Cough.
Cough.
Oh yeah……… and cough.
That’d be me and the kids then, in triplicate, surround sound coughing. A ca-cough-ony of coughs. A choir of coughers. We are cough-tastic, coughalicious and cougharamas R us.
Scarlett slept through in her own bed last night although she has now gotten into the habit of wanting me to sit with her while she drifts off to sleep and she fiddles with me hair. Davies did this for years and whilst there are many other things I could be doing of an evening – watching TV, cooking dinner, drinking wine, using the laptop, obviously not having a nice warm bath, coughing, I know I have nostalgic memories of sitting there while Davies went from awake and amimated to asleep and peaceful with his little fingers still tangled in my hair and it didn’t last for ever and there will come a day when quite apart from them having no desire at all for me to be in their bedrooms, let alone play with my hair if nothing else I hope to live long enough to look back fondly on the days when I could sit on the floor and get back up again 😆
Davies has been asking to make flubber, or some sort of Davies variation of it so I’ve been promising a trip to the shops for borax all week. Today we drove into town and parked for an hour, checking out the ice rink being installed near the seafront on the way – it’s back for the month of February only. We had a cheque to pay into the bank where we answered the ‘no school today?’ question and even managed ‘we’re doing chemistry!’ when we had a follow up of ‘so what are you learning about today?’. We then tried the pound shops, hardware store and Wilkinsons for borax to no avail. I dimly recall June talking about it not being sold any more about a year or so ago and people wondering how we’d make flubber now. We did have a couple of boxes of the stuff so might face the cupboard under the sink at some point and see if they are still living there.
Home for lunch and by popular request we went for popcorn and watched Living Free, which after trying to order from the library website last night and getting the same dvd listed that we already have here on loan I realised it’s a double disc with both films on it!
Davies and Scarlett played with the geomags – Scarlett made Elsa and her three cubs represented by rods and balls and I did some more batch cooking of mince, this time to make the base for cottage pie which we’ve all had for dinner tonight – the kids had little individual ones each as Davies only likes sweetcorn, Scarlett likes peas and Ady and I shared one with carrots, sweetcorn and peas in. It’s a bit like Zoombinis round here at times, trying to feed the Nerfs! 😆
Then to Badgers, finally, as we’ve missed the first 3 of this year. We arrived early and while filling out some paperwork for a training course I’m going on in a couple of weeks (which could apparently count as credit towards a btec in youthworking – ha!) Davies, Scarlett and I carried on with a conversation we’d been having about when life starts. Davies had mentioned a moose we’d seen on TV earlier that had been 2 months old and was saying ‘but really it was older because it’d been inside it’s Mummy’s tummy for months before that’ and I said age only counted from birth and we then talked about when you’d consider life to have started. That led to talk of abortions, age of viability, whether regression therapy taking you to before birth could prove you are a soul and if memory alone makes a life count, whether breathing should be the decider or whether conception, viability or actual birth can be clear indicators or if it’s all a bit blurry. We concluded (although I know we’ll come back to this one as Davies has already reminded me we’ve not finished talking about it) that it’s another one of those philosophical questions that has no definitive answer. Realised towards the end that we had an audience of Julie the Badger leader and the other Assistant Leader (who we call Jemima but is actually called Angie – but that’s another story) who were listening avidly. Julie said ‘wow that’s a pretty big deep question’.
Badgers was okay, well actually I hated it really but I’m prepared to concede that’s me being poorly and intolerant. I just don’t really like children and there is so much crowd control and seemingly pointless behaviour mananagement I found myself cringing inwardly most of the time. The group I am with are doing Communication and we had one of the Badger’s Dad in who is a French teacher to do some basic French with them. He was actually very good and had a great relaxed teaching style but the children are just so different to the Home Ed kids I know it is staggering. There is just such a difference between the supportive, caring, non competitive group of kids we socialise with and the constant undermining, showing off and putting others down atmosphere with this group. There are the ‘best friends’ who have to make a constant physical show of their closeness, the ‘naughty little boys’ constantly kicking at each other, calling names and being mean, the sly girl who was putting lots of pressure on one of the other girls in a sneaky way and constantly invading her personal space.
A fire evacuation practise was long overdue so in honour of having all the leaders there that was done tonight, except I was left with all the kids while Julie was off blowing whistles and I’ve never done a full tour of the building. We went to the nearest available fire exit and it was locked, so we went back upstairs, through the building and out of the main door. A farce! I was then left with the group and Julie set us up with a game where one child sits in the middle of a circle of others with their eyes closed and some keys behind them, a child I nominated grabs the keys and all the kids put their hands behind their backs, the child in the middle then opens their eyes and has to guess who has the keys behind their back. It was rubbish – the kids cheated loads by tellling each other who had them, got nothing of the idea of suspense and took the chance to be rough with each other by claiming the middle child was peeking and putting their own hands over their eyes for them.
I suspect I will need to have some tricks up my sleeve for keeping everyone in check at moments like that but I kind of don’t want to. There just seems to be far too much sitting still, being quiet, lining up and not enough entertaining or engaging stuff. Ah well I’m trapped now, will have to work out how to make the best of it.
Back home again we had a chat about how much money comes into the house each month and where it all goes, how we decide what to spend spare money on and what choices we have made about things we want and things we need, where we could save money, what we could spend it on instead and which things are non-negotiable. All very interesting – I like hearing a child’s take on household expenses and what they think are essentials.
Ady had got the fire lit and a bath run while we were at Badgers so it was a nice warm house to come home to. I finished making cottage pie for us and am now feeling pretty rough. I imagine I will struggle with a day at work tomorrow but have everything physically possible to cross crossed that when I get home from work it will be to hot water and heating.
And I’d like to end with a cough.