One word? When seven would do…

The first time we went to Legoland was September 2004. Me and the kids have been at least five times since, today was Ady’s third time.

Here we are 3 years ago:

Here we are today:

Things you may notice:

1 My hair is shorter now
2 We all look older, this is most noticeable in Scarlett, followed by Davies, then me, then Ady.
3 We spent money back then – note those carrier bags. We were also heading back to a HOTEL for the second night having been sightseeing in Windsor the day before back in 2004.
4 Ady is wearing the same jumper! 😆

We had an ace time – got there around 11am; Scarlett went on every ride except the big rollercoaster which she is still fractionally too short for and the ages 6 plus driving school. She decided she didn’t want to bother with the age 3-5 driving school so her and I went on the boats while Ady took Davies on the 6 plus one. I had probably about equal time with each child as we swapped adults throughout the day. Davies and I went on everything. It was quiet enough to go on almost every ride twice or more as there were no queues so we simply stayed on and went round again. In the case of the new Viking River Splash ride we stayed on and had five (count ’em five!) goes. We loved that lots! Our third ride of the day, ten minutes after arrival was the new Xtreme Team Challenge dinghy on a water slide ride so we had wet bums from the off, which meant a couple of goes on Pirate falls got us soggier and the 5 rides on Viking River Splash pushed us into ‘cant possibly get any wetter’ territory :lol:. We missed Johnny Thunder and only managed to see the 4D show that me and the kids had already seen, but it was still good a second time. We did dino dippers (3 times) and finished up with 4 goes on the round and round water ride (never know what that one’s called). T’was fab :).

I’ve weeded my flickr photos right down but don’t apologise at all for still having loads of almost duplicates, but each and every one makes me smile at how happy we all looked. I’m pretty thrilled to realise we’re edging ever closer to ‘proper’ thrill ride theme park territory – Ady is terrified!

We left about 530pm, got home about 730pm having called into Sainsburys for ‘dalek’ (garlic) bread as requested by the kids. They’d got changed into dry clothes back at the car but I’d not managed to pack a spare pair of trousers for me, so stripped off as I walked in the front door having sat with a wet bum for nearly 5 hours :lol:. Warm baths all round, tea for them followed by falling into bed, tea for us and I’m about to fall into bed myself as I’m working in the morning.

I’ll leave with a couple of pictures which for me really sum up our day – check out the pure delight and sheer happiness on these faces 🙂

and these very wet bums!

We were sitting watching TV tonight and I commented on something and Ady took on a superior tone and proclaimed ‘well when you’re on TV and…’ before he saw my face, realised just what he’d said and we both fell about laughing. I’m so not going to let him get all starry and refuse to hoover! 😆

I worked today, it was busy with lots of bitty queries and annoyances. The photocopier conked out and we had computer classes using up all the pcs for most of the day which always results in people coming and sort of standing there expecting you to wave a magic wand and summon up some more pcs or something. I did laugh with one woman who mock-frustrated said to me ‘well you’ve got no computers, no photocopier….’ and I said ‘yep, tech wise we’re a poor offering today. Can I interest you in any books?’ 😆

Ady and the kids spent lots of time in the garden. Unsurprisingly we have bedding plants aplenty so they planted them in, Ady gave them both all the plants from the QVC featured Autumn Plant Container kit and let them do their own designs. They de-chickened the garden although we’re keeping the run and coop incase we get offered wildlife from anyone – we’ve already been asked if we want a partridge. They also went to Tescos to get picnic supplies for tomorrow and had everywhere tidy when I got home at 5.

We had a big library book gathering up session with a pile ready to be taken back on Saturday and I read the children the big pile of childrens books. We had various titles including a few stories, one about God recounting various bible stories cartoon strip style and a junior non-fiction about signs of the zodiac as a result of a conversation I’d had with one of the children (not even sure which of them it was now, probably Davies) and ordered a book in to give more information. So we looked at the information on each star sign to see if we are like we are supposed to be and decided Ady and Scarlett are very true to their signs, Davies is less so and mine is not remotely like me – and never has been. We talked a bit about planet alignment too and how ‘proper’ star charts are drawn up. I once worked with a girl who was very into all that sort of stuff and did a tarot card reading on me and my whole star chart too. She was very into spiritual stuff and actually did manage to predict a fair few things, albeit in a very vague way, that have since happened to us, a good few years before there was any hint that they might happen. I must catch up with her actually, it’s been well over a year and I know where she was last working so could probably find her fairly easily… interesting friends like her really shouldn’t be allowed to slip away!

They went off to bed early, which was a pointless exercise as they both stayed awake for ages. Scarlett has a cold and I’m pretty sure Davies is going down with it (which at least explains Scarlett’s ‘trickiness’ the last few days) but I’m hopeful they’ll still be on form for Legoland tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it actually, Ady hasn’t been with us for over 2 years so being able to go on everything will be a real novelty :).

Well okay, Allie said she liked looking at them, Si commented that Tarly hadn’t changed much and I liked looking back at old baby pics of my once-upon-a-baby’s I thought I’d dredge up a few more:

Who’s this then?

and this?

An easier one

Awww

and a personal favourite

Cinema this morning, lunch and play with toy animals followed by visit to the park where Davies learnt to climb onto the metal tube on the climbing frame and then from that onto the pitched roof. Which he failed to manage to climb down from. Three times 🙄 :lol:.

Home for tea for Davies then off to Badgers while Ady and Scarlett stayed home. I sat in the car and read my book and ate toffee then came home. Everyone had baths, Davies has just appeared downstairs at gone 1030pm 😯 with his sketch pad and a four page story board story he’s been up in his bed doing since he went to bed around 8pm! Very impressive but I thought he’d been asleep for well over an hour.

Work tomorrow.

We’ve just been to the park. I tend to avoid parks generally to be honest, I don’t like them much but if I am to be seen in one it is almost always during school hours when it’s just us and the odd toddler. But today when we’d got back from the cinema and had some lunch I was itching to get back out and get some fresh air. I was trying to convince the children to go to Highdown Gardens or the beach but they were only really up for the park. This coincided with Lucy texting me so I asked if they wanted to meet us there and we headed off to the park. We arrived just after 3pm and had about 5 minutes there before the first schoolchildren started trickling in. It was pretty full within about ten minutes and Davies was particularly impressed with the leaping and clambering and zipwire tricks of some of the older boys who appeared. One of them followed us into the smaller park and was showing Davies some clever climbing. I heard Davies say ‘Oh I’m seven too’ and then realised from a distance that they’d moved on to school talk. The boy’s body language told it’s own story although we weren’t close enough to hear every word. Davies fell silent, Scarlett was being equally determined back in response to the boy’s aggression and eventually he stropped off as I walked over. He kept looking over from the sidelines though.

The conversation apparently went along the lines of him asking why Davies wasn’t wearing school uniform and Davies saying he was Home Educated. The boy claimed that ‘isn’t even a word!’ so they both explained to him that you don’t actually have to go to school and that they don’t. He started to get cross with them then and said that everyone over five HAS to go to school and that Davies must have been lying about being seven. That was when Davies fell silent and Scarlett carried on insisting that yes, he was seven and that she was nearly five and she didn’t go to school or nursery either. The boy tolerated this for a little while before telling her to ‘shut up’ and then aiming a kick at the climbing frame he stomped off, scowling as he went.

I actually felt quite sorry for him, chances are your average seven year old doesn’t know that there is such a thing as Home Education and has very likely been told that everyone over five does have to go to school so to be confronted with living proof that you’ve been lied to is probably quite hard to swallow. I’m sure even the happiest-at-school child sometimes questions why they have to go, I definitely remember asking why I had to when I was a child and chances are the usual answer is ‘because everyone has to go to school to learn’.

On the way home we talked about it a bit more and I explained that although we mix with lots of other home educators so it all feels very normal to us actually what we do *is* different to most people, and does attract lots of questions and will mark them out. I said that I get asked about it pretty much every time I meet someone new and the older they get the more they will be asked about it too. I told them that I am very proud of what we do and happy that we are different because it is something that I really believe in and am happy to talk to people about but that if at any point either of them feel unhappy about being so different then the choice is theirs to make. I’ve always been very aware that this is a big deal and a big part of Home Ed. There are times when I get fed up with answering questions and getting comments about it and I’m sure there will be times when they do too, but it is one of the downsides that I want them to be aware of and learn to deal with when it comes up.

We went to the cinema this morning for the first of the films we’ve booked to see through filmeducation over the next week or so. Today we saw Earth which was probably the one I was least expecting the children to sit quietly through as its a documentary rather than an animation or a story. We arrived early and saw Allie, Leo and Pearl in the foyer aswell as a couple of other semi-familiar faces of local HEors we know on a smile and nod type basis having crossed paths with at various places before. We sat right at the front as usual, for that full on cinema experience and were joined by Allie, P & L down there. The room quickly filled up with various school groups, probably the busiest screening we’ve been for for a filmeducation event.

I like going to the cinema like that, you know that there won’t be peace and quiet in which to watch the film, you know there will be lots of shushing, kerfuffles as children get up to go to the loo and a scramble to get out before the school parties start lining up and blocking the aisles, but I also know that if Davies and Scarlett talk to me or need to get up to go to the loo themselves then no one is going to get fed up with you.

Earth was very much a film that, Scarlett particularly, needed to talk bits of through as they happened. There were several incidents of animals attacking other animals, which she is fine with but needs to talk about as she watches. There was some breathtaking filming of scenery and ariel shots that had the audience exclaiming over – I enjoyed Davies and Pearl’s simultaneous ‘whoa!’ at one point 😆 and it was interspersed with some light relief such as ducklings on their virgin flight, furiously flapping their little two day old wings but still landing with a full body slam on the forest floor of leaves. I learnt a few things – probably almost imediately forgotten again, but interesting anyway.

Scarlett got restless towards the end and sat on my lap for the last bit so we could whisper to each other but having driven home singing along to Queen at the tops of their voices they went straight to the playroom to get the toy animals out, have dug out examples of all the animals from the film and are recreating bits of it coupled with their own imaginative additions. It always amazes me how little sitting very still listening to every single word and paying complete undivided attention is actually required by children to learn ever such a lot.

We had a quiet day at home today. We painted some of the airdrying clay stuff that had dried, watched ‘Beat the Boss’, ‘The Really Wild Show’ and various other CBBC shows followed by Lassie, which neither of the children were interested in so we gave up on and then ‘Meet The Robinsons’.

We made our Christmas cake, which took nearly 5 hours to cook on a very low heat and all had a stir and made wishes. The house smelt like Christmas all day according to D & S :lol:.

They played a very long and convoluted game involving setting their chairs and tables up, gathering belongings from all round the house including pillows and blankets, toothbrushes and toothpaste and lots of toys. They promised to put them all back again and actually they did!

We had lunch and as it was still raining – it’s poured down all day long – I offered them the choice of wellies and walking or driving and staying in the car round to the post office to send some ebay parcels. I was surprised when they both chose the car as normally the chance to splash in puddles is not passed up lightly, but it was rather cold and miserable as well as raining.

I spent some time pondering what to do with myself as they were busy playing and I was bored. I ate some chocolate, wasn’t in the mood for reading and eventually settled on some games from gamesgarage to while away some time before swimming lessons. We then had the almost weekly hunt the goggles debacle which were eventually located in the swimming bag in the washing machine! 🙄 Ady made the mistake of laughing at me when I phoned him to ask if he knew where they might be so it was a very brief handover of Scarlett before Davies and I headed off to the swimming pool.

Davies had a good lesson, they were depleted in number down to just six tonight – lots of bugs, colds and sickness about – which was good as they all got more individiual attention and he continues to try really hard and make week on week progress, and above all, really enjoy it :). It had finally stopped raining when we came out of the pool and I was half tempted to go for a walk along the beach with him but his dinner was ready and waiting at home so we didn’t. Scarlett has suddenly taken to watching Cbeebies late in the afternoon which amuses me and annoys Davies so she snuggled on my lap watching some nonsense about Night Gardens while Davies had his tea and then I went off to have a bath. I put a face pack on which Scarlett was most interested in until she got distracted by some nature programme Ady and Davies were watching, so they all watched that together and I bathed in peace, then the children went off to bed and I cooked dinner.

Not the most exciting day ever and I could certainly have been way more productive but I’ve not been feeling 100% so after such a busy weekend it probably did me good to do very little today really. Tomorrow we’re off to the cinema for the first of the 4 films we’ve booked for filmeducation film week so an early start is required. In the afternoon, providing the weather has cheered up a bit I need to start tacking the laundry mountain and working out how to start drying stuff inside again for the winter.

When I was younger if I ever imagined myself as a parent (which I tried not to, to be honest!) it was always as a mother of children, rather than babies. I can’t say I hated every moment of Davies and Scarletts’ babyhoods because of course I didn’t, but it was on the whole something I endured, looking forward to the children ahead rather than actively enjoyed.

I liked seeing Jasper and Anna this weekend (my favourite babies :)) and getting smiles and gurgles from them. I like the potential of babies – the first steps, first words and so on, but really I was eager to get that stage over and done with when D&S were little. When Scarlett was little I had a couple of mornings childcare a week but only for a year before we moved home again and certainly the first five years plus of motherhood for me were very intense. Time off from the children was rare and spent fretting over whether they were ok or not anyway, I have still only had one night away from them since birth and that was very recently. I’d like to think I’ve not been defined by my children but they have certainly been a pretty permanent fixture, both physically and mentally for the last seven years. For most of that time I’ve not sat down without someone sitting on my lap, not walked along without someone holding my hand, not crossed a road without asking ‘is it safe to cross?’, not got in a car without buckling two little people into their seatbelts first.

The liberation of not needing a pushchair is still recent enough to feel a novelty, being able to have a bag that doesn’t have to be big enough to carry nappies and wipes and calpol and spare clothes is still a luxury and going to bed every night secure in the knowledge that I am very unlikely to be woken a couple of hours later by a middle of the night wail is something I am still grateful for rather than taking for granted. But suddenly I’m aware that I am simply not needed quite so much all the time. The children can both open the car doors, close them behind them and get their own seat belts on and off. They often answer my phone for me, they can operate all of the tv, dvd, cd and so on better than I can. They can brush their own teeth, wash their own hair, get dressed and undressed, draw their own curtains and put their own bedside lights on. They can get their own food and drink, wipe their own bottoms. They know how stuff works and they know how to find out things for themselves.

I am still very much needed, just in different – and to me, way more interesting, fun, enjoyable – ways. When I first had children September 2007 was always going to be a landmark date, an age of independance as it would be when my youngest started school, when I had a seven and an almost-five year old. Clearly that’s changed over the years but the shift is there just the same. I wouldn’t have had the last 7 years any other way I don’t think, it’s been very hard work, easily the most challenging period of my life so far. There have been times I have felt trapped, frustrated, undervalued, something of a martyr for doing it all myself, although short of paying for help there hasn’t been anyone else to turn to for it really. But it’s all been worth it. One of the things that always amuse me when talking to people about Home Education is the shocked ‘isn’t that a big responsibility?!’ remark which I always answer with ‘no being a parent is a big responsibility, this is merely a small extension of that to me’.

I feel like I’ve done a lot of spade work this last 7 years, laid a lot of foundations, put in a huge amount of initial effort. I know there is plenty of hard work still ahead (I’m just not thinking about puberty yet! ;)) but I think the grafting, the really tough stuff, the bits that I was always feeling like a blind person feeling my way through are behind me. There were several times this weekend that life just suddenly seemed so much easier with older children and on Sunday walking in the sunshine, finally able to hold Ady’s hand and chat to him while the children ran off ahead, always in sight, often coming back to talk to us or ask us to watch something, but not *needing* us constantly was a lovely feeling.

I had a nice long lie in this morning. Scarlett was up early but came and got into bed with me when Ady went to work, and then got back up and went downstairs with Davies when he got up. I got up to find them happily Xboxing so I pootled about getting washing done and hung out, packed lunch ready and the kitchen tidied up while they had breakfast and got dressed.

Lucy and The Rs arrived and we went off to Magical Mondays. My big clock (and those of you who have been to our house will know just how big I mean when I say that) in the lounge has been running progressively slower as it’s battery runs out which has been really messing with my head. Even though I knew at each stage how slow it was (20 minutes by the end of today when we finally replaced the battery) it kept catching me out. When I was a child I had a digital clock radio beside my bed and a digital clock display on my record and tape player in my room, which you could see both of at the same time from certain places in my bedroom. I used to be obsessed with having them change at the exact same moment and sit for ages getting it synchronised. We got to MM first after Allie and Leo and Allie had got some air drying clay out. It’s made with fibres in which aid the strength when it hardens so by the end of the session we were refering to it as ‘hair drying clay’. :lol:. Allie had requested that it all got used up so she didn’t have to take it to and fro on the bus any more so we took that very seriously and our hearth is currently filled with our creations from today. I made a pot with 20 individual compartments to keep Davies’ teeth in as they fall out. I then made little individual lids for each compartment which he can number when he paints it up. We then made a header bit for it with ‘Davies’ on it and Davies made a little tooth man to sit on top which he used as the dot on the i. He decided to make something for me and his creation underwent several incarnations including pot and volcano before ending up as a mug with a M on it and a handle. He then made a coaster for it (cue much heckling about why you’d want a coaster without a table ;)). Allie had made a tealight holder with cut out shapes which inspired me to create a tealight holder in the shape of a pumpkin cut out with a lid, so Davies made one of those too – infact his is probably better than mine! Then while I made a witch, on a Halloween craft kick he went on to make a Shrek and a donkey. Scarlett made a mug / pot / pumpkin with a lid and then when I went outside to get a stick to be my witches broomstick I asked her to make a cat to ride on the broomstick too which she really went for, creating a really very recognisable cat. Davies actually went back to the clay again later and made a tank complete with a seperate ramp for it to go up for shooting stuff. It was really nice to sit with D&S and do stuff as often they go off on their own at MM while I hang out with the adults instead. Various adults came and sat at the table anyway so we still managed some chatting and banter including an interesting conversation about children swearing.

We then had lunch and Davies and Scarlett did indeed wander off and do their own thing while I did some chatting to adults followed by clearing up. It was another nice session there even though I didn’t manage my planned activity of biscuit baking and decorating. We’re getting a lot out of MM at the moment, which is great, having had various false starts with Home Ed groups over the years it’s really nice to feel so much a part of one and that we are both contributing and benefitting from membership. 🙂

Davies and Scarlett hadn’t really spent much time with Richard and Rebecca at group (Scarlett played with them a bit towards the end) so they were all wanting to have a play back at ours when we got home. Lucy and I were in the kitchen (I was cooking quiche for dinner) and left them to it. Scarlett and Rebecca were playing together in Scarlett’s room so Davies struggled a bit until he came and helped me with quiche making before luring them all to watch / play X box with him. Lucy and The Rs left, the children had an early tea – well Davies did, he loved the quiche, Scarlett was less keen and picked all the pastry off to eat then gave up and painted my toenails instead :roll:. We watched The Sarah Jane Adventures which we’ve managed to miss every episode of up til now then took Davies round to Beavers where he and Scarlett were greeted with people rushing up to say they’d seen them on the front page of Adur magazine :).

Tarly and I popped in the shop to get some potatoes and found Cadburys Wispas back on sale with the tagline ‘some things are best left in the 80s, others are not!’ which delighted me. Wispas were my favourite chocolate bars EVER. So we bought one and shared it on the way home. I’d promised to do a fairy puzzle book with her when Davies was at Beavers so we sat and did that, then watched Storymakers together. Ady was home in time to walk round and collect Davies and then I nipped off to Tescos for various bits and pieces including the ingredients for our Christmas cake which I want to make this week.

I got back to find the chimney smoking with the first fire of the season lit and roaring away and both children in their pjs. I’d bought Davies a new bedside light as the illuminated globe which he was using had blown its bulb and actually is ok as a nightlight but not for when he is reading in bed as it’s not bright enough, so I’d got a clip on goose necked spotlight to clamp onto his bed for him to angle as he pleases. He was delighted with that and went straight to bed to use it!

I’d listed a meet up at a local park in the sussex newsletter and on the local HE yahoo group but I think there is another local regular park meet up on Tuesdays anyway and no one has contacted me to say they want to come along so our plan is to do some painting of clay if it’s dry, maybe make the Christmas cake, wrap and post some ebay parcels that cheque payments clear for tomorrow and watch some of the backlog of dvds I’ve borrowed from work (Lassie, Doctor Dolittle 1, 2 and 3) followed by swimming in the evening.

Feeling quite festive today actually, but this has more to do with wandering down the seasonal aisle at tescos and getting two boxes of my most favourite Christmas delicacy, which I am tucking into as I type. 🙂

Friday – I worked all day and Ady was off all day at home with the children. They put Freddie, Wobble and Punzel into two cat carriers and took them over to our friend Bruce’s farm. Apparently they had a great time there playing with the farm dog, cows, chickens, ducks, geese, donkey and horses – the children that is! The chickens were transfered into a big pen together where they’ll stay for a few days before getting let out with the rest of the 30 or so chickens who free range round the farm. We were commended on rearing good looking birds and the children are very happy that they have gone to a good home. They came home with a load of fresh eggs and the promise they can go there as often as they like. Of course what they actually want to do is live on a farm all of their own, but this is a good compromise for now :).

I had a good day at work. In the morning I did Baby Rhyme Time . We had about 12 babies with their parents /carers and I’d prepared a schedule of nursery rhymes. Yvonne introduced me and said it was my first time and away I went. We had ‘warm up’ songs, some action songs, we had the instruments out (shakers, rattles, bells etc.) for some noisy songs, then some ‘calm down’ songs followed by the goodbye one. It went really well and I introduced ‘Five little men in a flying saucer’ to the Lancing Library repertoire as a new ‘track’ which went down well 😆 The rest of my day went well, I’m really feeling part of the team and get sought out for lots of the in jokes to be let in on etc. which is really nice :). Can’t believe it’s getting on for a year since I started – I’m so not the new girl anymore really.

Ady and the children picked me up at 5pm and we headed straight to Reading to Chris and Alison’s. We made really good time arriving while it was just Alison at the house. We waved Ady off to London and Alison went off to collect various children from brigades. We had a lovely evening – the children went off to bed around 930pm, sleep around 11pm (most of them) while Alison and I had our patented Perfect Pre-Party Evening (as tried and tested at Halloween 2005, Freya’s Pool Party 2006 and possibly other events). It entails staying up very late drinking wine and chatting the night before a very busy day with lots of children to be entertained in a party type setting. 😆 We find it aids productivity the next day to be operating on very little sleep and plenty of adrenaline ;).

Saturday – consequently did feel like really rather a long day. We were up early readying ourselves for Ady’s tv performance. He was staring in the Richard Jackson Gardening Hour
and had a slot sometime during that hour. The others wandered off to do pre-party preparation but I was a dutiful wife and sat through the full hour of people selling items as diverse and useless as a collapsible bucket with tools in the lid and a garden groom hedgetrimmer (complete with extra large garden bag retailing at nearly £30 on it’s own!) before Ady was finally on at about 945am. We all gathered on the sofa to watch together and it was nice to be watching with other people. 🙂 Ady did a fab job, was very comfortable, at home and confident, he came across as really knowing his product and at ease with the camera. I was very proud of him and it felt really quite odd to see my husband on tv rolling out the spiel he and I have sat around every night for the past week working on at home :).
.

After that we had a very productive few hours preparing Chris and Alison’s house for many, many houseguests. I made myself useful with the hoover (it’s the second weekend running I’ve found myself helping clean a mate’s house, it’s starting to become something of a hobby – Babs you might want to get some brasso in and I’ll do your silverware when we’re up in a couple of weeks and if anyone else wants to book us to come and visit just make sure you have new rubber gloves ;)) and after a fluffy of efficiency we were able to collapse with tea again. We then made several towering piles of sandwiches, Ady returned and their guests started to trickle in. Alison and I set up a rather good pizza processing system and the Ros arrived with wheat free, dairy free, pizza free pizza ingredients to assemble so I helped with those too (hey my houseguest skills don’t begin and end with drunkenly howling along to James Blunt songs at 3am you know ;)) before finally being overcome with tiredness and deciding I really couldn’t do another thing. So we had some wine :lol:.

I spent some time admiring my favourite babies – Jasper and Anna, delighting in having them in the same place at the same time and then we all convoyed off to the swimming pool. Both Ady and I were not really up for swimming for various reasons so decided we’d both do it and suffer together. I’m really glad we did and so was he as it was really good fun. It’s a lagoon-stylee pool with a flume slide and a wave machine and plenty of floats. We swapped over children a couple of times so I got to enjoy Davies’ all but swimming and filled with utter water confidence japes including going on the slide together, messing about in the huge wave machine waves and a game we created where he had to leap from one float to the next one with ever increasing gaps. And I got to play with Scarlett and her no fear of anything attitude too. I’m looking forward to her name coming to the top of the swimming lessons list, I think she’ll take to it quickly and really enjoy it. :). We had an hour there and then had a wide variety of articificially coloured fizzy drinks and various other party foodstuffs before doing the birthday cake and goody bag thing. Alison had put glowsticks in the goody ags so lots of the children ran around in the dark playing with them outside. 🙂

We went back to Chris and Alison’s briefly but the children (and us) were very tired and we had the promise of curry and a quieter environment back at Si and Layla’s so it wasn’t long before we headed round there instead. We quickly realised we’d left Davies’ pjs and Scarlett’s milk recepticle there though so Layla and I, wine glasses in hand, wandered back round there to retrieve them :lol:. Aside from Claudie being ill and Scarlett wandering back out of the bedroom to go on the rocking horse out on the landing and seeing no issue with that at 1130pm it was otherwise peaceful and we had a lovely curry, wine and chatting before calling it a night slightly earlier than the night before. 🙂

Sunday – up not too early this morning to a lovely array of morning goods and teas. A nice slow start with the children playing, flopping or watching Baby Einstein while we all gradually came to before we gathered ourselves together to head off.

We’d planned to call in to Tilgate Park on the way home if the weather was nice. It’s about 90 minutes from Reading to home and Tilgate Park is about 2/3 of the way home so I reckoned on it being about an hours drive. We used the sat nav and on Ady’s recommendation we went for ‘shortest route’ rather than ‘quickest route’. After over an hour and a half we gave up on that rather crazy idea and reset it to quickest 🙄 but we arrived there before 2pm and had a lovely couple of hours there following much the same route as earlier in the week but showing Ady everything. We had tea and cookies at the cafe and wandered round the animals and trees. Scarlett found a very impressive looking caterpillar so we looked that up in our British Wildlife Book and decided it was an Emporer Moth caterpillar, we also looked up various fungi and then Scarlett found a raven in the book just like the one we’d just seen. We walked through the woods for a while, then round the lake before ending up in the playground for the last ten minutes. Plenty on pics over on flickr.

Home for french cinnamon toast for the kids tea followed by a bath. Davies was very keen to play with his Doctor Who toys as he was given two late birthday gifts this weekend of more daleks, which means he now has a proper army of daleks for his game – he’s thrilled :). I cooked Nigella ham in coke, which coupled with a bath, plenty of wine and the promise of my own bed tonight has meant the perfect end to a really lovely weekend. 🙂 Thanks to both sets of hosts, we had a ball, and it was lovely to see various friends there too. 🙂

We’ve had a lovely day today, fairly spur of the moment last week I went through my diary and marked out a couple of free days this month and put a couple of suggested events in the Sussex newsletter and on the local Home Ed yahoo list. Today’s was Tilgate Park a council run park in Crawley, about 30 miles up the road. We’ve been once before, might even have been this sort of time last year and really enjoyed it then. There is a large lake, a big nature area with various farm animals, a playground and loads and loads of wide open spaces. There are various ornamental gardens, massive amounts of beautiful, established trees and squirrels, rabbits and various other wildlife aplenty. It’s a lovely place to go at any time of year, one of those fantastic places to watch the seasons changing. 🙂

We’d arranged to meet Lucy there and two other HE families; both of whom are fairly new acquantainces for us having come to the recent MM open sessions. Madeleine and her daughter P (4) and Cintha and her two daughters E (5) and M (nearly 3). We were dashing but arrived pretty much on time at 11am as arranged. Except I didn’t have any change for the ‘exact money only automated pay on admission’ parking barrier. So we reversed back and parked just outside the park. I’ve no objection to paying the carparking at all, as it all goes towards the upkeep, but actually it *is* just a couple of minutes walk back into the park having parked in the residential estate just outside it. As we walked back in we were passed by Lucy, who dropped R & R off with us and went back to park where we had. Cintha arrived shortly afterwards, having been delayed by having a non-dramatic but scary just the same car crash, which we’d actually driven past without realising it was her. Maddy arrived a while later and caught us up.

We walked through the trees and shrubs, pausing to look at leaves and note the changing colours and Davies and I stopped for a while looking at some spider webs which were still full of dew in a still shady area. I remember very clearly aged about 9 trying to paint a spiders web with dew on it at school for an art lesson where we’d been taken outside and told to find something to come in and recreate – and failing miserably to catch that look of diamonds on a criss cross of silken thread. I tried this morning to photograph it and probably still failed to do it justice;

We worked our way into the Nature area which has various farm animals. I struggled again with that one child running ahead asking questions about one thing (Davies and chickens in this instance) while the other hung back wanting to spend more time on something else (Scarlett collecting sweet chestnuts cases and wanting to open them to see the ‘treasures’ inside). We’ve been here before where suddenly a huge gulf opens up between them and where they are with things, but it tends to close again fairly quickly – or in this case hopefully might remain open with Davies becomming more able to read the signs himself to answer his own questions, or be more patient while Scarlett is coming into questions and observations in her own right, rather than always following his lead. Once she realised there were chickens to see however she quickly abandoned the sweet chestnuts anyway. There were all varieties of chickens, mostly bantams (the smaller variety of many of the larger breeds) so they identified a few they knew and looked at the various characteristics of them such as feather colour, feathered feet, different combs and wattles and so on. Loads of the mother hens were being followed about by broods of chicks of various ages, who were very cute. There were also plenty of cockerels all crowing loudly. Davies managed to stroke a couple of the chicks but I didn’t think we stood a chance of more than a quick brush of their feathers as they squidaddled past us as though they were clearly used to being watched by people they were not keen on getting too close. I bargainned without Scarlett and her supreme chicken whisperer skills however as while I was telling Maddy and Cintha about our chickens at home Tarly suddenly appeared with one, seemingly quite content, pullet cradled in her arms 😆

Lucy, who had been looking increasingly unwell decided she needed to leave so they headed off and the rest of us looked round the animals. There were pigs with their piglets noisily feeding:

Cows, goats, wallabies, deer, rabbits, guinea pigs, loads of chickens, turkeys and geese, cranes, ravens and more. We walked round fairly slowly as the children picked various places along the way to pause and play or look at the animals:

I really enjoyed chatting to Cintha and Maddy, about why we’d all come to Home Ed, how we’ve changed as people since having children, what we’ve done since career wise and then by virtue of having the eldest children and therefore being ‘the expert’ 😉 I answered a quick fire round of questions about autonomy, learning styles, LEA involvement and so on. This continued as we walked to the cafe and had lunch. It was lovely to be able to talk with confidence about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and answer questions about whether HE is expensive, how we’re approaching reading and so on. Really enjoyable :). The children wandered off while we were eating to go and feed a peacock that had wandered into the picnic area, with Davies and Scarlett going off to talk to the cafe worker who had appeared with some leftover chips to feed it and having talked to them for a while handed the tray over for them to feed it instead. I really enjoyed being the one with the oldest children – particularly two who were being good advertisements for HE today and happily leading the little group 🙂 Scarlett and P really hit it off today, they’ve mingled a couple of times at MM and I think they will seek each other out even more now. It’s nice to see her going off and making friends in her own right rather than by default as the offspring of a friend of mine, or the younger sibling of one of Davies’ friends. It reminded me of Davies and Ben Raine when they first met and made friends long before Babs and I had really acqainted ourselves. 🙂 We worked our way round to the tiny play area which really just consists of a slide and then at the childrens’ request headed back to the playground.

We had a nice half an hour or so there, Maddy and P left to get back for Ballet and Cintha and I chatted awhile before going to attend to our various children.

They then headed off which left just Davies, Scarlett and I. I was keen to go down to the lake which is just beautiful, Scarlett wanted to go back to the farm and Davies wanted to do whatever was going to wind Scarlett up the most 🙄 Eventually we decided to walk round the lake awhile and maybe try and come back on Sunday with Ady on the way home from a weekend away and visit the farm then. Scarlett found a fishing rod shaped twig and they sat and posed for ages, pretending to be on a raft, fishing. I was cursing my camera and poor photography skills for not being able to recreate with a photo the gorgeous scenery my eyes could see. I did play with the settings a bit but still didn’t manage anything brilliant:

We walked to the end of the lake where a bridge takes you over to walk round the other side but I decided we were getting close to rush hour traffic and would be wise to start making tracks home so we walked back from there, discovering a huge avenue through the trees complete with rabbits and squirrels back to the carpark:

They gathered all sorts of leaves, acorns, chestnuts, pinecones and feathers up and just had a lovely day. It really cemented in my mind that the life I want for them is one where they get to spend time exploring wildlife and nature, being with animals, messing about with sticks, water, identifying trees and plants and just learning as much about the world as they can. They are both talking lots about ‘when we live on a farm…’ and talking about our dream lifestyle again today to Cintha and Maddy has given me renewed ambition to make something happen for us sooner rather than later. Every time I think we are ready to do something wild life changes again though and at the moment Ady’s latest career turn with QVC is making us bide our time again for a while, but soon….. soon.

We arrived home to find the three chickens all on the road outside our house. I parked up and chased them back in the garden and while I was doing so our neighbour Maureen came across to say they’d chased them back in countless times already this afternoon including off the grass beside the main road. I think there had been gatherings of neighbours talking and she wanted to assure me she wasn’t complaining but wanted me to to hear it all from her first :roll:. We’d already decided to get rid of Punzel the cockerel within the next week or so but had a plan to try and swap him for a hen, or at the very least give him away. There simply isn’t enough meat on him to eat and actually Rhode Island Reds are more known for laying that eating birds. Our plan had been to keep Freddie (who we remain pretty sure is a hen, particularly given Punzel’s current behaviour towards her ;)) and maybe Wobble the black cockerel if none of the neighbours objected to the crowing, and to get two or three ex-battery hens to keep us in eggs. But in the time it took me to park the car in the drive the three of them had already hopped back over the low wall and were back on the pavement again. We herded them up and put them in their run and I rang Ady. The wall around the garden is too low to prevent them from jumping over, even if we were to clip their wings and as we’ve no desire to keep them caged and no money to create any sort of run for them (which we could ill afford the garden space to lose anyway – it was fine all the while they just shared all the garden space with us) we decided the time had come to call our chicken owning a day – for now. So Ady rang Bruce – the farmer who lent us the incubator – and he and the children are taking all three of them over there to be rehomed tomorrow. They will keep Freddie in their flock and will keep the cockerels for a while too, maybe for good. We’ll give the garden – and the neighbours – a chance to recover from our foray into smallholding endeavours with a plan to hatch some duck and bantam eggs maybe in the spring. We could fence off a strip of garden suitable for several smaller birds with a gate at each end. The children are sad, but philosophical about the practicalities. It’s been a great journey with the chickens and one we know we definitely want to expand on, when we are living in the right place to do so.

When I got to work this morning I checked out the copy of the local council freebie paper as Lucy had told me Davies and Scarlett were on the front cover. Sure enough there they were. And two of my colleagues had spotted them too so were laughing at me over how Ady’s pictures had been on the front page of the two local papers last week and now the children were on this one this week. So when they asked what we were up to this weekend and I said Ady would be on TV they almost weren’t that surprised really :lol:. It’s a nice picture of the children actually, you can see the top of it here on the council website. And the whole thing here on pdf.

Last week Lucy introduced Davies to Zoo Tycoon. When we first got a pc I had Rollercoaster Tycoon which I spent many happy hours on before we got the internet and I’ve never really played games since. It obviously had an influence as when I came home that afternoon the house and garden had been set up into a zoo, which I think I blogged about at the time. Today when I got home Scarlett, Rebecca and Richard were in the garden, building an ‘adventure playground’ with various garden furniture and toy props while Davies was sat glued to Lucy’s laptop creating what seemed to be a rather successful zoo. Lucy would be the one to tell you more about it as I’ve never played it and Davies, once he’d greeted me and had a cuddle returned to it and only really spoke to Lucy to ask her advice on various things, other than to tell me a bit about his marketing plan of free entry so more people would come and then they’d spend more money in the zoo on other stuff like refreshments. I explained that was called ‘marketing’ – the idea of using cunning to get people to spend more money and buy stuff you wanted them to. We mentioned how the museums are free but have lots of cafes and gift shops in London and I said that that was what my job was when we were in Manchester – thinking up ways to persuade more people to visit and to spend more when they came, giving the example of the various ‘ride for free’ type offers I’d done on Dreamieland which meant more got spent on photos and in our gift shop. He seemed to get that idea rather quickly so I suspect it will be something we come back to in more detail.

The others came back in and carried on playing and then Lucy and The Rs headed off which left Davies and Scarlett an hour to play before tea so they got the toy animals out straight away and created a zoo. There was some discussion about whether a killer whale would be in a zoo which I clarified by explaining about marine zoos. Then they stuck a Doctor Who dvd they’d been watching this morning on while they had tea. Ady got home in time to leave Scarlett here while I took Davies off to Badgers. They are doing junk modelling small scale models of their bedrooms at the moment so we’ve been taking in cereal boxes for that and also family trees so they’ve had photos of us all to cut up and stick on. Looking forward to seeing all the fruits of these labours come the end of term. 🙂

As often happens when I don’t seem to have spent much time with the children they found a way to be with me and both crept out of bed while I was in the bath to come and chat to me. Yesterday morning they’d both come up to my bed and got in with me for cuddles and story making loosely based on Allie’s story generator with me supplying the ‘once upon a time there lived a ____’ and then filling that in. Tonight it was general chit chat and plans for tomorrow and the rest of the week and the weekend which we’re all looking forward to.

Our own personal brand of Home Education is very much based on time spent together, talking, just being and living really. I rarely fret about educational provision just because it’s hard to stop Davies and Scarlett asking an almost constant flow of questions, or making observations, or using stuff they see to illustrate a point made before. I never really worry about socialising as I think that is one of the bases we’ve got pretty well covered here with a good mix of socialising in different environments and two very socially-able children. I think we are good at the out and about exposing them to different things with a healthy mix of real life stuff like household running things and stuff just for fun or entertainment or to follow up an interest. I think we have a great load of resources and would pride myself on providing lots of stimulating stuff to incite new passions, learn new skills and introduce new ideas while leaving plenty of scope for play, imagination and creativity. I don’t blog a lot about any tweaks I might make to our lifestyle here and there, or even dwell on it too heavily but I am pretty reactive to the children and their needs.

What I do think I am guilty of however is not spending enough time doing not a lot. All 3 of us love being out and about, or with friends, but Davies especially does request at least once a week that we stay home and don’t see anybody. Some of our best chats take place while driving along in the car and as we very often have company in the car that seems to have been in lesser supply too lately. The children rarely, if ever, actually ask to spend time with friends or say ‘can we see X today’ and often actually are pleased on days when it is ‘just us?’, so I’m going to try really hard to keep at least one day a week free from time with other people and ‘just for us’. I doubt we’ll stay in all day because that doesn’t really suit me unless I’m actually actively doing something at home but it will give us that time in the car to have the music up really loud or to chat and to walk at our own pace looking at what interests them. This all sounds very ungrateful at us having friends at all and I don’t mean it to at all, I’m just aware that when other people are around I am less available for Davies and Scarlett and I think it curtails the whole autonomous following interests, asking quetsions type stuff which I strongly believe in.

So today I promised we wouldn’t see anyone else and they both asked to go to Drusillas for the day. Except I’d forgotten that my Mum was coming home from a week away and was desperate to see us so I’d said she could join us. They were both slightly disappointed although pleased to see Granny and actually she arrived 20 minutes late and then was keen to get going long before we were so actually it was a bad idea to bring her with us anyway. Well aside from her buying us lunch when we’d have brought a picnic instead :lol:. We were members at Drusillas for a couple of years after we moved home but gave it a miss last year and only really rejoined this year as Ady’s bonus came at the same time as Wallace and Gromit appearing there so we joined back up again. So today it was dead – there was one smallish school trip who were in the play area when we arrived there but left shortly afterwards and a few parents with toddlers and that was about it. So for the first time ever we gathered up the two different booklets you can get and walked round with them. The first is a Zoolympics one where you do various tasks around the zoo and see where you compare to animals for weight, jumping, running, hanging on, standing on one leg, shouting, holding your breath etc. The second is just an animal spotter book where you stamp to show you have spotted various creatures. Davies did the writing and filling in in his and Tarly did some of it in hers so it was all very educational. We spent a while in the farm area with them feeding the animals, petting them and ‘milking’ the cow and cooing over the bantams. They would soo love to live on a farm those two children :). Photos over on flickr.

We had lunch in the soft play area bit with them having a good whizz round that too and then a brief play in the play area enjoying the new spider mountain bit – which was a trampoline base tower with about 10 layers of crisscrossed elastic straps which you had to part to scramble through and get up without falling through. Excellent fun, I was desperate to have a go myself 😆 Tarly did well after an initial hissy fit about not being able to do it. Davies took his time but got to the top in the end. Scarlett then bounced on the trampoline while Davies went on the zip wire and then because my Mum was getting twitchy about going we had a ride round on the train before heading for home. It was really nice though, out and about, I’m always happy to listen to the children over a conversation with my Mum so they got more attention than if I’d been there with a friend and they got loads more out of the animals and activities there than we ever have before. :).

Once home Mum headed off and as we had just about an hour and a half before we had to leave for swimming I suggested we stick a film on. We’ve had A Series of Unfortunate Events here for weeks from work, which I’d picked up for a long car journey somewhere and hadn’t been taken in the end (not sure where we were going now :?:) so we stuck that on and watched it together. We all enjoyed it although there were lots of bits which needed explaining (terms like orphan, how and uncle could be a baddy, what a will is, who they’d want to look after them if me and Ady both died, that sort of thing :lol:) but we all thought Violet was fab. We also watched about 10 lots of people walk past our garden and double take looking at the chickens and the two or three mums on the school run who walk past every day and even call out ‘hello chickens’ as they go past :lol:. So nice to be a local curiosity!

Ady was having a bad day at work with his very own series of unfortunate events (see what I did there? ;)) which meant he wasn’t going to be home in time for me to leave Scarlett with him and take Davies swimming so he met us at the pool instead and we all watched Davies swim. Another good lesson although he was hampered by having lost his new good goggles when they were ‘playing a game with the goggles’ yesterday in Scarlett’s room (all now very clear that goggles are not toys and are not to be taken out of the swimming bag and placed in random locations around the house only to be realised they are not in the swimming bag ten minutes before leaving for swimming :roll:). We did find the previously lost crap pair so he had those on instead. As we were all there and Ady wasn’t at home getting the kids dinner ready we got them chip shop chips for their tea and I introduced them to the culinary delight that is the chip butty :). That still counts as being more adventurous with their dinners right?

Work in the morning and I’ve cleared a big pile of books, films and cds to take back having realised we’d got up to about 70 items in the house again :oops:.

A very efficient morning today with me waking early enough to justify reading in bed for half an hour and finishing a book before getting up and finally putting away a couple of baskets of washing that has been cluttering the bedroom for ages. The children came and helped and it was all done very speedily. A couple of times in the last week or so Davies has proclaimed something ‘boring’ which has surprised me as it’s not something he’s ever complained of before. Admittedly it is usually something I’d have to concede is fairly mundane – the most recent was the food shopping on Saturday – but it prompted a conversation about stuff we simply have to do, or can choose not to and live with the consequences, such as food shopping, cooking, tidying. I don’t think I have a particularly negative attitude towards anything really and I know he’s not alone in being a bit less than enthusiastic at being a child in a supermarket, but I explained that a big part of Home Ed for us is that the children get to participate in everyday life and get an idea of what it means to be a self sufficient adult (that’s in terms of looking after oneself rather than killing chickens and growing stuff in a polytunnel you understand!). I did offer the choice of him attending school and me getting all the food shopping done while he’s there instead but he declined that one ;). So it was quite nice to see him totally up for helping put his own clean, dry, folded clothes away. Tarly sat and matched up all Ady’s socks :).

We came downstairs for breakfast, followed by bananas while they watched a bit of TV, not sure what and then we headed out to the bank. I put a Queen album on so they could hear what We Are The Champions sounded like before Crazy Frog got his flippers on it 😉 which went down very well, we dashed to the bank, followed by the petrol station, followed by Lucy’s house to pick them up, followed by Magical Mondays.

I’d gathered up stuff to make cheese scones and some glass jars with marbles and extra thick cream to make some butter. I don’t think extra thick cream works so well as double cream though as one lot worked but was very soft butter and the other seemed to go over past butter and back into rather sour tasting cream, but we all got lots of exercise shaking the jars anyway! 😆 I had a couple of helpers for cheese scone making and as one of the other parent’s said ‘it’s not like Henny Penny is it?’ so we had lots of help eating them spread with the butter. 🙂 Davies spent a while with Allie working on a Doctor Who story using the story generator blogged about here . It was really interesting observing them from afar across the room, as I couldn’t hear what was being said but was reading Davies’ body language and seeing him creep ever closer to Allie and start to turn his whole body towards her and lose self consciousness about being in a one to one and start to enjoy what they were doing. He showed me his story and then went off to illustrate it, and made a dalek with a flip up window to show inside too. He also played a lot with Leo, which is a fairly recent thing as they seemed to be largely unaware of each other for ages but suddenly appear to have clicked and Davies talks about him a fair bit during the week ever since his birthday party. 🙂 Scarlett also did some fine sticking of feathers and pompoms including writing her name on her artwork. She managed to fall over and hurt herself twice within the first five minutes or so of arriving today but then recovered and had a great time. It was a good session there today, we all feel like we belong to the group now and the addition of new faces in the last couple of open sessions has been largely a positive thing too :). It’s nice to have a local community to feel part of with potential for the children to grow up alongside HE peers.

We came home and Lucy and The Rs came back. Davies was initially not happy about that idea but had some time on his own in his room and then seemed to decide it would be more fun playing with the others so lured them upstairs with promises of dvds to watch and they had a nice couple of hours together, letting Lucy and I chat some more. They left and the children had a rather hurried dinner (Davies had roast beef and yorkshire pudding and Scarlett had pasta, so still fairly varied but a good start) before we walked Davies round to Beavers. They’d been asked to bring in a story book this week and I’d accidentally ordred in a giant classroom edition of The Gruffalo to work (I was looking for the dvd of the stage show and found a title with ‘educational edition’ next to it so assumed it would have ideas of activities based on The Gruffalo and satisfying relevant key stage criteria so ordered it in to have a look at. Once it arrived it was so huge I felt I had to bring it home :oops:) so he took that in. Once home Scarlett and I put the chickens away and then sat on the sofa while she brushed my hair, put loads of clips and bands in it and decorated me with necklaces and bracelets :lol:. Ady arrived home soon after so I popped round to collect Davies and he was buzzing with having used The Gruffalo to put on a ‘show’ of the story. It turned out the others had all read out their stories but when he said he couldn’t read they decided to turn his into a play instead, and he got to play the part of the fox, who, he tells me, is his favourite character. I asked him how he felt about being the only one who couldn’t read and he said it was fine ‘cos it’s cool to be different!’ :lol:. Later though he was looking at the word ‘title’ on the tv when Ady was doing something with the dvd player and talking about reading. I said I thought he could actually read already, he just needed to find something he actively wanted to read and challenging him to read ‘title’ and ‘text’, which he did, fairly effortlessly. I then told him I reckoned he could read that Gruffalo book if he really tried and as soon as he had got into his pjs and brushed his teeth he brought the book to me and asked to have a go. It was flaltering, and of course he does know the story very well so it was more looking at the picture and working out what the beginning and end sounds of each word might be before making an educated guess but he really wanted to do it and was enjoying it. He tells me that Thr Gruffalo is going to be the first book he learns to read all the way through so I packed him off to bed with our regular sized version to carry on looking at it in bed, as we’d only got halfway through. I’m not getting all excited about this as we’ve had false starts before where he’s been up for trying to read something and then lost interest but this is probably the first time something has come from a genuine desire to master a skill rather than bribery for something or to prove something to someone else, so I’m tentatively hopeful. We’ll see.

We had lots happening this weekend and me and the children were still pretty tired from London on Friday, so with me falling asleep on the sofa last night while pretending to watch Hot Fuzz I didn’t get round to blogging.

Yesterday was Big Monthly Food Shop day so I wrote the month’s menu and shopping list and we headed off to Tescos. It was heaving in there so not the best shopping experience but we did get everything from there we needed and well under budget. We’re trying really hard to only use supermarkets for things like tinned and dried food, which it is undeniably cheaper for, whether or not we like their ethics. We are then buying locally and from small suppliers like the butcher or the greengrocer. We’ve come a long way from spending £150 a week at the supermarket on our food shopping and it’s one of the achievements finances-wise that I am most proud of. We also pledged yesterday to try and start feeding the children more of what we eat, with them either having the same food as us cooked earlier, or leftovers the following day, so even if they don’t eat chicken in the same incarnation as us eg curry or stir fry they will at least have a chicken based dinner that night. It is easier in the winter to pull this off as lots of our dinners are slow cooker style meals which can easily be ready by the childrens’ teatime and still ready for us later in the evening.

We only had time for me to run in and grab my work keys and name badge before heading back out again as we’d been into town to the bank to pay a load of ebay cheques in before going to Tescos, so me and the children dropped into the butchers to leave our shopping list with him (Ady stayed in the car listening to football :)) before they dropped me and work and went home to put all the shopping away (most of which I have relocated back to it’s ‘proper’ home today :roll:). I had a nice afternoon at work, I had teabreak with Tom, the 17 year old Saturday assistant and we traded ‘wildest party I’ve ever been to’ stories. Understandably I won (well I do have an additional 16 years on him :shock:) and he told me about his uni applications. He’s a pretty cool lad actually, very individual and very sure of not necessarily where he’s going, but definitely the experiences he wants to have along the way. If I were his Mum, I’d be pretty proud of him :), and having met his Mum I know she is!

We’d been planning to head over to Ali &J’s after I finished work but a hushed phonecall to Ali which I took in the staff loo rearranged that for today instead, so we came home for X Factor viewing, pizza dinner and having watched Hot Fuzz win a movie award we decided to watch the dvd again but I fell asleep on the sofa having peaked early with wine before dinner was ready. 😳

This morning we headed off out to the last car boot sale of the season early and found it very quiet – both with buyers and sellers. I got various clothes for Scarlett including several fleeces as she seems to get them grubby enough for a wash after just one wear so I decided to stockpile a few more, and in colours other than pink :roll:. I’ve been back in my DMs since Friday but the kids wore their crocs again today before both deciding it’s time for closed in shoes again having got dew in their shoes walking round the grass before 9am. We got a few books there but nothing else and none of us could be bothered to go to the PYO so we came home for lunch.

Over to Ali and J and their two houses (limited period only!) for Ady to do some Ady Machining on their lounge carpet. I did a bit of window cleaning, flash wiping of paintwork and some flouncing about at cobwebs with a feather duster, but was probably slightly less use than Ady 😆 The children all played in the garden of whichever house we were in at the time and we had a couple of tea breaks. We left there and with renewed enthusiasm for all things house related decided to sort out our playroom properly over the next few weeks. There is stuff in the kids’ bedrooms which doesn’t get played with because it is tucked away and the big units in our playroom which housed baby and toddler toys well do a less effective job with the toys they play with now. The plan is to shelf the walls and get everything down to an accessible level for the children, take the chiller out of the understairs cupboard and into the garage freeing up storage space for hoovers and Ady machines in the cupboard and to bring in a table from the garage to go in the corner with a laptop set up in there so they can have a computer to play games and access the internet on. We’ve also got a spare tv, video and dvd player to be set up in there for them. They’ve agreed to having a good sort out of their outgrown toys and we’ve been talking about Christmas presents and they would both like a DS for Christmas. That suits us as we’d probably spend about that much on them each anyway and it means no more clutter. I’ve resisted the lure of DSs for ages as they’ve never really been that bothered about gaming and while they like the novelty of playing with their friends’ when they see them it’s not something either of them have ever asked for when questionned about Christmas or birthday presents. We’re planning to gradually get rid of bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks before dismantling the units and getting them out in a couple of weekends time. I love de-cluttering :).

We had lots of shouting (mine) and tears (their’s) at bedtime due to everyone being tired and fractious (and I include myself in that :oops:) but it all got made up before they went to sleep. I’m about to have a bath and then roast beef for dinner and then it’s straight back into the bedlam that is our normal week starting again tomorrow. Proabably wouldn’t have it any other way ;).

We headed off to London today. We used to go up fairly regularly for a while but it petered off last year with just one or two visits and this year I don’t think we’ve been at all. Actually I’d conclude from today that Davies and Scarlett are in a period of requiring two adults for maximum enjoyment of such things. When they were small I was quite fiercely indpendent and able to do everything, on my own with them, and woe betide anyone who suggested it might be a bit tricky. I have many an anecdote of nightmare trips to London with a toddler, a pushchair and a preschooler but I was never really daunted by it. Now I am finding that whilst it is not challenging logistically it would just be a more productive and enjoyable trip all round if D&S had an adult each to go round with. Neither of them are reading, or close enough to it to make sense of the signs around exhibits, but they are both old enough to want to know more, except that they are also individual enough to want to look at different things, close enough in age to want the same level of interaction with someone else and far apart enough to want different levels of it at the same time. Just like Legoland was tricky on my own simply because they both wanted to go on everything but both needed an adult accompanying them, today was tricky because they both wanted to know all about the things they saw but needed someone constantly chatting to them about it. Definitely a small window of this though between having Scarlett in the pushchair or content to wander along following Davies’ lead and zoning in and out of what I said to him while counting her own toes or people watching or being happy with a rice cake shoved in the pushchair while doing active ‘stuff’ with Davies and having two independant children who can go off and read the signs and do stuff themselves though, I should probably savour it while it lasts ;).

After a very organised start, which even left me time to chat online on an international level 😉 we set off for the station. It was a brisk and enjoyable walk, which was my first indication that this was going to be a differnt sort of experience to two years ago really. We chattered all the way, recalling things we’d seen before, observing stuff and generally feeling like people who like to be together rather than a babysitter. We arrived just as Lucy and The Rs were coming out of the ticket office which meant I could leave D&S with them and dash across to the cashpoint. There was now a queue at the ticket office but luckily Lucy had already bought her ticket and was able to find the same one on the self service vending ticket machine so we got that and dashed back across the crossing to our side of the platform to catch the train.

We sat all but together – we were opposite a lovely lady who complimented Davies in his drawing (he’d brought a small pad and pencil and set to drawing a train) and smiled a lot at Scarlett, while Lucy and The Rs were across the carriage opposite a trio of older people who were getting off at Gatwick to fly off on holiday. We moved across to sit opposite them when they got off. Train journeys previously to London have always been without company and usually pretty stressfree as we look out of the window, play games and chatter. It was slightly different with company and Davies and Scarlett were louder and less well behaved than I would have liked, but I suspect that was much more my issue than theirs :?:.

We arrived at Victoria, cut across to the tube station and aside from one small false turning had a very smooth journey the two tube stops to the museum. The children got to see a busker, which we had only been talking about the other day when Mr Bean does a bit of busking in the film we watched last weekend, so I was able to give them 10p each to go and throw in his violin case. It’s a longish walk from the underground to the overground at South Ken. but we arrived pretty much dead on agreed meeting time with the rest of the people coming, entered the museum and headed to the loos. Julie rang me while we were in there to say they were three stops away on a bus so we arranged to lurk in the foyer to meet them. Lucy and The Rs headed off, Davies and Scarlett very happily completed a giant jigsaw of the iguanadon in the foyer and we waited for Julie and co to arrive.

We didn’t have long to wait and once we’d greeted them Davies and Scarlett were very keen to head off to the Human Biology bit as they’d seen a picture of the giant baby advertised on one of the interactive touch screens around the place and wanted to go and see that first. So we headed off there, looked at various baby-making exhibits, which tied in rather nicely with all the books we’ve been reading lately about reproduction, puberty and so on. We then decided we were quite hungry too so headed off to the picnic area to join the others for lunch. That was a fairly speedy affair for us – I don’t really see the point of travelling for 2 hours to get to London to sit for an hour eating in an underground area that could be anywhere – and as I’d already decided not to put pressure on us to see more than we could manage I let D&S decide where to go to next. They both wanted to see the bugs and insects so we went there next, which as it was next to the picnic area the others joined us at.

We looked at lots of interesting stuff about bees, termites, spiders, crabs, ants (including the classic leafcutter ants carrying leaf bits along a log and into their nest display) oh and a very graphic exhibit about flies and how they munge up food to eat by vomiting on it (I recall there used to be a poster in our science lab at school with all but the identical wording on it actually). We then moved on as I was very aware of the differing levels of interest and pace between Davies and Scarlett, let alone adding another 5 adults and 6 children to the mix.

We went to the dinosaurs, which has gotten even better since last we were there 3 years ago with a couple of excellent animatronic dinosaurs there now, which captivated D&S for ages. :). We decided to wander a bit after that and went upstairs to look at various things before coming downstairs to look at the mammals. There are pics on flickr but as I struggled with the flash and getting the camera to take the amazing shots I could see with my eyes but not get it to replicate I won’t post any in this.

Scarlett had flagged rather by this point, although she could be rallied it was all but impossible without compromising Davies’ experience although I managed a bit :). We moved onto mammals which they both loved. Julie and Co had by now started to head for home, so I spoke to Lucy and we decided to also make a move. I was really cross to have missed the volcanoes and earthquake area as I recall it from before but had been convinced that had been at the Science Museum, not the Nat. History one (although I’m not at all sure why 🙄 at self). A trip to the gift shop which netted us a set of jacks each – D’s are dinosaurs and S’s are sharks. D has been after a set of jacks for ages so that’s good. 🙂

Back again to the tube, where we arrived on the platform at almost the split second the next train did, so we squashed on. The children loved the tube, Scarlett liked the dare-devilnness of not holding on to the bar until the last minute 😆 :roll:. Back to Victoria and as there was no direct train listed yet we decided to go to Brighton on the fast train and catch a connection back to Lancing from there. There were no seats to be had on the train but actually that was fine. We stood for the first couple of stops, the train thinned out and Lucy and The Rs got seats but me, D and S were very happy with all the legroom afforded by sitting in the gap between carriages and we played a few rousing games of ‘on saturday I went to the supermaket and I bought’ memory games. We had a shortish wait at Brighton before getting on the train home.

Ady was waiting for us at the station whereupon I rather slumped and we had unpleasant episodes from tired mother and daughter 🙁 All quickly made up though and they were both asleep pretty early by their standards. It was a good day, made me resolve to get back up to London more frequently again and enjoy some of the stuff like that which just doesn’t happen at home without that sort of stimulus.

For me all day. Which means I don’t really know what went on at home. I know the geomags and the toy cars were played with. I know that in the afternoon Davies and Scarlett created a zoo. I know this because I was greeted at the gate with a sign saying ‘soo’ made by Davies and taken on a guided tour of said zoo. This included a hand built ‘waterfall’ in the garden, a row of chairs for ‘visitors’ and some real live chickens 😆 (one of which pecked Davies today, rather sealing its’ fate as next for the table, if we only had a table of course :lol:). Then inside to Tarly’s bedroom which had a variety of soft toy animals and a toy laptop on the bed as ‘Tarly’s office space’. In the playroom there were more soft toy and plastic animals and then upstairs in Davies’ room were yet more, including a monkey house where toy monkeys hung off a dalek put there for decoration and climbing fun for monkeys :lol:. I love their imagination, creativity, inventiveness and attention to detail. 🙂

My day was fine, filled with chatter with workmates and borrowers. And I’ve been scheduled for my first Baby Rhyme Time session next Friday so will be practising lots of nursery rhymes for the next week :).

I beat Ady home by about half an hour so the children were sitting down to tea when he arrived home. We sat and chatted while the children disappeared off to play again. I popped off to get picnic food for tomorrow and then we sat down with dinner and watched Build a new life in the country, which was about a couple who sold up, bought a derelict house and land in Ireland and with limited budget renovated the house and started the road to self sufficiency, with no mortgage, no debts and no need to work. It was an excellent show and I thought the family were really inspiring with their passion and belief in their dream, not to mention their committment to it through the rough patches. Very interesting watch :).

We were all up quite early this morning and breakfast was an easily organised affair as I’d picked up some reduced croissants at the supermarket last night – two almond and two chocolate. I’d have put money on Ady and Davies wanting the chocolate ones, I prefer almond and Scarlett usually has whatever I’m having, but Ady had scoffed an almond one, Scarlett wanted chocolate which left Davies with the choice of one of each remaining and he chose almond. So I had chocolate, and marvelled at everyone doing the opposite of what I’d expected (although Scarlett was indeed delighted that I had chocolate too so her and I had the same 🙂 ).

We were just getting organised to go out when Lucy texted to ask if we wanted to go conker hunting. I really wanted to get Scarlett shod today as the rest of the week is busy and it’s really too cold for crocs with holes in now, so I texted back to say we’d be ready to meet in an hour after we’d dashed off shoe shopping part II. I put a second load of washing on and we headed out. We tried Matalan – nothing, Asda – nothing and Brantano – nothing. All a dire selection of black school shoes, tarty Bratz style boots with high heels (high heels! For a four year old!!! 😯 And a tree climbing, clamering on playground equipment, splashing in muddy puddles, scrambling over rocks at the beach, running as fast as the wind four year old at that – she’d knacker her ankles by age six!) or sparkly party shoes. So we gave up and went to the park instead. Lucy confessed she’d lured me to the park with promises of conker hunting knowing the park would be an outright
‘no’ but actually as we arrived first and saw the park was totally empty I was quite up for a play there instead. I sat in the giant sink plunger style swing watching my children from afar pondering the fact that finally they are the optimum age for enjoying playgrounds. They can go on everything without help, get up, get down and propel themselves. The sun was shining which it’s done very little of all summer, and yet this is when they should be closeted away in a classroom instead – something is surely wrong there?!

Lucy and The Rs joined us and with only mimimal amounts of helping we had a lovely time with Lucy and I going on most stuff – with varying levels of hilarious results. Three out of four children having a whale of a time on the zip wire, Davies showing off his fairly newly acquired swinging skills and Scarlett getting a bit of time just her and I in the middle of it all, sitting on the roundabout chatting. :). Rebecca was due at her Nanny’s and the other children were getting hungry so we decamped from there, with a brief period of conker discovery as we walked across the park back to the car. Davies did various mathsy stuff with the 13 conkers he’d collected. He’s doing lots of that lately, all very practical stuff like telling the time or relating it to money – he told me the other day that 50p and 50p was one pound, which is clearly nothing amazing for a child a couple of years his junior but is not something Ive ever told him, so is a self discovered bit of maths, which has gotta be the best sort :). We also had a chat about singulars and plurals yesterday which I forgot to mention with him asking if ‘one pound’ and ‘a pound’ were the same thing, ditto ‘one hour’ and ‘an hour’ and why we had two names for describing them. I explained that we don’t tend to use the prefix ‘one’ so much as an and a, but we do use numbers when it is more than one: eg there is a dog, or there are two dogs. We also talked about the term ‘couple’ for describing two or three of something. All very low key ways of everyday stuff that just seems to come up and get dealt with at the time, but when I put it all together I realise is his way of getting every bit of information he needs from our day to day lives to build up the knowledge he wants / needs.

Home for lunch, the children played with the chickens while I hung some washing out and then Lucy and Richard arrived. It was a changed dynamic without Rebecca and poor Richard didn’t seem to come off well from it really. The four of them rub along together pretty well and I think the siblings, age gaps, gender mix gets bridged across the way, but taking one child out of the mix meant the whole thing folded rather with Davies and Scarlett a bit reluctant to bring their games down to Richard’s level and possibly seeing him as something of a responsibility rather than a playmate :(. Lucy and I did get to finish our chat though, while I sat and wrapped a load of my ebay parcels ready for the post office.

Lucy and Richard left and Davies and Scarlett fell straight into a game. I’d spoken to Ady – who passed his screen test with flying colours, got really good feedback, complimented on his ‘Paul Newman eyes’ and has his first appearance next weekend 🙂 🙂 🙂 – and he was on his way home so Scarlett and I decided to wait for him to get back so we could take his car and leave Davies behind with him for the next phase in our shoe shopping. On the way over we talked about what sort of shoes she wanted and she agreed she would like boots and red ones if possible. The first shop we tried was Peacocks – a cheapy shop which has often come up trumps in the past for things we’ve failed to find anywhere else. Sure enough there were a pair of lovely dark red, knee high boots with no heel and easy for Scarlett to manage herself zips. 🙂 She ran around the shop in them to practise and decided they were perfect. 🙂 Also in there were fake croc wellies for a fiver a pair 🙂 so I got her and Davies a pair of those each ready for our upcoming Autumn and Winter Walks ;).

On the way home I gave Scarlett the phone and got her to talk to Ady to ask him to get dinner on for the children as Davies had to be at Badgers. He passed the phone over to Davies and the two of them chatted away for ages. Really nice to hear them so pleased to talk to each other :). Once home I quickly wrapped a couple more parcels that had been paid for since this morning and then dashed off to the post office to get them on their way. I was cutting it fine for Badgers really but I didn’t want to spend all of my lunch hour tomorrow in the post office and the one in Lancing town is always packed with queues. Back to collect Davies and off again to Badgers.

I whizzed round to Lidls for a few bits including a particular cereal they both adore which I’ve only ever found in Lidls and then sat in the car reading my book and eating chocolate limes until he came out again. Just like at Beavers he is now one of the middle sized children as the bigger ones have moved on and smaller ones have joined. Scarlett will start there in December, which will be great, there are a couple of other sibling sets at Badgers including the boy and girl who came to Davies’ birthday party and both D&S are looking forward to her being there. :).

Home again to make quiche, wrestle children to bed (and persuade said children that once in bed sleeping rather than looking at Mr Men books would be a good idea – I swear that child is teaching himself to read with sessions in his bedroom every night :lol:) and organising a courier online for one of the bigger ebay sales, giving feedback and general ebay admin. I’ve made nearly £100 from last weeks flurry of listing so I’m very pleased with that. 🙂

Tomorrow I’m working and Friday we’re off to London for the day to the Natural History Museum with various HE friends, so a busy end to the week lined up.

Made about sixty quid on all my ebay listings, that’ll pay for Davies’ Legoland birthday treat visit in a couple of weeks :).

We now have two definite crowers aka Sunday dinners here. Still holding out hope that Freddie is a hen though and doing daily egg searches. Punzel (who is on the most borrowed time) did a bit of a runner today – the children chased him over the low wall and onto the grass verge outside our house. I went flying out there, followed by Lucy and all four children and ended up herding him into the next door neighbours garden before finally coaxing him to jump back over the wall. We had traffic stopped to watch and it nearly caused an accident with someone not looking where they were going, but I guess two women, four children and a runaway cockerel beside a normal suburban street probably was something of a spectacle really :lol:.

I had a small list of stuff to do this morning, with the aim of getting back home for lunch time and a planned visit from Lucy and The Rs in the afternoon. My car was desperate for petrol. Actually it’s been desperate for petrol since about last Tuesday but I didn’t get paid til yesterday. I was not even sure it would make it a mile along the road to where there is a supermarket, petrol station and retail park, it was that low. Both the children needed winter shoes and we needed a few bits of food shopping. Perfectly planned to do altogether. I got several loads of washing washed and we headed off about 11am. First of all the petrol station was shut, for refurbishment 🙁 then there were no shoes even remotely suitable for either child :(. They are both in big enough sizes to only have a selection of black school shoes to choose from and neither of them want black shoes. In Scarlett’s case there is the alternative of glittery party type shoes which are equally unsuitable for day to day wear given their shiny, skinny soles and stiff, heel rubbing egdes – plenty of time for her to suffer pain for the sake of gorgeous shoes when she’s older if that’s what she’s inclined to do.

So, stopping to bung a tenners worth of petrol in the very overpriced little garage we headed off to the next retail park along where M&S nestles side by side with Tescos and McDonalds. No shoes in Tesco (only more sparkles or black boots with heels for S and a selection of trainers with either Spiderman or The Simpsons on for D :roll:), no shoes in M&S and last I checked McDs aren’t giving away shoes with Happy Meals. So we decided to pop into town instead.

Davies found a pair of really quite nice, velcro fastening brown boots which look good and only cost £7.99 in the first shop we tried but we didn’t find anything for Scarlett at all :(. I think boots are the best option for her as they go with skirts or trousers and negate the need for socks or tights, both of which she loathes. She’s had boots for the last two winters and they seem to be the most sensible footwear for her. She does have a yearning for something red though. I’d buy her DMs but I’m not spending 30 odd quid on shoes she could grow out of in a couple of weeks. We’ll go and look at Asda and Matalan tomorrow and hopefully find some. Whilst in town we got some cakes from the bakery for lunch. We came home via the CoOp which has both a shoeshop and a clothing shop concession in it and had no further luck with shoes but did get them both socks and super snuggly pjs that they were both in need of (Scarlett reckons she’ll ‘try’ and wear socks but at the very least does need them for soft play places and trying on shoes :lol:). They both love to snuggle into fleecy pjs even in warm weather and all last years winter pjs were actually from the winter before so at 2 pairs for £6 it was a good deal to get them a couple of pairs each.

We came home and I hung all the washing out and the children spent ages in the back garden on ‘a nature hunt’ together while we waited for Lucy and The Rs to arrive. The children all went out into the garden and aside from the chicken rescue incident seemed to get on well, having all missed each other after a week apart. Lucy and I chatted and then bit the bullet and cut her many years worth of growth plait off. Pictures on flickr. 🙂 The plait went from being part of Lucy to a lump of dead hair very quickly and we both felt a bit squeamish towards it, although the children thought it was hilarious. Ady came home and noticed it straight away (bless him, he is so well trained 😉 ).

Davies and I went to his swimming lesson. On the way we talked about Beavers last night and he wanted to know why I thought some of the boys were unruly, once he’d satisfied himself with my definition of unruly. I shared with him my theory that after being dictated to what to learn and sitting at a desk for six hours most of them were probably fed up of being told what to do and just wanted to run around and shout. He agreed and I explained that my strong feelings against curriculums and prescribed learning were one of my chief motivators for Home Education. I tend not to say too much anti-school to him but clearly I don’t big it up any either. I do talk about my own school days, mostly in a positive light as part of a recalling childhood context to them but obviously they have friends who do go to school so they have developed their own ideas of what it might be like. Davies had grasped the whole sitting down bit already and seemed pretty amazed at the very notion but tonight was the first time he realised that the stuff children learn at school isn’t what they have shown an interest in themselves, it’s what someone else has decided they should know. He was horrified and thought it was no wonder the rest of the beavers didn’t want to listen to any more educational stuff and that they are probably sat down with pens and paper at a table and not allowed to draw whatever the mood takes them to draw. I guess the very concept of formal learning to someone who has never experienced anything like it would be very very strange. He did say that at Badgers and Beavers they sometimes sit down and learn stuff but that he always found that ‘really interesting, but that must be because me and Scarlett do all our running around and and being crazy at home in the day when everyone else is at school!’ :lol:.

Swimming went really well. He seems to be getting better each week and still he is really enjoying it. The instructor praised him for really trying and I can see that he really is putting his all into it and it is starting to pay off. 🙂 A marked improvement even from last week. On the way to the swimming pool it had started raining heavily having been threatening it for hours. I remarked to Davies about the smell of wet pavements and we stood inhaling that scent for a while. I love the smell of wet pavements. 🙂

I dropped Davies home and popped out for the food supplies we never did manage to get earlier. Then when I got home Ady popped out for some drink supplies ;). He has his screen test at QVC tomorrow morning so has been practising his schpiel all evening with me firing questions at him like a pretend caller. He’s wearing blue just like Joan (Rivers) told him too and I’m sure he’ll be ace at it.