I overslept dramatically today – Davies woke me at 9am (in fairness we had had a bad night with Tarly in our bed from about 3am and I’d not gone to bed much before 1am anyway) but I was in the middle of a lovely dream so I told him to let me finish my dream and I’d be down. I didn’t finish my dream and I was semi awake listening to the children playing downstairs but the next thing I knew it was 10am 😳 and we were supposed to be at Lucy’s house at 1030am!
So I dashed downstairs, fed the children and gave them clothes to get dressed into, cursed at Ady for having left a sink full of washing up so did that, dashed back upstairs to get dressed myself and came back down with just enough time to make a cup of tea and a picnic lunch before heading out dead on time. Except the cat had crapped in a door way, which children had then closed the door over without realising, thus spreading said cat crap across the carpet and smearing it on the underside of the door. Urgh! 🙁 So sorted that out retching and gagging as I did (which made me grateful I’d not had time for a cup of tea as I would have been struggling to keep it down), disinfected the whole area and then made the picnic lunch. I think we did well to be out of the house a mere 45 minutes after I got up with that in mind 🙂 And only about 15 minutes late to Lucy’s house. Davies and Scarlett were making up songs about birds in the car on the way to Lucy’s which they carried on with a little bit after we’d picked Lucy, Rebecca and Richard up but it didn’t last much longer. They were funny though, cramming loads of information into them including Davies’ song about ostriches who can’t fly but are still birds and have long necks to reach food high up from the ground 🙂
We got to Julie’s where there was another woman who has a nearly 2yo son who she is wanting to Home Educate but she doesn’t have any contacts anywhere yet and had loads of questions. It was lovely to sit and talk to her and really feel like we were giving her good information, helpful advice and lots of reassurance. I told her a bit about autonomy which she seemed very interested in the idea of and have promised to follow it all up with some links and online support like Early Years etc. She left in a flurry of toddler past his nap time noise and the children continued to play outside in a mostly harmonious way. 🙂 We left around 3pm as Maisie has ballet on a Thursday afternoon and it started to rain and then hail just as we called the children in from the garden.
We dropped Lucy and co home and came home for tea. Ady arrived not long after us and he sat playing games with Davies on his laptop – I think they’d found some Flushed Away game, while Tarly and I looked at educationcity again. She’s done all of the reception level science so I showed her the maths bit. She did the first 3 games but by question 3 of 6 she was realising it was asking her to do the same thing she’d already gotten right twice before so clicked on quit claiming it was too easy and not worth doing 🙂 – actually it demonstrated to me that both her maths skills and her ability to recognise numbers is better than I’d realised. So I set her up on the year one science which proved just as easy for her with questions about waterproof materials, magnetic things, living and non living things and so on. Again I found the whole making it into a story thing utterly aside from what it was actually asking you to be tedious and annoying and given both of them only seem interested in the science questions which we’ll have done both their actual ‘school year’ and the year above for them both by the time the free trial ends I guess it won’t be something we’ll be paying for :). Glad I looked at it again though, if only to reassure me we’re not missing anything by not having it. I’ve got a couple of question and answer general knowledge books on order from work which I think they’l both enjoy far more being straightforward without all the fannying about with crap animations just to satisfy their testing’ needs ;).
Tonight we’ve watched World Trade Center which I didn’t particularly want to watch but Ady did. Don’t quite know what to say about it really but I bet it shapes my dreams tonight. And now, as I’m off to work all day tomorrow I really should go to bed!