Was Pulborough Brooks day, the once a month HE get together at the local RSPB nature reserve. It’s a great HE get together really as if no one else goes we still have a nice walk round and it’s a fab place to note the changing of the seasons in plants and flowers, wildlife and general scenery as well as things like how wet the ground is, how warm the walk is and so on. They also flood part of the reserve at certain times of the year so the landscape changes quite considerably too. There seems to be an almost ever changing cast of attendees too which is great as sometimes it is thriving and there is a big group of us and other times it is more intimate and you get to have proper one to one chats with people and get to know them better when perhaps you wouldn’t normally meet up with them one to one otherwise.
This month it was just us and Katie, the women who organises it. Katie is on EarlyYearsHomeEd and as I have possibly blogged before reminds me a lot of HelenHaricot (in all good ways :)) so I feel very affectionate towards her to begin with quite aside from her being a lovely warm, interesting woman anyway. We’d gone on ahead and she caught us up about halfway round which was nice as I got to chat to my own children about things first. They both did spotter sheets this time, which were special signs of spring ones and there were leftover posters from the Springwatch event they’d held there over the weekend about baby animals. Davies stunned me by reading pretty much all of them pretty fluently – they were all ‘what is a young x called?’ questions with multiple choice answers but he knew ‘what is a young called?’ straight away, had a good go at most of the animals although he stumbled slightly on words like ‘stoat’ and read most of the answers like kit, pup, chick etc. and could guess words like ‘tadpole’. Just like all the autonomous people promised he is reading at 7 – blimey! 🙂
Katie and I had interesting chats about autonomous education and autonomous parenting and various other things and then we arrived back at the centre. I popped off to the loo while Davies and Scarlett handed their spotter sheets in, chatted to the volunteers about the various things they’d spotted (no snakes but we did see and get very close to a rabbit, see deer and Davies was fairy convinced he’d seen a bird of prey doing it’s circling thing over a field) and then we headed off for home.
Katy and Becca (yes, way too many people called Katy / Katie and Becca / Rebecca around us this week :lol:) arrived moments before us at home so in we came together and the children pretty much straightaway disappeared, only coming back eventually for food. The weather has been lovely so they spent the whole afternoon outside playing with the chickens or in the front garden and generally having a lovely time. Katy and I chatted, at length :). Ady popped home and then out again with my Mum to get my Granny’s birthday present and return Dolphin Island and get Zoo Vet in it’s place for Scarlett. The children went to bed in Davies’ room altogether with a dvd but still took several hours to finally fall asleep (I think it was around 1130pm), we did our usual hosting trick of feeding Katy more alcohol than she’s used to along with a very late dinner 😳 she held out well though 😆 and her and I were up to around 2am putting the world to rights :).
A has zoovet for pc and really liked it, hope S (and you!) get on better with that one 🙂
Comment by Liza — 10 June 2008 @ 11:48 pm