A local friend who runs a Circus skills group with her husband and another woman had facebook messaged me last week to say this week they had a gymnast coming in to teach the children some tumbling skills. The Circus group runs on a Tuesday afternoon and clashes with swimming lessons. I have previously tried to swap swimming to a different day so we can do circus but had no luck. Much though I think Davies and Scarlett would enjoy circus, and quite a few of their local Home Ed friends go along I’m not prepared to drop swimming altogether. But I’d talked to Debs before about tumbling and acrobatics when D&S were wanting to learn back flips as I thought it was more of a circus skill than the sort of gymnastics they were doing at the local gymnastics class when they tried that for a term. So we decided to miss swimming today and go along to see what Circus skills was all about and be there for the tumbling too.

We had talked about going swimming in the morning today instead as Davies missed swimming last week, they both missed it the week before and I’ve missed it for ages and ages for one reason or another. But our local pool literally just had the big pool open this morning and the two nearest other pools are really expensive, have pay and display parking and are quite a drive away, plus their timetables on line looked like they were doing Adult Swimming so I suspected we’d get frowned at.

After some moaning from me Ady had spent some time tidying up the playroom yesterday so D&S took full advantage of the accessibilty of the toy animals and the lego and were playing with those. Davies then got out the animationstation and was making some films with lego. I decided to nip to The Range as I’d heard they had home brew stuff and I want to have a go at winemaking so Scarlett and I nipped out leaving Davies to his animation. When we came back half an hour or so later (empty handed, we could find no home brew stuff at all) he had made lunch for himself and Scarlett and tidied up :).

I processed some laundry and spent some time online while the kids watched some How’s It Works and ate lunch. After eating they both clearly had far too much energy so I sent them outside to play in the garden for an hour or so.

Then it was circus skills time (with a quick skip into town on the way for a home brew wine kit). We knew several of the children there although we were expecting to see Archie & Eliot and Toby and none of them were there. I really liked the sessions, thought it was a good mix of structure and guided learning with lots of scope for doing your own thing. They spent time with the gymnast doing various bits and also used hula hoops, diablos, staff, poi, juggling balls and spinning plates. There were 5 adults to help and everyone got plenty of one to one time on whatever they wanted to learn more about. The session started with some circle time, a couple of fun warm up games and ended with 15 minutes up on the stage showing off what they had learnt today.

Davies and Scarlett enjoyed it and we’ll have another look in September to see if there is scope to move swimming so they can go to Circus each week.

Back home Ady had arrived so I just dropped the kids off with him and headed straight to the library. It was reading group and I was running it as Brenda is on holiday. I laid out chairs, got drinks ready and printed some stuff off about the book we’d been reading – Carry Me Down by Maria Hyland. There were 15 of us including me and we had a good discussion about the book, spent some time tossing about ideas for future reads and generally chatting. It was good :).

Everyone left, I put stuff away and closed down computers, turned off lights, set alarms and locked up. Home for dinner and chats about all sorts of things with Ady and now I’m falling asleep over my laptop so I’ll boing off in a Zebedee type manner.