One word? When seven would do…

I have approx 350 pages left to read of book group book for tonight. I’m going to do 90 minutes serious reading while the kids are left to their own devices – they have out toy cars, plastic animals, foam blocks, pens, Doctor Who stuff and are watching Pink Panther so I think they’ll manage to amuse themselves ;).

Then it’s lunchtime and I’ve promised to watch Bridge to Terabithia with them which should take us to 2pm ish. Which leaves me a further 3 hours to finish the book afterwards before it’s time to take D to swimming lessons.

I’ve got a load of ebay stuff ending today at various times – latest check showed loads have already made starting bid and it’s up to £45 sales altogether – hurrah, that’s half a DS!

It’s been pouring with rain here all night, all day and looks set to be all night again. Which aside from giving me the idea of dismantling pallets to craft an ark and rustle up breeding pairs of any animals I can get my hands on (not many for sale on ebay I notice) was also responsible for flooding Lewes, where we went to collect Ali and Freya from on the way to Magical Mondays. It did mean that in a brief sunny spell there was an impressive rainbow over our house which we oohed over for a while and Davies came up with a fab idea for marking a party ‘or other cool place to go to’ by firing guns loaded with colour in the right order for a rainbow from the party location to lure people in, similar in style to the star which led the three kings to baby Jesus, so perhaps not original but a nice colourful twist on the idea just the same.

We then spent some time googling for instructions to make a whistle from a paper straw, it was unsuccessful but fun to try. I also told them about laser light and how on the night a nightclub was opened on the end of Worthing Pier when ‘I were a lass’ there was a very impressive laser light show visible all the way from my parents house.

On the way to Lewes we’d been magpie spotting and I’d taught them the ‘one for sorrow, two for joy’ thing which Richard Herring so fabulously explained the flaws in which got me telling them about superstitions and old wives tales. We thought of some we knew and talked about whether there was a basis in truth to any of them or whether they were all a load of bunkum. We decided stuff about the moon might be true but things like determining the gender of a pregnant womans’ baby by dangling a threaded wedding ring over her tummy was probably rubbish and the whole chucking salt over your shoulder if you spilt some was not just nonsense but also a bit crazy too.

When we got to Ali’s we’d driven past a flood which we pointed out again on the way to MM and was the inspiration for a very surreal ten minute conversation. It started as a debate about the depth of the puddle and whether it would come over the top of boots. I felt it would go over the top of a child’s ankle boots but not knee high boots, possibly an adults ankle boots but not knee high ones, unless of course your ankles had failed you and in a groundbreaking and medical science first a knee joint to ankle position operation had been carried out in which case your ankle boots would actually reach your knees and therefore would get wet. This, naturally with three children and two somewhat prone to the fantastical adults in the car degenerated pretty rapidly and we had a whole world transformed by a teeny tiny person with a magical remote control who made everyone else in the world the same size as themselves and everything else in the world with the exception of the puddle teeny tiny too so everyone lived underwater. This meant a whole new species evolved – a cross between a fish and a human – Davies initially liked the idea of mermaid style for this with human upper body and fish tail but changed his mind to a fish head and human legs. This was all well and good until I realised it would totally wreck that feminist claim that ‘a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle’ because actually if you had human legs instead of your fish tail a bike could well be a good way to get around. Scarlett liked this idea as it allowed Queen’s Bicycle Race to become the new national anthem. We decided rather than end feminism we’d have a new motto – ‘a woman needs a man like a fish need a knife and fork was put forward’ but this of course would put an end to Sheffield’s stainless steel knife and fork factories and through The Babs and The Barts and everyone else we know up Sheffield way into local crisis, it would become a ghost town with tumble weeds drifting past that bit of the M1 and northern folk turned savage making their survival by looting and pillaging and stuff. I think that was about the point we arrived at MM (correct me if I’ve forgotten any salient points Ali, please) but it was a useful example of surrealism which is something I mentioned to Davies just last week and enabled all sorts of stuff like evolution, cause and effect, feminism, naming of new species, creating anthems and means of survival and all sorts – a sort of car-based Sims if you will. And that ladies and gentlemen is what Home Education is all about! 😆

I was slightly carried away with all this lunacy, that and my bunches. My hair is at that inbetween stage of needing a haircut to wear short and slightly too short to wear up so I’ve been sporting bunches. Which probably make me look really quite ridiculous all by themselves but coupled with the effect of overweight children’s TV presenter they seem to have on my personality definitely put me into ridiculous territory (as though you’d not already gathered that from the above paragraphs! ;)). So when Scarlett circled the craft table set out once while trying to decide where to sit and led me behind her it seemed only natural to turn her to circle the other way and try and coax her to do jazz hands while we went. The craft was musical instruments from junk such as fruit punnets, elastic bands, dried pasta and some unidentified pulses and lentils. I was really brave about this and even handled them, infact I think at one point I even said ‘oh I need the lentils!’ which of course would be a sentence I’d have sworn noone would ever hear me utter. We made all sorts of cool stuff including some musical jam jars and sang ‘Music Man’ and the Doctor Who theme tune. Fortunately there are at least 3 other adults at MM who are equally as lunatic as me so I had plenty of company in my crazy mood today.

We sort of drifted away from that and as the children went off to play Jem broke out his guitar and did some strumming and we all sat round and had a singsing. It was ace 🙂 Really enjoyed it. We did stuff like Crowded House, Oasis, Beatles and the Kinks and it was just really lovely. Hardly any of the children joined in although Davies mentioned to me later at least two of the songs he’d heard us singing so they’d obviously been aware.

Sadly, just as I was feeling all warm and fuzzy (I think it was during A Little Mouse With Clogs On) I went to investigate some childish shrieking and discovered Davies thumping another child 😯 which wasn’t the cause of the childish shrieking but very quickly became the cause of my adult shrieking. He insisted he’d been hit first which was supported by independant witnesses and he stuck to his story even once ritually tortured at home but he still got a massive lecture on that not being an ok way to deal with something. Shortly afterwards, probably in an attempt to get the heat off himself he came and snitched on Scarlett for being outside. I had a quick look out there and couldn’t see her so then walked around the whole building looking for her and couldn’t find her, slightly raising my anxiety levels. When I did find her, indeed outside, in bloody November, without a coat, in the rain, digging mud with a stone and getting dirty when SHE IS NOT ALLOWED OUTSIDE I led her rather firmly by the arm back inside and shouted at her Very Loudly Indeed. Predictably she cried, at length. 🙁

But those two small incidents aside it was a really nice session and obviously I adored the singing :).

We left and dropped Ali and Freya home before heading back over to Tescos (sorry Ros ;)) and I made them listen to Mr Blue Sky just because it is such a fab record and needs to be listened to all the way through, before letting them choose and they both really liked a couple of Beatles songs (we were in Ady’s car today so had a different selection of cds to choose from to normal in my car). Tesco’s was fine, we got various bits for Scarlett’s party, some balloons and streamers, stuff to go in party bags and so on and a few bits for dinner tonight. They were both really well behaved and redeemed themselves beautifully :). They’d seen a paper on the stand of free publications which they wanted, right up the other end of the shop to where the tills were so while I was packing the bags Scarlett – with permission – went off and fetched one. She came back with it and then Davies decided he wanted one too so they went off together and came back to meet me at the entrance.

We got home and I had one of my regular tantrums about not being able to find any sellotape anywhere in the house so being unable to wrap an ebay parcel. I finally recycled one of the padded envelopes one of my dresses had come in and stuck it back together with PTFE tape 😆 It was pouring with rain by now so rather than drag everyone back out again I made lasagne for dinner instead. The children had promised to try it so I made them a little individual one each and a big one for Ady and I for later and cooked theirs. They played with a Hotwheels-alike ramp kit and the toy cars and listened to some more Beatles music – they particularly like Yellow Submarine :). Ady came home (he’s been to London to QVC again today, more meetings not filming) and I dashed out to my now nationally famous post office where I was able to sign their petition at the same time as sending my parcel.

The children ate their dinner – well they ate their garlic bread, Scarlett picked the meat out of her lasagne and Davies didn’t like it at all – and watched the Sarah Jane Adventures before I whisked Davies off in the rain to Beavers. We were slightly late and it was raining so we ran pretending to be Sarah-jane and Luke cos we thought they might do lots of running :). I got home and Scarlett was colouring and doing dot to dots but we were both really cold so we had a bath together and did face packs and body scrubs and deep hair conditioning treatment. She loves doing that and I really enjoy it too. I was telling her about the Lush shop and how my birthday present from my parents this year was a spending spree in there and I was hoping for the same again next year and promised if I do then she can come with me. Ady went to get Davies and he had a nice long bath after we got out, all Lush scented and smooth skinned :). Davies had had a good time at Beavers and made a cardboard rocket complete with tail fins and red crepe paper fire. He’d also plucked up the courage to correct them when they’d spelt his name wrong (missed out the ‘e’, they always do that round there :roll:) by apparently watching them write it and then telling them ‘I think you might want to try that again!’ – bet that endeared him to them 😉 :lol:.

Ady went off to Tescos to fill his car up with petrol as I’d failed to do it despite going to Tesco as there were huge queues at the petrol bit and I hate using his company petrol card. So I let the children stay up and play with the rocket while he was gone. Davies was teaching Scarlett how to count down from ten to zero (or rather, blast off!) and then we packed them off to bed.

Tonight there has been a spectacular thunderstorm which rumbled on for hours. It was sheet lightning but as I’ve just been googling it appears that is simply fork lightning hidden behind a cloud so the whole cloud and sky is illuminated by the lightning. I was also under the impression – presumably from personal remembrances although Ady said the exact same thing while I was just thinking it, that you only get thunderstorms in the summer, but googling proves that incorrect too. Interesting stuff; one way and another I’ve learnt a lot today :).

Happened upon it when D wanted to make a whistle from a drinking straw and was looking for web instructions to see if it could be done 🙂

Intructables.com

It’s been bitterly cold here today, with it feeling like it might even snow but it ended up being really nasty wind and just rain instead. Really feels like winter now, we were so lucky with our NicCamps weather, just 10 days ago. 🙂

Ady set his laptop up in the playroom on the table yesterday so the children have made much use of that playing on Barbie and Doctor Who games respectively. There’s also been further full use of various other things now easily accessible and on display in the playroom which is good and thanks to a buy it now negotiation on some dressing up clothes money is already starting to roll in from the copious ebaying I did with unwanted stuff from the clearout – I listed another 27 things today and now have about 70 items ending over the next week which all adds nicely to the Christmas fund :). A continued barrage of questions including various requests to send things to Spain and France and a lot of measuring clothing dimensions with the only suitable tape measure I could find being one of the freebie IKEA paper ones have meant I’ve earnt my money well though.

This morning Tarly spend some time on a Supercook kit Ady had found in the cupboard. It was chocolate, white and milk, to melt and pour into a bouquet of flowers mould and then decorate with writing icing. She did almost all of it herself and sat for ages painstakingly icing round the flowers before getting Ady to help her put them in the presentation bags and tie them with ribbon before breaking the milk chocolate one open again to share with the rest of us and scoff. I think it was a Mothers Day kit I picked up reduced to clear in Asda after Mothers Day had passed because the box was a bit battered.

I rang my parents, conscious of not seeing them again for a couple of weeks and arranged for us to go over there for lunch. I’d offered to do some baking with Davies as he’d asked to make cupcakes but somehow he got distracted with the pc and we never got round to it. He did come and sit with me and read me a story book though – a very simple board book style one about Gromit which he has had read to him enough times to know the gist of anyway but he is clearly well on the way all of a sudden with his reading and while he doesn’t seem inclined to do it for too long at a time it all does seem to have clicked for him and he really can ‘do it’ rather than ‘fluke it’ which is what I think was happening previously. Hurrah and woohoo and I hope the spate continues to a good amount of progress before it wanes off again.

We headed off to Mum and Dad’s via Sainsburys where they were giving away free bags for life, hurrah for Sainsburys! 🙂 We had a nice lunch despite some niggling from Dad about reading and arithmatic and home education. Never will he get what we’re doing or why we’re doing it and the further away from mainstream or school at home we stray the less he seems to understand it. I tried to explain about personal happiness and fulfillment but as they still fully expect Ady and I to divorce fairly imminently over our debts and can’t quite factor in why I don’t want to pack the children off to school, get back out to work and earn money so we can go on holidays and out for dinner again I don’t think anything less than material gain will ever impress then as output from Home Ed eventually. Ah well.

It was bloody freezing round there though. They live in an old, cold, big house that is dark and a bit drafty and never actually gets particularly warm even in the height of summer so a bitter cold day today was always going to be a wrap up warm day round there, but to make things worse the new boiler they had installed earlier this year appears to be on the blink and they have to keep turning the heating on and off to get the thermostat to kick in so it was positively arctic. Davies was quite happily playing round there but Scarlett really wanted to come home, she’d been upset by me telling her off for constantly interupting me while we were talking over lunch (she gets really upset about being told off infront of others, which is something I recall being a very big deal for me as a child, I must try harder not to do that to her but she does make it difficult with attention seeking behaviour although I notice they both seem to play up when I’m defending Home Ed or anything to do with them, as though they think there is a danger of me being swayed by someone else’s viewpoint perhaps?), so she was cold and wanted to come home. So we left at 3pm as we needed to get dinner on but Davies wanted to stay behind for a couple more hours, so we left his car seat (Mum: does he really need it, wouldn’t he be fine in the seatbelt in my car? :roll:) and left him behind. He apparently had a great time, Frazer came and watched The Simpsons with him and he got to drink coke and stuff, while Scarlett came home and was a bit loose endy without him but played on the laptop in the end.

Ady brought home four pheasants on Friday night:

which he plucked this morning with Scarlett as a very interested audience and cooked for dinner. The children had two breasts each for their tea, with chips :lol:, Scarlett adored it but Davies wasn’t so keen and we had the rest as a proper roast dinner later with red wine, brandy and onion sauce, roast potatoes and parsnips – delicious. And of course very cheap ;). This is from Ady’s workmate who bought us the bantams and is also supplying us with a massive amount of free logs for our fire. His father is very wealthy and has a business idea which he wants Ady and I to come in on with him so we have a meeting set up sometime in the next couple of weeks to discuss it further, which is potentially exciting and maybe even lucrative. Those new doors do keep on opening at us…

When Mum dropped Davies back her and I found a great present for my parents and brother to give Scarlett for her birthday and she has offered to put £40 each child towards the purchase of DS and games for their Christmas presents too, which means with my backdated payrise lump and Ady’s potential Christmas bonus we have everything covered, which is good. 🙂

That’s a wide array of hope, which is what comes to pass when a child is born ;).

This morning started with a quick trip into town to pay some money into the bank, which was depleted from paying for NicCamp food on my card and collecting cash off everyone so I needed to put some of the cash back into the bank. Every single time I go to the bank – at least once a month to either pay in or withdraw cash in my new improved awareness of the state of our bank account state I get asked if I’d like to upgrade our account. We have a very basic account which allows direct debits, a cash point card which has recently been upgraded, without asking, into a VISA electron card, which is fine as it does a check on the balance before every single transaction so still wouldn’t allow us to go overdrawn, no overdraft, no cheque book etc. It is precisely this type of account which has kept me in line these last two years and is also one of the many conditions of our debt management plan that we have no facility for credit. But every month I am offered different accounts, credit cards, overdrafts and asked about switching our mortgage over to one of theirs, this despite telling them we have bad debt and only manage to pay interest only on our current mortgage. I know they are trying to get my ‘business’ but really, it’s hardly worth it unless they want to be added to our long line of creditors – does make me tempted to take one of the ‘financial products’ they throw at me sometimes, just to blow the lot on frivilous things and then say ‘well I did try and tell you!’ when I inevitably default on repayments. We still get at least two pieces of mail declaring us ‘pre-approved’ for secured loans each month too. 🙄

I dropped Ady and the children off back at home and headed over to Ali’s. Ady has been listening to Christmas music in his car for the last week or so already so I listened to some too, hence the blog title. First time of listening to it this year and it had me in tears as usual with it’s noone being forlorn for a spell of two bit.

Ali and I headed off to our Writers Retreat Day – my fourth such day in the last year. I’ve never really blogged about them but they are something I get huge amounts out of on many levels. In much the same way as I do at Reading Group (ooh get me with my adult literacy attending both reading and writing groups :)) I often feel my ‘uneducated’ status quite heavily. At both I tend to zone out slightly when there is highbrow talk of books they have read, genres I am unfamiliar or plain not interested in and references to things I don’t understand. It’s taken me a long time to make peace with that element of myself, to not feel inadequate when I’ve not read the Shakespeare play being referenced, or seen films being talked about in reverential terms or to even be ok with the fact that often I’ve not even heard about some of the things being talked of. I don’t think I had a fantastic education – it was basic state secondary at which I did medium-well with a bias towards academic stuff coming heavily from my parents to whom I was a ‘bookworm’ said in faintly derogatroy terms being the only person in the house who ever read anything for enjoyment, but my actual bias probably being towards the things that were squashed out of me as not very worthy. I certainly didn’t shine in any one area. My parents are also fairly uneducated, not very cultured but were very much of the work hard and you’ll achieve mentality and both had their own businesses from my very early childhood, which they both did well out of materially but I doubt either of them would presume to claim any level of satisfaction or even great enjoyment from.

I’ve pondered what exactly I was doing with myself when everyone else around me was doing all this reading and film watching and the only conclusion I can come to is that I was busy. One of the reasons I nearly got kicked off my A level courses was that I was also working 30 plus hours a week alongside full time studying – something fully expected of me by my parents – 2 seven hour days a week (Saturday and Sunday) were spent working for them in their restuarant from age 14 and from 16 when I started A levels I also worked at B&Q for 3 hours a night Monday to Friday. Somehow I fitted in the other reason I nearly got kicked off my course around all this college and working, which was hardcore socialising with nightclubbing 3 nights a week, pubbing the other 4 and fairly frequent all night staying out at my boyfriend at the time’s flat. When I left college I continued both the crazy working hours and the crazy partying, with very little time leftover for sleep let alone reading Shakespeare or well respected poets. By 20 I had a mortgage and a retail management career so while the partying had stopped the working hours had increased to fill the gaps – there is a whole generation of TV shows that I never watched simply because I was never sitting down infront of a TV – things like This Life, Cold Feet, shows I hear other people my age talk of fondly simply were not on my radar.

I then went from working 3 weekends out of 4 with 10 hour days the norm let alone the 14 hour plus days we’d pull off during stocktakes, sales and Christmas to pregnant within a month so when I did pick up TV viewing again recreationally it was for Richard and Judy, Ready Steady Cook and The Weakest Link – oh and of course Teletubbies, Tweenies and Zingalong. And reading? Well that was reduced to Spot or Gina Ford really, so while I could debate at length the works of Doctors Seuss versus Green (Christopher, Toddler Taming) the ever elusive french subtitled films or Lord of the Rings the second time round (I missed the first time too, much though I read lots as a child that whole fantasy world stuff never did it for me) wasn’t really on my agenda.

I think looking back the reason for lack of culture and education is that I was quite simply, busy. I was doing Other Stuff. Also there was always that suggestion that simply sitting around watching TV or reading a book was actually A Bit Lazy, which probably explains why both my reading and writing groups feel quite so decadent, luxurious and much though I enjoy them both also make me feel a little guilty too as they are a bit self indulgent, a bit Nic-focussed and probably take me away from stuff I *should* be doing instead. I think the other thing is that I’ve always been a bit crap at doing stuff just because someone else thinks it would be beneficial. I’ll give a suggestion a go certainly but unless it’s intrinsic value is almost immediately apparent to me I’m likely to lose interest pretty quick. And the odd bits of these culture things I have dipped into have utterly failed to grab me and life’s just a bit too short to do stuff which doesn’t delight and entertain and amuse you really isn’t it.

So today I realised that what I always highlight at the best bit of both reading and writing groups is the people, the eclectic mix of people I wouldn’t normally cross paths with that I get to sit and chatter with. And it’s the chattering, the incidental asides and idle catching up with snippets of each others’ lives that punctuates the undeniable enjoyable pursuits of discussing a book we’ve all read, or writing exercises and sharing our work afterwards, with what I really adore about them. I think what I really like, what I’m really interested and endlessly fascinated with is people. The more diverse and different to me the better, what I like to do above and beyond anything else is talk to and listen to people, to share ideas and experiences and dreams and life stories. I don’t want to read what Shakespeare wrote but I’d love to travel in time and meet him for a chat, I’m not interested in fantasy and sci-fi films or books, I’d far rather sit in a cafe and people watch or talk to someone I know about something in great detail.

Anyway, writing group was great, it was with a theme of Fairy Tales so we had various writing exercises based around them. One of mine was a brief to write a story around this plot line:
“A tiny fairy child no bigger than a thumb is born. They are ridiculed but the Queen realises that having a miniature spy is very useful and rewards the tiny child with a lord/ladyship title”
which also had to contain the twist:
“The hero/ine discovers they bear a resemblance to the prince/princess so they swap lives for one day”
chosen randomly by number from a long list.

Next was writing a modern take on an old fairytale, my chosen one was Rapunzel which I enjoyed doing and producted lots of great stuff within the group as we all had fun with that one.

We then did an autobiographical piece where we introduced a fairytale character to a bit of our own life and got the character to help us through something difficult.

We each chose an image from a fairy story – we were offered (non Disneyfied) pictures from Bluebeard, Hansel & Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and had to answer a series of questions from the perspective of the anti-hero of the story and finally we had to write about an everyday or mundane scenario with a fairytale twist of a character coming to either help or hinder the situation.

We had our usual bring and share lunch, which was less successful than normal for me today with about 15 different varieties of cous-cous and chickpea based produce and not a lot else. I ate french bread, lots of it! It was as usual a good day which I came away from feeling I had been productive and gained some ideas for writing, some of the stuff I worked on I may well try to do more with, but as usual that will feel like something too indulgent to be spending time on when there is ebaying to be done, children to feed, general martyrring of oneself to attend to ;).

I sang along to more Christmas songs all the way home and arrived to find a very peaceful household. Scarlett had been doing hama beading and Davies and Ady had had a puzzle fest. Clearly getting everything all accessible worked wonders :). They’d also spent some time playing with the bantams, watched a film, done more puzzles, played a Simpsons game online, done some drawing on the aquadraw mat where apparently Scarlett was doing writing and learning how to spell Mummy, Daddy, Davies and Candle. She’s into the idea of reading and writing lots at the moment with plenty of observations of words that rhyme or have the same letters and sounds in them. She told me David Tennant made a good doctor the other day because there were sounds the same in David and Doctor 😆 Scarlett painted my nails and generally fussed round me insisting on having a (very diluted with water) glass of wine when I had one and sharing my bowl of peanuts.

Davies carried on puzzling with Ady but did come and sit with me for the end of X Factor and started to watch Family Fortunes, which he was surpisingly good at. 🙂 We finally chased them away to bed around 830pm but then when I went upstairs to say goodnight to Davies he was sitting up in bed with ‘I can read with my eyes shut’ And sounding out whole sentences beautifully, so I stayed with him and helped him with a few more pages. He has suddenly clicked with the whole thing I think – amazing to see if actually happen after about 3 years of thinking he’s on the verge of it with knowing letter sounds. He is now totally capable of sounding out a word and working out what it says, seeing the patterns of rhyming words in Dr Seuss so using that to help decode stuff but above and beyond all else he is enjoying it and doing it because he’s decided he wants to read, which frankly can be no better reason in the world to do something. I promised to sit with him tomorrow with any book he likes for as long as he wants and do more, assured him how very proud I am of him for getting it but mostly just establishing that he is proud of himself and pleased with it, which he is. I’ve long said I can see D & S learning to read together and I can still see that likely to be the case as she is similar in levels of enthusiasm and wanting to do it. It’s great 🙂 :).

This morning all felt rather frantic with Julie cutting it very fine to get to me and then Ady having kindly defrosted my windscreen but done it so early it had refrosted again all made me slightly late. Work seem very laid back about this though, I have explained I am reliant on people arriving at my house and therefore am often dashing in and as the library doesn’t actually open til 930 me arriving not on the dot of 9am doesn’t appear to be a problem. I always apologise and they always wave it away…

My every other Friday is my turn to do the banking with Carol, we have to empty all but the float out of the three tills, do some cashing up process on the system on each till back on the counter, then return in, count up all the money, reconcile it against what the system thinks we’ve taken and then one of us bags it up and fills in the paying in slip ready for the banking while the other enters it all on the computer and emails it across to the council head office. I really like cashing up actually, it was one of my favourite daily tasks at Clintons (mostly because it heralded the end of the day and I used to sit and drink tea and smoke while I did it so it was a nice sitting down activity too) but I do find the lack of cash slightly less satisfying, I like a big wodge of notes to count quickly. I’ve also had to get used to adding up columns of figures again, which clearly has done me no harm but made me realise how very dependant I’d grown on calculators for even the most simple of maths – I think I’d need to refresh my memory now to do long division or long multiplication on paper which is actually quite shocking really. We then take it in turns to go to the bank, so we both get to do it once every four weeks, which always seems to come around very quickly. It was my turn today and I was stood outside the Natwest waiting for it to open and it was bloody freezing!

I did some online training on Britannica online and various other online tools that the library subscribes too, and had fun with the interactive timeline and tried to find the answer to a question Davies had asked me a while ago about sea boundaries which I’d not been able to answer. Then I did a stint on the enquiry desk followed by lots of time spent on the counter this afternoon. As I left to go to lunch there was an army of pensioners swarming around with banners and a proper chant and several community police officers accompanying them. It turned out they were marching from my very local post office to the main Lancing post office in protest at plans to shut 3 of the post offices, including my local one down. There were about 200 of them and they all marched into the post office with loads of press there ready to capture it. Good for them! 🙂 One of them came in the library later, all flushed with his adventure and chatted a bit to me, apparently the post office workers had not gotten wind of the fact they were coming and looked all aghast when they arrived. Let’s hope people power has an impact eh?

I had a very frustrating lunch break spent mostly in Somerfield, I found various little advent and Christmas bits so bought them for the kids for us to do in the first week or so of December as we’re not doing the card exchange but I do like a bit of festive craft of some description, and things for dinner tonight. The queue was horrifically long so I stood in that for about 15 minutes and then the checkout girl kept stopping to chat to her friend who had come in to shop including disappearing off her till at one point to get a pen from somewhere so her mate could write her phone number down :shock:. On the way out of the shop one of the carrier bags broke so I replaced it but another broke again not far out of the shop so I really struggled back to the library carpark with five bags and crappy breaking handles to put everything in my car and then didn’t have time for a cup of tea before being due back from lunch.

This afternoon I had an interesting conversation with Yvonne, the direct boss at Lancing library about a child protection course she’d been on this morning and what level of state intervention should be required between parents and children etc. We also talked about smacking and general child abuse – interesting chat.

Tonight I did lots of cuddling up with the children until Ady got home, we watched some of Children in Need with me insisting that they got the idea of what it’s all acutally about, so there was lots of chat about parents who for whatever reason can’t look after their children properly with Scarlett suddenly saying in a wonderfilled voice ‘Mummy, we’re REALLY lucky aren’t we?’ to which the sad, but honest answer is probably yes really, and probably even more so than she realises yet… And then Dayve arrived. Really good to see him; he was my assistant when we worked in Manchester and is the only person I’ve stayed in touch with from back then. He and his partner had a civil ceremony last year which was great as he’d previously been in a fairly crap relationship which I think took some getting over but he now seems very happy and settled. He does a variety of work including lots of promotional work, which is why he is in Sussex this weekend, selling irons and kettles in a nearby shopping mall; working as an extra (he’s been in Doctor Who and a couple of months ago did three overnight stints of filming for the next Torchwood) and also performs his own music and is in the process of recording his second album. So he’s an interesting person to chat with.

I’ve very much enjoyed my wine this evening after my enforced teetoallness but am now feeling sneezy and snotty and shivery again so am off to bed to throw off my malady once more ready for the weekend.

I’ve been bidding on dresses on ebay as Ady has a fairly posh Christmas do this year (and I do like to look my best for when I meet his colleagues ;)) and have just won the third one which should be here tomorrow. The first one was a gorgeous chinese style long green one which is indeed beautiful but as the ‘full length’ claim was for a shorter person than me and it only reaches just below my knees the mid thigh slits are infact mid arse cheek instead. Which is not really my look – I’m more about exposing flesh about the waist than below.

The second one was actually a size 10. I’d searched for my dress size and the word ‘dress’ and it had come up, I realised after I’d won it that it was actually the RRP that was my dress size rather than the dress itself. It’s here, it’s lovely, but other that taking it out of the packing to check it over quickly before relisting it on ebay again I’ve not given it further thought. I’m not optimistic enough of my own self-deprivation any time soon to ever see size 10 again so unless I keep it for Scarlett it won’t get worn in this house.

So it’s back on ebay with the chinese style one and whilst I accept my own idocy in bidding and winning on a dress that isn’t even my size I think this question I’ve just had probably trumps my own moment of dizziness:

hello, i am a size 10/12, i know that h&m sizes can be really weird, would it fit me ok,
thanks,

🙄

I’m feeling a bit better today, still very sneezy and cold but definitely not in need of lemsip or cocaine enhanced cold and flu tablets, so that’s good.

It’s been one of those perfect crisp clear cold days here today so I got loads more washing done (and oh, what a joy it is to get socks and pants dry with my cherished airer – thanks again, it makes all the difference and I think of you every time I hang my pants on it 😉 xx) and as we had no bread and I was in the mood for the theraputic benefits of both the actual baking and the consumption of said baking afterwards I hung out in the kitchen and made cheese scones and flapjacks. Granny arrived and was let in and greeted by the children which meant I just carried on in the kitchen, hung washing out and so on and finally went through with cups of tea after she’d been here nearly half an hour :). Davies and Scarlett had brought Davies’ collection of Micromachines down from his bedroom and were playing with those. He has a London themed one which folds up into a London bus and is complete with all sorts of London landmarks such as Big Ben and Parliament, London Eye, St Pauls, Westminster Abbey etc and the cars are black cabs, red buses and minis so she was talking to them about that and they were telling her about Guy Fawkes plot to blow up parliament and pointing out the various places in London they’ve been to. 🙂

We had a chat about Home Ed, frustrating as usual. She asked about NicCamps and the age range and I explained we had all ages from 1 year olds right up to 11 year olds and she asked me twice if I ‘found them intelligent’ as though the children were some sort of lab rats. I ignored it the first time and went on about how HE kids are so very different to schooled kids in their interaction with adults, mixing in groups and blah (you could all write the script for me I’m sure) and so she asked me again. Then she asked if I was happy with my decision to HE and then said ‘well I suppose you wish you could afford private school really?’ which is a bit of a no brainer as I explained to her as if I wasn’t at home HEing the children I could easily be out working earning sufficient to put two children through private school?! I then explained, at great length, precisely why I am anti schools, exactly what I felt the benefits of a non academic focussed, non measured, tested and compared to others education was and how I felt it to be a holistic approach to raising children into adults equipt to make it in the real world as happy, contented individuals and how I consider personal happiness and the freedom to do and be who they want to be as far and away more important that any other single thing and that I think that the focus taught in schools of material goods, worship of salary and benefits above job satisfaction etc. is all wrong and not what I want for them. I talked about how NC and SATs have destroyed the idea of teaching as a vocation, the yearning to be inspiring, to pass on your passion for your given subject and to share with your students the joy of learning about what it is you want to impart to them has long since given way to being a ‘career’ that is low paid, exhaustively tested and well, again I guess most of you could write that script for me too. She then asked about what I thought Davies and Scarlett might want to do as careers, to which I laughed and reminded her that they are still just 7 and 4 and that Scarlett would only have actually started school 6 weeks ago so I think career direction is a little premature just yet, but reeled off some things that they have been allowed to concentrate and spend time on and enjoy.

We looked at some pictures of camp and of the Roman Day at Fishbourne which she only really wanted to gauge educational value of rather than enjoyment of and wanted to know if either of them could still remember how to write their names in Latin. FFS! She’d brought them a colouring book each with Christmas pictures so they were colouring in those and she was making them colour really hard so no white showed through, all the while checking with me to make sure she was ‘saying the right thing Nics?’ which of course she isn’t – they don’t need their simple pleasure at colouring watched over and judged otherwise it becomes a chore or a test rather than something they do for the sake of it, but I let her carry on with it because neither was it likely to do any lasting damage to their lust for arty stuff really. Davies did appear to be concentrating on colouring in so no white was showing but midway through my sermon on education he turned round and joined in with a couple of bits about why learning like he does is the right way, how he loves being able to just ask questions as they occur to him and either getting the answer from me (or whichever other relevant adult is around) or coming along for the journey of finding out. While she was here we’d been talking about teeth and how the front teeth are serated and thin for biting and the back ones are flatter with bigger surface areas for chewing and grinding, we’d likened the different sorts of teeth to different tools which do similar jobs and talked a bit about the ‘best’ time to lose teeth before he’d continued with his Micromachines and I tried to use that as a live, action, on the scene example of how ‘it’ works for us, but I don’t think she really got it. I don’t know if anyone really gets it unless they are doing it to be honest, but it’s nice to realise that Davies and Scarlett seem to get it and I guess in the end they’re the only ones who really matter when it comes to judging whether it works or not. She’d also brought them a lined exercise book each ‘for writing’ which thankfully she didn’t seem to expect them to sit at tables and do there and then, but I guess she may come armed with a red pen for marking them next time we see her :lol:.

As arranged Lucy and The Rs arrived at around midday for lunch and a play. We all ate together and then Granny left. They children, particularly Davies and Scarlett spent quite a while outside playing before coming in and getting stuck into a variety of games including some time in Scarlett’s bedroom for her and Rebecca and a group game of Doctor Who. I managed to finally organise the shelves in the playroom so all the stuff I want to be accessible now is and all the stuff I really don’t want to be accessible finally isn’t. I also pretty much cleared the table (gasp) and sorted out the craft drawers (again!) so I’ve managed to get most of my things I wanted to achieve this week done. I have one last heap of ebaying stuff to get listed and then everything inside the house is attended to – next to start on the garage.

Tomorrow is work all day and a friend coming over for dinner which will be nice as we’ve not seen him for ages in real life so I’m looking forward to that.

I worked this morning and met a new colleague for the first time, Sarah. There are two Sarah’s at Lancing library, which actually makes me feel quite at home as I spent most of my school days in classrooms packed with Nicolas and Sarahs. The new Sarah has just left working in the school library of my old secondary school part time so we chatted about that. She has a daughter just started at uni and another in her last year at my old school so we talked about careers options for teenagers, how the hell you are supposed to know aged 15 what it is you want to be when you grow up when most of the 30something friends I have still don’t know and how careers options are so limited with none of the very real job possibilities talked to children about and people channeled into areas like ‘customer service’ which doesn’t mean a thing and is unlikely to make anyone feel passionate. I am passionate about customer service but in all areas – I expect it from everyone I meet as a customer as a matter of course, not as something they have chosen as a career. I didn’t ‘come out’ to her as Home Educator although I’m sure she either already knows or soon will but it nice to feel so free on behalf of Davies and Scarlett of crappy school careers advice and limited before you’re old enough to earn a wage what it is you might do to earn it when you are old enough.

I worked on the enquiry desk for the first hour and a bit and rather enjoyed the fact the photocopier was broken and the chaos it caused – people were vying to tell me their reasons why they absolutely MUST get X copied this morning as though if they had a good enough reason I would pull a magic wand out of the desk drawer, remove the OUT OF ORDER sign and declare it all fixed :roll:. I spent some time pretending to be Maddy from Moonlighting trying to find a newspaper article from 1951 about a man’s grandfather with very sketchy details, tried the proper library methods, tried google and eventually had to give up. I then spent some time rejacketing books and then did some shelving and reorganised the paperback spinner.

Home for a quick cup of tea, change of clothes, few mouthfuls of lunch and very brief chat with Lucy before they left very speedily followed by us off on an Autumn Walk. I like working just a morning, it doesn’t feel like it takes too long to get back into the swing of being me and the kids again like it does when I work all day, I think if I had a wish list of changing my hours it would be to 3 mornings a week rather than one and a half days.

We drove over to Slindon, and on the way had a very interesting conversation about parliament, government, democracy, consitituencies, voting, laws and the whole political process in this country. We then talked about universities – I must have a gleam in my eye and a covetous tone leftover from youthful days of yearning to be a MP as whenever I talk about it people seem to pick up on the fact I once cherished an idea of that. Mind you I also wanted to be a financial advisor, a teacher, an estate agent and an illustrator some of which are far more credible ideas now than others ;). We talked about who we know who has been to university, why they might one day want to go to one themselves and what people might look for when voting for a MP. This came about as a side step from talking about hunting and reasons for doing it – sport, food or culling. They both supported hunting for food, were both against hunting for sport and couldn’t quite decide what their stance was on culling. They quite liked the idea of myxomatosis initially and then we talked about why humans felt they should be the ones to decide everything and Davies said that crops should be grown for rabbits to eat so they didn’t eat people’s crops and then everyone would be happy. So I asked how he thought that would happen – who would pay for it, work on it etc. and he said there should be a meeting about it and surely everyone would see it was the logical answer, hence we talked about taxes and running a country. I often think that children have this unflawed logic that works in their world but just gets cocked up when adults get involved with our sense of ‘fairness’ and ‘control’. Children are much bigger into cooperation and teamwork than adults generally are. Or maybe D &S just spend disproportionate amounts of time doing communal living :lol:.

The walk was lovely – we met Julie, Jack and Maisie and the children all gathered sticks and ran straight off, it was beautiful there, loads of gorgeous colours, piles of fallen leaves to trudge gratifyingly noisily through and cold and crisp and clear.

We fed the ducks, Jack managed to chuck his paper bag in with his last handful of seeds so the children decided to fish it out. It was a long way in so they gathered long sticks, tried to work out if they could lash them together to make one long one and gave up on that idea and then suddenly a breeze lifted and the bag started to drift back towards them. Julie and I sat on a bench and tried not to look as we were convinced at least one child would surely end up in the pond. Davies was the most likely candidate but I figured it was very shallow, he wouldn’t be in danger of anything other than getting wet, he was wearing oldish clothes and actually falling in a pond while leaning too far in trying to fish something out with a stick is probably something every child should do at least once :lol:. So clearly with an attitude that relaxed coming from me he didn’t fall in at all and successfully fished the bag out on the end of his stick. He told me that ‘if you try hard enough you can do anything’ and the stick was christened ‘Champion Stick’ and came home with us in the boot of the car so it can continue to right wrongs, fight the good fight and save the world generally. I’m thinking of setting it loose on the table ;).

We then walked a bit into the village where Julie has a part loan on a little pony so needed to feed it and shovel horse poo about a bit. They’ve had it for a while now but it’s the first time we’ve been to see it, we’ve planned to go again next week if the weather is nice so Davies and Scarlett can have a ride on her. Very nice little pony although I’ve never been remotely interested in horses or ponies or anything like that and the kids were very enamoured with her and her field mates:

Back through the woods to the cars stopping for a brief look at the latest batch of wigwams built in the woods by people and then headed for home. On the way we talked about road signs, what 300 yards is, why my brother still lives at home even though he is 31, why some children swap bedrooms with their siblings and some children share bedrooms, how old I was when I met Ady, moved out of home and in with Ady, married Ady and so on, who has slept in all the various bedrooms over the years in our house and my parents house (they did a similar bungalow conversion into a house and Frazer now has my old bedroom) and various other chatter I can’t recall now. I loved the way our conversations twist and turn.

Tea for them and a cup of tea and chocolate for me as I suddenly remembered that I was feeling pretty crap actually and started to slump. Ady came home and Davies and I headed out to Badgers. The traffic was amazingly light and we’d managed to leave dead on time to allow for lots of traffic so we had time to whizz round the supermarket for various bits before Badgers which was good, he went off in on his own just kissing me goodbye in the carpark (landmark moment, he can be brave now knowing Scarlett starts Badgers in about a month so I’ll likely be back to being dragged in and not let go again anyway!) where I sat with my book and a packet of humbugs turning the engine and the heater on every so often when I felt too cold to turn pages.

They had a carol concert practise and Davies told me that they were given the choice as to whether they want to be in the concert or not and several of them didn’t so they stayed in the other room and did something else instead. I was waiting to hear him say he’d decided not to do it too (which would have been sad, I’m looking forward to going to see it) but he said he’d gone in and told me the songs they’re singing : Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, When Santa got stuck up the chimney and We Wish you a Merry Christmas – hardly carols but nice just the same :). So we sang them all the way home to practise.

Ady had run him a bath and was reading Scarlett Beatrice Potter stories in bed so I read Davies War Boy while he had a bath. Which was long and very wordy but he seemed to enjoy and I quite liked reading.

Tomorrow my Granny is coming over in the morning to see the children and tell me how fat I am looking, which will be nice, but as people saying things which can be hurtful without meaning to be horrible was one of the many other things the children and I talked about in the car I think they are both intending to tell her it’s not a very polite thing to say if she tries it tomorrow, which will be amusing :).

I’ve been really tired ever since we got back from camp, sleeping on the sofa in the evening and having to drag myself out of bed in the morning. I’m sure it’s just catching up from being away but in honour of that and a Save Nic’s Liver Campaign I’ve sworn off midweek drinking again for a while. So expect me to be either perky, bright eyed and up with the larks each morning or simply in an evil frame of mind without my alcoholic crutch Monday to Thursday :lol:.

This morning I was determined to do something productive and had either the playroom with it’s desperately in need of attention table to deal with – see that is why we didn’t have a table, it’s nothing but bloody trouble. It sits there all inanimate, covered with homeless clutter just waiting for someone to come and deal with it. Fucking needy things, tables. Or the ebay pile which currently resides in our shower. I know, I know, it’s a funny place to use as a storage solution but what can I say, we’re zany us, wacky, alternative, up until a week or so ago we didn’t even have a table so using a shower cubicle to keep the ebay pile is just par for the course round here – you should see what we keep in our bathroom cabinet ;).

So rather than trail everything downstairs I took the camera, the laptop and a very big mug of tea upstairs and sat and photographed and listed a huge pile of stuff. This was hampered slightly by three things. The first was my camera being a bit poorly. It has a slider button to change settings from still, movies or playback and it keeps getting stuck on movies, so it only takes stills every so often. It also fell off my leg onto the floor with a big clatter last week and the lens cover thingy doesn’t work properly so it’s in semi retirement really while I decide whether it’s worth taking it to a camera repair place or not. The second thing I was hampered by was Davies who had decided his productive day would be ‘getting further on all my xbox games than I have ever got before’ and needed me to find a walkthrough online for the next bit of the Wallace and Gromit game he was playing and then read it out to him. I did that and he disappeared off again. The third thing was Scarlett who had decided to come and plead the case for approximately half the items I was intending to ebay and to ‘check everything is there’ on the rest. Which largely involved scattering stuff across the floor, declaring she was bored, distracting me from writing things like ‘perfect to take your little space ranger to infinity and beyond this Christmas’ about Toy Story cd roms on my ebay listings (I used to be in marketing you know!) and generally being a pest.

When the laptop battery ran out I brought the remaining stuff downstairs with me and sat and did a load more. By now the children had tired of X box so they did some drawings and then got the geomags out. They started to watch War of the Worlds, then started to watch some of the WWII in colour dvds I’d got out and finally we put Nightmare Before Christmas on because we decided that NOW was the optimum time for viewing it midway between Halloween and Christmas. I listed dressing up clothes and letterland flashcards and games laughing to myself at how easily phrases such as key stage one, early literacy, pre reading skills and the like tripped from my keyboard.

We had cinnamon french toast for lunch, I drank lots of tea, we had the heating on all day. The bantams came out to eat their layers pellets, shivered awhile then said ‘cluck this, it’s bloody freezing’ and went and huddled back inside again. It rained. Me and the kids had plenty of interesting conversations not one of which I can recall now, they drew me lots of pictures including keys on the front to tell me what the picture would be like inside and Scarlett helped make the cinnamon toast by ‘fighting the eggs’ (she meant beating! :lol:). We had a frantic me loading the kids into the car with Ady pulling round the corner home just in the nick of time so me and Davies got into his car instead and he and Scarlett went back into the house and I took Davies to swimming lessons. He was commended at being the best at jumping in the pool – which was good as it was something the rest of them had been doing last week when we’d not been there but Davies didn’t falter when she said ‘right everyone stand on the edge and jump in’ and just went for it :). He is making some headway generally actually, to the point I was enthused enough to pick up a timetable for public swimming times with the idea of maybe taking them during the week so he can get a bit of practise in. He won’t be olympic standard anytime in this incarnation but I’m very proud of his tenacity and ‘if I try hard enough I can do anything’ even when it’s bloody tough and doesn’t come naturally attitude. 🙂

Home for tea for him and I had an early bath while Ady put the children to bed. I’d had a real yearning for a curry last Friday night when we got home from camp, I wanted something really spicy and Ady had cooked a fairly disappointing one so I did one tonight and it was lovely, exactly what I’d wanted :). We watched Down with Love, well I did, Ady got pissed off with it and went off to watch something else in bed instead. And now, because I’m working in the morning and partaking of an Autumn Walk in the afternoon I’ll be off to bed too.

I’ve had an email back to say they can’t confirm price or availability for December 2008 until December 2007 but will contact me again on 1 December, which would suggest to me we are in with a good chance of getting it booked if no one else can until that date either.

So far we’ve got me, Em, Jo, Babs, Helen & Chris as possibles and willing to pay deposits, it’s a 35 bed hostel with just 7 rooms so we look to be only looking for another 2 families (or more if folk are up for sharing) – it’d be good to be able to book as soon as we can get a price and they’ll accept our booking, I know Kirsty & James were pretty up for it too – anyone else prepared to commit to a deposit?

Off to Magical Mondays this morning, Davies brought Crazy Frog with us, having got me to label his foot with ‘Davies’ just incase someone else happened to have brought one along too or found his and thought maybe it was theirs by mistake or something ;). I have to say I would be slightly more inclined to let that one go than the sonic screwdriver actually, but never mind :lol:.

I sat and did some drawing with Davies and Scarlett – there were some wooden shapes to stencil round so Davies did a penguin and then decided to turn it into something else. I was really impressed with his very confident lines he drew, with a very clear idea in his head of what he wanted. It looked to me like a cross between Angel Gabriel (cool name that ;)) or the Angel of the North so after checking it wasn’t Penguin Gabriel or the Penguin of the North I gave up guessing and he coloured it in and added detail creating a toucan instead. He then added various details around it to give it a habitat (a term we were discussing yesterday and has taken his fancy so is now into everything’s habitat) complete with insulation against the snow and a person juggling snowballs outside. Lots of his drawings put me in mind of Lucy in the sky with diamonds actually with more than a touch of the surreal about them at times, mixed with an odd sort of 7 year olds logic. Scarlett drew round a monkey which she coloured in beautifully using a mix of fluorescent yellow, pink, green and blue and to which she added a polar bear with claws, a blue lion, a giraffe so tall that it’s head went off the page and her name perfectly formed across the bottom – so equally planned out and achieving her exact aim but equally surreal to me :lol:. I am incapable of sitting with pens and paper and not drawing but was uninspired by the wooden shapes so copied the Crazy Frog toy and drew that instead. Davies liked the idea of that and wanted me to draw him one to colour in but instead I persuaded him to come and sit with me and I talked him through drawing it himself. We’ve not done anything like still life or indeed other art types before really and whereas I’m quite good at a reasonable copy of something he is good at drawing from memory or imagination but I showed him how to pick a bit to start with and build the drawing up around it, looking at a few bits which you are going to focus on and he did a really good job.

Davies then wandered off to do some baking with Eira (fruit scones) and Scarlett stuck around to draw a bit more and I meandered off to drink more tea and chat to adults. Eira came back to say she’d enjoyed the one to one with Davies, which isn’t the first time someone’s said that about him in the last few days and I’ve enjoyed a couple of conversations with him recently too, he’s been very pensive and ‘thinky’ which always makes for insightful and interesting observations from children I think. He seems to have a bit of a following from the younger children at MMs and took them all off to the cloakroom area today where they were closeted away, apparently playing Doctor Who and being occassionaly led out and paraded round by Davies before closeting themselves away again.

We left there having issued an invite to Lucy to come back to ours which she did bringing just one R (younger) and after a while the children disappeared upstairs to play leaving Lucy and I a chance, albeit a fairly regularly interupted one, to catch up a bit. They left, Davies and Scarlett stayed upstairs for a good while afterwards, had a bit of a kerfuffle about tidying up which they pretty much resolved themselves and then returned downstairs again. I got their opinion on something I was messing about playing with and then they sat down to watch tv and have an early tea before it was time to walk Davies round to Beavers.

Scarlett had a bath while Davies was gone and I was invited in to watch her ‘Diving Show’ which involved lots of splashing and spluttering but some fairly impressive staying under the water moves too. Ady arrived home from a very trying first day back at work after a holiday and he went round to collect Davies from Beavers. He had a bath while Scarlett and I had a very long and wearing debate about rewards and punishment and why I would like her to do stuff when I ask her because she wants to and can understand the reason for it instead of me threatening or bribing or coercing her into it. Ady was all for removal of dummies but by the end of my very long and tactical chatting he was in awe – way hey, thanks Alfie Kohn! She went off to bed after lengthy making up cuddles, Davies had hot chocolate and The Simspons and then he went to bed too.

Tomorrow is phase two of operation playroom with the aim being to get the table cleared and ready to receive the laptops. I also have a massive pile of ebay stuff to try and get listed and general day at home type stuff.

Davies and I were talking yesterday:

“When I was younger I used to think that when on adverts on TV they used to give you a number to call for something you couldn’t ring it until they’d finished the advert because they were busy being on TV at that time. Now I know they only make the advert once, film it and show it lots so you can ring them anytime.”

Candle the cat has been going mental at night since we’ve been home from NicCamp, doing lots of roaming the house and miaowing. Scarlett woke up the other morning and said to Ady ‘I heard Malice (our cat who died last year) last night Daddy’, Ady explained it would have been Candle scratching at the window or miaowing to get in when he chucked her out in the garden and Scarlett said ‘No Daddy, it was Malice, she can walk through walls!’.

Scarlett was watching the Doctor Who fest and on the first part of the last episode with Rose when Jackie is telling Rose and The Doctor about the ghosts and how Grandad Prentice visits every day and they are watching all the TV channels with ghosts featured (including Eastenders, the news and a Ghostwatch show) and someone says ‘there have been claims that some of the ghosts are starting to talk’ Scarlett said ‘I know what the ghost talk sounds like’ in her spooky way. I braced myself for something odd and she came out with ‘DELETE! DELETE!’ explaining that the ghosts are Cybermen but nobody knows it yet. And of course she was right, I’d just forgotten.

Which was neither busy or productive but did ease us back out of being with a big group and we got all the washing done!

Saturday morning I was back to work, having managed to only take 7 hours leave for the week. It was busy which was good as I was still tired and quite possibly nursing some sort of accumulated hangover, but nice to be back. I learnt that the full time colleague who has been trying to leave since I started there nearly a year ago has finally got another job (although she hasn’t actually handed her notice in yet). I’ll miss her but it will be nice to get another new colleague and as she had most of the more interesting jobs allocated to her it gives me a chance to try and nab some of them for myself too :). It also means that I will probably end up doing Storytime on my Thursdays and Baby Rhymetime if it falls on my Fridays as she used to take it in turns with the Senior Library Assistant. This is good too, makes my working day a bit more varied and gives me an ‘audience’ 😆 ;).

In the afternoon we headed into town. Scarlett spotted Fur Real Cat in a toy shop last month when we were getting a birthday pressie for Ben and has gone on about it ever since. I’d said ‘no way’ to spending £40 on a soft toy but actually she gets a lot of play out of soft toys, more so than anything else we’ve ever bought her and she does love cats (her other choice of gift being a real live kitten!) and it does just bring one small item into the house rather than yet more plastic crap so when I discovered Argos have a tenner off them bringing it down to £30 I reserved one online and we went to collect it. We found a parking space in the two hour zone so wandered round town for a couple of hours, soaking up the pre-Christmas buzz. We had a bit of a result in a charity shop too with me getting a Boden skirt, several books and bits for under a fiver. Then Ady and the kids went back to the car while I popped to Argos to collect the cat which miaowed all the way back to the car :lol:.

We watched tv and the children had an early night. We watched Flood which neither of us was particularly impressed with, infact I fell asleep. The effects were not magnificent, the storyline was a bit weak and rather natural disaster movie predictable with ex-wives and estranged sons and fathers being thrown together which seems to happen a lot in such films and we were very distracted by Nigel Planer being in it and kept saying ‘heaveeeee’ to each other a lot and giggling over the key lines.

Today I was reminded again of how lovely Ady is with tea brought to me in bed, roast pork served up and all the washing and drying up done, and glasses of wine and cups of tea brought to me at regular intervals – all that layby action must be playing on his conscience 😉 :lol:.

We headed off to a car boot sale this morning but other than a rock tumbler for me for the bargain price of £2 we returned empty handed. I’ve wanted a rock tumbler since I was a kid for no real reason other than just wanting one and never getting it so I’m a bit thrilled. It all seems in good working order despite looking pretty old so we might pop to the beach tomorrow and get some stones to tumble. It’ll be a good lesson in patience if nothing else – phase one (of five!) takes 8 days.

Once home the children did some drawing – Ady’d brought home some cardboard boxes from work to use as temporary storage in the playroom which haven’t been used for that but have been appropriated by the children as excellent for creating ‘houses’ so they’ve been making them up, deciding who they are going to house and then creating the perfect residence. Before camp they made a Simpsons house (Davies) complete with full quota of Simpsons family and a jaguar house (Scarlett) with all sorts of details and relevant stuff. Davies had picked up a Crazy Frog toy at the carboot sale for 20 p so he built a house for that with all sorts of ‘crazy’ details like a too small door because Crazy Frog apparently would go through the door all hunched into a ball in a crazy fashion. I sat and failed to sort out the playroom any further or list any items on ebay simply because I couldn’t be arsed to move :oops:. Scarlett and Ady went and washed his car and both got very wet.

We had lunch / dinner and discovered Doctor Who weekend on UKTV drama so spent the rest of the day watching that including the last one with Rose which both children insist they’d not seen before and had me sobbing at the end. We finished off with a couple of Simpsons episodes and then the children went to bed and Ady and I sat watching War programmes including the My Son Jack one which is still on now.

Tomorrow we launch back into normality, work for Ady, Magical Mondays and Beavers for us and we’re a full week lined up ahead of us as usual. I’m feeling rather more settled thanks to the good company and enjoyable time I had last week. The chance to ‘chew the fat’ a bit with friends, spend some time away from home and routine, do a fair bit of what all four of us do best and shine at and actually a bit of appreciating where we live on the couple of trips walking on the downs, along the beach and Ady taking people off to the airport has settled me back into being ok with where we are for now. I know it’s not what I want long term, I still have my dream and know Ady shares it too of a different lifestyle to what we’re living now, but I’m restored and rejuvenated sufficiently enough to bide time again for a while. I’m busy planning lots of stuff to look forward to and enjoying counting my blessings again rather than bemoaning my woes.

is just plain wrong. He’s on my list, hell, as some people found out last week he’s even on Ady’s list. I love the music of Cole Porter, but the two just go together about as well as a horse and tutu.

We’re planning a Goddard Tour of the North 2008.

We have a space in a garden in Leeds booked for us and the SuperTent for Wednesday 13th August so I think Ady and I will take the full week off and plan to travel northerly on the Friday before and come home the Sunday after. Any offers of garden space to pitch the SuperTent or even space in a real proper house will be noted into our diary and we’ll try and plot a route assuming we have weather on our side, which isn’t always a given in August nowadays.

Venue yet to be confirmed but I’m hoping for Helmsley or somewhere equally quaint and pretty, planning now for Christmas NicCamps 2008.

Dates will be Monday 1st – Friday 5th December.

On offer will be mulled wine, mince pies, maybe even a Christmas dinner if the cooking facilities in the hostel are up to catering for that sort of food. We’ll have a carol concert, parlour games, secret santa and Christmas decorations.

To book a YHA we’ll need 25% upfront (probably around £10 per person at most) although if I’m struggling to find the right youth hostel I might cast the search net wider.

Register your initial interest here and I’ll get more details to you as soon as I have them :).

Monday It felt very odd to be going on holiday but with very little to do in the way of last minute stuff. I’d done baking on Sunday but had no containers for it so added that to my shopping list, did very little all morning other than gather together 2 bags of clothes for the week (in a very unfussed fashion, knowing Ady would be coming home twice a day so anything forgotten could be collected – but I still managed to bring back one full bag unworn!), towels and coats and stow them all in the hall ready.

At midday we headed off to Tescos to get food for the week. Davies and Scarlett had very kindly been offered the chance to go to Magical Mondays with Lucy while I did the food shop but had chosen to come with me despite me explaining how tedious it would be so we found a parking space and a trolley and walked round half the store for the first load of shopping. I’d not done a list but had the meals for the week in my head and just picked up other stuff as we went by going up and down every single aisle. The tills were fairly quiet at that point so D and S loaded while I packed and it was all very cooperative and civilised :). I’d got a few bits for us too including our alcohol, some slipper socks for the kids and some tinned bits knowing they may well not be up for eating what everyone else was. Oh and some cheapo tupperwarealike for my baking, so I spent ages explaining why it had to go through seperately to the children. First shop was £92. We loaded it all into the car, then walked back with our empty trolley and went round the second half of the shop.

I had a brief chat with Lovely Em about custard which probably heralded the beginning of the end really – we were right at the end with just dairy free custard to find and a trolley which was so full we were all carrying loaves of bread in our arms and they got bored standing next to me while I was on the phone so were already slightly on the edge of wild and wanted to go and sit on the windowledge at the end of the tills while I loaded and packed. Which would have been fine if that’s what they had done but it sort of wasn’t, so I was starting to get a bit ragged what with trying to fit a full load of heaped groceries back into a trolley that they simply wouldn’t go back into once bagged, fretting slightly that my card might not quite have enough funds to foot the second bill and monitor two obviously school age children during school hours being all unruly and rowdy in a supermarket while I shopped for the masses! Just as I hoiked them back over to stand next to me with whispered shouting a middle aged woman (sort of my mum type age) leant over, put a hand on my shoulder and said in my ear ‘well I think they are wonderfully normal!’ and then walked off with me calling ‘thankyou!’ after her in very grateful tones and thinking that actually she was right – I do after all have a seven and nearly five year old who had just suffered two and a half hours trailing twice round a supermarket and through the tills with merely a last five minutes of acting like children right at the very end. 🙂

Home to quickly collect the baking, hastily decanted into new containers, the clothes and towels etc. and to say goodbye to the cat and the bantams and we were off. My timing was nearly an hour out though and from thinking I’d be at the hostel for 2pm it was actually closer to 3pm. I’d had a quick tour round / handover session with the hostel manager – hereafter known as ‘Badger Mark’, installed Davies and Scarlett in the lounge and started to empty my car into the foyer when Ros & Co arrived. Ros singled handedly carted all the food upstairs, despatched Davies and Scarlett to put all our stuff in our room, Amelia went and put door signs up on rooms once we’d located the white tack and I put all the food away and got the mulled wine on. It was a triumph of organisation! 🙂

Layla, Claudia and Jasper arrived shortly afterwards and were followed by everyone else through the course of the next couple of hours with Ady and Alison the last to arrive. We had the traditional first night dinner of raw jacket potatoes (will we never learn, Chris French did warn us ;)) and all settled in. The nights have rather blurred into each other but I know they all contained much chatting, laughter, teasing, texting, music, singing, consumption of alcohol and baking, enjoying in-jokes and creating new ones and generally having the sort of life-affirming experience that is spending time in the company of Very Good Friends. I had two nights of respectable 2.30am ish bedtimes, one traditional 5.30am one and one embarrassingly early pre-midnight (but only by about 10 minutes and only because I quite literally couldn’t keep my eyes open a moment longer) one. I did my legendary Beef or Veggie Stew and dumplings including dumpling tossing with Alison and Scarlett (who has markedly improved in a year :)), we did a very nice pasta with choice of sauce and garlic bread and the last night was taken care of with party food for children and sausages in rolls with onions and ketchup for adults. So with the baking too we ate very well :).

We had fireworks before potatoes which were nice – not the most impressive display ever but probably a good balance of bangs and flashes for our audience with just enough danger in the way of fallen over ones shooting into the crowd and setting fire to the fence with the catherine wheel that didn’t turn.

Tuesday Was The Day of The Walk. The Autumn Walk (or as Ros christened it for Rei’s benefit given she is keen on neither Autumn or Walking, it was the Winter Fly :lol:). We started with almost a full quota of walkees but only a handful managed the full Autumn Walk. We were only out about an hour and a half but did a circuit including a very steep hill indeed (I had to borrow James’ inhaler once we reached the top). We were treated to the sight of three deer dashing across the downs (I really want to say majestically about that so I will :)), amazing blue skies, sea views, downland scenery across Sussex and the coast and felt totally justified in topping up our mulled wine levels again having been all active and fresh-airy. We actually left the mulled wine on a gentle simmer before we left so we were able to bring a tray down outside and greet the final returners with a glass in our ‘those who made it’ picture.

I was particularly proud of Scarlett who managed the whole walk without a murmur of complaint, walked the whole thing (ie didn’t ask for carries or piggybacks) and actually ran the last bit when I realised looking at the pictures at the end that she was the youngest. All those Seasonal Walks we partake of must have done her good ;).

Wednesday Had been the lastest night to bed the night before for most of us I think so in the morning there were lots of us looking like this:

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Having seen the sea the day before from afar we’d made a plan to go to the beach on Wednesday and have chips for lunch. So having got stew cooking that’s what we did. I’d been rather wobbly about the fact we were on holiday just 4 miles from home and had planned not to leave the hostel in the car all week so the idea of visiting ‘our’ beach which we spend a fair bit of time at anyway felt slightly odd, but actually it was one of the highlights of the week. Ros and I collected money and went to the chip shop for as many chips as we could buy for £20, Lucy and The Rs joined us (bringing ketchup :)) and we sat on the beach, in the mild November sunshine, with the children clambering on rocks with their friends, playing chase the waves, eating chips and generally not being in school! Every so often our lifestyle and Home Education gives me a feeling of utter joy, total freedom and an overwhelming feeling that these simple moments in life are what makes it – what punctuates the mundane, what form the mental (and these days often the actual digital images) snapshots of our lives that we flick back through when questionning our choices and underline for us why we do the things we do. Sitting there on ‘our’ beach, surrounded by friends from all over the country and just enjoying the simple pleasure of cheap chips, a sunny day and the freedom to be there rather than anywhere else in the world was pure bliss. Ladies and Gentlemen you can’t buy it in the shops but you can collect it free of charge at NicCamps ;)!

Back for mulled wine, dumpling tossing and general being together. I had my usual need to be left alone during the late afternoon which I managed to deal with by closing the kitchen door, putting the music up loud on my phone and bopping round for a bit while I made dumplings. It didn’t last long and by the time I was joined by Ros, Layla and Alison I was happy to have company again. A sad side to the week was Ali and Freya only putting in a brief appearance from Tuesday lunchtime to Wednesday evening due to Freya being poorly. 🙁 It had the plus side of meaning there was indeed a lack of cous-cous but for their company I would even tolerate chickpeas and lentils being around so it was a real shame they were so brief in their stay :(.

Thursday Saw the first NicCamps Cabaret Event. The first Kessingland one was very much an adult introduced idea having thought it was nice at HESFes and the second one was still perhaps more based on parental indulgence than actual talent but having not given a NicCamps one a thought a request from one of the children a couple of weeks ago came so we did just that and had a half an hour programme with 11 acts on Thursday morning. We had instruments, singing, dancing, collaborative efforts between groups and some born during the previous couple of days. What was apparent however was that each ‘act’ was treated with respect and appreciation by the children and even some pride in their peers talents, obvious pride from parents but also a realisation that amoung our number we have talented, confident, performers with real skill and natural leanings towards their chosen arts. It was a really enjoyable half an hour :).

A special mention has to go to Catie who sang so beautifully, with such a tender song that she reduced at least three of the adults to tears.

After lunch there was a need to chase people away so preparation for Claudia’s party could commence so a mass exodus happened. I’m not actually sure where everyone went but Ady headed off with James, Katy, Jan and Jonathan and all assorted children to Shoreham airport followed by the park. They had a great time apparently and the pictures certainly suggest it was enjoyed by all. I stayed behind with various others and helped with decoration, food prep, oh and drank mulled wine ;).

Once everyone was back and had their heads in the game a really rather impressive party happened for Claudie with a High School Musical theme.

The last night was lovely, a real sitting around chatting for hours evening with hot dog style sausages and lots of leftover baking to finish (including some top ups from The Babs). We had really nice chats about how fab Home Ed and camps generally and all our children are, we talked about our favourite bits of the weeks – and our least favourite, there were some wonderful quotes from Chris French and James, plenty more laughing and that slightly surreal chatter we always seem to descend into such as planning other themed camps ; Kylie Camp, Rolf Camp, Survival Camp, NicCamps the Musical and more.

Today was the usual mass group effort to get the hostel straight. This always works best when enough people have left to have the space to tidy and I really like that last pot of tea moment when the remaining few use up the last of the milk and have a tea break before setting to the last little bit. The remaining children were all out climbing trees and chatting to a shepherd who came up each morning with two sheep dogs and did proper sheep herding in the field opposite the hostel. The children had been watching him each morning and today Davies, Claudia and Scarlett spent some time chatting to him and came back full of the names of the dogs, details about them and sheep herding, they were really buzzed up about it :). Ady had already headed off to take Katy and Becca to the station so Chris and Helen, Layla and Si and I were the last to leave having bid Badger Mark a farewell (his inspection of the hostel consisted of him staying behind his counter top, looking in an exagerated fashion from left to right and declaring it all ‘fine!’ :lol:). We were home in ten minutes! 😆

The rest of today has consisted of lots of not a lot really, the kids were early to bed and after a huge bath I’m thinking I won’t be too far behind them.

I’d say it was probably my best NicCamps yet, nearness to home aside I think everyone who came got what they wanted to from it, which is great. I enjoyed the evenings, watching my children mix and mingle when they wanted to and find their own things to do when they weren’t in the mood. I love the way we all know each other so well now and different adults and children all have relationships with each other. I got a poem from Lovely Em (xxx) and even if we didn’t manage the child formed letters spelling out NicCamps it was still something of a triumph I think :). Thanks all for attending, mentions to Sarah, Stella, Bob and Katy and Merry who were almost theres and would have made the mix all the richer with their presence and of course a very special thanks for the day visitor who really made it special with their attendance ;).

Today was baking day in preparation for NicCamps. I had a plan to make parkin to take too (double portions infact, one for tonight and one for NicCamps) but I couldn’t find my loaf tin and then got bored looking for it so gave up. I did make a couple of trays of flapjacks, rice crispie cakes, chocolate chip rock cakes, snickerdoodles and some cheese scones. Ady and Davies played with the brio, looked up some clips of things on youtube and then went to Tescos to get fireworks. Scarlett helped me with the baking.

Predicatably Scarlett woke this morning as though she had never been ill at all and has had a busy and full day with no signs of the feverish child sitting up on the sofa til gone 11pm last night. So that’s that then, Davies has already had it and I seem to have some sort of immunity to illnesses caught from my own children so I guess we’re safe (ha! famous last words!).

Scarlett was, as usual not just good company while baking but actually quite helpful. We listeded to music so did some kitchen dancing as we baked and plenty of singing into our wooden spoons – how nice to still have a young enough child to not be embarrassed by her mother just yet ;). She did lots of weighing and measuring and out loud but working out in her head maths including stuff like ‘you wanted five, that’s three so I need two more’ mumbled mostly to herself. We then worked out together that if we wanted to double a recipe of 8oz flour and I accidentally put 9oz in the first time we’d need to do one less than 8 next time to make up for the one more than 8 that time and therefore needed 7oz. I overheard Davies later tonight dealing out glowsticks between four children and casting just a glance at them before deciding everyone got two each and when someone asked for three saying ‘no there aren’t enough for three each – just two each and two left over’. 🙂

The bakefest took about four hours with various clearing up inbetween, Scarlett did some washing up (I rewashed it again afterwards, she’s good but can’t have the water hot enough to clear flapjack saucepans effectively), then I prepared potatoe gratin and slow cooker chicken to be put on ready for our dinner later tonight and had time for a sit down with a cup of tea before we were needing to leave for Chris and Julie’s.

We called into the farm supplies store on the way and got more layers pellets for the bantams, passed by the legs rings on the basis that they are too feather-legged to wear them, ogled the coops for ideas – I’m planning a supercoop build in the spring – and then got to Chris and Julie’s. They’d requested balloons on the basis it was a ‘fireworks party’ and ‘you can’t have a party without balloons’ according to Jack – gotta love that 5 year olds logic 🙂 so Chris and I blew up loads of balloons while Julie made apple cake and Ady went out to get some milk cos they’d run out. The children played while we all sat and chatted and then I made some jam tarts (scoffing at having to use readymade pastry although the jam was homemade) and some spiced fruit juice and Julie tidied the kitchen. It got dark around 5ish so Chris and Ady cooked up some sausages and burgers outside which we brought indoors to eat and then all headed back out again for fireworks. Maisie isn’t a big lover of noisy ones so they’d got some fairly tame garden ones and we had sparklers. I did a health and safety chat about the sparklers which had Maisie in tears and both my two insisting on using Chris’ bamboo cane sparkler holders once Jack and Maisie had finished with them. To be honest I thought these were more dangerous than simply stating ‘this end is hot, if you touch it it will burn your hand’ which was all my chat consisted of as when waved around the sparkler was prone to fly out and let’s face it what are sparklers for if not waving around? I think my patience with everyone and everything sort of wore out around then and my good spirits didn’t really return until after we got home and the children had gone to bed. I can’t bear unwarranted hysteria :rolls:.

Anyway…

We went back in for apple cake and jam tarts before coming home when all the children showed signs of needing to be in bed and not in polite company anymore. We drove home firework spotting and promising more big and noisy fireworks tomorrow night. Davies and Scarlett went off to bed and were both asleep very early, we had baths and dinner and now I’m thinking I should probably head off to bed too in honour of not expecting to be in bed at any sort of early hour any time for the coming week. 🙂

I was up until nearly 2am with Tarly and eventually went to bed leaving her still awake last night. She was cheery enough despite her dreadful cough and quite happy for me to go off to bed and leave her once I’d completed her checklist of glass of water, blanket, finding a lost dummy and kissing her goodnight. To be honest I fully expected to be seeing her again before morning but the next thing I knew Ady was bringing me a cup of tea and nagging me to get up and it was 830am.

In a bid to be productive I didn’t sit down or turn on my laptop but got straight on with pegging out some washing and sticking another load on and then headed straight to the playroom. It’s been in a limbo state since last weekend with one unit dismantled and removed but all it’s contents stacked up in a corner and the other unit still there. So I cleared the interior while Ady cleared the top and then I dismantled that one and he took it away. Then to steal a metaphor from Allie it was rather like a sliding puzzle game as I worked round the room clearing one area to put something in it’s place before clearing the next area. I had four shelving units to make up and put against various walls but needed to move the piles of stuff from the place they were going to go, hoover the floor where they were going to stand, load them up with stuff to clear floor space in order to start the next unit and so on. It took pretty much all day. We now have four units round the walls containing all the puzzles, games, toys etc, a table (! 😯 I know!!!!) and two chairs ready for my old laptop to be set up and with a plan to look out for a pc on freecycle to take it’s place soon as it is on it’s last legs and needs an external disc drive and has a very wobbly wireless connection due to it meeting it’s demise from falling off the sofa and having all it’s usb ports smashed up, the printer and the laminator. All the craft stuff is in drawer units under the table and the rail of dressing up clothes is under the window. It looks like a cross between a classroom, a school-at-home area and a workspace for junior creative types! :). Really pleased with it though and when it’s totally finished (still need to clear said table of ‘stuff’, set up the laptop and go through the drawers to clear out dried up felt pens, drawn on paper and do a grand pencil sharpening exercise) I think it’ll be great. Next plan is to either paint the walls or get the children to do some colourful and creative artwork to go on them before moving on to sorting Davies’ bedroom out followed by Scarlett’s. Our ensuite shower is currently filled with piles of stuff ready to list on ebay when we get back from NicCamp and we got rid of several bin liners full of ‘stuff’. 🙂

While we did all this Scarlett mostly dozed on the sofa and then played on Barbie.com for ages while Davies made a complicated brio track round the lounge and popped in to ‘help’ in the playroom every now and then. I got all the washing done too and did the hoovering and washing up before finally sitting down with a glass of wine and my laptop in the late afternoon.

Ady and Davies popped to the supermarket for various bits while Scarlett and I cuddled on the sofa. She is still far from right and has quite a high temperature but is better than she was yesterday, so I’m hopeful she will be much improved tomorrow and fine for Monday – children always seem to bounce back way quicker than adults. It seems to be a nasty cold which effected Davies and Scarlett in different ways – she tends towards a temperature and a croup-like cough with bad colds whereas Davies suffers with blocked nose and earaches – and I probably need to take some blame for bad mothering dragging them out and about in the cold for three evenings this week :oops:.

Tomorrow is baking day – I may well not bother doing any more to the playroom and just bake all morning instead, I want to do several different things including some parkin to take over to Chris and Julie’s tomorrow afternoon for fireworks and a few things to bring to NicCamps.