One word? When seven would do…

Aided very ably by a new soundtrack 😉

A dreadful night with Tarly (oh how the pattern repeats and repeats – various nights away in various places, Ady home and then away again and a cold all conspire to have her waking at 2am, getting into our bed and then thrashing around and making lots of noise until dawn before falling asleep herself just as Davies wakes up!) meant I gave up at 4.30am and went to sleep in her bed, so was awoken by Davies in a state of utter confusion about where I was and what I was doing underneath her rainbow canopy in a sea of pink and purple!

We breakfasted and made up the bits of the sketeton that arrived yesterday as parts 1 & 2 of the Funny Bones mag subscription (ribs, brain, neck and top of skull) and had a brief chat about that and showed them what their skeletons would be doing inside when they tilted their heads back and forward and turned their heads from side to side. Then we all got dressed and they played in Davies’ room with his castle some convoluted game about princesses, dragons and knights while I changed our bed and felt briefly housewifely!

We then started to make up the wooden fire engine from the kit that Ali had given him yesterday but the glue included was not sufficient for a five year olds lavish ways with it so we decided to head off to Tescos as we needed food for lunch, food for the whole week for dinners, staples such as bread and of course some more wood glue!

Kids were perfectly angelic in Tescos and sat side by side in the trolley. We spent ages wandering round the Halloween display and got Davies’ party outfit (vampire – very cool outfit actually), picked up the cd as indulgence for me and got some new felt tips as I have started to throw them away when they are put away without lids on and we now have a very depleted supply of mainly yellow ones with blue nibs! Got some traditional autumnal dinners for the week (chilli, roast chicken to do with roasted root veg, pork chops to do with some sort of mashed potatoes creation and stir fried brocoli – I hate brocoli but one of the staple foods when we did Atkins a couple of years ago was it stir fried with pine nuts and lemon juice and it was actually quite palatable, so as part of an effort to eat healthier and indeed wean the kids off their tinned or frozen foods we spent ages in the veg aisle and bought quite a bit to experiment with. Tonight we have spaghetti bolognaise and while seclecting the pasta we had lengthy chats about all the different pasta shapes on offer and what they were called. It felt like some sort of educational field trip actually, loads of questions asked, loads of observation and understanding of stuff displayed. An excellent advertisment for that classic ‘why we cover every subject on the curriculum just in one grocery shop!’ Home Ed line 🙂

Came home and made lunch then continued with the fire engine. We finished glueing all the bits together and then left it out to dry. Davies and Scarlett played with the London micromachines thingy he got from my brother for his birthday, I rang my Mum and then my brother to talk about the speech I am doing at John’s funeral and finished writing that and we listened to the cd rather than putting the TV on – very pleasant 🙂 Davies correctly identified one of the songs as from Shrek (Hallelujah – during the wedding preparations scenes) and they both had clear favourites among the ones they listened to.

Then we had great plans to start some sort of project and I gave Davies the choice between Castles, knights and Dragons which is a current favourite theme or dinosaurs. Amazingly he chose dinosaurs, which is handy as it is the theme for group tomorrow 😉 I have a plan to do some sort of lapbook type thing with him which will involve some reading of books together – factual and story books, some writing, some drawing and maybe some other stuff. Very low key in terms of him doing much more than listening, copying writing or being creative but hopefully his love of creating some ‘piece of work’ will urge him on with the reading and writing side of it and it will also encourage his arty stuff too. So I’d thought dinosaurs would be a good one to start with if not the castle one and he agrees 🙂 As it went we brought down a book to read to start us off and then he checked the fire engine to see if the glue was dry and it was so we decided to shelf the dinos in favour of painting and completing the fire engine instead.

I will confess right now that I hate painting with children. I struggled with my own issues to let him stick the fire engine together and it not being perfectly straight so to see the paint going on slightly randomly, mixing with colours next to it and getting splodged everywhere was very tricky 😉 Made worse by Tarly wanting to ‘help’ of course. Sigh! But I managed it, we kept it contained and fairly clean and actually he has done a very good job of it and now has stuck on the stickers (and no, they are not straight!) and it looks pretty bloody good. He’s really proud of it so thanks Ali – a good gift that 🙂

The kids wandered off after clearing up and started playing some game about going on holiday together so I left them to it and sorted their tea out.

Somehow despite being really tired Davies is still awake and has just spent half an hour in the bathroom with Ady while Ady’s in the bath doing mental maths and seemingly from the applause and copious praise doing rather well – I think I’ll leave them to it 😉

Tomorrow is chaotic mad day with Tarly’s TumbleTots at 9.30am, Home Ed group 1-3pm, straight to Davies’ Tumble tots at 3.30pm and then back out again in the evening for a meeting about the future of the group at 8pm. Jenny and I are very hopeful for a different venue, increasing members, offering something really quite exciting in terms of the diversity and amount going on each week and really moving the group forward. We will either be feeling heartwarmed that our vision is shared by others and happy that some of the burden of doing the whole bloody thing ourselves week in week out has been lifted by willing volunteers or I personally will have given up and removed myself from the group as it appears to be slightly at risk of morphing into something I have no need for and I would rather leave the people it does suit to get on with it and invest my energy in something else than keep slogging away at something that no one else seems to want. That sounds slightly dramatic but it is not meant to. Our week is just so busy and we have at least four sets of local HE friends who I would love to see weekly as well as our Tumble Tots so unless I really feel that the children – and I – are getting something worthwhile from attending group I would rather not bother for now and use the money, the time invested in trying to organise it and indeed the two hours a week spent there doing something else instead. We have had weeks where I have felt really proud of all we’ve achieved, we’ve had great attendance and people really getting involved in the weekly themes and giving their all, but we have also had weeks of very low attendance, kids just running round without being engaged in any of the activities and weeks where I really have to drag myself to the venue only to sit around wondering what the hell I am bothering for. I really hope we can continue and take it forward into something positive and something we get a lot out of (this is sounding like a speech given to Darrell Rivers now!) but if we can’t then I have reached a philosophical state about it. Group is not the be all and end all of home educating and if there is not one out there which suits our needs, and in trying to set one up to do so I have not managed that either then I guess we just don’t need a group!