One word? When seven would do…

Thursday We were supposed to be going to London for the day as a local HEor had gotten tickets for the Maharaja exhibition at the V&A. I’d already thought on Wednesday that we might be better off having a day at home but set my alarm to get up, make picnic lunch and rouse Davies and Scarlett. Davies was already up but sneezing like mad and looking pretty pale and washed out. A quick confer between the three of us concluded we’d all actually rather just stay home and have a peaceful day so I texted our apologies to the organiser and we settled in with various things we each wanted to do.

Davies had some new ideas for animation station stuff thanks to working on things with M on Wednesday on their animation station. He also did some fab paint pictures of Day, his crisp packet character who lives at a landfill site. We talked some more about what he wants to do with that and hopefully we’ll find some time in the next week to set something up, a blog or website or something for him to progress with his plans for that. Will link as and when that’s sorted and will also post a pic of his paint stuff too soon.

Scarlett spent some time looking at books and DSing, she’s into mini-games style games on the DS at the moment and is spending lots of time hushing everyone and telling us off for distracting her while she is trying to concentrate! 😆

I carried on trying to get a handle on the crazy world of Home Education in the UK and spent some time dreamily looking forward to camp. I really need the break, the relaxed time spent with friends who also happen to be HEors and the chance to switch off from everything other than why we do what we do. I had a text from our mate Jim, who moved to Ireland 5 years ago asking if we were up for him coming over for the evening as he was staying locally with his MIL for the night before heading to his annual lads weekend at Butlins on Friday. I texted back to say yes.

The kids and I have been talking about going to Emmaus for weeks to look for various bits for our Secret Santas so we decided to do that. As usual we got lost on the way – it is very close to us and I do know the way if I go via one road but I always decide it would be quicker to go via another route and then realise it probably is, if I only knew which road to turn off at to get there 😆 We drove past it three times then because there was nowhere to park before eventually driving a short way away and parking and walking back to it.

Scarlett and Davies both got some bits for SS, both got something small each and I picked up a top for me, about 5 different kits (perfume factory, brand new fimo kit, flower pressing kit and various other things) which I was anticipating paying about a tenner for in total – the top was labelled at £2.50 and Scarlett had already asked the price of the armful of stuff she had and been told £1.50 the lot, but the bloke at the till just asked me for £4.50 for everything :). Hurrah!

We came home via Sainsburys where I rather blew that good work by buying two jumpers in their half price sale for myself (bargains but not as bargaintastic as Emmaus!), various bits for lunch and some stuff for the kids tea to make up for them not having McDonalds at Victoria which I’d said they could probably have when we’d been planning to go to London.

Home for a very late lunch and we all watched Coraline together which we’d picked up at the library on Tuesday. I think it’s a fab film, enjoyed it at the cinema when Ady and I took Davies to see it in 3D. Scarlett was a bit reluctant but she actually enjoyed it too despite it being pretty dark. We then watched all the dvd extras (aside from the entire film again with directors commentary) which meant we spent about 3 hours watching various Coraline related stuff. Davies was very envious of the puppeteers and all the various little bits and pieces of body they were making. We talked about the voiceover actors and other things they had been in / done voices for (Jennifer Saunders is in Shrek as Fairy Godmother, Dakota Fanning is in Cat in the Hat and War of the Worlds, oh and Charlottes Web that Davies knows of).

I did their tea, spoke to Jim to confirm he was welcome over any time and then Ady arrived home. Ady and Davies spent some time looking at a DS game site while Scarlett and I ploughed through a HUGE pile of picture books I’d picked up at Shoreham library. I’ve taken them all back now and can’t remember them all but we read for nearly an hour.

Jim arrived while that was all still happening and sat watching us all for a bit before the kids eventually went off to bed. Scarlett did lots of coming back in and out, Davies cleared off and stayed away. I won’t say too much about Jim’s life as it’s his story not mine but I did feel very sad to hear and see someone I’ve known for nearly 20 years, when we were both just starting out as adults really, having such high hopes and dreams for himself and his family and now sitting here with regrets and sadness 🙁 We had a great evening, full of laughs and in-jokes that five years distance will never erase and we picked up where we left off really. There were some poignant moments where he said he wished he’d been as involved with and taken as much joy from his sons when they were still as little as Davies and Scarlett, and another moment when he said he asked his wife for a radio for Christmas after one of the first times he’d come round here for dinner and sat listening to Ady and I singing along to the radio together in the kitchen while doing the washing up. He says that radio has always lived in his kitchen with the intention of he and his wife singing along to it together. They never have 🙁

I realised the difference between us though when I said I considered the most important thing I will ever impart to my kids is that they are responsible for their own happienss, life will be to do with their perspective on what is dealt them and we choose to be happy or not. He said he agreed to a point but still felt money made a huge difference and would continue to encourage his kids to amass as much money as they could. Maybe it’s to do with being the child of two parents with that attitude and seeing it never made either of them happy despite the vast amounts they have amassed that makes me disagree with him but I suspect Ady and I would still sing together in the kitchen even if we couldn’t afford to have a radio and that will be what makes us happy.

Philosophising aside we had a great night, way, way, way too much alcohol was consumed. Laughter got louder, Ady and Jim have the same slide phone as each other so I was calling ‘DRAW!’ every so often and they were racing to slide their keypads out, we put a sticky plaster on a can of beer to represent Pudsey and found that hysterical and it was all just very silly but very fun. Jim finally left at about 230am and my alarm went off at 8am, a mere five hours after I’d finally got to bed.

Which brings me to Friday. Ady bought me and the kids all different Pudsey t shirts a couple of weeks ago (mine is red, Scarlett’s is black with rhinestones, Davies’ is long sleeved pretend t shirt over long top) so I was wearing mine and then got a text from F at work to say it was dress down day and we could wear jeans so I quickly got changed and headed off to work.

5 hours sleep and 1.5 bottles of wine does not make for a buzzed up, enthusiastic Baby Rhyme Time leader really but I’m assured I pulled it off ;).

The day felt pretty slow though. I had tea with a couple of colleagues who were talking jokingly about reusable sanitary towels (no idea how we got on to the subject) so I said I used them, and a mooncup and they were shocked and rather horrified, which I found a bit sad really. Quite ironic that I then had to ring Ady to ask him to bring me an emergency parcel of just that 😆 It was spotted being handed over and they asked what it was to which I tried to persuade them to see but they refused to be anything other than grossed out by it all. Ah well. F said her 17 year old daughter is still so squeamish about the whole thing she has to buy it all for her as she can’t even buy the stuff. I’m thinking Scarlett – and actually Davies, already having a very matter of fact attitude to all these things is surely a better way forward?

I planned my Christmas display (12 days of Christmas, planning to enlist D and S’s help on that one) and generally did my job really. Not sure I was in a fit state to recall detail worthy of blogging.

Davies is definitely coldy, hopefully that’s all it is and I feel on the rough side but I’m assuming hormones and hangover are responsible rather than a virus.

Back at home Dad was here as Mum had dashed off to accept a job offer. She has been doing some voluntary work for another charity shop and they have now offered her a proper job too. I’ve not spoken to her about it all yet but Ady said she was really buzzed up and is planning on taking that one and turning the other one down now. Massive confidence boost to her to be offered two jobs within two weeks though :).

I cooked dinner for the kids, walked Tarly round to Rainbows, chatted to the leader who said that it is the last Rainbows before Christmas next week, they have a Christmas presentation and it will also be Scarlett’s leaving session as she turns 7 the following week. Wow, end of Rainbows! They did practising for the Christmas presentation (singing mostly I think). I went back to pick her up and Ady arrived home at the same time as we did.

I cooked, we all watched Children in Need, I tried and failed to have a peaceful bath as all three of them kept coming to tell me stuff and try to talk to me (grr) and finally everyone went to bed. Which is precisely what I’m about to do too.

Super early start today which is always just horrid. Actually it probably isn’t early by Normal People Standards but anything before 8am, particularly involving alarm clocks is early for Davies, Scarlett and I.

I got up first, staggered around with no clothes on but contact lenses in and got them breakfast then went back upstairs to get dressed myself while calling timely reminders to get dressed back down to them. We left home at about 815am and drove to E’s. My car was booked in for 2pm, some 25 miles away from E’s so I made clear to Davies and Scarlett that when I arrived to collect them at lunchtime they would need to come straight away, not beg to finish a game / have ten more minutes / stay for tea and they both agreed.

I dropped them off, explained the need to collect them and dash off again when I was picking them up later and headed off back eastwards again. I was working at Shoreham (our nearest branch) library today; partially as respite from Nightmare Colleague and partially as career development in working at other branches and learning branch specific stuff in other places. I’ve worked there about 4 times before and the staff are very nice and friendly but it still feels all odd and to be honest I’d rather be at Lancing although being given the travelling time and being nearer to the kids than in my usual branch was helpful today. I also got to browse their slightly different to ours selection of books. Obviously everthing they have is available to me to reserve from Lancing but some of the kids books I don’t know even exist until I see them on a shelf. The staff there all said they’d seen me in the paper / on the news over Home Ed. I’m still shocked by just how many people do infact watch the local news / read the local papers!

I whizzed over to E’s to pick up Davies and Scarlett and was really pleased with my timings. It looked like we would have time to nip home for me to get changed, call by a cash point and still be at the mechanics for 2pm. Except…

Davies not only asked if he could stay longer /finish what he was doing, he also asked if they could just stay there while I went and took the car off. NO! Because that’s really rude to ask to stay at someone’s house past when you’ve been invited. Because it would make no sense at all for me to have driven to Brighton to pick them up, then to leave them there after all, drive all the way back to the other side of Worthing, then all the way back to Brighton again to pick them up etc. He also couldn’t find his coat. It turned out it had been hung up as he’d left it on the floor so I was possibly irrationally cross with him about this but my reserves had been drained by the fact that…

Scarlett was MISSING!

E sent M (8yo) who had been playing with Davies off to fetch Scarlett and T (who is about to turn 6) as they were off playing in the street. Davies and Scarlett don’t play in the street at home.This is partially because I’m not 100% happy about kids playing in the street, partially to do with road safety but mostly to do with the fact no other kids live anywhere near us and we have a perfectly good garden so there is nothing to play with in the street anyway. I think I’m fairly liberal in listening to what Davies and Scarlett are comfortable and ready for in terms of letting them out of my sight, sometimes leaving them home alone for a short period etc. I know E’s boys play out and Davies and Scarlett have previously played out in their street too which I’ve been fine with as they are in and out and visible from the front door.

Today though, S and T had gone missing. M couldn’t find them so E started to look worried and I joined her in walking up to the alleyway she had said they could go as far as. They weren’t at the alleyway, we walked all the way through it and they weren’t there either. That came out on a rather busier street and the other two roads flanking the block are pretty busy and Very Busy so none were desireable to have them wandering about on. E suggested going back to get a car to drive round the block so I said I’d do that and ran back to get my car. I drove round the block, now conscious I’d been there for 25 minutes and they’d not ‘just left’ when I got there so had not been seen for upwards of half an hour, they are two six year olds wandering the streets alone, in school hours and for Scarlett at least, in a totally unknown area. I was torn between my default ‘it’ll be fine’ stance and mentally recalling what clothes Scarlett was wearing, what would be a good recent picture to release to the press and an even half decent reason for what the hell I was doing letting someone I’ve not got a CRB check for look after my children :(.

I came across the two of them fairly quickly, wound down my window and in what I imagine was a fairly terrifying tone told them to get in the car. I ranted at them and drove back to E’s. I left E talking to them both in the car as I collected Davies from the house, thanked her for having them, apologised if I’d traumatised T and we left with me still shaking and asking Scarlett precisely what she would have done if a stranger had asked her if she wanted to see some puppies, if someone had grabbed her and bundled her in a car, if a police officer had walked or driven past and asked her name, what she was doing there, where her mummy was and why she wasn’t in school.

It took 3 hours before I stopped feeling sick and E rang me later to apologise again and assure me that is not what I should expect when I have entrusted the care of my children to her while I’m at work. I’m fairly sure this was kids pushing boundaries and taking advantage of freedoms but it did strike me as odd when Davies was telling me that the boys have egg timers to monitor their time on DS and Wii and why did I think that was when I let Davies and Scarlett use their DSs whenever they like that we often end up with very mismatched approaches to what is and isn’t okay for our kids. I’m guessing that all the various ‘what could have happened’s will be giving me nightmares / keeping me awake for the next few nights.

We whizzed over to the mechanics, only a few minutes late and he actually pulled up a couple of minutes after us. He asked me to leave the car for a couple of hours and that it would cost ‘not much, about £30’. His workshop is not quite in the middle of nowhere and has the garden centre Ady used to work at about 10 minutes walk away so we went there via a handily located cashpoint. We had a really good look round all the Christmas decorations, looked at the fish in the indoor pool and waterfall, looked at the guinea pigs, mice, rabbits and hamsters and the aquatic section and then went to the coffee shop. I bought us a hot chocolate each and the kids chose a chocolate cake to share, all of which came to nearly a tenner 😯 Very nice hot chocolates though and not the sort of treat we normally have. We sat and chatted while drinking them and I was struck by how lovely it is to be able to do that with bigger children as there were two mums with young babies at the next table and I overheard them looking forward to when they were big enough to sit up and drink hot chocolate!

We walked back to the workshop and the work was all done and complete and he only charged me £20 in the end – result! And meant the hot choclolates were sort of free ;).

Back home again to put the chickens away, reheat stew from last night for the kids tea, chivvy them into Badger clothes and go back out again to Badgers. Ady joined us there after about 15 minutes. We’d been officially asked to be Parent Helpers tonight and actually assist with the activity which was dreamcatcher making. They were BakerRoss kits and very good but a bit ‘this is the right way to do then’ or maybe that’s just Julie, the leader’s way. Whatever I got the impression it was like that famous quote HEors like about a grade school teacher getting pupils to draw a tree and then telling kids they’d got it wrong when they did their own versions of trees, all crazy coloured and shaped and the author realising what she’d actually meant was not ‘draw a tree’ but ‘draw MY tree’. I encouraged with colouring (and sympathised with the kids moaning about using coloured pencils on shiny paper as they didn’t really show up) and then helped with threading the middle to the outside. Some of the kids got this straight away, others didn’t get the hang of it at all and several wanted to do it their own way. One of the lads who has all sorts of ‘behavioural issues’ and conditions with letters was head down, focussed on doing something he clearly had a vision for. I asked if he wanted my help or to be left to get on with it and he insisted he was fine. He did something totally different to everyone else in the way he’d threaded it but it looked great and was really creative. One of the other girls told him it was ‘wrong’ and his was ‘bad’ which had him about to crumple so I stepped in and told him how great his was because it was His dreamcatcher, different to everyone else’s and really creative and individual. I then had a posse of children around me all keen to tell me how their’s was different to everyone else’s for X, Y and Z reasons which was just fab as they were all so proud of the differences and uniqueness. Over on the other table I heard Julie telling someone they had done it wrong so I suspect if I’m not around next week those I bigged up might be made to feel bad. I hope not. At times like that I think I am quite good with kids after all, I had them all wanting to talk to me and chat about stuff and feeling good about themselves but then they have to reintegrate to the rest of the group and abide by the rules. What I sometimes wonder about with Davies and Scarlett I guess but on a micro-level. Ah well, Ady tells me he was doing similar and told someone who was getting a hard time from another girl about her string being too big and not tight enough that it didn’t matter because obviously she had very big dreams and that was a good thing! :). The whole thing was a world away from the Book Club yesterday where a mish-mash of ‘junk’ was made available and kids came up with amazing creative works of art all under their own steam. Wonder if there’s a market for St Johns Anarchists?! 😆

Back home again and in the re-telling of the Scarlett went missing story to Ady I slumped and decided the whole day had really been far too much. I went off for a bath, cooked dinner, chatted to Davies about an idea for a blog for him for a series of stories he’s worked on (mostly told through pictures) about adventures of bits of litter at a landfill site. He’s loving the drip feed of stuff I learn at my course each week and integrating lots of it into new stories. I think it is all excellent on every level and want to help him push forward with it as I think it has loads of potential.

We’re supposed to be going to London for the day tomorrow. I have to confess that financially (train fare) and generally I don’t really feel that enthused so we may make a last minute decision not to go in the morning.

This morning we went off to Bognor for a new Home Ed Book Club. There are two groups being run together in someone’s house. A 6+ group in the kitchen and a 12+ group in the conservatory. I signed us up when it was first mentioned as I thought it would be a good way of meeting some new, same aged Home Educators locally, I already know the woman running the 6+ group, like her lots but never manage to meet up with her. She has a same age as Davies son and a same age as Scarlett daughter too so it’s potentially all nice and tidy :). I also thought it was worth seeing if something structured like this would appeal to Davies and Scarlett moving forward. I know we’re never going to go down the me teaching them stuff route and I don’t think structure generally is something any of us are hankering for or in need of but I was curious as to whether the time is right for activities like this. I know they both get elements of group learning, circle discussions and stuff at Badgers / Rainbows / Sea Scouts / Wildlife Explorers etc but I thought something Home Ed specific might be a nice occassional addition. This is monthly, coincidentally the same day each month that my library reading group is (3rd Tuesday of the month) and on the basis of today was a very promising addition to our calendar.

I used to work in Bognor managing the Clinton Cards there and Ady used to live there. Infact it’s where I first met Ady as I was going out with someone else who lived in the same house as him and his then girlfriend. Spookily that house is now owned by some of Ady’s friends so we’ve been there since with the kids which feels very odd. I don’t like Bognor though, I think it’s a crappy seaside town with a really seedy feel to it. I was telling Davies and Scarlett I used to do the drive we were doing this morning every day on my way to work and promised I’d take them into town afterwards to show them where I worked. However I only ever used to drive to and from work and so the rest of my knowledge of Bognor is rubbish and I don’t know where anything is. I’d looked at a googlemap and written down some directions but got fairly lost and only fluked seeing a road which happened to lead from where we should have been to where we’d ended up it was so long. We were then able to find our way.

The group was for 2 hours and went really well. There was so talk about judging books by their cover, illustrations, fonts and how they told stories, some examples of books with interesting illustrations and then a load of different fonts were shown and the children decided what sort of stories they might be used for. There was some talk of genres and the children all talked about books they liked.

Then they all wrote their name in a font they thought reflected them and wrote some words to describe themselves. Scarlett was pretty resistant to the very idea of coming up with words to describe herself but Davies threw himself into it and came up with loads. He spelt them out letter by letter and I agreed he was right; loud, fun, adventurous, creative, imaginative, clever, artist,animator. Scarlett did concede to doing her name and made each letter into an animal as she thought that was what she was all about. She did the E in a zebra print, the L in leopard print and made the R have a horn like a rhino before realising L was for leopard and R was for rhino. She then regretted the E being zebra but I told her that was the second letter of zebra and then she wanted to make all the rest animals beginning with that letter. She had Snake, Camel, Ants, Rhino, Leopard, zEbra, Tiger, Tortoise and either coloured them accordingly or added ears, humps, forked tongues etc to the letters. It was really good and the first time she’s every shown interest in letters and sounds really.

All the kids then got given a folder to keep all their Book Club stuff in and Katy had a big stash of collage-y bits to stick on them to decorate them. Scarlett very comprehensively decorated hers with stuff, Davies was more measured and wrote ‘My Folder’ on it turning a couple of the letters into pencils writing the rest. He then decided to do some drawing and did a fab picture of Littlenose and Two Eyes from the book we are reading for next time (that we’ve already read), which was good enough to have several of the other parents commenting on it :). He also did some stuff with shadows and shading which was very good effects.

The group finished and both Davies and Scarlett were really enthusiastic about it and keen to do it monthly so it was well worth it :).

We then parked in the town for an hour, went and saw Clinton Cards, I bought a new pair of jeans as I seem to only have 2 pairs that fit me but don’t have holes and rips in them. I’m in the process of patching the ones of those in least tatty condition with the ones in worst condition but as I wear jeans 6 days out of 7 (even to work on a Saturday) and only ever buy very cheap ones when I tried on a pair in a cheap shop and they fitted really well I bought them.

On the way home we called in to see Chris and Julie’s mechanic to see what his take on my non-opening bonnet was. He managed to open it straight away! He thinks it needs a new handle though so I’m taking it over to him tomorrow afternoon to have that done.

We called into the library to collect a few items I’d had emails to say were in as I’m working in a different library tomorrow. Back home for all of about 20 minutes and the kids disappeared straight upstairs to Davies’ room to listen to the Star Wars OST which was one of the things we collected from the library.

Then back out again to swimming. Both the kids’ lessons went fine, they both played with friends while the other had a lesson – D made a friend and S played with her regular chum. We managed to be slightly late so I only had 50 minutes swimming. I was in a reflective mood rather than an agressive one so only managed 46 lengths but found that reassuring as I was 10 minutes down and not putting in massive efforts. I spent most of the time thinking about a friend who had just shared some very sad news :(.

We got back to the car to find Ady had been ringing me (I leave my phone in the car) to say he wouldn’t make it home in time for me to leave for my course. So we rang my Dad and arranged to drop Davies and Scarlett off there for Ady to collect them on his way through. Davies and I talked about Sea Scouts as his enthusiasm has been waning. I’ve not been able to ascertain whether it is genuine lack of interest, worry over the whole Home Ed teasing thing, or just being wiped out after an hours swimming and not being up for turning out again at what is usually pretty close to bedtime in the cold and dark evenings. I suggested he went today, stopped at a halfway point and thought about whether he was glad he’d made the effort to go or not. If he felt he was pleased he’d rallied and was enjoying it then he should remember that next week when he is feeling tired and not up for it. If he still felt like it wasn’t where he wanted to be then he should remember that and decide not to go and maybe think about trying again next year.

I dropped them off at my parents, nipped home to put the chickens away and collect my course notes and then headed off to my course. I had to double back to collect a teddy as we were doing real nappies this week and had been asked to bring one to practise nappies on. In the end it was only me and one other woman who remembered to bring teddies anyway. The course was good; we talked about Smart Shopping which we’d started to cover last week but run out of time on, learnt about what the supermarkets are doing on waste prevention and looked at various statistics and initiatives, then talked about nappies, handed round samples of disposables and resuables, learnt about more stats relating to both and the various initiatives locally for real nappies. Next week is the last session.

Back home I presented Scarlett with her teddy now all nappied up and caught up with Davies on the whole Sea Scout thing. Ady had (finally!) gone and chatted to the leaders and Davies is being invested next week. They were keen to check he was happy and to assure him that is he was feeling unhappy with anything he could tell them. Ady said the Home Ed thing didn’t come up but I’m guessing it has been noted anyway. Davies said he talked to the boys and said ‘look I really don’t go to school but let’s all stop talking about that anyway and just get on with being friends’. He seems pretty happy with the whole thing now so we’ll go ahead with investing him and take it from there. After next Tuesday I’ll be able to take him anyway and can do my customary wading in heavy handedly if necessary ;).

Very late dinner (stew I put on this morning before we left the house) and another early start and long day ahead tomorrow. Oh and Thursday. And actually on Friday too…

Shockingly despite three days at home last week we ended up at home again today. I had planned to go out but the weather looked grim again (in the end it cleared up but it certainly didn’t look promising at 10am when we were chatting about what to do today), the children were both up for staying home and as we have otherwise got a fairly full week it seemed like a sensible plan.

A local freecycler had posted about a bag of girls clothes and I’d got in first so I nipped round there to collect them this morning. Davies and Scarlett stayed home. I was only gone 15 minutes and it is nice to have that sort of small dose freedom all round I think. I had to drive past the sea to get there and it was very high – high tide anyway and a very grey and foamy looking sea. If it hadn’t been high tide right then I might have suggested we go back to the beach later but I knew the tide would be out again by then and it’s not nearly so dramatic.

A mini fashion show ensued when I got home with the bag of clothes as Scarlett fell on them. In the end she only accepted about 1/3 of the black sack-full as okay. Pretty much everthing fitted her as she is a very standard age 7-8 years size in most places but she is *very* picky. She doesn’t much like labels and isn’t keen on tight waistbands. She won’t wear skirts, *hates* those tops with pretend vest tops and off the shoulder looks (which is all good by me, I’m not keen either on a Little Girl), doesn’t like shorts (even in the summer, I know she wouldn’t be wearing them in November anyway) and flatly refuses to wear pretty pastel shades, frills, flounces or anything with a slogan she doens’t like – today she liked a top but rejected it because it said ‘Girls Academy. No Boys Allowed’ which she said was just stupid and didn’t want to wear – feminist she might be but she’s all about the equality! ;).

This rather limits her to jeans and trousers with soft waistbands and tops in bright bold colours with no slogan or one she deems acceptable. Despite all this she also claims to have ‘a style’ and was deciding things were ‘not my style’ or ‘are my style’. It would appear her style is rather tatty jeans, lots of black tops and materials that are soft and tactile. She did accept about 3 pairs of trousers, a couple of tops and a fleece though. The rest all the stuff all put me in mind of pretty much every other little 6/7 year old girl I know – Maisie, Rebecca, loads of those coming to camp but Rebecca sprang to mind first so I send Lucy a text asking if she’d like to cast her eye over the rest of it to see if anything was suitable. We arranged for them to pop round later this afternoon which seemed like a good compromise on not doing anything today.

Davies got out the 3D drawing kit and did several 3d pictures and checked them out with the glasses. His drawings were great – one was a lizard which was fab, but his appreciation of which bits should stick out 3D wise was a bit off and he had middle bits of things coming out and looking wrong. We talked about perspective and which bits of your face would be the ones to stick out most, looked at profiles and he started to grasp the idea of creating natural looking pictures rather than flights of fancy (which are also fine and great of course). Scarlett got out a window sticker kit and spent ages doing outlines of things to be filled in later, and mixing colours and trying different effects. She is really into her craft kits at the moment – will definitely be getting her more of that sort of thing for birthday / Christmas, but making stuff rather than beads and bracelets.

I did online stuff and then made some flapjacks – baking therapy is top. You feel productive, it smells gorgeous, you have real life evidence of your efforts and you get to eat stuff too! 🙂 I also did several loads of washing including the accepted freecycle clothes which came from a smokers household.

We had lunch and caught a clip on TV – I think it was Nick Jr with some little kids singing nursery rhymes and shaking instruments while a fairly patronising adult says things like ‘well done, you sang that beautifully. Shall we sing that one again?’ Davies asked me if that’s what I did at work and I agreed it was just like that. Scarlett asked if I said the whole ‘well done, let’s do it again’ stuff too and I agreed I did then asked them if they thought that sounded like something I would do. They both said it didn’t and I confessed I don’t much feel like me when I do that bit 😆 We talked about whether I liked that bit of my job and I said I didn’t hate it but I didn’t love it either. Scarlett asked which bits I did love of my job and Davies said ‘oh that’s easy, it will be meeting new people and helping them find the right book!’. He’s either reading my blog, listening to my conversations or knows me very well. I suspect it’s the latter!

Lucy and Rebecca arrived and stayed for a couple of hours. Whether it was the altered dynamic of no Richard, or whether we were just lucky the three children played really well together (Davies had put some effort into thinking of games and ideas that would go down well, flushed with the success of Friday when Ali and Freya came, which must have also helped) and Lucy and I got to chat and chat and chat, which was just lovely :).

It did mean I was rubbish at getting the kids tea ready on time so they were rushing to finish it, get changed and get out to gymnastics and we were a few minutes late. They both said they’d had a great time tonight and progressed with their cartwheels.

I popped to Asda – bread rolls for 25p and loaf of nice seeded brown bread for 25p, then Co Op, fair trade oranges for 10p per net bag, British apples for 10p per bag, big lump of braising steak for £1. Planning on beef stew for me and kids tomorrow and some carrot (from the 25p bags last week glut) and orange cakes which I might freeze ready to bring to camp.

Ady was already home when I got back so I put the shopping away and we caught up on each others days before heading out to collect the kids from Gymnastics. I read a chapter of Littlenose – we’re on the second book now. If you’ve not come across these and have 5-9 year olds they are well worth a look IMO, Davies and Scarlett are enjoying the gentle humour, the simple illustrations and the educational element of neanderthal man.

Ady and I looked silly eating our dinner while watching Derren Brown in 3D wearing our glasses 😆

I slept pretty badly thanks to reading various Home Ed lists last night with varying degrees of horror and then going off to bed thinking about it all. The wind and rain were still howling around the house, which felt both appropriate and annoying…

Which led to a late rising this morning, for me at least. Ady and Scarlett were out in the garden tidying up the mess from the weather, Davies was doing stuff with Paint (as in the Word pro not the messy liquidy stuff ;)). I went out in the garden too to try and gather some twigs and sticks for the first layer of my new super composter but didn’t get very far – we seem to have a lack of sticks in our garden. I’ve a plan to go stick collecting, along with pine cone collecting (currently eco-warrior battle is getting Ady off chemical firelighters and pine cones, small bundles of twigs, tightly rolled newspaper and old lemon rinds are said to be just the thing) some time this week so it will have to wait for then. I put it all together yesterday, remembering just in time that making something that big in the playroom which then needed getting through the hall and kitchen and back door was a bad idea so moving it outside to construct, but now it needs the correct starting layers of material.

I also slipped over in the garden much to Ady’s amuseument 😆

After some discussion with both children we decided to go to the Christmas Market at the Weald and Downland Museum. We joined for the season this summer with the intention of getting along to most of their events and so far we’d only managed the Autumn Show so I was keen to get to this one. Am also intending to do the Boxing Day one. Ady was less keen and the children both wanted to go to the beach in the hopes of seeing some extreme weather but they were easily swayed and so we headed off there.

It’s always slightly further than I think it is and there were big queues to get into the carpark – more due to poor direction than actual parking issues it turned out and the whole place was a bit of a quagmire thanks to very heavy rainfall almost incessantly every day this week. We should have been wearing wellies! I announced a prize to the least muddiest person upon our return to the car, fully expecting to be the one to fall over and disqualify myself. The whole place was very squelchy – if Park Resorts could have seen it they’d have been there, setting up a Sparkies show and turning it into a camping field ;).

The Weald and Downland museum is very charming even when no events are happening – it comprises original and recreation buildings from various ages and has a watermill, a town square style contruction, various houses and cottages from very basic to fairly luxurious, cottage gardens, a maypole, various livestock and heavy horses, open fires and authentic furniture in every building and is just a nice place to spend time. Except when it’s very muddy indeed, it’s packed with hundreds and hundreds of people and all the charming tiny little buildings are host to stalls selling Christmassy stuff.

There were some treasures to be found – Sombrerolatin seem to have a stall at every one of their events and their stuff is fab, there was another stall selling musical instruments including spring drums, thumb pianos and ocarinas which were all fab. If the children hadn’t been so taken with them I may have been able to slip back and buy them one each for Christmas but they kept on about them so much it was impossible. Will have to google for them and find another place to buy though. There was also a stall selling felted items including flowers, candles, tree baubles and holly wreaths all of which were fab. Some inspiration there to make some stuff definitely.

There was also a fair bit of dross there too – no plastic tat but the middle class equivalent of nasty, mass produced wooden toys pretending to be good quality and ethical ;). We’ve been to Christmas Markets in Bruge and in Manchester (which has magical, huge Christmas markets with ice rinks and stuff and is fab) and been utterly taken to Christmas with the sights, smells and sounds, drank alcohol laced hot chocolate, eaten roasted chestnuts and gingerbread and generally felt very festive. This didn’t quite pull that off but was very well attended nonetheless.

Ady tried a quandry in the Tudor kitchen which is a bird,in a bird, in a bird in a bird. We’ve seen it done on Hugh or similar but never tried it. He said it was very nice and is keen to do his own now. We can’t get one cooked bird on the table before 1030pm, four in one dinner is likely to end up as breakfast ;).

We didn’t actually buy anything but on the way out to celebrate no one getting muddy and everyone winning the cleanest Goddard left standing competition we had a ride on the horse and cart. Davies did some very speedy mental maths – 50p for children, £1 for adults, sothat’s £3 then. And then proceeded to work out what a quarter of a pound was too quite quickly. We talked about the crazy horse and cart ride last winter in Bruge as we rode rather sedately round a field in the car drawn by two heavy horses.

Then we headed back homewards. As promised we stopped on the way and had a half an hour or so on the beach. The tide was way, way out and the weather had calmed right down but there was evidence of the storms in the level of stuff washed up. We pranced about between the rock pools, all getting our feet wet until it got too cold.

and no, I’ve not sorted out getting my horizon straight yet! 😉

Back home for baths for the kids to warm up / wash up. I got a roast dinner on but thanks to it being a HUGE joint of pork my timing of getting it on the table for 7pm and Doctor Who was off and it was more like 745pm in the end. Very nice dinner though :).

I didn’t see all of Doctor Who as I was in and out but Davies tells me it was good, Scarlett was too scared to watch most of it but did keep teasing Davies over his glass of water at dinner so clearly got the gist of it while she did some more playing with Paint on my laptop.

We watched X Factor while eating dinner and I tried to explain by translation why I was laughing so much at some very sweary texts I was getting from a friend. Think all of the humour got lost in translation 😆

Work for me this morning. I did various things, can’t be bothered to type them all out but it was a good morning:).

Back at home Ady and the children had tidied up the downstairs bathroom and then the kids had got art and craft stuff out and were applying glue and glitter to paper when I arrived home.

I’d brought a couple of ‘how to draw’ books home although they were both cartoon ones and Scarlett wants real life ones rather than cartoons. The kids disappeared upstairs to listen to Michael Jackson music and draw, Ady researched lined curtains online and I read a book and gave occassional pearls of ecofriendly wisdom to Ady as I read them 😆

We then messed about with Paint for a bit thanks to a chaper in one of the books about computer drawing. That’s pretty hard but with fairly good results. Guess we’d need one of those tablet things to make it work how we want it to though.

Then we headed off for Chris and Julie’s for fireworks postponed from last weekend. We stopped at the farmfeed store on the way for chicken food and then had a lovely few hours with the Other Goddards including some fireworks in the garden.

Home via McDs for the kids and my parents for me to collect my car and Sainsburys for me to get some bits. Ady and the kids arrived home to discover wind had wreaked havoc on the garden and chickens area so Ady put that all straight and the kids got into pjs. I read a chapter of the next Littlenose book and then they went off to bed.

Thanks to a Serious Talk about bedtimes they both actually listened and went to sleep rather than meandering about the house for two hours which may go some way towards helping the purple shadows under Davies’ eyes :rolls:

A soggy start to the morning. Last nights rain had continued all through the night and there were puddles and flood all around the place. I nearly slipped over and got soaked just going to let the chickens out. We were car-less and utterly without motivation to go anywhere in such dire weather so we settled in for another morning at home.

Davies asked for the hama beads out and I ironed the various things which had been waiting precariously balanced on boards for ages. He then built a Bamzookis board and several Zooks out of hama which I also ironed for him and we talked about sturdy and non-sturdy bead formation patterns. He also said he didn’t like the various shaped boards we have (elephant, teddy etc) as he prefers to make up his own and assumed everyone else would too. I explained that just as many people are happier with a pattern to follow and enjoy that as much or more than making up their own and we talked about colouring in, dot to dot etc. I still don’t think he quite got his head round not wanting to do your own thing really though 😆

Scarlett played with the toy animals and we had an interesting conversation about whether she was a ‘Moxie girl’ after we saw an advert for the toys. She said she wasn’t. I asked if she was a Barbie Girl, a Baby Annabel girl? and got equally disparaging replies. I asked what sort of girl she was then and she replied ‘an Animal Girl’. Which I think sums her up pretty well really, in every respect ;).

We watched Evacuation and it was the last day of the 2 week stint for the kids. I started crying when they all listened to Churchill’s ‘war is over’ speech on the radio and pretty much trickle-cried all the way through with peaks at the points of the children being sad about leaving, being reunited with their parents and writing goodbye letters to the teacher and farmers. I’m such a sap!

Then I had a very welcome phonecall from Ali asking if we’d like them to come and join us in being trapped at home without a car in the rain. The answer was a resounding yes and a prospect we looked forward to for the rest of the day :).

Davies and Scarlett cleared up the hama and animals and went up to Davies’ bedroom to prepare something that would keep all three of the children occupied and happy as last time they visited nothing seemed to go well and they ended up leaving way earlier than planned. Davies had the amazing plan of making their own Viva Pinata gardens and he and Scarlett set about putting scrap paper down to cover the carpet, gathering paper, cardboard, materials, junk, glue, pens etc to do it with and generally preparing his bedroom as a workshop.

We had lunch and watched TV together including a very good programme none of us had seen before called Howard’s Big Question which was excellent. Then Ali and Freya arrived.

The children instantly disppeared upstairs, re-emerged for food a couple of hours later and then disappeared again for a couple more hours. This freed Ali and I up to drink tea, then wine, chatter to our hearts content and generally have a lovely time :). We took Scarlett round to Rainbows and I collected her again before Ady took Ali and Freya home about 730pm. A very successful visit :).

Davies and Scarlett tidied Davies’ bedroom up to a Very High Standard Indeed and then I read some stories. Scarlett and I fell out and made it all back up again with some Serious Chats about things like unconditional love and me getting cross not meaning anything other than me losing my patience (although I actually hadn’t on this occassion). Ady returned and cooked a very nice dinner and the children finally went to bed.

I often feel really uninspired blogging on the days I work all day each week. Not because I don’t enjoy my job, I do but it feels like a tiny thing I compared to the rest of my week. I hesitate to use the word ‘respite’ because that indicates I need some sort of rest from my Home Ed lifestyle and I really don’t but I really do feel like I’m becomming a whole other person when I pin my library badge on. I get the same feeling at my Waste Prevention Advisor course. I guess it’s a feeling of ‘walking alone’. I’ve never lived alone, been half of a couple for nearly half my life and a mother for two thirds of that time. So it’s rare to go somewhere without an Ady, a Davies or a Scarlett and not be anybodies girlfriend, wife or mother. And there wasn’t much of a gap inbetween that starting and me still being someone’s daughter or sister really. I think I’m a fairly strong character, not really defined by the relationships to those around me but the physical proximity of some or all of them to me most of the time does probably colour my actions fairly heavily.

At school and later on at work I have always felt more me, judged on my own credentials and the face I choose to present. I like the camaraderie of a workplace, the in-jokes, the finding out how to work well as a team. I quite like the order of a certain workload to be complete in a certain timeframe, I like helping people (I’ve always worked in service providing roles so satisfying customers has always been a key part of all my jobs) and I enjoy meeting and interacting with different people. My Home Ed life incarnation has elements of that but remains something of a ‘work in progress’. It definitely feeds my heart and soul but there were also gaps in meeting my other needs which these various outside things I have started to pick up over the last couple of years have met for me. Davies and Scarlett clearly get the same needs met at their Badgers, Rainbows etc groups and Ady gets them from his job. It’s utterly right that we don’t rely on each other to provide everything to everyone.

Ooh, don’t really know where that all came from, talk about stream of consciousness! 😆

So, I was saying, I don’t have much to blog about on my working days because it’s kind of mundane in the details and I have no real idea what the kids are up to in my absence. I can tell you what they’ve been playing with or eaten as it’s usually still evident or they tell me but I don’t know what conversations they’ve had, what questions they asked, what crazy tangent based on something small and inconsequential might have led to today’s new thing they learnt or became interested in. Which is often what makes up the main content of my blogposts.

So I’ll do a more detailed account of my day at work instead.

Anyway. I went off to work – Ady and the kids dropped me off as my car is at the garage with various mechanics trying to work out how to open the bonnet. I did some tidying with the others before we opened the library and topics of conversation included old people having sex and at what age they stop – if at all, times any of us have been on telly and a challenge of tidying a large print paperback spinner from the bottom up so needing to use reverse alphabetical order.

My first hour was on the Enquiry Desk. I spent some time trying to find books on Amazon and on the library catalogue pertaining to Maharajas as we’re going to the V&A museum next week to see the exhibition and wanted to read something to the kids before we meant to give it some context and link in. I failed to find much at all and got really cross when all the books I did find were listed on the library catalogue but only available through the Schools Library Service. More on that later.

I ordered a few books in for various borrowers and did some paperwork chasing up reservations that were long outstanding.

I had teabreak with Nightmare Colleague. We chatted about a workshop she’s doing at a local wool shop she lives nearby that runs an afterschool craft club Monday to Friday for kids. They do knitting, sewing, fabric collages etc – it sounds fab! She does it once a week but was saying she struggles with the children not behaving. Can’t decide if that is her or unruly kids 😆 I was dreading the fact I was rota’d to be on lunch with her particularly as I didn’t have my car to go and retire to but Y changed the rota when she realised I was on break and lunch with her – bless her :).

Next I had an hour of doing my own work – I sent a couple of work related emails – one about setting up a coffee morning event with Reading Groups run from Lancing library, one about the Late Night Christmas Shopping event craft activties and one confirming I am happy to work at Shoreham Library next week. I sent out some letters about overdue items and receipted a book we’re borrowing for one of our lenders from the British Library.

Next I was on the counter so dealt with the delivery – books and things coming back to us from other libraries and books and things coming to us for our borrowers from other libraries. Some to go back on shelves, some to be put aside for phoning people to tell them it had arrived. Also issuing and discharging books for anyone coming to the counter.

Then I had lunch 😉

I was back on the counter after lunch. All of the delivery had been dealt with so it was packing up stuff ready to be collected in the morning instead – white slips on things just going back to libraries, pink slips on ones that are for reservations. We have boxes for Shoreham and Worthing – our closest libraries and ones we get stuff brought back to us from most frequently, a third box for stuff going to head office to be sorted before being put in boxes to be sent back and finally a box left open for items going to libraries which are after us on the van’s route each morning so the driver just drops those things off along his way.

I chatted to the librarian who was on the desk about the Schools Library Service and how annoying it is that we can’t access it as Home Educators as I know other authorities do allow HEors to use their service and also that as a ‘normal’ borrower it is very annoying that I can see multiple copies of some books on the system for Schools use but no copies on the catalogue for other borrowers. I could put in requests for copies to be bought for the public service but of course in this instance they wouldn’t be in time for next week’s V&A visit anyway. And there are budget cuts in spending on new books anyway so no guarantee they’d buy them at all. She was equally unimpressed and asked why I didn’t make a big fuss about the inequality side of HE kids being denied access to resources. She also was shocked that we don’t get any funding when we save the council so much money in not taking up school places. I agreed but explained why I wasn’t willing to make a fuss and risk outing myself but if we do end up registered I will certainly be making all of those noises and demands. I also told her my interesting statistic that there are about 20,000 state schools in the UK and at least that many HE families so there are more homes where children are being educated than institutions! She emailed the Schools Library Service (SLS) manager to ask whether we could access the service and the woman rang her to say no. She cited other authorities and the woman insisted they would have to pay. Apparently the SLS is funded out of the Schools budget (LA / Education) which is why schools have free access to it. Independant schools can access it at a cost so if I wanted to access it on the same basis that they do that could be looked at. It would be £30 per 14 items for one term and I didn’t ask because I wouldn’t use it but I’m guessing there would be hoops to jump through in proving our status and the risk of our information not being kept confidential too.

Tea break and then an hours Shelving. I spent more time chatting than shelving really but did have a burst of efficiency in the last 10 minutes of the hour and cleared everything anyway.

Finally I had half an hour on the counter at the very end of the day.

I was expecting Dad to pick me up from work in my car but he didn’t arrive. I rang round my parents house and my house and finally reached my Dad. Clearly there was some crossed wires as he’d rung the mechanic at 330pm to discover the bonnet still hadn’t been opened but hadn’t thought to let me know or come and pick me up in his van instead. I was there with two heavy bags of books and it was dark and raining so I really didn’t fancy the 15 minute walk home and Dad wasn’t offering 🙁 I rang Mum back and she did offer to come and pick me up but it would mean the kids sitting in the back of her car with no car seats (and also coming out in the rain) and she wouldn’t be prepared to leave them home while she came for me. So I rang Ady who luckily was only 20 minutes away on his way home so I went back in the library again and waited for Ady to come and get me instead.

Had a chat and cup of tea with Mum, put the chickens away in the pouring rain, made the kids some tea (this created all sorts of fussing – one wanted rice, the other wanted pasta, it was getting late and I was fed up. They agreed to toss a coin and then the loser decided if they couldn’t have what they wanted they’d have nothing at all! Finally got them sorted and fed.)

Ady cooked an epic dinner of pheasant and potatoes which took way longer than he expected so we didn’t end up eating til about 1030pm. I read the kids the last few chapters of Littlenose which they have enjoyed enough for me to order the rest of the series and then . They took forever to go to sleep which was annoying.

We watched River Cottage that we’d taped from earlier but ended abruptly when Scarlett had sat on the remote control and turned onto some other channel about 10 minutes from the end :rolls:

And that was Thursday.

I slept in this morning so everything was much later than it should have been really. We had no plans for the day until Badgers this evening and I offered a few choices but both Davies and Scarlett were happy for another day at home really.

We watched Evacuation together which we’re all really enjoying and then a documentary about Venus (Earth’s evil twin) which was interesting, then we all lapsed into quiet beating the computer games – me on my laptop and the kids on their DSs – Scarlett was playing Boys Toys or something similarly titled which looked to be a load of minigames including things like spot the difference and rubbing off part of a picture then a multi-choice about what you thought it was. She is still adamant she is never going to learn to read but she was doing a fairly credible job of identifying the picture then deciding which of the 3 words started with the correct letter ;). Davies was playing Transformers. He got bored quickest and played Xbox for a short while instead, leaving the sound down because ‘then I get to practise reading at the same time!’ as it has subtitles for any dialogue on the Star Wars game he was playing.

I made some cheese scones for lunch as we only had fairly stale white sliced bread and then made some snickerdoodles too as I had a cinnamon craving :). They all went down very well :).

The rain that had been colouring the sky a stunning dark grey but not actually arriving still hadn’t put in an appearance so I decided to drive over to my parents and fill my car radiator up. No one was home but I’d just filled a jug with water and gone to open the bonnet to discover the catch didn’t seem to be working when Dad pulled up. We both faffed around with the catch and couldn’t get it open so Dad jumped in and we drove up the road to a mechanic he knows. He had a quick look and also couldn’t open it so said if I took it back tomorrow he’d have a look at it for me then. Dad and I worked out a speedy getting my car back to his house tonight so he could take it up there in the morning and then collect it and come and pick me up from work in it tomorrow plan and we drove home again. Fingers crossed it is a niggly and easily fixed thing rather than something needing parts – it’s already cost me the £60 insurance excess to have the windscreen fixed and it has it’s MOT due next month so I am fretting about car costs atm.

We’d taken some snickerdoodles over so we went in for a cup of tea and chat which was nice. Dad showed me the brochure for the holiday he is booking for February for him and Mum (4 weeks in NZ) and bemoaned not knowing what best to do with his money at the moment as banks are not paying much in the way of interest. He was debating buying another property (he clearly has even more capital than I thought) so I suggested ‘investing’ in our house and sorting our kitchen out! No idea if he will and I suspect it will annoy my Mum who still regularly tries to plead poverty to Ady.

Back home again and I stuck some tea in the oven for the kids then went out and totally de-crapped my car of all the broken cd boxes, scratched cds, sticks and stones and sweet wrappers, parking tickets (pay and display ones, not fines) and general rubbish straight into the wheelie bin. I then parked it on the drive and brought the hoover out and hoovered it all too. Clearly this won’t make it cost less to have various things fixed but made me feel better about the prospect of spending money on it! I also found Davies’ phone which has been missing since the Sustainability camping trip and we’d started to give up hope on finding :). Davies then instantly remembered having put it in the door where I found it :rolls:

Off to Badgers where our usual mates were heading off for a walk but Ady was about 15 minutes away so I said I’d wait for him instead and they said they’d be back to join us soon. I sat in the coffee lounge and had a cup of tea and then Ady rang to say he was there. I’ve just rememered I left my tea cup lying around :oops:. I walked to Waitrose to meet Ady and we walked back to collect his car and then drove to where I thought we were supposed to be giving blood to see what the parking situation there was like and whether we’d be better going in one car or two. We totally failed to find it at all (church hall) and had to get back to collect the children. We were asked if we could stay next week (booking us in advance!) and all the Badgers who did the parade were given some chocolate buttons for doing so well. 🙂

We had another go at finding the church hall – Scarlett and I in my car, Davies and Ady in Ady’s, failed and gave up, only to drive past it as we turned round. It was only 15 minutes before the session finished though and there was no parking so it was another failed attempt to do something today.

We drove to my parents where I left my car ready for Dad to take to the workshop in the morning and came home. In the car Davies and Scarlett played ‘name that tune’ with the music on my phone. Davies is very good at it :).

I read the first couple of chapters of which took us to 9pm. I had a bath and cooked dinner and Ady and I watched Come Dine With Me while eating. Davies sent me several text messsages from his bedroom which is rather a scary sign of the times.

An at home day again today. Days at home are always the ones that have me fretting about my laissez-faire attitude towards the kids Home Ed. Is it neglectful? Would it stand up to scrutiny? We tend to have a pattern of getting on with our own things when we’re at home, which in the case of today meant I spent some time on the laptop, some time reading and some time baking. Davies and Scarlett both spent some time on their DSs, both spent some time snuggled up next to me, both spent some time watching stuff on TV (Evacuees, Worlds most dangerous animals, some cartoons) and some time playing together with the geomags. Oh and Davies played with his Ben 10 figures for a bit too. Aside from the odd ‘what does this say?’ or ‘I didn’t know that about crocodiles, did you Mummy?’ interjection I was called upon very little which either seems a bit too good to be true, or at the very least worthy of suspicion that I’m not ‘doing my job properly’ really.

I admitted seasonal defeat at both getting laundry dried outside and needing to put the heating on, which sort of ties in nicely together really as it meant I could do several loads of washing and get it dried on the radiators. I had planned to top up the water and antifreeze in my car, along with checking the oil and the washer bottle and maybe even de-craping the interior a bit but it needs to be parked on a flat bit of road and as both our road and our drive are sloping this means taking it somewhere else. I am also not keen on the idea of lifting the bonnet outside our own house for risk of neighbours, and yes I’m thinking David Thank-you in particular swarming over to offer a hand. I’d planned to take it to my parents after lunch, call in for a cup of tea and do it there but the relentless rain all day long prevented me from following through with that idea. Maybe tomorrow.

I made a couple of trays of brownies – one with and one without nuts and we had lunch.

A peaceful early afternoon and then off to swimming. I was feeling quite slothful and rather full of brownies and was very tempted not to swim but berated myself for such laziness and took what I thought was the right money in change with me. I discovered when I went to pay that I was 10 pence out and had to dash back to my car and collect 10p worth of rather green coppers to make up the money. Hurrah for not having tidied my car out I suppose!

A brother and sister who are also Home Educated and we know loosely from groups over the years go swimming on a Tuesday afternoon – they are older than Davies and Scarlett – I think the sister is about 12 or 13 and the brother is maybe 10 but they are big children and the lad particularly plays rough which when he towers over Davies by half as much height and size again slightly bothers me. It always seems very amicable and Davies and Scarlett are always pleased to see them but I feel conscious of keeping an eye on them all incase general horseplay gets out of control. As a result I was distracted and only managed 46 lengths today. I did change my stride to front crawl, backstroke, front crawl, backstroke, breast stoke, back stroke, repeat though as front crawl is definitely quicker and more energetic than breast stroke. I also kept a sharper eye on the time – I did the first 10 lengths in 10 minutes but by 15 minutes I had dropped to 14 lengths. At 20 minutes I was down to 16 lengths and at 30 minutes I was just about at 26 lengths. I was hoping to manage 52 lengths today so was about on track at half time but of course my second half of the hour tends to be slower as I get worn out.

Back home again I did the kids some tea and got changed before Ady arrived home and I went off to my course. Week seven of nine tonight so only two more to go. Today was all about Smart Shopping and included a talk from a woman from Love Food Hate Waste. She gave us loads of freebies including fridge thermometer, pasta and rice measures, bag clips, magnetic shopping list, foodsaver tub and recipe books. She gave a really interesting talk and infact we ran out of time so some of the other stuff about shopping we were due to cover is being carried over to next week.

I got home to find Davies hadn’t gone to Sea Scouts. He’d already said he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go and he wished it wasn’t the same day as swimming as he is worn out by swimming for an hour and always wants an early night. Didn’t stop him reappearing back downstairs at 1045pm with a robot spaceship transformer thing he’d made from a bit of McDonalds Happy Meal toy, some cardboard and a load of sellotape though :rolls: I can’t decide if he has lost interest, it’s because of the whole refusing to believe he’s HE’d or genuine tiredness really. I do wish it was me taking him each week as I suspect Ady hasn’t been as good as I would have been in easing him in and maybe having a chat with some of the boys who are giving him a hard time or speaking to the leader. We’ll see…

Other than that I am getting really frustrated with an online game I am desperate to get to level six on so will maybe just have one or more tries at that before I go to bed…

A welcome break in the rain yesterday although the pay off for sunshine and clear skies was bitter cold. Winter is really in the air. It always seems sudden in November when October is still so often T shirt weather.

Yesterday was Pulborough Brooks Home Ed walk and we were hoping to catch up with Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna along with a few others but when we arrived there was noone else around. The children were greeted by name by one of the very enthusiastic volunteers who sometimes helps out with Wildlife Explorers. They declined spotter sheets and played in the ‘childrens corner’ while I went to use the toilet. When I came back they were looking at a really nice wildlife rug which has numbers and words all round the border 1-10 of different things eg 1 frog, 2 flowers, 3 ladybirds etc. You then have to spot those number of things on the rug. Davies was shocking me by reading everything on it and when they were struggling keeping track of 8 butterflies he came up with the idea of taking 8 jigsaw puzzle pieces off the counter and placing them on the ones they’d counter already. We debated borrowing the ‘explorer packs’ which they lend out for a £10 deposit and included rucksack with binoculars, birdspotting book and nature sheets, pens and paper, magnifying glass and so on. They decided against it but I suspect we will next time as we regretted not having binoculars several times as we walked round.

No one else arrived or was in the playpark so we decided to head off on our own and walked the opposite way round to usual so we would meet up with anyone who had already set off. We did come across two other families at the halfway point and looking at the facebook group invite I’m pretty sure they were Home Educators but they had very young children – at least one was still in a pushchair so we smiled and said ‘good morning’ but didn’t introduce ourselves or check if they were HE folk.

Instead we enjoyed the walk just the three of us and spotted green woodpeckers, rabbits, deer, robins and various other birds we couldn’t identify (hence wishing we’d had the explorer rucksacks). There is a ‘resident’ peregrine falcon that comes back this time each year and was around. We think we spotted that but were not sure. We heard the geese honking and then saw them fly over our heads and talked about why birds fly in the V formation.

The deer

by the green pond

Scarlett found some fox poo and got a couple of sticks so she could pull it apart to see what it had been eating. It was even more interesting than she’d hoped and she found some claws (rabbits we presume) and lots of fur and small bones

We then decided as it was just us we’d detour to the 1/2 mile walk hide we’d never been to before. I was worried there would be loads of serious birdwatchers and photographers there as we often see people with hi-tech equipment setting off on the trail so had warned the kids we’d need to be really quiet in the hide and so on. So it was a great surprise when we cautiously opened the door to find a large group of people and were greeted with a big ‘Hello!’ from a couple of volunteers. Along with the more serious twitchers were volunteers with various binoculars and telescopes to show people how to use the equipment and point out interesting things. We saw a cormorant with it’s wings outstretched, a couple of ducks hopping into the water, a swan taking off and a flock of geese landing and all got to look through the binoculars.

Davies had refused to wear a coat insisting he’d be warm enough in his jumper but he was getting cold and shivery so I wrapped him in my scarf and we walked briskly back to the centre to keep warm. We decided it was far too cold to sit out and eat our lunch so ate in the car driving home instead. We took the route over the downs home that Scarlett and I had gone on Saturday and it was very pretty – the sun was hanging low in the sky and creating gorgeous colours of grey, pink and yellow. I wanted to stop several times to take photos but the road is narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass and twists and turns so many times that by the time there is a safe place to pull over the landscape has totally changed again.

Back home we had a quiet afternoon with the kids playing on their DSs, they Xboxed for a short while and then played Creationary for a bit. I spent some time synching my diary and phone for various things. The kids had tea and then it was time for gymnastics.

I dropped them off and went to Asda where I got two big bags of carrots reduced to 20p each, two packs of tomatoes for 20p each and some coriander for 10p, CoOp where I got loads of croissants for £1.00, some cheap avocados and a couple of other bits for dinners for this week. I also popped into the libarary as I’d had an email to say a couple of things I’d reserved had come in and I knew we had a copy of the Jacqueline Wilson book Alison and Jax mentioned as I’d ordered in a load of her books for the display I did last week so I collected that at the same time.

I got home and had just put the shopping away when Ady arrived home so we headed back out again to Gymnastics to catch the last 10 minutes watching the kids. They both seem to be doing well and progressing but neither of them look like gymnasts 😉 I certainly can’t seem either of them being invited to join squads or compete but they are enjoying it and learning something aswell as getting yet more regular exercise (although that is probably the least of their needs!).

Back home again Scarlett swept the ashes away in the fire and Davies did the hoovering, both because they wanted to and offered when Ady and I were about to do said tasks. Made us laugh to be sitting down watching them though 😆

I read followed by a chapter of Littlenose and then, as I was begged I also read , then it was bedtime.

Ady and I watched Life, the kids will catch up with it on Sunday evening.

When I woke up this morning the sun was shining, by the time we left the house it was tipping down with rain and it continued to do so for about two hours 🙁

Ady shone shoes, the kids were persuaded into several layers of clothing including socks – Davies took no persuading at all, Scarlett took most of my skills which having honed on her I will be using to persue a career in hostage negotiations and talking down armed gunmen one day 😆

As we pulled up at the carpark where the Badgers and Cadets were meeting the heavens truly opened. I like the thought that there are servicepeople looking on at us thinking ‘are you really grateful, do you really remember us? Will you stand in the rain for two hours?’ As usual the worse the weather, the more people seem inclined to come out and have stiff upper lips and ‘Be British’ so it was a huge turnout this morning in Worthing.

Ady dropped the kids, me, two brollies and my mug of tea off and went off to find free parking. Davies went off to join the important St Johns people he was laying the wreath with (one adult, one cadet and for the first time apparently, one badger). Scarlett and the other 3 or 4 Badgers who had arrived joined the Cadets as there simply weren’t enough of them to make a parade of their own. It would have been simply neglectful to leave the children without coats in the pouring, freezing rain for nearly 2 hours so in the end they kept them on this year. Ady rejoined us and along with one of the other Badger mums we went to watch the service. As always I cried a bit when I saw the very old men pushed along to join the parade in their wheelchairs and saw other old people crying through the service. I was very proud of Davies who was the only little kid involved in laying wreaths, and very proud of Scarlett who stood still, quiet and sombre for the duration.

We walked round the block with them and there were no firemen related incidents this year but we did hook up with my parents who had come along. I’d mentioned it to them but I often mention stuff the children are involved in and invite them along and they seldom do attend so when it had rained this morning I thought it a certainty they wouldn’t come – Dad doesn’t do rain!

The service and parade complete we headed into town in search of hot chocolate and found a cafe selling rather good ones with whipped cream and flakes. All the better given Dad paid for them 🙂 😉

We sat and chatted about wars and relatives who fought in them. My Granddad (Dad’s Dad) fought in the first world war but was too old to fight in the second and worked in a munitions factory in Scotland instead. Dad said he said very little about fighting in WW1 – he was in Egypt and lost two brothers, other than to advise against joining the army as ‘you get your dinner and your pudding on the same plate!’. Dad reckoned either he had a very sheltered war experience or was sanitising it for the retelling! It’s easy to think it is all so distantly removed from us happening last century until you realise parents and grandparents were directly affected. Dad and I were talking about visiting Ypres, I went with the school when I was about 14 and would like to go again, Dad has never been. Ady would also like to visit Dunkirk too.

We said goodbye as they’d parked at an opposite end of town to us and walked back to our car along the seafront. The sky was dark grey and the sea was almost luminous green, very striking.

The colours and contrast hasn’t come out on photo, but it still conjurs up what I love most about the sea in the winter. Summer with the line between the bright blue of the sea and sky almost merged, calm ocean and golden sand is nothing when compared to the beauty of a raging sea under a grey sky splintered with lightning.

We called into Iceland to get a cheesecake for dessert and queued behind a man who stank of cigarettes, alcohol and general unwashedness. Scarlett asked rather loudly ‘what’s that smell?’ not thinking for a moment it might be coming from a person so we talked a bit about that and then when we’d got back in the car we saw a man walking along barefoot with just a sleeping bag clutched to him. Davies wanted to know if that was what Grannys new job was about (she’s going to be the retail manager for a new charity shop for a local homeless project) so we chatted a bit about that too and reasons why people may become homeless. I suspect there is very little in the way of books or films suitable for the kids on the subject to help answer their questions.

We got home and decided as everyone was cold, wet and a bit tired popcorn and dvds were in order so with some negotiation (Davies gets that from me ;)) we settled on Madagascar 2 and even managed to get Ady to sit down for the whole film and watch with us 😯

Davies and Scarlett went off to play – this involved packing up rucksacks and pretending to go exploring and camping while I got roast lamb cooking. We ate at 5pm, watching Jimmy’s Farm and all hankering after the smallholding / livestock owning lifestyle again. We then watched Life while eating cheesecake.

I went off for a bath while the others watched Total Wipeout, then the kids went to bed and Ady went for for a bath while I watched X Factor.

I don’t even remember posting that last night! 😳

So, catching up then…

Friday work all day for me. I did banking in the morning, followed by Baby Rhyme Time. We had a good crowd including Pushy Mum, Pushy Granny and faintly disinterested daughter who are fairly regular attenders. When I asked if anyone had any requests Pushy Mum and Pushy Gran asked in unison for ‘Peter Rabbit’ and did the pointy ears with their hands 😆 😆 Faintly disinterested daughter, who must be about 4 was busy sticking the handle of one of the shakers up her nose and doesn’t seem to give a monkeys what we sing. Two of the little girls have taken to following me into the office afterwards to try and ‘chat’ to me. Must remember to close the door behind me to prevent this in future.

I spent some time digging out the songsheets from the Christmas rhymetime I did last year with Christmas songs and some rewritten lyrics to some of the favourite songs (twinkle, twinkle Christmas tree, the bells on the sleigh go jingle, jingle, jingle). Jan was saying she thinks I should do a Rhyme Time in the style of Marguerita Pracatan. Definitely up for that 😆

I had my usual stints on the counter, the enquiry desk and shelving and then spent some time putting up a display of Jacqueline Wilson books. No one had put their name down to do the Christmas display either so I have put my name down for that and need to think of some inspiration.

Back at home Ady and Scarlett had spent the morning tidying Scarlett’s bedroom up and Mum, Davies and Scarlett had spent the afternoon watching Deal or no Deal, playing Deal or no Deal on the DS and Davies had made several animations based on Trap Door including speech bubbles and titles. Mum remarked on his spelling and writing and Davies further proved his reading by casting an eye over the post and asking ‘what’s that from the Dome then?’.

I had a cup of tea and chat with Mum, made Scarlett a hasty dinner of eggs on toast which she ate, then got changed for Rainbows and Davies showed me his animations. It was pouring with rain and really miserable so we assumed the Sea Scouts fireworks wouldn’t be happening, and didn’t want to go even if they were. Ady arrived home, Mum left, I took Tarly to Rainbows and then nipped to the supermarket for mushrooms for Ady’s pizza. It was so rainy I decided to park outside Rainbows rather than take the car home and walk back so sat in the car playing with my phone for ten minutes before going in to collect her. She’d been decorating mini gingerbread men and done one to look like me bedecked with mini marshmallows and loads of red strawberry laces sweets to be my hair :). She’d taken her Arctic Animals book for show and tell along with the couple of 3d penguins she’d made from it.

Back home we read which we have read before but was the only atory book about war we had on the shelf at work and I wanted to read something with them before Sunday. I do like Shirely Hughes :). We then read a chapter of Littlenose the Hero to cheer us up with something lighter again at Scarlett’s request.

Then it was bedtime, as been mentioned elsewhere I drank lots of wine and staggered to bed around midnight.

Saturday Our cockerel has got his body clock all messed up and keeps crowing at 4am. No idea why, he didn’t crow when it was 5am, it is pitch dark and the only real response to such behaviour is ‘do you want cranberry sauce with that?’. We’re fairly sure none of the neighbours can hear him as ours is by far the closest bedroom with all the others having hedges to further muffle the sound and it is by no means loud to us but he did wake me last night.

This morning was only about the second Saturday this year that the kids have had Wildlife Explorers and I have not been working but it happened to also clash with YACs for Davies. It never has before and I think YACs is normally much later in the month than the first Saturday which is what Wildlife Explorers always is but I assume they’d moved it closer to Remembrance Day as it was WWII themed. Davies had agonised over which to attend and decided on YACs. So Ady took him in one direction and I took Tarly in the other.

YACs was fab apparently. They prepared and cooked WWII food, then all sat and ate together, had some visitors who had been children in the war to talk about their experiences including a couple of evacuees, dressed up in various wartime things and then went outside to practise throwing grenades and running away. Throughout the morning they had an air raid siren that went off several times which meant they all had to get under the table. Ady was very enthusiastic about the whole thing and Davies had a great time too :).

Scarlett meanwhile learnt about feeding the birds and made a bird feeder by smearing a pinecone with peanut butter, then adding seeds and nuts to it ready to hang from the tree in the garden. They went outside to play a game about what birds eat what foods (berries, worms, snails, seeds etc.) and she said it was good fun.

I walked round the reserve. It was quite slippery in a few places thanks to muddy spots from lots of rain and fallen leaves. They are continuing to put massive animal sculptures around the place and now have a lizard, snake, butterfly and something else I couldn’t identify as raised mud areas to go with the existing cow and coiled snake. They look fab.

I saw, and correctly identified (checked on a spotter sheet in one of the hides to confirm my guess) a couple of green woodpeckers and a jay aswell as loads of other birds I couldn’t identify, several rabbits, squirrels, cows and some of the herd of deer. I could hear geese honking but couldn’t actually see them. It was a beautiful sunny morning and I enjoyed my walk round all alone :).

I collected Tarly and we decided to look in a couple of charity shops before heading home. I found a jumper for me, a top for Tarly and she picked up a little ornament which is either a weasel or a stoat which I agreed to buy. We chatted about poppies, how I knew the names of the towns and I enjoyed listening to her chatter away :). We drove back over the downs which is always a pretty route and beat Ady and Davies home by about 15 minutes. Scarlett and I had some lunch (they were full from the food at YACs) and Ady did some stuff in the garden, the kids played with the chickens and I unpicked half of the jumper I knitted last winter (I wasn’t happy with it so I’ve taken off the sleeves to use again and am going to re-knit the body) and started again with it.

Everyone else came in, I nipped off to Asda for a few bits, the kids had a bath and I cut Davies’ hair and brushed and plaited Tarly’s ready for tomorrow, they had dinner and watched whatever Star Wars film it was that was on, while both reciting all the lines along with the actors. I read my book :).

The intention was an early night for them both but neither of them managed it despite being in bed from about 730pm.

I have gone easy on the wine. With one eye still on those 2012 Olympics 😉

far too much to attempt to blog tonight. Not at all sure what future self will make of this – will she be all reformed sober and judgemental? If so she can consider this great evidence of a drink problem and use it to highlight when she realised things were sliding.

Will she merely be old and addled? If so I don’t really care what she thinks? I could take her on, hell I’ve drunk a whole bottle of wine, I’ll take you all on!

and rather proud of myself for remaining silent on things where ‘people are wrong on the internet’ to misquote a funny cartoon. Not sure if I am coming down with something or just tired and suffering from Clocks Going Back Syndrome which must surely be something known only by its intials and with some homeopathic remedy I could try? 😉

Anyway, today we were off to Paradise Park which we have annual membership for but have not made as much use of as I expected us to, so must rememdy that in the remaining 4 months or so left. I took a fairly sizeable lunch, most of which we didn’t eat but I carted around the place with us anyway. We met Lucy and The Rs there and the kids all got on well and enjoyed each others company, leaving Lucy and I plenty of chatting and catching up time, which was great :). I was proud of both Davies and Scarlett at various points for being considerate and kind friends :).

On the way over I’d said they could each have £2 worth of tokens in the 20p amusements so they were working out how many tokens that would be each. Davies sat there counting in 20s to 100 to get 5 (20, 40, 60, 80, 100) and then Scarlett chimed in with ‘so five and five is ten – ten tokens each, woo hoo!’ But in the end they had less than that and shared them but were promised a small something in the shop for £2 each instead. Scarlett set about finding more tokens under the machines and managed to find about 10 I think 😯 She spent most on playing an air hockey type game with Davies or giving them to Davies to go on a grabber machine game to win soft toys – the deal was he got to operate it but she got to keep any prizes. They didn’t win though :(. She then gave one each of her remaining tokens to the others :).

We walked through the Planet Earth bit which has been tarted up a bit with a big chunk about water and sealife first. Davies and I learnt that ‘if you put all the water on earth into just 100 glasses, then less than 3/4 of one glass would be the water available to humans’. We also learnt a bit more about sea urchins, anenomies and starfish. Scarlett took it upon herself to educate Richard and was telling him about all sorts of things too :). He is honoured really, she so doesn’t normally bother with smaller children.

We went through the dinosaurs, the cacti garden, the various outside bits and finally came to rest in the amusements. We spent some time indoors and some more outside and the kids played the crazy golf for a while before it was time for Lucy to head off. We said our goodbyes in the shop where we spent a fair while looking at possibilities to buy. They talked about pooling their £4 for something joint and then Scarlett remembered they sell books so we went over to look at those instead. She chose an Arctic Animals sticker book and Davies, who had been adamant he wanted something with a dinosaur theme found which was at the bargain price of £2.99. I rarely refuse to buy books so I was happy to add another pound to that. He’s already been using it loads adding pictures and notes, reading quite a bit of it and tells me his plan is to use it in games with Scarlett about Prehistoric Park and pretend they have gone through a time portal to collect dinosaurs for the new park.

Back home for dinner for them and plenty of using their new books. We put on to watch which I’d seen before when it was on TV but totally captivated the children. I think JL is fab anyway so was more than happy to watch it again and I cried when she cried at seeing the lights too :oops:. Predictably both children are now also desperate to see them and Scarlett totally fell in love with the icehotel and it’s little chapel, deciding that she’s never getting married but if she does that is where she wants to do it! 😆

Ady arrived home and we did sparklers in the garden before walking across the road to the pub which had bonfire and fireworks advertised at 7pm. The huge fire was indeed roaring away but there was no sign of fireworks and infact they didn’t start til 8pm in the end. So we had a rather boring, cold, dark hang around for an hour 🙁 When they finally happened they were rather a disappointment too, being the cheap supermarket types rather than decent commercial ones. Can’t complain as it is all free (although they’d have made a killing with all the food and drink and glow in the dark plastic tat they were selling!) but in previous years the fireworks have always been excellent so it was a shame to not live up to normal standards.

Back home for bed for the kids, bath and late dinner for us.

I waved Ady and the kids off this morning to Julie’s. We were a bit seat-of-our-pants today wrt childcare as I was staying a couple of hours later than usual at work for the My Story event so the plan was Ady would drop Davies and Scarlett off with Julie, spend the morning in the office, collect them during his lunch break, take them on a couple of mystery shopping visits then drop them home to me before doing his last hour or so. He got delayed though and ended up late collecting the kids from Julie and being all stressed about the whole business. He has a new MD and a new direct line manager at the moment and it’s all very up in the air as to how long his flexibility to do one morning a week will be. My Mum starts her new job too so the afternoon a week she does for us could also be a bit iffy but I’m assuming my Dad will step back into that role. I guess we’ll just keep muddling through for now and see how it all pans out though – it’s 3 years since I started at the library next month and it’s worked out so far.

So I had a fairly busy and typical Wednesday morning at work. I had teabreak with Frankie who I like a lot. She is having problems with her 17 year old daughter so we chatted about that and she asked some questions about Home Ed which have clearly been things she’s pondered on for a while. I’m fairly sure she considers me mental, particularly when we talked about me trying not to get Davies and Scarlett do do things ‘because I said so’ and not having a Naughty Step. :lol:She wanted to know what I did when they ‘kicked off’ and my answer of ‘well they sort of don’t really’ just drew one raised eyebrow. I should probably have confessed that the person most likely to ‘just kick off’ in our house is me really 😆

Abi and I spent half an hour or so planning our My Story event and deciding on a structure for the session, some activties and exercises and familiarised ourselves with the competition rules and so on. We had a really disappointing turn out of just two people in the end though :(. The session went very well inasmuch as we looked at the website, read some of the rules, talked about ideas, shared some hints and tips,I read one of the already submitted stories out and we talked what sort of story they both wanted to submit. One of the women had come along with a fairly sure idea she wanted to tell her Grandparents story of narrowly missed being bombed in the Portsmouth Blitz in 1941. A really powerful story of coincidences and how them living means there are now 9 grandchildren alive today. The other woman claimed to not really have a story but went on to chat to us about growing up in Ireland, being in the RAFA, marrying her husband and the rations and food supplies they lived on in their early days together, how she loathed washing his snotty hankerchiefs, how after they retired they bought a motorhome and spent weeks and sometimes months travelling near and far in it before finally giving it up earlier this year (she was very difficult to age but must have been in her 80s). We decided her issue was working out which story to tell in 1500 words rather than whether she had one!

I really enjoyed it and whilst very disappointed we didn’t have a much bigger turn out was nonetheless positive that we’d made a difference for them and shown there is a market for such events in the future. I’m a bit hooked on the My Story website now and am checking it several times a day to read the latest submissions and keep toying with the idea of posting one of my own.

In the middle of all of this the man came to replace my cracked windscreen and then came back a further twice to fix the mirror on. I am now convinced something will happen to the windscreen within the next fortnight!

I got home at about 330pm and rang Ady to discover he was about half an hour behind me. I had some very late lunch and then Ady and the kids arrived home so I did the kids tea too. Then it was off to Badgers.

We were asked to stay again as they were too short of adults to run so Ady and I sat and chatted to each other, to the Badger leader and generally observed the session. They talked about drinking and smoking (which led to some very interesting snippets from the various children about their parents! ;)), then they all had to draw an outfit for the others to decide what season it was. Scarlett cunningly drew someone next to a tree with green leaves so they all assumed it was spring or summer, then declared ‘no, it’s an evergreen and it’s winter!’ 😆 Julie the leader said ‘only your daughter…’ to me 😆

Davies was formally asked if he would lay the SJA wreath on Sunday and Julie very nicely asked if he could have his hair tidied up a bit. I agreed we would either cut it or tie it back :).

Home via the CoOp for more reduced bread for lunch tomorrow and a bottle of red wine to use for pheasant cooking for dinner. I read the kids which we’d not come across before but it the first book for the new local HE Book Group we’re off to in a couple of weeks so I wanted to have a look at it. It’s good, if slightly on the basic side, even if it does come rather too hot on the heels of the whole Jean Auel Clan of the Cave Bear books I read recently.

Another morning at home which Davies and Scarlett were pleased about, maybe they are getting more into time spent at home or maybe they’re just hunkering down for the winter? Whatever they continued much in the same vein as yesterday watching some TV (Evacuees again) and then connecting on their DS to play Viva Pinata. For two children who can’t read they are doing a fine job of working that out. Actually I’m being unfair to Davies with that statement as he clearly can read and is demonstrating that more and more these days with reading things of the TV, signs and instructions. He has clearly seen the value of trying and is doing it. Scarlett lies in bed every night with piles and piles of books and while she remains utterly resistant to doing any sort of reading with me there is clearly stuff going on there and she does now know all the letters.

I spent some time looking at the My Story website and was in turn entertained, amused and moved by some of the stories already posted up there. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s event and hoping we get a decent turn out attending.

I used up yet more of the pumpkin and made some cupcakes (which are very nice :)) and was amused by the short work the chickens have made of the pumpkins we put outside, they have already joined up the nose, mouth and one eye carved in one of them, and pecked a hole through the back of the other one.

We had lunch and then headed up to Truleigh Hill to visit the hostel manager and look over everything before camp. Davies and Scarlett have selected our room – they decided they wanted one with a fire exit in it, just like at Helmsley. There is an additional oven this year which will help for Christmas dinner but it is otherwise unchanged.

We spotted loads of birds, a magpies next, three cock pheasants in the field opposite and on the way home watched some mating sheep. It was all very wildlifetastic! 🙂 We talked about the starlings that gather at Brighton Piers and decided we should visit there soon to watch them at sunset.

We got back home for half an hour before heading back out again to swimming. I had my full hour and achieved my by-Christmas aim of 50 lengths :). Very pleased and proud of that. I hit a bit of a wall at about 30 lengths and really struggled to manage the full 50 in my very strict hour (I’m really trying to make it about time rather than endurance). I found the first 10 or so easy to do in a minute a length and actually the last 10 were probably not much slower than that as I was desperate to achieve it and was at 48 lengths with about 3 minutes to go. I could blame the minute or so stop for Davies and Scarlett’s lesson changeover and there was a point where three elderly people got in the way of all the proper length swimmers, got tangled up in the the 3 women who were struggling to keep up anyway and created a big bottle neck which slowed us all down but realistically that was a full hours swimming. Having managed my goal about 8 weeks early I’m not really sure where to go from here. I don’t think a length a minute :60 lengths in the hour is doable but I guess I could aim for 54 or 55 and see how I get on with that. I’d also like to do some research into which stroke is the best exercise as back stroke is my strongest, fastest and the one I actually feel some muscles working in but suspect it’s not necessarily the one having the biggest impact on fitness. Whilst it’s also the stroke I feel most able to up the pace on it is also the hardest to do in terms of being able to check who is infront of me and in my way.

Still, hurrah for 50 lengths! 🙂

Davies did some general practising while Scarlett had her lesson and then she joined up with her regular swimming buddy while he had his. She found out her name is Amber and she is also six today :).

Quick shower and change and home. Ady beat us and had already got the kids’ tea on and presented me with some garlic bread to keep me going til late dinnertime and a cup of tea – love that man :). I consumed that, replaced my washed off mascara and headed off out again to my course.

This week (week 6, only 3 more left now) was all about composting and was very interesting. As ever I learnt new things. I also chatted with Sheila about music for Davies and Scarlett and we’re going to meet up when the course has finished so she can do some music with them. She has a piano and a folk harp and is very passionate about every child having access to music. I love how this course has thrown me together with people I wouldn’t normally cross paths with :). We set dates for our post-course interviews (I will have to nip off for mine while we’re at camp, but actually it makes it easier in terms of not needing childcare to do it while Ady is around).

I arrived home just before 10pm and the children, who had only been in bed about ten minutes both got back up to greet me. Davies had had a good time at Sea Scouts -they had had a visit from the recycling place we visited last week so he’d done well on answering all the questions she asked. He is suffering with most of the other boys refusing to believe that he doesn’t go to school though and says they tease him and say he is lying. He told me he’d told them to ‘go home and google autonomous!’ which made me laugh, I didn’t even know he had got the idea of googling 😆 I’ve said I’ll email the leader and also give him the youtube link of him on the news back in the summer. He wanted to know if he could make his own website and I said yes he could. I think the time might be right for him to have his own blog, or just take over his Monster Movies one – might look at that with him over the weekend.

Curry for dinner and in a real acid test of how old my children are now I can see the bottom of the Sudocrem tub I had when Davies was a newborn thanks to my using it for my own excema. No closer to reducing the baby talc mountain however, I think that they are probably destined to be passed to my grandchildren. 😆

Determined to see if I could not waste any of the pumpkins this year (which were free and locally grown anyway) I decided to deal with the carved out stuff today. The pumpkins themselves are round with the chickens who are making very short work of them. It is also quite gruesomely amusing watching the chickens peck at the pumpkins eyes 😆 So I fished through the flesh and stringy stuff and seeds and seperated out the seeds, chucked the best of the flesh in a pan with some carrots and stock and cumin for soup and then whizzed up the rest to make puree. I’m planning pumpkin and cheese bread, and pumpkin and orange cake with cream cheese frosting tomorrow to use up the last of it.

I made some bread rolls to go with the soup for lunch, toasted about half the seeds (with a teaspoon of bovril which has given them a lovely twiget-equse flavour) and then made a rather unsuccessful cake. I knew the mixture was way too wet while making it but decided to chuck it in and see what happened anyway. What happened was the very top burnt, the just under the top cooked beautifully and the middle and bottom didn’t firm up and started to bulge and collapse when I turned it out of the tin. This has proved to be no issue at all as the chickens eat the burnt bits, Scarlett ate the cake-y bits and Ady and I have had helpings of the rest which is now being called Pumpkin Pudding with custard and it’s lovely :).

But getting back to stuff other than cooking…

This morning we watched Evacuation which was interesting. Davies and Scarlett were not actually that horrified about most of it though, claiming they live without technology for a week at a time while camping, an outside toilet is not an issue, they’d love to live on a farm and it all looked fun. They were less keen on being away from me and Ady for weeks, months or even years mind you. They are over their annoying each other-ness from yesterday and spent most of the day connected up to each other on DS.

We all came together again for lunch. I’d managed to whizz the blender with soup in it without having the lid on properly so had to clean up lumpy soup from pretty much every surface in the kitchen! As others have already said I really should have taken a photo first, it just didn’t occur to me at the time. As predicted the kids were not keen on the soup but they did like the bread rolls.

I got out the Planet Earth kid we’d got at the charity shop last week to look at and we set up the volcano in the bath. It’s the standard vinegar and bicarb and actually due to me not fixing it up properly it didn’t stream through the plastic volcano anyway but Davies and Scarlett assure me they never tire of vinegar and bicarb :). We read a bit about volcanoes but weren’t really in the mood for the next part of the kit which was painting miniature globes and drawing tectonic plates on them so we put it away again.

Davies wanted me to find the walkthrough for Viva Pinata DS again as he wants to finish it – he’s been on the last level for nearly a year so we looked at that for a while. I phoned up to arrange for my car to have it’s windscreen fixed. I found a crack in it way back in about January which has slowly grown bigger and bigger and I know would be an MOT failure when it’s due next month so thought I’d pre-empt that cost this month as I have a £60 excess to pay on my insurance for it. I also rang the hostel manager at Truleigh Hill to arrange to go up and look round and check out whether the kitchen has been improved since 2 years ago.

Early dinner for the kids and then off to gymnastics, along with £60 for this half terms fees. I dropped them off and then went to Asda and CoOp in Lancing as we’re trying to shop for half price or better, or reduced to clear items only this month. The plan is to visit supermarkets when we are passing anyway (so nights the kids are at gymnastics or Badgers) and menu plan around what bargains we can find to see if we can food shop cheaper than we have been. It will take a while to really see the benefits as we can’t not buy staples like flour, pasta, rice etc but long term the plan would be to stock up on those when offers are on. Ady went to Sainsburys and got loads of their Taste the Difference Mince reduced to a pound a pack. So we have 9 of those now in the freezer. In Asda I stocked up on poppdoms on offer, butter we needed anyway, kids pasta on offer, frozen veg and then on to CoOp where I had some great bargains; loads of lovely bakery rolls all at 5 and 10p each, some half price croissants and pain au chocolats which we’ll have in the morning, a bag of 5 oranges for 10p, some root ginger for 10p and a bag of British root veg (stew pack) for 10p. CoOp definitely the place to go at 630pm then. I think we spent £80 between us and we have a full up freezer already for the month. 🙂

We both got home within moments of each other, quickly put the shopping away and went back out to collect the kids who had had a good time at Gymnastics.

Home for the first few pages of before bed. I’ve finally had a look at a CV for one of Ady’s work colleagues that I’d been promising to do for months so I feel good about that. And now I have no idea how it got to be tomorrow o’clock!

The kids sleepover needed some sort of disclaimer really as there wasn’t a great deal of sleeping happening really 😆

I went to bed at 1230 and they were still awake, although quiet then. I had a really bad nights sleep as the cockerel decided to crow about 4 or 5 times at 430am – why? It was still pitch black outside and then it started raining really hard.

So it was a slow start all round to this morning. We’ve not spent much time with my parents lately so as we had nothing much planned and the weather dictated we stayed indoors I rang them to see what they were doing and we went over there for lunch.

Mum had some very good news – a year after losing her job she has been offered a proper, full time job as a retail manager of a charity for the homeless. Charity shops are a new fundraising venture for this charity which is church run despite the charity being nearly 20 years old so it is quite an exciting venture for her to be involved from the very outset of the project. She is really buzzed up about the whole thing, particularly as she was starting to feel that at 62 her working life might be over despite her not feeling it should be. Ideally she’d prefer to not work a full week so may try to negotiate that down to 4 days rather than 5 at some stage once it’s all up and running, but they have a policy of retiring staff at 70 rather than 65 so her age is not an issue. Dad was really proud of her and very vocally so which was lovely. I lived in the shadow of how they were relating to each other for so many years that being around them when they are happy and being nice to each other still has a massive effect on me (much the same as being around them when they are being negative about each other and taking swipes and putting each other down) which made for a very nice few hours round there. Frazer was briefly around so the kids got an Uncle-fix too.

We had lunch and then Ady and the kids retired to the lounge to ogle the big HD tv they have while I sat and chatted to my parents in the kitchen. Scarlett joined us after a while (Davies and Scarlett were rather overloaded with each others company and not that great at getting on well with each other today) and talked them through the flickrstream of Longleat photos.

We came home again before dark to put the chickens away and get a roast dinner on early enough for us to all eat together. The kids had a long bath and we watched Countryfile while eating dinner before the rest of the household remembered Total Wipeout was on the other side so I went off to fold laundry instead (I really HATE that show), then the children went to bed, Ady went for a bath and I watched X Factor (he really HATES that show ;)).

Yesterday I was feeling a bit guilty that we’d not really done anything Halloweeny, although in fairness it’s just an excuse for a party rather than anything we really celebrate as such. I don’t much like the whole trick or treat thing and the only way we’d ever do it is on an organised walk to people already expecting us. We’ve given away so many ‘No Trick or Treaters’ signs to elderly people genuinely worrying about having their door knocked on after dark by a gang of children wanting money or sweets with menaces that I really wouldn’t want to be responsible for that. In our own street Davies and Scarlett are the only children and while all the neighbours are very generous to them with birthday and Christmas and even just for the sake of it gifts I would feel really bad about the kids knocking on their doors begging at Halloween.

So fortunately I had organised a Halloween event at work and we’d been invited to a Halloween Harry Potter Party this evening :).

I dressed in my witches outfit from the party (Anna wasn’t the only one recycling her outfit ;)) and Ady ran me in to work this morning as they were heading back later so could lurk and bring me home. So I had a nice morning, spent decorating the childrens’ library with cobwebs and spiders, cutting up paper for cotton bud skeleton pictures and handprint bats and looking at rhymes to read out.

The event went well – we had 16 children all in fancy dress (including Davies and Scarlett. Davies came as a vampire – also recycling his outift, Scarlett was a cat which involved a black T shirt, black trousers (from I believe a fancy dress policemans outfit), ears and tail. Ady had face painted them both very well too). Abi read several spooky short stories, I read one spooky rhyme and then a couple of Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes (Red Riding Hood and 3 Little Pigs) and Frankie read another spooky rhyme and a story. That held all of them for the first half an hour and then we did crafts. They also went well and we awarded one little girl best dressed and presented her with a goody bag. Everyone, other than Ady, Davies and Scarlett drifted away and we tidied up.

I finished at 1pm so we all came home again and took off facepaint and costumes and had some lunch. Ady had brought home a pumpkin each for the kids from someone at work who grows them commercially so they both wanted to carve them. I managed to remain utterly hands-off (oh so hard!) and just helped with digging out flesh and other tricky bits rather than design. I now have a huge pan full of pumpkin flesh and a big bowl of pumpkin seeds to be imaginative with tomorrow. We tried to watch The Story of Stuff as Davies asked something about Fair Trade which I though would be best answered by that rather than me but the internet was being all clunky so we only managed the first five minutes or so, will try that again tomorrow.

Fancy dress outfits for this evening were very cobbled together. Davies wanted to be Harry Potter so wore his vampire cape safety pinned to his black top with shirt and tie printed on (to look like school uniform) and some black trousers. Scarlett wore one of my white tops under a fake fur gilet from a charity shop and the leggings we’d painted to look like zebra print for Adam’s Madagascar Party of about 4 years ago to be the snowy owl from Harry Potter. Ady and I didn’t dress up, me in protest as part of my long running refusing to acknowledge Harry Potter at all really ;).

We arrived and the party was super organised with a Quidditch match on the lawn followed by Herbology, a Harry Potter quiz and various other games and tasks which I have to confess meant nothing to me so I am unable to recount but were clearly HP themed and very well thought out. While the Quidditch was happening (which was very rough and at least 3 children ended up wounded and wailing) the kids had to be searching for some golden ball which apparently Davies actually found first but had snatched off him. He never really recovered from that and although he decided at the end on balance he’d mostly enjoyed the party he did spend a fair chunk of it wanting to go home or looking fed up. I think both Davies and Scarlett struggled with the fact it was an established group of friends at the party who all knew each other with them as the new kids, plus the hosts were not very good at putting them at their ease or making them feel welcome, instead playing on the fact they were the obvious outsiders and making them feel it. I don’t have a huge issue with that really and Davies was playing the victim rather well which always annoys me but at the same time I felt his pain and could relate to him just wanting to leave. He managed to keep it together and participate as much as he was allowed until it was home time anyway. As usual most of it went over Tarly’s head and when she heard Davies was upset about being told he wasn’t allowed in a certain room she demanded to know who had said that and marched off to put them straight 😉 😆

Ady and I enjoyed chatting to I, who was one of the chosen few to attend the round table Select Committee meeting and talking to him about Home Ed, how we do it, why we do it and how it works. He knows a lot in theory but having much younger children still doesn’t have absolute confidence about it all in practise so we chatted a bit about how it works for us on a day to day level.

We then also drifted to the outer circle of the room as the rest of the adults all clearly knew each other and all the rest were school friends. Neither of us really felt like being the token HE parents so we chatted to each other instead. On balance we were all glad we’d gone, had a mostly good time, but were reminded of what a fab circle of friends we already have and how very comfortable we all are with them.

Back home Ady offered the kids a sleepover together and to watch films. They are still very much awake and I suspect it will be a late night for them but listening to the sounds of their laughter together drift downstairs is just heartwarming. The idea that Ady and I created those two little people up there who are now taking such delight in each others company is just wonderful, I don’t think there can be any lovelier sound in the world than their giggles together :).