Or maybe even the end of our drive.
Put to the vote Davies and Scarlett both wanted to stay home today. Davies and I had quite a long chat later about what he wants to do more of and I’ll come to that in a bit. But the vote was to stay home and play so we went with it. Saves money on petrol, shoe leather and reduces carbon emissions so all good :).
The children both had Readybrek for breakfast – now there’s a successful TV ad marketing campaign – one of the ads I remember from *my* childhood was Readybrek and although I suspect I’ve never actually tried it – Frazer always seemed to get to choose breakfast cereals and it was always for the giveaway plastic toy inside rather than the cereal itself – the current tv campaign had Scarlett asking to try it and Ady buying it for his own nostalgic reasons. I had my first contact with an open packet this morning and am very skeptical about why it twinkles and looks like Christmas decoration fake snow. Might try and make them some real porridge and see what they think about that.
I let the chickens out and they were actually out and about today having been slightly freaked out by the snow and not braving coming very far from their chicken shed this last week. The little cockerel is making some odd noises which I assume is frustrated crowing rather than anything sinister but I’ll be keeping an eye on him to check he’s okay.
We watched some TV – Gimme a break and a couple of other CBBC shows and Davies did some reading to me. We did look up reading age tests so he could measure his improvement but both decided they were very boring having looked at the first one long before we got far enough to actually measure anything. My very resistant to reading Scarlett seems to be doing quite a bit of sounding out letters under her breath at the moment too ;).
I made cheese scones for lunch after which Davies put on Flushed Away and they settled down to watch that. I decided it would be good to do something productive so having hung some washing out to dry and put another load on I went upstairs and sorted out all of my clothes. I now have very tidy drawers and wardrobes with everything put into tidy organised areas. I have more T shirts than I will ever wear, all my summer clothes at the back, all my Nicola clothes seperate from my Nic clothes and several piles of clothes for various destinations. The first is on the doorstep in a bin liner waiting to be collected by a freecycler in the morning and contained clothes too good to be cut up for rags, not good enough to worth ebaying. The second is the pile that is worth ebaying – that is 3 carrier bags and will have to wait until after Centerparcs as if I list it now I won’t be here for the auction end. Next was a smallish pile of stained or very tired clothes (mostly t shirts and tracksuit bottoms) which I have cut up for rags and are now in the cupboard under the sink for dusters / mopping up spills and a couple ready to go out into my car for wiping the windscreen. Finally I have a pile of ‘sentimental value’ type clothes which are mostly just t shirts I have liked but don’t fit or have stains but I don’t want to give them away or rip them up for rags and the wouldn’t be worth ebaying. I have a plan to somehow make something with them although I’m not at all sure what yet. Only a tiny pile of those though so plenty of room for them to stay stashed away for now.
When I came back downstairs Flushed Away had finished and Davies and Scarlett were playing with geomags. I made a cup of tea and settled down to watch some of the Parliament channel on sky. They watched some bits with me before tidying up the geomags and going to play upstairs. I called them down an hour or so later for dinner and we took a break from Parliament then. I have caught up with the pertinent bits later online anyway including Graham Stuart’s speech.
Ady came home and there was much tickling and general horseplay before it was pj time. We finished How the Whale became and I’d already got the other two books in that series by Ted Hughes so we started the second one . I love reading Hughes aloud, there is such poetry in his writing, such amazing pictures are painted with his words and his whimsical words are reined in by such fantastic storytelling. Davies commented that the Whale book had been a picture book (we actually had both picture book and storybook versions as I duplicate ordered from work but I chose to read the illustrated one as the pictures were quite beautiful) whereas this was just an unillustrated paperback. He said he prefers Ted Hughes without pictures as he likes to paint his own in his head while listening :).
I read the first two stories and the kids went off to bed.
Except they didn’t stay there :rolls:
Davies appeared while I was getting changed and we had a long chat about whether he would like to spend more time with friends. He said he is very happy with the proportion of time he gets to play with friends and he gets to spend as much time as he wants playing with Scarlett anyway. He did say he misses Archie and Elliot lots and that they are his very best friends to play with:( but other than that he is happy with the time he spends with other boys at Badgers and Sea Scouts, seeing local friends like Toby and his cousin Jack. He wishes we lived close enough to see more of Marcus and that he’d usually say that about Ben too but he’s seen lots of Ben lately so hasn’t had the chance to miss him.
Davies then asked (although he’s heard the story before) about how we came to Home Educate and I told him (again) about how I knew Alison online before he and Elijah were born and that Alison, along with June were people I knew who Home Educated long before it was something we thought about. He asked what would change our minds about Home Ed and I said if he or Scarlett wanted to go to school instead, if the goverment dramatically changed how Home Ed works and it didn’t suit us anymore and school somehow became more desireable. I explained that I have no desire to ‘teach’ and that if I ever felt our relationship as mother and child was being damaged by me having to deliver an education to them against all our will we might have to reconsider if school would be a better option for that chunk leaving us free to enjoy the rest of our time together unhampered by educational obligations. I can’t see that being the case at all but it is one possible I suppose.
Davies then asked me about Science and we talked about Chemistry (like all that stuff we’ve seen at the RI lectures?), Physics (like that contraptions game?) and Biology (like what happens inside of me?) and he said he might want to learn more science stuff. I said we’d find some online resources, learn some stuff together and then if he was still wanting more see if we could find some sort of Science club or similar. We then talked about inventors and inventions, I told him the phrase ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and explained what it meant and he came up with a theory about how he is at his most creative at night because he is processing all the things he has seen and done during the day, spots a need for an invention and wants to create it ready for the next day so he has it ready to go. He is definitely prone to brilliance about 2 hours after I’d like him to be asleep 😆
Meanwhile I thought Scarlett was listening to Bernard Cribbins softly telling her Sophie stories but it turned out she was cutting out counters for an animal board game in an animal annual in her bedroom. It didn’t come with a dice so she’d also cut out six pieces of card, written the numbers 1-6 on them and designed a ‘shake them in your hand and pick one without looking’ instead of rolling a dice. Also prone to brilliance at inappropriate times of day.
I veer between thinking I should give them ever more freedom and stop imposing any sort of anything on them, go with their flow, dance to their beat and be amazed at them as they reassure me that there is nothing whatsoever to worry about on their accounts. And feeling I should probably be doing timelines of British monarchs and learning a third language with them rather than decluttering my wardrobe while they play with geomags! Definitely coming down on the decluttering the house and my worries today :).