One word? When seven would do…

I always consider myself to be a pretty sociable person. I enjoy the company of others and spending time with other people. I love to talk, I love to listen. But I also enjoy my own company, I am equally happy with silence than I am with chatter. Perhaps if I had the chance I might experience loneliness but I don’t ever really get the opportunity. I live in a fairly busy house, with pretty noisy people, we lead an active and sometimes bordering on the frantic life. I’m utterly confident it is the contrast I enjoy but very often my favourite part of the day is the hour or so after everyone else has gone to bed when I turn the tv off and sit in peace and quiet, sometimes I look at blogs, sometimes I look at flickr, sometimes I go back and read my own words from days, weeks, months and years gone by. Equally I love my bath time – I sit, again in silence with my book, or my thoughts and just enjoy not being needed for anything.

I always find that by day 3 or so of living with lots of other people at camps that I am craving a bit of time with noone else around, Davies seems to get similar feelings on camps and is often really flagging by the end of the week (I tend to recover slightly quicker by taking myself off with a book for an hour – he is getting better at recognising and dealing with it and twice last week he happily went off to our room to watch a film and lie on the bed). I didn’t feel it so much last week but on Saturday while we were out shopping I realised how much Ady and the kids were annoying me just by talking to me. I think Ady realised and that was part of the reason he took both the kids back to the car when the meter was running out but of course I bumped into friends so my dazed wandering round Woolworths was interupted.

The clocks going forward invariably cocks up your body clock for a good week or more so today although the kids didn’t wake until 730am old time / 830am new time it still felt all at odds and although now at 11pm it really does feel like 11pm it’s been an odd day with the usual vague idea of what time it is even without checking a clock totally gone to pot. As a result I’m not really sure where the morning went. Persuading the children to get dressed seemed to take forever, which was very wearing. Ady suddenly realised he had 2 almost bald tyres so shot off to get them replaced before his car gets MOT’d tomorrow (fortunately not costing us any money but still a hassle) and the children did some drawing. Scarlett has various annuals she’s been given over the years and is suddenly really into doing all the activities in them. Some she does alone, some need assistance or guidance and some she just makes up her own ideas on, so she’s been doing lots of colouring, dot to dot and copying bits. Davies and I made a birthday card and some wrapping paper for Leo with a dragon card which Davies wrote really nicely on and in with Tarly coming to sign her name. She has learnt to write without any real guidance so some of her letters are quite queerly formed when you actually watch her write – her ‘C’ for example is a straight line with a top and a bottom curve drawn on seperately. So I showed her how I would form each letter and although you wouldn’t really notice any difference in her finished name it appeared to be an easier task for her. Davies then remembered how to write ‘Leo’ by himself so that was good 🙂 but he refused to write on the envelope anyway. As we didn’t have any wrapping paper – and I am always so impressed with Em’s idea of recycling children’s drawings as wrapping paper I got Davies to draw a picture instead for us to use. He says that Leo likes ‘dragons, Star Wars and Doctor Who’ so set about drawing a scene with various characters from those shows – amusing as he’s never actually seen Dr Who and only a brief bit of Star Wars. 😆 but he did a good job.

Mildly entertained by the latest blogring craze of Education City (again! 😉 ) I was trying to recall exactly what it had been that I’d not really liked about it when we’d done a succession of free trials a year or two ago so I signed back up for a free trial for reception, year one and year two to have a nose around. I decided to test run it on a real child so called Davies over to play on a year two Science bit and then gave Tarly a go too. Despite the few bits we did being quite ridiculously easy (they both scored 100% with relative ease on all of the bits they did) they both seemed to enjoy it. I do recall hating the idea that it made it fun to get things wrong by setting some comedy sound effect or happening off which Davies used to try and do rather than answer the question (although I guess you need to know the right answer in order to deliberately click on the wrong one) but they seemed to have forgotten that this time. I think my other big issue with it is that it is basically testing, which I have general issues with, and testing to a level according to age which totally puts my back up, but Davies recently got very into watching Junior Mastermind and I have two ‘questions and answers’ books on order from work to recreate it for him at home and increase his general knowledge so I guess in the spirit of autonomy if a child is after being tested then testing is what I should offer! 🙂 Neither of them had any inclination to do other topics than science and IIRC it was specifically the literacy bits which I didn’t like much last time, along with the repetitiveness of some bits (Tarly was doing a bit where the character is on a desert island and you have to shelf or bin stuff according to whether it requires electricity to work and is therefore of use or not on the island. It really didn’t need 9 or however many examples it went through to hammer this home, she’d gotten the hang of it after 3 and the whole desert island thing seemed rather unnecessary – the year two stuff seemed a bit more sensible though). No idea whether we’ll revisit it, we have so many other computer resources and free online places to go we’d never bother subscribing but we might try and work through the science bits over the next 10 days if the kids show any more interest in doing so, particularly as we can hook them both up at the same time on different laptops.

Ady returned home and we headed off to Leo’s party. The traffic on the way to Brighton can be so changable that we arrived about 20 minutes early and were spotted by Pearl sitting in the car so invited in where we tried to stay out of the way of last minute party preparations. 🙂 It was held where we have MM Home Ed group which was great because D&S are both familiar with the hall and enjoyed showing Ady around. It was a circus skills workshop party with trickswop teaching us how to juggle, tightrope walk, diablo, spin plates, flower stick and loads more. Davies was really into it and despite being an amateur at even basic throwing and catching had a good go with the juggling balls (and having spied Dani being most impressive with her juggling I’m determined to practice that now 🙂 ), the plate spinning and the diablos. He also did some tightrope walking at the end. Pics are on flickr, I’ve family & friended them as they show glimpses of other people’s children (Dani / Allie, not sure if you have a flickr account – if so let me know so I can add you as a friend and you can view them 🙂 ).

Scarlett was being very four, at the end of a very busy week, with Ady around. So she was not at her best and while not particularly badly behaved or disruptive to others she did prevent me & Ady from joining in as much as we’d have liked and indeed having more of a go at some of the stuff ourselves. She did rally towards the end and sat playing with the lego for ages – mostly once I’d persuaded Ady to just leave her alone to get on with something and to go off and do what he wanted instead of watching over her. The trickswop guy mentioned their intention to set up some circus skills workshops for children aged 6 plus to which Davies’ eyes lit up and he insisted I go and put our name down for more details. Actually this is the most enthusiastic I’ve seen him about something like that and as potentially it could be a fairly reasonable cost, not to mention something I’d like to go along to aswell and a pretty cool set of skills to learn I hope something more comes of it 🙂 . So Happy Birthday Leo, thanks for having us along, it was a pretty cool party :).

We came home and having scoffed party food most of the afternoon the kids were not too fussed about anything much for tea so we watched TV before packing them off to bed where neither of them fell asleep until about 9pm, I cooked a very late dinner and am enjoying my hour or so of peace before heading to bed myself.