LA helping her source workshops, events, sending her photocopied information and so on. She is a working model of how it can work really well if you want support.

There was Caz, a teacher herself, married to another teacher with a philosophical ideal very similar to my own but a very different route of coming to it. They were known after de-resgistering but having moved (to NZ!) they clearly haven’t been caught up with since coming home again.

There was Cate, mother of an adult son and two younger HE children. They are autonomous and she frets about not meeting the LA’s tick boxes with her not-reading-yet 11 year old.

There was a man who has a now adult autonomously educated son who didn’t read at 14 but now studies drama and makes his living from reading scripts.

There was Chloe Watson. I doubt she needs any introduction ;).

There was Chloe’s Mum. And her boyfriend. And Chloe’s Dad a bit later on.

And there was me.

And Ellie Evans.

First impressions of Ellie Evans? How can one woman wear so much make up? And how does she lift her hands up to gesticulate so much with the weight of those false nails? 😆 But I imagine it was a suit of armour because really, she’s just a person like all the rest of us and I believe she does have what she thinks are everyone’s best interests (including her own, naturally) at heart and it was pretty bloody brave to walk into someone’s house knowing she was facing a room full of Home Educators with several axes to grind.

There was no real agenda and I did feel there were several different agendas at play really. The ‘known’ folks were, I felt, keen to justify their status and demonstrate how very beneficial that has been to them, and to continue working with the LA to better improve relationships generally. And for all of the rest of us to do so too.

The unknowns were keen to ascertain precisely what is to be gained from being known.

Some were there to score points against each other.

My initial feelings are:

Positive:
Having met Ellie in person I am reassured that she does get Home Ed, she does understand (to an extent) autonomous Home Ed and that she is happy to tick a box and say some evidence of an education is being provide and move on to the next person.
She has a team of 3 people who do the EHE visits. She was very keen we didn’t refer to them as Inspectors as they are Advisors. Potatatoe, potartoe say I (or if you prefer registration, licence). They are all fairly universally recognised as ‘good’ by those who have encountered them. She was keen to put across that their remit would remain the same, any subsequent staff would be of a similar ilk, indeed she had already been approached by people keen to join her team who had worked with the traveller community and ‘you can’t get more used to different educational styles and philosophies than that’. She is keen to foster links with the Home Ed community and would like some of us to sit on a panel helping to recruit and train future advisors.

There is currently no joined up way of getting registered. She is in charge of Children Missing in Education and EHE children. Basically anyone not on a school roll is MiE unless they are on the EHE list. So that would be Davies and Scarlett. Except they are not on the list at all because unless you contact them, or the school does when they deregister or some ‘concerned’ outsider reports you then they don’t seem to have any method of finding you. She couldn’t answer quite how that might change when/ if a registration requirement comes into play. Which leads me to feel secure for a while longer in simply not being found.

From a purely personal point of view I have always felt confident that as an intelligent, articulate, passionate person with a strong belief in the way I am raising my children I could convince anyone that they are being provided for educationally. I am even more confident of that now. But that is selfish and leads me to…

Negatives

Ellie has a background in some way in Child Protection / Welfare I think and her views are totally clouded in the meshing of education/ welfare. No matter how many time we (Chloe, me, a couple of others) stressed that the two are not connected she refused to accept that. She actually said ‘I don’t want my face on the front page of the Daily Mail in connection with a childs death!’ I did question in what way someone with a remit of Education would ever have that as a concern when there are other agencies concerned with child protection but she refused to accept the division. She blanket accepts that Home Ed is a factor in the Khyra case (and I do accept people in her position will be running scared and taking every single precaution to ensure their necks aren’t on the line but not at the cost of me and my kids). To be fair though this argument isn’t one to be having with someone at her level I guess. If laws are passed that blur the lines between welfare and education then she will be accountable on some level.

A big part of the conversation was about us telling her what we’d like. She was clear about the fact that in order to get anything we’d have to be registered first and that as all budgeting is a business / supply and demand issue then in order to gain funding for exam places, subsidised music / sports / science / literacy / numeracy / whatever other demands we might make they need numbers and to get numbers we have to be registered. I accept that and if and when I want to claim my ‘goodies’ then I might consider registering. Until then I’d rather be left alone.

I was slightly disturbed by the atttitude of the known people with their ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to hide’ stance and you could feel Graham Badman in the room rather than Graham Stuart ;).

Ellie said she supported Badman to an extent and that she particularly supported the ideas of help for Home Educators. Except that she already knows about 400 Home Educated children in West Sussex that are registered and presumably have been for a while and so far there is no funding or support available for them (other than the reward of a pat on the back and a well done from one of the inspectors advisors and maybe some photocopied information).

So my concerns: There is nothing at all to be gained for me, Davies and Scarlett from being registered and known. There is no guaranteed funding / support / access to facilities / free exam places.

There doesn’t seem to be any imminent risk of a SAO either inasmuch as I am pretty sure we would be considered fine in terms of our educational provision but I am championing the right of a single mother in a council flat having a bad day to Home Educate, the rights of my children to autonomously Home Educate their children (my grandchildren) in the same way as they are enjoying being HE’d, I am securing my rights to continue this path should my marriage suddenly fail and me become depressed or alcoholic.

I am fighting to protect the right to home educate for as long as a child is considered safe to remain at home with their parents. At the point a child is at risk of abuse or there is a welfare concern then it is clearly not an educational issue any longer, up to the point a parent is considering capable / acceptable / worthy of parenting then in my opinion they are also by definition up to educating that child too. I don’t buy into the scenario of a lack of education being abuse, I can’t see that ever happening in isolation and I don’t think you can fail to provide an education, if anything that would be one of the very last things to go in an abuse situation because for me, by my beliefs and values simply living is education.

So Ellie took away her list of things like ‘lay on educational workshops in libraries, give us free exam places’ and off she went, with parting words that it was a two way street and she expected phonecalls to register on her EHE list on Monday morning 😉 😆

I was left feeling that LA is like the NHS. I’m glad it’s there, I am happy to support it with my taxes and should I wish to avail myself of it’s services then I want it to be there ready for me to do so. If I am ill and I cannot deal with it myself by lifestyle changes or over the counter medication, or googling my condition on the internet or finding a book about it at the library, or talking to friends, or even considering homeopathy (;) ) then I might visit the doctor. But the idea that I should be subject to checks to ensure I am getting enough exercise, eating the correct foods, not smoking or drinking to excess is not acceptable. Currently the responsibility for my health lies with me, as does the responsibilty for educating my children. When I want help, when I’m doing ‘topics’, when I need the external validation of being told I’m doing a good job or even the brain stretching exercise of writing a report to illustrate as such then I will know just where to go to access all of that. But do I want it forced on me? No I do not.

Nothing I heard today convinced me of any benefit to anyone of us being registered. I did hear things that convinced me of potential

benefits of others of being registered and I would support their choice to do so but it should remain just that – a choice.

And now, Kirsty and James have arrived. Will be back!

We were doing ‘by the seat of our pants childcare’ again today. Not sure why it’s particularly tough at the moment but it is. So Ady had gone into work to collect the company credit card as his task for the day was some serious plant shopping – and by serious I mean four figures. Apparently in order to prove they are cheaper than the competitor one of the large retailers has to go and physically buy products from the other, bring it to be inspected by their lawyers along with proof of purchase and compare with the same offering from themselves.

This meant I was woken before my alarm clock to say ‘get the kids ready, I’ll be back to collect them in 20 minutes!’. I say woken and that was something of a novelty last night as I seemed to spend most of the night coughing so felt like I only actually fell asleep once it got light 🙁 . The kids were already up so I got them breakfast and rallied them to get dressed while I did the same and had them presented, Jane and Michael Banks stylee at the front door awaiting their father’s inspection when he arrived home 😆

They all headed off plant shopping for the day and I gathered up books and dvds to return and went off to work myself. It seemed like a very long day today, not sure why. I did rather put my foot in my mouth by talking about someone without realising they were nearby 🙁 I am very hopeful she didn’t hear me although I suspect she may have done so I am feeling a bit bad about that 🙁 One of those tricky situations that you can never really put right either, unless they openly confront you and you get to unreservedly apologise. A lesson there to be learnt in either not being so bitchy or at least ensuring the coast is clear first I guess…

I beat the others home by a good 90 minutes but was feeling pretty rough with my cough giving my a headache by then. I also (whinge alert!) managed to hurt my finger yesterday at the allotment while pulling up parsnips. I’m not sure if it was just a load of dirt going under my nail or an actual splinter but it has gone all infected and is really throbbing under the nail although aside from a bit of redness and swelling there is nothing visible. So I made myself some tea and toast and sat on the sofa moping for a while 🙁 I tried to chop some kindling and managed to get the hand axe stuck in a log so was feeling all helpless and pathetic. I did get a fire lit in the end though, put the chickens away and got some dinner on for the kids when they arrived home.

The children ate, we had lots of cuddles (I do *really* miss then when I work all day, particuarly when the day is elongated like that with another 2 hours), they had baths and hairwashes while I got dinner sorted for Ady and I and then we watched the last of Lambing Live which we have really enjoyed. Will miss it. Davies and Scarlett did get me to email in a question, which ironically was the same as one they answered from someone else tonight about how ewes can have one white and one black lamb. A shame they didn’t get name checked, that would have been fab although I’m guessing many thousands of people probably emailed in to the show.

Davies and Scarlett went to bed, I had a bath and did dinner, we watched a couple of episodes of Lead Balloon that we’ve been working through having borrowed the whole of series one on dvd. Am hopeful for a better nights sleep and tomorrow I’m off to meet the LEA!