No more questions!!!!

We had a lovely time with Dayve here despite earliness to bed all round. He told us last night that he is getting ‘married’ to his partner which is excellent news as his previous two relationships had been really messily ended and left him quite commitment-phobic so it’s lovely that his new bloke – Nick – has restored his faith in men! 😆 Only trouble is during a previous drunken text message exchange Ady had agreed to be a bridesmaid if he ever got married and wear a pink frilly dress so I think he is slightly concerned about having to see it through – pink is so not his colour! 😆 Dayve has previously always been pretty terrified of children, which I completely understand, with the exception of my own two and a very small selected number of other children I know well I am fairly terrified of them too. Usually he either hissed at me to ‘not leave him alone with them!’ or followed me if I left the room – inconvenient if I was going for a wee really 😉 but he appears to have had something of an epiphany having worked on one of his last promotional jobs with loads of children. So he was actually very comfortable with Davies and Scarlett, who, having been brought gifts by him were his new best friends! Last night we chatted a bit about Home Education with him *totally* getting what it was all about and thinking it was a wonderful thing and everyone should do it – which is an easy thing to think I guess when you are a gay man with no intention, or danger, of accidentally fathering children! 😆 This morning I came downstairs to find him flanked by them on the sofa, looking really quite relaxed considering. He said Davies had told him he was going to be a film-maker and Scarlett had said she intends being a pilot – so he certainly went away with the impression that HE works just fine! 😆 He left with Ady Very Early this morning to get a lift to the station to his next job, he’s been handing out supernoodles to uni students at freshers fairs for the last couple of weeks up and down the country and was off to replace mobile phone displays in Sainsburys mobile phone concessions today before heading off to set up a new coffee shop somewhere else tomorrow. Interesting life although he always reminds me of The Littlest Hobo somehow. Must tell him that, he’d like that as his theme tune I’m sure. 😆

Davies spent an hour or so on the xbox and suddenly blasted through 3 whole levels of a game he’s previously needed help on every level with before all by himself, so he was feeling super chuffed – and then on a roll cracked a bit of the other game he’s never managed before either. Very proud of himself for that :-). Tarly wrote me lots of ‘notes’ in her banana paper notebook. Then we gathered ourselves together and went to Lucy’s via the post office.

Sam (routine lady from yesterday) was there too and I had brought her a couple of books on Home Education to look at. It was really interesting to observe Sam who was obviously in her element with a group of children around her sitting with Davies, Scarlett, Richard, Rebecca and her own son Alex. Particularly so soon after having watched Dayve with Davies and Scarlett. Sam is very good with children having been a nanny so dealt with them in a professional capacity for years but it is that very professionalism that somehow grates on me – and certainly D & S are slightly suspicious of it too. Ady is excellent with children but it is far more a relating to them and enjoying being with them natural part of his personality rather than something he has ‘learned’, I (and Dayve) am utterly uncomfortable with children and can only really talk to them as people and hope they respond. So it was really funny to observe that just a few hours after Dayve had sat talking to my two and gleaned from them that they had ambitions to be a film maker and a pilot – with all the background information about how they had come to those career choices, no doubt, knowing them, to see Sam asking them things like ‘if you were a bird, what colour would you be?’ 😆 😆 I often get cross with my Mum for not ‘challenging’ the children or helping them with things they are more than capable of doing themselves but actually I don’t think it is to do with challenging them, I think it is to do with not patronising them. Really a child will act up to the expectations placed on them and if they get ridiculously over praised for that then why bother to strive harder. Very much a generalisation I know but very clearly illustrated today within a matter of hours.

I did watch Davies though and started to detect a bit of a narrowed eye look in him and when she suggested that ‘we all act like bunnies and collect all the crumbs up off the floor’ he physically backed away and said ‘er no I don’t want to do that!’ which really made me laugh, particularly as not five minutes earlier I’d asked him to pick up a few dropped sandwiches from the plate and he’d happily done it . Even Tarly, who’s favourite game currently is ‘pussycats’ where she only communicates by the power of the miaow looked doubtful at a grown up suggesting such a thing! 🙂

Sam then took all the children into the garden to play football which went down well for a while but again I think a grown up determining who’s turn it is next between four children who spent lots of time in each others’ company and are fairly adept at deciding who’s turn it is next between them threw them off kilter a bit so we decided to go to the park. Davies had a great time climbing really high up one of those rope climbing frames while Tarly rotated playmates with Davies, Richard and Rebecca enjoying everyone’s company and particularly Richard’s. It’s nice to see the Davies:Rebecca split and the Tarly:Richard one – Davies retains his status as oldest and Richard keeps his position as youngest but Tarly and Rebecca get to swap roles a bit and test out being the older sibling / younger sibling in reverse to their normal family situation – quite funny though because Davies and Rebecca would make a very different duo to Richard and Scarlett in that pairing, but in their real life couples they are similar really with the oldest being pushed forwards by the daring younger one in order that they don’t get overtaken.

Sam (who kept calling me Nikki, must tell her not to do that!) seemed to be interviewing me on a prepared list of contentious topics to do with parenting and education and is so often the case when you are feeling a bit interogated you get slightly defensive and either shut up about your true feelings or swing to an even more extreme viewpoint. We talked about smacking, discipline, rewards and punishments including stickers and star charts. And I remembered just how hard it is to spend any length of time with someone with a much different aged child to you if that is all you have in common. I am so not interested in baby weaning, sleeping through the night, how to prevent them from posting sandwiches into the video – it all just seems so many years ago I was there and actually intellectual wavelength wise unless you are meeting someone on sort of common ground it becomes a pointless conversation if you are both quite happy with your approach and have no interest in selling it to the other person. I can quite see the next generation of Home Educators being active choice from the start rather than failed school experiments who find their own way of doing it and very possibly go down the almost schooly route of clumping together in groups to skill swap ‘teaching’ areas. And actually for a while that was the sort of vision I had of how it might all work and I am sure for many it would be the perfect solution. But once you’ve moved on, you’d really rather be getting on with helping your budding film maker and pilot realise their dreams by making movies with a digital camera and drawing story boards and making characters out of magic maize, seeing how quickly a rock falls when dropped from the same height as a feather to learn about aerodynamics than worry about whether you should laminate your worksheets to make them wipe clean or photocopy lots of them instead? Anyway, enough ranting 🙂

We left the park and headed back for a last cup of tea, Davies, Scarlett and Rebecca disappeared upstairs and made the enormous cardboard box Rebecca’s new bed had arrived in into a space rocket complete with coloured in chalk decoration (which Lucy very kindly washed off my children before I had to deal with it – I have chalk ‘issues’) and were having a very loud, but very enjoyable time. I have no idea what Lucy, Sam and I talked about then so it must have been non confrontational and neutral 😉 and by about 4pm we headed for home.

Scarlett started to get all snotty and tired as soon as we arrived home so she has been mediseded up and sent to bed early (it was a late night for them last night too with their sleepover in Davies’ room), Davies and I played some more X box and he got all the way through to a Mine Machine bit straight away and then to continue his run of luck I managed to complete the Mine Machine bit 🙂 yay! So we saved that ready to start a brand new bit of game for next time. And then he was fast asleep really early too.

Lovely dinner of slow cooker chicken with potato gratin and an aborted attempt to watch a dvd when it started stopping and freezing half way through. I’m expecting The Beans tomorrow thanks to a surprise text yesterday to say they’ll be down this way so we’re all looking forward to that and then I have a feeling we’ll be off on yet another rollercoaster of a weekend heading into next week with loads planned.