You know when you can just tell where a line of questioning is going with your offspring and you mentally panic as you realise they are about to ask you a question you don’t actually know the answer to? 🙂
And how it is almost always in the car, or certainly somewhere where you do not have access (ie books and the internet) to the places to find the answer? 🙂
Various bits of education happening here today – so that was all good 🙂
I was woken this morning by a huge rolling thunder clap and looked at the clock saying 7.30am. Was tempted to snuggle back down and go back to sleep as I could hear small people and Ady talking about thunderstorms and fork and sheet lightning downstairs so knew all was well but I had a busy day ahead so decided to surprise them all but being up and dressed before 8am. Arrived downstairs about ten minutes later all bouncy and tigger-like to find it was gone 9am and my clock must have stopped during the storm – oops!
Ady was working from home today on some H&S stuff related to his new role so I was able to dash to Sainsburys and Boots sans children, then back to collect kids and picnic and then head over to Chris and Julie’s a mere half an hour late. Realised when Julie handed me a cup of tea at midday that it was my first of the day though which explained my woolly feeling 😉
Row resolved over there we had a really nice day with two other Activeo families coming. The kids all mixed really well and parents had a nice chat too. One of them used to come to WAG (Kathy with Leona and Daniel who wants to be a girl Jenny?) but moved and is now living too far away to come so it was nice to catch up with her as Leona and Davies get on really well (she’s 7 and likes to mother him 😉 ). Also got to talk to her a bit more and understand Daniel too. He is a beautiful little boy who is adamant he wants to be a girl (well actually he’s adamant that he is a girl and dresses in very feminine girls clothes (pink dresses, glittery sandals etc)). She has looked into the whole gender cross dressing and transexual thing and found lots of support groups online and allows him to dress as a girl and agrees that he is when he is getting upset but is reserving judgement as to whether it is just a phase or he truly does want to live as a female until he is older. Strangely the other family there have an older boy (nearly 6 – Daniel is only 3) who is slightly the same but his father will not allow him to wear the nail varnish or fairy dresses he desperatly wants to. Not at all sure I would deal with it as well as Kathy although she does concede it is easier without his dad being around (they live with her mum so he is in a house with three other females). Good discussions though 🙂 Kids all played inside and out in the rain, various games in various combinations of children but all highly enjoyed and with relatively small amounts of adult intervention required 🙂
Left there later than planned and had lots of interesting car ed chats on the way home. Davies told me that the rain which was making puddles would get sucked up by the sun which would give it back to the clouds to fall as rain again (which was not a bad recounting of the water cycle which we only briefly touched on a month or so ago I thought), then Tarly told me – apropos of nothing – that bees make honey. I confirmed that yes, indeed bees did make honey to which Davies insisted that people could make honey too. I said I thought they couldn’t and that it had to be bees. He then started asking exactly how they made it – was not satisfied with my mumbled explanation that they drank pollen and processed it ‘somehow’ to ‘make’ honey and wanted to know out of which orifice it came out as honey and whether it had germs and needed to be treated in any way before being suitable for human consumption (and I have to tell you that his words were not far off of the way I have phrased it either!). He then told me a bit about hives and collecting the honey wearing special white suits and hats to put it into jars and asked again what ingredients (his word) would be needed if people could make honey. Will no doubt have to pick that all up with him again at some point so will make sure I do know the answers by then 😉
Got home to find Dad and Frazer here on their first beer so children were delighted and didn’t bat an eyelid when Jenny arrived to spirit me off an hour later. In the meantime Frazer was looking at my pc (he is midway through some sort of accredited microsoft course and is the resident expert on all things pc related which are way above and beyond me) and getting my printer to work again. We brought my laptop into the playroom to look at side by side – he was uninstalling various things on the pc which were contriving to make it run s l o w l y and I thought I’d get him to exercise the same thing on my laptop when it totally died. I left to go with Jenny feeling really quite bereft that my life support system may be leaving me. I rang when we arrived at Hove to suggest that it might be power supply related (and infact it was – oh the relief!) before going into a truly lovely child-free IKEA stylee flat to get a training session on making a silk purse from a sows ear!
Jenny may well blog about this too, but basically we have been recruited to write cvs. By a private company who offer a professional cv writing service both to private clients (ie professionals who have enough money to pay a cv writing service to do the job for them) and for people who are long term unemployed and are being signed up by government run schemes who have a budget for getting them off the social and back into gainful employment. Given their unemployed status their CV will be a bit light on the employment history section and focus more on competancy based skills, practical life experience and, erm, spin 😉 Suits me just fine as it is not a million miles away from the task I performed as Recruitment Consultant years ago sitting on the phone to a client ‘selling’ someone to them as ‘dynamic, self starting and with excellent interpersonal skills’ as said person sat opposite me with their finger up their nose or picking at a patch of flaky skin on their ear lobe and then sniffing their finger afterwards! Have brought away a trial one to have a go with which looks very similar to the sort of person I used to try and get into ‘picking and packing’ work on production lines in the local frozen chicken factory for minimum wage so should not prove too taxing. Ady is slightly concerned at how ethical it is to ‘talk up’ people in such a way but I have no such scruples as a) We need the money b) It’s just marketing 😉 c) If the potential employers selection process is so patchy that from an interview with the dreadlocked applicant they cannot decipher ‘sales consultant for nationally recognised publication’ as ‘I sold the Big Issue’ then they are asking for all they get and finally d) I don’t have scruples anyway 😉 and I do like a nice bit of creative writing :-).
Tomorrow brings a haircut for me (can’t wait – I love catching up on my teenage stylists wild social life and Saturday mornings normally bring a hangover and tales of her boyfriend’s Friday night drunken stupidity 🙂 ) and then a trip to the circus with the kids and my Dad – they have only been to the circus once before – and Tarly is too young to remember anyway. We went to Blackpool and did the tower then stayed til dark and drove home past all the illuminations the year before last and saw the circus in the tower then which Davies loved. Likely to have parents and brother here for takeaway dinner tomorrow night so don’t expect to hear from me until Sunday pm.
Honey is basically ‘Special Bee Vomit’ – They eat/drink nectar, do somehing to it in their stomach and then bring it up in the hive.
Comment by chris F — 20 August 2005 @ 1:07 am
yeah, that’s what I suspected but didn’t want to come out and say 😉 also I think D had deduced it was some sort of bee bodily fluid and was moving towards questioning why on earth we would want to be eating it (although if that puts him off honey then we are likely to have the same issues with eggs, milk and great big slices of animal flesh I suppose! 😉 )
Comment by Nic — 20 August 2005 @ 7:53 am
Good job he likes peanut butter sandwiches!
Have a good weekend, glad your laptop survives, can imagine the horrible fear…
Comment by Ali — 20 August 2005 @ 9:19 am
There is a girl at karate who wants to be a boy.She is 8 and has been like it since she was tiny. Tony was convinced she was a boy for ages! She can shorted her own name to make it sound like a boys, she dresses in boys clothes and wears her hair short. Her mum lets it go to a point, and is already preparing herself for what is to come. So difficult for all.
You have work!!! wayhay!
Comment by Roslyn — 20 August 2005 @ 2:13 pm
Wow! Everyone’s getting all employed!
Congratulations Nic, but don’t give up the blogging 😉
Comment by Heather — 20 August 2005 @ 2:22 pm
As if.
Comment by Roslyn — 20 August 2005 @ 6:51 pm
Elinor quite into the bee sick explanation. we then went into birds regurgitating food for their babies, and that in some cultures, mothers prechew their babies food, but I didn’t hthink I would do it for Alys.
Comment by chris F — 20 August 2005 @ 10:33 pm
I’ve chewed bits of meat occasionally for mine, but not as a general rule, and veg doesn’t seem to need it as much 😉
Comment by Alison — 20 August 2005 @ 10:45 pm
it was me above, and actually wouldn’t find it too dreadfu, but high couldn’t be bothered factor! being veg makies it unlikely though. more commonly i get handed Elinor’s prechewed stuff!
Comment by HelenJ — 21 August 2005 @ 2:37 pm
Stop blogging? Can’t see that happening any time soon 😉
If anything I’ll be doing it even more as now have justified reason for sitting infront of computer for hours!
Have now fully educated self about honey and bees and other bee related product ready to bring out and impress all with vast bee knowledge at every opportunity 😉
Have never pre-chewed food I don’t think but often found myself absent mindedly eating something edible (just!) handed to me by one of my children without really thinking about just how eww it was til I’d swallowed it!
Comment by Nic — 21 August 2005 @ 5:40 pm