Halcyon days…

I worked yesterday morning. Normally Davies and Scarlett go and play with Archie and Elliot every other Wednesday morning but my Mum is off work this week so she offered to come over for the morning. They walked down to the laked park and all round it so were worn out already by the time I got home at 1pm.

I had a fairly stressy first half of the morning at work. It is unusual to have stroppy customers at the library really but I had two within the first hour :(.One was a teacher who was very stressed as she’d been sent in by her headteacher from a local first school to the library to find out all about the school’s history. I think she was expecting me to either present her with a colour illustrated book entitled ‘X school – a complete history’ or be able to do all her research for her. While the library is an information centre it is very much about assisting people and pointing them in the right direction rather than being unpaid researchers for them – a bit like my view of Home Education really ;). So I showed her the area with the local history books in it and left her to peruse those while I made a phonecall to the local studies expert at Worthing library for his advice. Which was to give me a direct number for an archivist at the West Sussex records office and tell me to get the teacher to ring them for details of the schools log (apparently all schools are supposed to keep a school log, a bit like a captains log with details of events, teacher issues, admission registers, governors meeting minutes etc. which are then stored at the records office).Then to go to Worthing library and look through the local papers archives which date back over 200 years for key events at the school which would have been covered in the paper when they had dates for them. I thought that was pretty helpful, along with a cuttings folder which had some paper clippings about the school too that she could copy. She was less enthused and stroppy about having to do photocopying :rolls:. Then I had someone who got really arsey when she wanted to print a Guardian online article but was getting the banner ad off the webpage printing instead. I explained she would need to copy and paste the article text into a word doc and print that but she blew up at me saying she didn’t *need* to do anything and she was illegally parked and had to go and it was a rip off and the computers shouldn’t work like that!!! I managed to revert to retail management blank face and ‘I understand your frustration’ type response before walking away from her rather than exploding at her back which was my natural reaction. Fortunately the rest of the morning went smoothly and was fine.

Mum’s car was booked in for an MOT at a nearby garage so we followed her there and then drove on to Highdown Gardens – a local ornamental gardens with all sorts of ponds and different plants and flowers. We were walking round the pond and bumped into a woman and her son that we’d met at Julie’s Not Bluebell walk last month. We recognised each other at the same point and stood chatting for about an hour altogether while the children played. Her son is about3 and she is facing the nursery or not dilemma at the moment so we chatted about that. I put forward my case against and explained that we’d avoided all the associated issues with not going by throwing ourselves into the Home Ed scene at that stage and surrounding ourselves with other home educators, taking inspiration from older HE children and parents and enjoying the freedom of not being tied down. She is really nice and I’ve said I’ll email her with more information and perhaps get together to chat again. Davies and Scarlett were in full on perfect HE children mode being all lovely with her little boy, charming to each other and spotting all sorts of educational things to comment on 🙂 Clearly she caught us on a good day ;).

We drove back to the garage where Mum’s car had dismally failed it’s MOT on about 4 things so I brought her home with me and we left her car there for them to work on it. Home for tea and icecreams before heading out again to Badgers, dropping Mum home on the way.

Davies and Scarlett are doing ‘creative badger’ this term, they’ve split the group into two and the other half are doing ‘caring badger’. Last night was wax drawings where you do patches of colour, cover it with black and then scratch off pictures. I dropped them off and went for a lovely walk and occassional bout of running barefoot along the beach. The tide was out and it was lovely 🙂 Then I had about 20 minutes sitting in the car reading a book which was also lovely and I watched the badgers play a game on the lawn for the last 10 minutes or so too.

Home for stories – the plot lines of Famous Five are clearly too transparent, much as they are enjoying them and I’m seeing the characters spill out into their games, art and general conversation they areboth guessing what will happen long before it does. I know I do that with books now but I don’t recall doing it as a child but I guess I was reading them myself by Davies’ age so probably concentrating on that rather than thinking ahead in the story.

I packed the children off to bed at 8 and had a bath, got dinner on and was ready to watch The Apprentice at 9pm but Ady arrived home just as it started so the children got up to see him (Davies has really missed him) and then we spent some time working out how to zip two sleeping bags together so I only half watched The Apprentice. Late dinner of curry and some online chatting and trying to find some free software to stitch photos together.