Back to life, back to reality today for all of us.
First thing we all had the dentist – Ady went off to do a couple of local B&Qs first while me and both children stayed in bed asleep 😳 Davies woke me at 8.30am, Tarly had arrived in our bed sometime during the night and was curled up asleep next to me, so we dashed around trying to get breakfasted and dressed ready to go in half an hour. 🙄
We changed to a NHS dentist last year when we realised just how broke we were and having only ever gone to a very posh private one before I confess to being prepared for the worst when we first went. A far cry from the waiting room as big as the downstairs of my house, with a box full of wooden toys for the children to play with, delightful collections of Winnie the Pooh books to read, well lit oil paintings on the walls, huge squashy sofas and a grandfather clock, while classical music was piped in to a small waiting room with four chairs for the 12 people occupying it at any one time, a small box of broken plastic toys and nothing to read but oral health leaflets but at just £31 for all four of us to have a six monthly check up rather than the nearly £150 we used to pay I reckon this is a frugal move I can manage with little effort! (To justify that somewhat we used to pay into a private health care scheme which covered my contact lenses and all our dentistry so the bills never seemed quite so scary, plus I had no idea it was quite so overpriced!).
The childrens’ teeth are all fine, D might indeed have a bottom wobbly one as we suspected camping last week but only very slightly so not official yet ;-). I was quite ashamed to be told that the really bad staining on my teeth (too much red wine and tea) was actually perfectly possible to remove with better brushing – I’d been told at my private dentist it had to be done six monthly with their special whizzy whitening machine so never really bothered that hard to get it off at home. I was really conscious of it last week actually and was checking out everyone elses’ teeth colour all week, so will be far more consciencious with my brushing in future, but they are nice and shiny white again now anyway. 🙂
Ady went off to work and got his next holiday (Tour of the North – two weeks time!) OK’d so the countdown starts all over again 🙂 He had a pretty good first day back as his new camera arrived at work for him to collect. He’s been ogling it for months and months having first seen it in Belgium last year and convinced work he needed a smaller and more discrete one for taking his covert shots of bedding plants. 🙂 It is quite lovely, purple and with lots of gimicky gizmos which I’m sure will be available to enjoy the results of on flickr sometime very soon.
The children rediscovered TV watching a couple of hours of Discovery Kids and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on dvd and had a mammoth session of playing with geomags and plastic animals and dinosaurs. We had lots of random conversations as they went along including one about what will happen after people – Davies wanted to know if it would be ‘a circle, with another big bang and it all starting again with dinosaurs?’ so we chatted about theories on stuff like that and how it all started etc. This moved fairly logically to space with Davies then wanting to know if our world ended would another one begin and I shared with them my own childhood imagining that our entire known universe could be no greater than a marble in the pocket of a small boy for all we know. We talked about endlessness, unchartered space and how actually no one really knows, but we are learning and proving more all the time. We talked about the first men on the moon (which led to Davies asking if that was why Buzz Lightyear was called Buzz!) and I ended up by saying that all we know now is only because children like them asked questions and carried on asking them as they grew up and set about finding out the answers. Davies wanted to know how to go about becoming an astronaut when he grows up. 🙂 We touched on how the world as we know it cannot possibly remain forever and various other deep and mindblowing stuff as far as it is possible to do with my own limited knowledge and a five and a three year old. 😆 I heard a few bits and pieces from last weeks Africa Alive! visit and talk creeping into their play too and plenty of them telling each other facts and figures as they played. I’ve mentioned before how lovely it is to watch them reestablish their sibling friendship when we leave the company of a big group where they have not spent so much time together and I enjoyed witnessing that again today.
And me? Well aside from dentist visits, odd chatting with the children and providing them with their food and drink I have spent pretty much all day online 😳 but I did have lots of catching up in various places to do. I also spent ages looking at needlefelting stuff and was inspired to make a small rainbow bracelet with some of the wool I bought off Steph. It started out very small for Scarlett, grew bigger for Davies and ended up fitting me 😆 I’ve promised them one each too when I master sizing! Inspired to do some serious ebaying this week as I found several bin liners of outgrown children’s clothes in the garage when sorting out camping stuff which could raise a few quid so must make a start on that tomorrow and then I can maybe spend some of the paypal pretend money I make on needlefelting ebay stuff. 😉
Davies had Badgers this afternoon, I took a book and read in the car. He even had a quick glance about to see who was watching before kissing me goodbye so I reckon his days of needing me within his vision are slowly but surely coming to an end. He’s so a part of the gang there at Badgers and having watched him last week performing to an audience and simply playing as part of a group I am filled once again with total belief in Home Ed as the right path for Davies having allowed him to reach his true self in his own time and be confident and comfortable in who he is. 🙂 Not even sure what they covered in there today but he came out with a fab picture of the weather and there was plenty of thudding about in team games which he seems to adore. He also brought home a letter about an outing to Shoreham Airport in a couple of weeks time. It will be a guided tour of the airport including a look in the police helicopter if it is not out flying. Ady wants to go along himself which I will check to see if possible but I think Davies might well be ready for this on his own even if Ady can’t go. We’ll probably plan to stay somewhere on their airport ourselves to bolster his confidence if he needs it but it’s a huge change already from the outright NO in relation to a proposed Fun Day that we wouldn’t have been able to attend a month or so ago.
A couple of other mentions are that Davies and I played Zoombinis for ages yesterday and worked our way through all three discs getting through the levels on them all although of course you can continue to go back and carry on. We also played with Green Eggs and Ham for ages too. Davies did all of it with very minimal help from me and I noticed his reasoning, logic and general maths stuff is coming along well. Ady and him have been working out sums up to ten using fingers and he is getting very proficient at that so I’m leaving them to that and will step in later when fractions and percentages are required ;-). He also tonight was talking about letters and how different letters make different sounds depending on what letters are before and after them. Lots of sounding out and playing with rhymes being done atm so even if we are not at the cusp of a big leap forward he is certainly getting the foundations very well laid. Tarly is also obsessed with what everything written says at the moment so I want to capitalise on that by doing some more reading stuff with her – she quite liked 100EL so we might pick that up again, or just do lots of Dr Seuss type stuff.
And that’s about yer lot!