One word? When seven would do…

It was second-Monday-in-the-month Pulborough Brooks Home Ed meet up today.The last couple have only really been Katie-who-organises-it and us but today had a massive turn out :).

Scarlett is being tricky (again – I’m sure I could find plenty of excuses or justifications, but really she’s being a poo-bag and I’m rather conscious of the impact on Davies who tends to wait patiently, trying to help if he can and adopting an air of ‘is it worth the hassle?’about him). We had a strop about her trousers which resulted in her putting two other pairs on before going back to the ones she started with. I will accept deciding not to like an item of clothing for rational reasons such as being uncomfortable or even not liking the style or design – I very clearly recall a pair of red flared dunagees with a soldier on the front that I loathed at a much younger age than Scarlett is now. But she is very articulate so a simple ‘I hate them!’ isn’t really going to cut it with me. She has had ‘potential issues’ in the past with things as varied as deciding she is scared of her bedroom, suddenly disliking food she has always loved and other such nonsenses and I have always employed the technique of not pandering to anything that she can’t clearly state the reasons for her upset over.

So that episode had us running late and we needed petrol and some additional top up to our scanty picnic. The petrol station had nothing so we decided to pop into the Tesco petrol station for food. Then we hit a major traffic jam through the small village that Pulborough Brooks is the other side of, then I went and got the extra food and it all conspired to make us half an hour late altogether. Both children chose to take spotter sheets and we walked along fairly quickly chatting as we went, all good humour restored :). We caught up with the others fairly quickly into the walk – Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna were there along with 2 of Julie’s other good HE friends and their children, Katie-who-organises-it, another 2 HE families who often come and a new family from Lewes with two children, the oldest is flexi-schooling at Lewes New School.

Scarlett and Jack imediately ran off together; Davies mixed hanging back with me and Julie or whoever I was chatting to at the time with running ahead with George and Aled the two other older boys who were there and he knows fairly well. It was a nice walk with plenty of different people to fall into step and chatter to for a while. Scarlett and Jack went right off ahead and Davies went off to catch them up. They’d been in the visitor centre / shop for a while by the time we got there and had already handed their spotter sheets in and got their packs :). The volunteers there seem to be getting more used to the fact they know their way round and are not going to go running out into the carpark and get run over if they are not tethered to me now :lol:.

I collected our random picnic from the car and we all sat together in the play park to eat and play. I felt rather ‘odd one out’ for a while as everyone was talking about school / Etudeo / structured reading and writing, plus they all seemed to be feeding their children mixed seeds and pulses with hummus dip and raw vegetables while Davies and Scarlett were mostly eating Monster Munch :lol:. There are some very interesting sub-sections of HE culture (and I’m very aware we are in one just the same as everyone else) and this is not my natural habitat one! I did get to cuddle Lorna for a bit which was nice but marred slightly by Scarlett having another big strop. I don’t think it was related but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she was pulling the ‘I’m YOUR baby!’ stunt. She recovered fairly quickly and we’ve chatted about it since. She can be so mature and rational about things when she is not being a lunatic! She so is the little girl who had a little curl ;).

I got stupidly sunburnt on my arms and cleavage for managing to completely forget about suncream. I was so good about it back in April but have gotten out of the habit what with there being no sun for weeks and all. The children are fine, they were covered anyway and playing mostly in the shade so at least I don’t have bad-mother-guilt to contend with aswell as stinging red bits :(.

We left and nipped home to collect library tickets and some books to return before heading to the library to join this years Summer Reading Challenge. They did the find the characters treasure hunt, got their stickers, registered to start and chose a couple of books each. Davies has chosen books he thinks he might be able to tackle himself for his starting two so we’ll see if he gets anywhere with that. He also had a mini-adventure at the library when he needed to use the loo so I sent him to get the key for it and go off himself as he knows the building really quite well now. He did manage to use the lift though, got confused about going down and pressed 1 instead of G so the doors closed but the lift didn’t go anywhere and he pressed the alarm button. Someone came and ‘resuced’ him so he was very happy with his handling of the whole situation :lol:.

We had a quick look round the charity shops while we were there and found two brand new sealed kits in one. A ‘puddle monster’ kit which is basically a plastic pond with a channel for grass seed to create a swamp look and some sea monkey eggs – for 99p! We planted the grass seed and have put the puddle monster eggs in so should see something with the magnifying glass tomorrow :).

We also got a flower pressing kit with a nice chunky flower press aswell as bookmarks, cards, envelopes and glitter glue to make things from your pressed flowers. We all went and picked some to press and did that too. Funnily enough we’d been talking about flower pressing recently and talked about having a go at it so it was great to find that for a quid too :).

We came home, did the activities, Davies and Scarlett played with the geomags and then had tea. Ady arrived home and Davies and I popped over to Ali’s to return Freya’s car seat and drop off some promised plants from Ady. It was nice to have Davies all to myself for an hour or so and we had some good conversations about all sorts of things :). We popped into Sainsburys to get a few bits too and then came home. Time for a couple of stories and then bed.