Off to Katy’s house today where we’ve not been before, for 6+ reading group. Before we left home and indeed on the way I did some lecturing and Davies and Scarlett did some acknowledging that life needs to get more harmonious, cooperative and self-directed around here. Probably need to make all sorts of post-illness, pre-Christmas type allowances but am looking forward to new year, new challenges, new ideas type stuff and thinking some re-evaluating would be good.
Katy lives in the same town as Chris and Julie but although I’ve been there loads I don’t know it at all well other than Chris and Julie’s house and the smallholders store where we get the chicken food from. Katy lives in a very cute, fairytale type cottage in the middle of a terrace. It’s adorable, very pretty but also very small and quite cold and due to intolerant neighbours they are about to move out. It’s a very dinky 3 rooms downstairs and 3 upstairs with a small front room, little middle room, one side of which is a kitchen and then a sort of sun lounge room on the back. The 12+ book group had the front room and the 6+ had the back room, with any lurking adults hanging out in the kitchen in the middle. I vaguely know one of them and the others I’d briefly met last time. I sat and chatted to a couple of them but then a rather ‘larger than life’ type woman burst in late and did a bit of ‘commanding the room’ with anecdotes in which she was the heroine with pauses left for people to tell her how great she was. I found this very tedious so quietly got on with some knitting while internally mocking her and entertaining myself with my own cruel thoughts ;). I was then joined by the woman I vaguely know – Clare and had a really nice chat with her about Home Ed generally, wobbles over approaches and what to do with 9 year old boys. She has 3 children – 13 and 15 year old daughters and a 9 year old son -the girls did go to school but her son never has. He is a reluctant attendee of the 6+ book group mostly because his older sister is the 12+ so he’d have to be there anyway but he kept coming out to try and drag Clare in with him. It turned out he has quite a lot in common with Davies – they did meet many years ago when they were about 4 and hit it off then although neither of them would remember. We agreed that maybe we should get them together and planned to arrange something, but actually within the hour when all the kids had gone outside for a run around Davies and Jack found each other anyway :).
The kids did some cave painting – aka a roll of lining paper hung up around the sun room and the kids let loose with paint (well watered down food colouring, much cheaper than paint and with more satisfying colours) to create cave paintings, then they did some collage self portrait stuff and chatted about Littlenose. Katy said to me afterwards that Davies and Scarlett had been very much leaders in the discussion and chatted with her loads which was good as last time they’d been a bit shy of saying much in the group. We were on the cusp of leaving when Katy offered me another cup of tea so a few of us stayed to chat awhile longer and Katy took delivery of a parcel containing some frozen food being kept cool with a couple of bags of dry ice. A handy group of Home Educated children proved too much of a temptation to let the educational value of such a coincidence go by so we called them in, emptied the dry ice into a saucepan and everyone cooed and oohed and ahhed over it. We also added some food colouring, tried to freeze a blade of grass and saw what happened if you huffed warm air over it. Very cool 🙂
We left with promises to meet up soon and headed for home.
I was planning on finishing my reading group book which was Travels with My Aunt but I was on page 58 and it was failing to grab me at all so I decided not to bother and made some mince pies instead. Scarlett made another foodchain cycle picture thing and then spent some time on one of her animal hospital type DS games learning more about animals (she took my chat very seriously about self directed learning ;)). Davies spent some time snuggled up with me, played his DS, watched some TV and made a real effort not to wind Scarlett up.
Ady came home and I headed off to Book Group at the library. We were having a festive time tonight complete with mulled wine and various nibbles people had brought – I was the only one with home made offerings mind you ;). We talked about the book – everyone but me had enjoyed it so I conceded my literary bimbo-ness :lol:, we had a quiz of book titles we have read before at group, which myself and Liz won (we split into pairs) and I impressed even myself by remembering all of the authors of too – got a box of liquers for that triumph. Next we had pass the parcel with a chocolate coin and a ‘how many lords leaping / maids milking / geese laying are in the song?’ challenge in each layer with a box of chocolates as the main prize. Liz won that too although I was the only one who knew all the lyrics to 12 days of Christmas. We had a final prize for the person who could come up with the sum total of gifts given over the whole 12 day period.
Home for dinner and a little light reading in the shape of the Select Commitee report.