do the fairies keep him sober for a day?

A bit of a mixed day really, mainly due to my own impatience and the childrens’ tiredness rubbing against each other at times. First thing we sat and did Davies’ Christmas scene stickers. I offered to sit and do the Christmas jewellry with Tarly but she wasn’t interested and wanted to play on barbie.com instead. She loves that site and has learnt how to type her name and navigate all around the site from it. She wanted to type ‘unicorn’ today so I wrote that out for her and she did that. She also spotted that the C and the R were also in Scarlett. I should probably dig out some of the software Davies liked playing when he was about her age but I think it is the all things pink and girlie which is captivating her about the barbie site rather than the novelty of ‘playing’ on the computer.

Davies played with the geomags and Tarly kept coming and going between the geomags and the laptop and then Lucy arrived, finding both children still in pjs :oops:. It took some persuading but I talked them both into getting dressed and then as Tarly was being stroppy about anyone watching her on the laptop and Davies was asking to play Zoombinis we swapped over and Davies played Zoombinis with Rebecca as an audience with Tarly and Richard and Rebecca veering between the two playing with toy cars and at being pussycats. We had lunch, Ady arrived home and Colin came to collect Lucy, Richard and Rebecca.

We had some laptop time after Ady went off to college with Davies Zoombini-ing, Tarly Barbie-ing and me catching up my monsterteeny blog which is very boring to write so is probably boring to read. I do want to record our day to day stuff trying to seperate the education and have a record of what we do do as autonomous Home Educators but I’m struggling to keep it even weekly and am sure it is more of a list and far less capturing what we actually do and what gets learnt and lived. Not sure what to do about that really, will ponder further.

I had some biscuit dough left and wanted to make some more mince pies so Tarly and I did some baking and Davies continued on Zoombinis before moving on to X box. He did come and join in with baking for a bit doing some cutting out, greasing tins and putting boiled sweets in the middles of biscuits but soon got bored and went back to his x box! I forgot to mention that Ady gave him a diary yesterday that he’d got free at work and Davies instantly started to fill it with all sorts of drawings and snippets of writing. He called me up to his bedroom to show me some ‘inventions’ he’d drawn last night. Both the children are at really interesting, but very different stages at the moment and I can’t help feeling slightly torn between them, spending time with one always feels like compromising the other as neither of them are interested in the same thing as each other – need to find a way of apportioning my time between them better so they both get the one to one they want at least some of the time with me.

So Tarly and I did lots of baking. For once it really felt very educational indeed in very obvious ways today with lots of counting, adding and subtraction, practical skills like rolling, cutting and filling mince pies. Julie rang at one point so I was in and out of the kitchen a fair bit and Scarlett did really well at just taking over what I’d been doing and rolled out pastry, cut circles and started to put them in a tin before apparently remembering she is only four and starting to stick the pastry brush and a knife in the remaining lump of pastry and making shapes with it instead 😆 Scarlett is a very interesting companion to work side by side with. Davies tends to engage very much in conversation and really spending time in his company is like being with another adult much of the time with lots of observations, anecdotes and on topic chatter. Tarly is rather more random, prone to all sorts of apropos of nothing statements and lots of declarations of love and affection, often in relation to what we are doing. ‘I love these sweeties Mummy’ ‘I like them too, they’re yummy’ ‘I love these sweeties more than anything in the world. I love them millions’ ‘that’s nice’ ‘but not as much as I love you Mummy’.

Ady arrived home, followed by my Mum on her way home from work. Davies, who has the beginnings of a cold and has nowhere near caught up on tiredness from the weekend was starting to struggle with being nice to be around. They had tea, I cut Davies’ hair long, long, long overdue) and they had a bath, which raised his spirits a little again.

Tomorrow Tarly has a 4year development check at the health visitors which I have mixed feelings about but having always really quite liked my HV and feeling quite definant about having nothing to prove I am going to attend with her and weather permitting we’re meeting Julie, Jack and Maisie for a walk in the afternoon which will no doubt do the children the world of good if they are wrapped up warm.