Day Four…

It’s been an odd week. I was so looking foward to getting back in the swing of things again after Christmas but with Scarlett being ill we’ve been housebound instead. She is fine today, all but completely back to normal although she had two seperate bloody lip incidents – both by Davies and both ‘accidental’. The first was when they were playing up in his bedroom with some Ben 10 characters and he threw one which hit her in the mouth. They were both adamant it was an accident but it made her already sore and cracked lip bleed a little.
Later there was a table related incident which I didn’t quite get to the bottom of but Davies was very contrite and she was sure he hadn’t hurt her on purpose but her top lip made contact with the edge of the table having been pushed by him and bled, quite profusely.
Bloody table ;).

Anyway, to get back to what I was saying, days at home feel quite odd. I have been very productive and got lots done, the children have played with loads of toys from the playroom, done loads of DSing (together, it is a very sociable activity at the moment with them as they are connecting lots and helping each other through the games) but if I’m home I tend to have one of two default states; sitting on the sofa with my laptop and a cup of tea or being busy in the kitchen doing baking / laundry. Either way I tend not to be particularly accessible or ‘with’ the children. Whereas when we are out and about we seem to chat and interact more with each other. We are so not Home Educators, we are far more Gallivanting Educators :).

Today I gave myself a job list as I had various things I wanted to get done. I went through the freezers in the garage, chucked some stuff out and did an inventory. We have £20 for the rest of this week and next so I made a list of all the food we already had, a list of what else we needed to make dinners and worked out a shopping list for our budget.

I did some laundry processing but not as much as I’d aimed for as there are still two towering piles of clean stuff to be put away.

I made a couple of lemon meringue pies as promised to take with us this weekend :).

At their request I made home made pizza for Davies’ tea and home made pasta for Scarlett’s. I’m thinking of asking them to call me ‘Mumma Mia’ rather than just ‘Mumma’ 🙂

We had a visit to the supermarket where Davies read all the items on my shopping list (it was only things like eggs, milk and bread but there is a definite leap) and we discussed some of our shopping choices including free range eggs when Davies pointed out how much cheaper the value ones were and I explained that was because they were from caged hens. We buy cheap white sliced bread (I don’t eat sandwiches, only toast and it all tastes the same when it’s toasted!) and they said Granny and Grandad had said our bread was cheap and nasty and I agreed it was but if we wanted nice bread we’d make it rather than buying the fancy expensive ones. It’s interesting how they are starting to notice the differences between our lifestyle and my parents and pick up on the things my parents obviously say to them.

While we were there the cashier, who is one of the mums from Rainbows was asking me when it started again (tomorrow) and saying how her daughter is desperate to get back and then she suddenly seemed to realise I have both my children with me and asked why they weren’t at school. I explained about Home Education and was amused that her biggest question was ‘don’t they drive you mad though, with you all the time?’. This was particularly telling as her daughter drives me mad for the one hour a week I spent in her company at Rainbows -she is a very full on child ;).

The biggest job I have done today though is clear out all the paperwork in the filing cabinet and in tray from the playroom. This was years worth of bills, statements, documents and stuff. The filing cabinet had fallen apart (it’s on freecycle now, doubt anyone will want it so it will probably go to the tip next week) and I was aware we were hoarding paperwork we didn’t need to be keeping anymore. I checked online about how long you should keep tax documents and payslips etc and then set to going through the whole thing and putting it into four piles – recycling, shredding, filing in archive style files and filing as current. I found receipts and instructions for electrical equipment we don’t even have any more, the instructions for loads of baby stuff including baby monitors, microwave steriliser, Scarlett’s pushchair and (awww) both sets for the table and chair sets that went yesterday. I had an email today from one of the recipients to say how much her little boy is loving sitting at his own table and chair and doing his drawing which made me smile :).

I also found all the paperwork from our big financial crash in 2005. There are statements, threatening letters, debt collection agency letters, all the correspondance with CCCS and copies of all the letters we sent. With the benefit of over 3 years hindsight and knowing that 3 years down the line none of those threats of court action, making us sell our house, baliffs coming round etc. actually came true it really sunk in just what a mess we had been in for so very long. Also, all filed in with all that was copies of emails and blogposts from the whole blow up with Jenny which all kicked off at the same time. What a dark few months those were :(. It was very theraputic to shred the whole lot knowing we’ve moved on and everything is in hand and positive now :).

I’ve shredded two bin liners full of stuff which will make excellent bedding for the chickens and then when they’ve liberally coated it with their own personal brand of compost accelarator it can go to the allotment and join the compost heap :). One of the blue boxes is full again with recyclable paperwork, there are a couple of small folders with payslips and tax information, one full of pensions documents and an A-Z folder of all the current stuff. There is another huge pile ready to be shredded which Scarlett can do tomorrow. I now need to get in touch with the couple of places we are still getting paper bills and statements from and try to change that over to email / electronic paperwork.

The playroom has this massive empty space in the middle now which makes me want to dance about whenever I go in there. I said this to Ady and he looked at me as though I was rather mad. Perhaps I am. Maybe it’s for the best I am back to work tomorrow 😆