One word? When seven would do…

Happy Birthday to Jax 🙂

Four.

Whilst there are still many obvious traces of the toddler you have been the glimpses into the past to see the baby I once cradled are more fleeting, more rare and more precious. When you sleep the shadow cast by your eyelashes onto your cheek is still the same, when you curl your fingers around mine although your nails are painted and your hands are so much bigger it is still the same grip as when you were hours old. Although your legs dangle way down to my knees when we cuddle you still fit in my arms the same, although there is frequently an overtone of Barbie spray about your scent, when I bury my face into your neck you still have that same Scarlett smell about you that you did when you were a newborn, and when I look deep into your eyes I can still see into the same soul I gazed at seconds after you were born.

They say you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. I also believe you don’t necessary know what you were missing until it came along and completed you. And that’s what you did Tarly. You completed me as a mother of a son and a daughter, you completed Davies as a big brother, Daddy and I as a family rather than simply parents and all the generations above us.

You are bold, beautiful and brave. You are reckless, feckless and fearless. It’s been a rollercoaster of a four years and far from you being born a blank canvas I feel I have barely scratched the surface so far of who you are. I hope that everyone who is honoured enough to have you in their lives realises how priviledged they are but most of all I hope you continue to be aware of how wonderful you are.

Scarlett, you do indeed bring my sunshine on a cloudy day, the month of May when it’s cold outside and will forever be my baby, my girl, my Scarlett. Happy Birthday Darling, I love you very much. xxxx

Cos, you know, you can’t be all rowdy at the library!

Thanks for all messages, texts, emails and comments – it really meant a lot. 🙂 Not least cos I was actually really quite nervous this morning, partially I’m sure because I hate feeling wrong footed – I like to be super confident, know what I’m about and bluff it if I don’t – which is a bit tricky on your first day in a new job, in a place you know nothing about including how to get in to the building on your first morning when you are starting half an hour before the library actually opens!

So Ady was his ususal husband from heaven and made me tea and almond croissants for breakfast (that he’d sneakily bought and hidden in the kitchen yesterday in preparation), got the children dressed, told me I looked lovely, assured me I’d be fine, loaded us all in his car and took me there incase I couldn’t find a parking space. I waited until someone else looked like they were there to go to work and leapt out the car and followed them 🙂

Fears very quickly were allayed as they told me their names and assured me I would forget them all anyway (I remembered at least four of them out of the five though 🙂 ), gave me a set of keys for toilet, staff room, locker and front door, a badge to mark me out as A Worker and a coat hanger of my own. 🙂

I did lots of adminny new starter type stuff, learnt a bit about Dewy Decimal :shock:, did some putting books and dvds back on the shelves and spent ages chatting to the Senior Library Assistant. I sat for a while as she told me all about Customer Service and The Best Way To Talk To A Customer Including Dealing With Complaints before deciding actually I needed to say something so I explained some of my past career and readjusted the footing slightly – being patronised I can deal with, particularly if the person isn’t aware they are patronising – wasting time telling me something I used to give training sessions on is probably just pushing things a bit too far ;).

So there you go, they seem a friendly team, it’s a really nice working environment, I got my library ticket updated to a Staff one which among other things means NO MORE FINES 🙂 :), enjoyed the library vibe, which is something I have always loved, liked watching the gang of old men who come in every morning to read the papers and debate the news of the day every morning together – Oh how I see them becomming blog fodder for me in weeks and months to come ;). And I was told again about long term career prospects. Obviously very early days but so far, so very bloody good. 🙂

The children were fine – Tarly wanted to come to work with me but Davies just asked me if I’d bring back a library book for them each. And when I said I would he asked if I could do that every time I go to work. So that’s a fairly easy bargain to stick to 🙂 D’you know I reckon there might just be rather a lot of perks to this job :).

Ady came and picked me up at 1pm, Lucy had arrived around 11am and that had worked really well. 🙂 A went off to college, I came in and made lunch and we had a debriefing session, then Lucy kindly let me dash out again to the Wizard store to pick up a couple of pretend Barbies. We managed some more chatting while the children played, I read some Charlie & Lola to any listening children (the books I’d brought home) and there was a complicated and potentially dangerous game involving stunt leaping over two stools onto a pile of pillows and cushions which denegerated into rough play. Which seems to work just fine on two children but gets out of hand very quickly when a third and a fourth join in 😆 Davies had spent time on creating some sort of greenhouse which Luct did explain to me and seemed both complicated and rather excellent – it was all 3D and contained inside bits and accessories. I love how his art and craft has gone to that next level now and how he visualises what he wants to create and works out how he is going to execute it, then does it. He also did some more snowflake making. His scissor control is not a patch on Tarly’s, I really need to get some decent child’s scissors anyway and maybe work on how to hold them with him. But then again his pen grip is still pretty ‘individual’ and I have long since realised that he is capable of quite lovely writing with it when he wants to so it’s sort of irrelevant how he holds it really. I guess the same goes for scissors – however he holds them he is still improving.

I made Tarly’s first birthday cake (there’ll be another one for the party on Saturday obviously :lol:) – a triple sponge with (very) pink icing and lots of sugar flowers and silver balls. Both the children took forever to get to sleep tonight, I asked a very sleepy Tarly at about 8pm how old she was and got the answer ‘three’ for the very last time. Davies and I made birthday cards for Tarly. He did a fab flying horse with a 4 on the front and with only a little help wrote ‘Happy Birthday Scarlett love Davies’ inside. He did six kisses because he’s six and four hearts because she’s four. Then he decided to do some embellishing of the letters and did some vines and flowers on the H from Happy then a heart and a kiss inside the O on love. His letters, although not bad at all, are not quite clear enough to stand up to such messing about with really but given Tarly can’t read anyway and I was so impressed by his idea to do it in the first place I let him carry on :).

When they finally fell asleep I wrapped the last couple of pressies, Ady’s blown up balloons and the house is ready for a four year old.

It looks like an interesting site although the competition is for 16 and overs.

Davies and Scarlett have been really into playing with each other today. They have periods like this sometimes when they just enjoy each others company so much and play together all day, even when there are other children around. I’m sure school attending siblings are close too but I love the fact that not only would they actively choose each others’ company a lot of the time they are also having so many shared experiences and are genuinely best friends.

So this morning they played with some foam shapes in some very imaginative game about a monster fish – they were even talking about it later in the car and planning what was going to happen next. 🙂 I did some sorting out for NicCamps Spring Camp 2007 and wrote out address labels for my ebay parcels.

Then we went off to MM. We were making decorations in preparation for next week’s Christmas party so I took some white paper, a compass and scissors and cut out circles to make paper snowflakes with. Allie had gone one better and printed off templates from an internet site so we had lots of snowflake options available. Kate had brought some ‘corn for popping’ (just like in Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!) which we spent time threading – Davies really enjoyed that, he decided he wanted to do it and went and sat with Kate really happily. 🙂 I love his confidence with other adults nowadays, it’s been hard won at times and still feels worthy of note. Tarly and I ripped up strips of paper and coloured them with crayons to make some paper chains too.

Davies went off to make chocolate crispie cakes with Sam – again, really nice to just observe him from a distance while I sat chatting and threading popcorn and Tarly sat beside me eating it. Interesting chats about the future of Home Ed, times of doubt about doing it and how we would love for our children to have the chance to learn things from people who are passionate and knowledgable about things they are interested in – like the very best teacher you had at school, the one who really inspired you and encouraged you.

Davies and Scarlett both disappeared for a bit and were to be spotted having a great time joining in games until it was time to spray the popcorn threads with gold and silver spray. Lots of spray on the popcorn, lots on children’s hands and enough solvent fumes to have us all happy and chilled ;).

We came home, I had some late lunch and wrapped my parcels while the children carried on their game with the introduction of geomags too. We drove to the post office because the weather was horrid again. We bumped into a neighbour in the queue so stood chatting to her for a while. All of the staff in the post office know us now – so the young girl who works there stood helping them choose some sweets while the older woman processed all my parcels and told me to get them to write to Santa and bring their letters into the post office. I imagine one day it will occur to them that the children are in there at all sorts of hours and are old enough to be in school, but for now they seem to love having them to visit. 🙂

Once home I left the children to get on with their game and went and did some trying on clothes ready for tomorrow. I realised that on some level I must have always known I was going to work in a library as I have almost embarassing amounts of clothes perfectly suited to such work. I have 12 skirts FFS! 😳 Wonder why I seem to wear mostly the same clothes actually now…. Sorted the kids’ tea out and Ady came home.

We’d been watching CBBC (or as Davies calls it ‘green cbeebies’ ) earlier so that got left on and they watched Raven, which Davies claims to love, some cartoon about dragons which I paid no attention to and then Blue Peter which I stopped and watched too. Partially in horror at the crap presenting but mostly for nostalgia when they made the ‘here’s one I made earlier’ stuff. 😆

Read them number 4 in their Christmas Carol advent calendar books, and then Scarlett’s traditional ‘3 stories’ in bed – wonder if that will go up to four from Wednesday? 🙂 I’ve been getting lots of cuddles from her today mindful of the fact that cuddles from 3 year olds are limited period only now.

Part of our ‘shopping list’ this weekend on our charity shop trawl was ‘Barbie stuff’ as Tarly is getting Barbie and accessories for Christmas. We only managed to find one item – a Barbie pushbike. Today though Ady popped into a charity shop next door to one of the stores he was visiting and found two massive bags of Barbie furniture marked at £4.99 each. He scrabbled round in his car and managed to gather together £7.00 so went in and offered them that – which after some heartstring tugging stories of his little girl (probably backed up with pictures from his mobile phone) they accepted. He was still not sure he’d got a bargain but when we opened up the bags and spread it all around he agreed it was £7 very well spent. 🙂

There is loads of stuff there including a couple of beds and wardrobes, a kitchen and washing machine, tables and chairs, a nursery including cot and highchair and some bookcases etc. So hurrah for some sort of CSC type intervention stepping in and paying off all our trawling with pretty much exactly what we were looking for on ebay yesterday and in charity shops today. 🙂

I’m actually feeling really quite nervous about tomorrow, glad it is just a half day and that Ady will be home with the children. It’s been just shy of seven years since I last had a real first day at a job and back then I rarely stayed anywhere for more than 12-18 months so first days were not that rare an occassion. But I’m a bit out of practise for remembering everyone’s names, modifying my behaviour and looking polished so although I’m sure it will all come back pretty soon, I’m feeling a bit rusty and apprehensive about it tonight.

We had storms here all night, kept me awake for hours. D’you know I truly think that very rare but there just the same sleeplessness is easily my most obvious sign of feeling like a grown up nowadays. Mortage, marriage and motherhood never really did it for me, but lying there awake due to the wind or the rain or worrying about money somehow makes me feel more like ‘someone’s mother’ and a proper adult than anything else.

I made our first batch of mince pies today, from my own homemade mincemeat that I made earlier in the week. I was still doing that when Ros arrived so we stood chatting in the kitchen while Davies and Adam played X box and Tarly dragged Ellie around to play. Tarly adores Ellie, she is easily her favourite ‘big girl’ but very amusingly seems to be the one taking Ellie by the hand and leading her about. 😆 Amelia hung out in the kitchen for a while before deciding we were boring and going to play with the geomags instead. 😆 Dad and Ady went logging and came back in time for mince pies.

Ros & co left and Ady cooked lunch while me and the children made paper snowflakes. Tarly did lots of playing on Barbie.com on Ady’s laptop, Davies and I played Battleships and Connect 4 and then they played with the sticklebricks.

We had (a later than planned) lunch and did plenty of lazing around this afternoon. Ady dug out the children’s Christmas trees from the loft and found evidence of mice. They had chewed through a cloth advent calendar and lots of a cardboard box filled with low carb food from when we did The Atkins Diet. He found one and disposed of it, cleaned and hoovered the loft space out and sprayed it with all sorts of chemically sprays so hopefully their stay here is over. Bet I lay awake tonight listening for sounds of scrabbling in the loft 🙄

We put trees up in Davies and Scarlett’s bedrooms, I read them the first three books in our advent calendar with 24 books telling the story of A Christmas Carol. Tonight I’ve gathered all Tarly’s birthday presents up from various hidey holes and wrapped them all.

I had a load of items finishing on ebay today and was bidding for a load more. At one point my paypal balance went down to just 20pence, but then some of my auctions ended and it went back up to £30 odd again. We also found a load more things ready for ebaying that the mice hadn’t touched in the loft.

And now, as the lights and the broadband connection keep flicking on and off (must be the wind!) I’m off to bed.

Today was our day of Christmas shopping. Pre children we would always take the first week of December off work, draw up a rota of where we wanted to go and spend most of the week Christmas shopping. We used to arrive at our chosen shopping destination, split up for an hour or so, meet for lunch, then split up again for more shopping. Once we’d taken care of shopping for each other then we’d join forces to shop for family and friends. It was a week long retail extravaganza.

When we had children it changed slightly inasmuch as the focus became on stuff for them rather than stuff for each other.

Last year it was rather different.

This year it has been different again. Penny watching is something which has become second nature with no excess money for December so I have been doing lots of buying stuff on ebay or in charity shops and stashing it away for the last couple of months, we have whittled down the list of ‘I want’ from watching the TV adverts on Nick jr and traipsed round toy shops with them to determine what they ‘really’ want. I do like the idea of getting them at least one thing each to make their faces light up, similarly I like the idea that they have a couple of surprises and still a decent volume of things to spend time opening. This year, for probably the very first time we’ve finally got the balance right between what they want, what we want them to have and what we can afford. Woo hoo for us :).

Today we went on a mammoth charity shop run all along the south coast. No idea how many miles but certainly well up to our 10000 steps a day as measured by my pedometer on my phone and at least 30 charity shops and a whole load of Christmas songs on the cd player :). We didn’t actually get a whole lot – the children each got a toy today – Davies a Gromit I’ve not seen before for £1.50 and Tarly a toy jaguar (her most favourite big cat) for 50p. We picked up a couple of videos each for them, various other bits and pieces but mostly enjoyed being out in the early Christmas hustle and bustle all together. We had lunch at McDonalds courtesy of Pinecone Research luncheon vouchers. Bargain of the day had to be these boots though – spotted in the second charity shop we went in to and in my size for the bargain price of £3. Slightly battered but I reckon I’d get ten times my money back on ebay anyway, but these won’t be being listed cos I’ll be wearing ’em. Next I want either red or purple ones 🙂

We finally arrived home and had baths before my parents arrived for dinner this evening. Not too late a night as frankly I’m exhausted.

Tomorrow we’re going logging in the morning, roast chicken for lunch and I have some home made mince meat ready for making the first batch of mincepies while Ady and the children set up the little Christmas trees in their bedrooms and maybe the lights outside the house (inside is not being put up until after Tarly’s birthday).

Hey, it’s DECEMBER!!!! 🙂

Deck the halls, open the advent calendar and break out the chocolate liqueurs and brandy snaps!

Had one of those days when it all felt a bit bordering on the hysterical today, I get them sometimes. I’m sure if things had been different I could have been a manic depressive, instead I am a manic normal! 😆

The post brought a couple of board games of Flushed Away which we gave Davies and Scarlett. They included various characters to use as counters which required colouring in so they did that. I cut out the various bits and pieces for them including little dice to make. I made the dice and they spent ages playing with them throwing them at the same time to see who threw highest. Realised that actually Tarly does indeed recognise numbers 1-6 (the dice had numbers rather than dots) during this – I suspected she might but she kept denying it :lol:. Thanks loads Bob for the link about the game – we’ve yet to play the actual board itself but it certainly kept them entertained for a long while this morning – oh and Davies read ‘Sid’ and recognised all the words along the bottom for ‘Wallace and Gromit’, ‘Shrek’, ‘Aardman’ and ‘Dreamworks’. 😉 :).

Finally got them dressed and we headed off over to Ali’s. We collected together a handful of Christmas cds to take with us in the car – it will surprise noone that we are well stocked with them 😳 ;). Tarly is really into ‘Santa Baby’ and wants to learn all the words. I am torn as I have this barely hidden part of me which could so easily turn into pushy US Mom dressing her in frilly flounces, rouging her up and giving her a real Britney training style of childhood – I’m guessing I’ve already failed if that was my plan though as she is hardly likely to be compliant to such crazy notions, and let’s face it she doesn’t need to bother with the child star fame bit as she already has the drink habit! 😆 So we did lots of very loud singing along and in car dancing to festive tunes including me welling up at ‘when a child is born’ just like I did along that same stretch of road pretty much this time last year.

Had a lovely time at Ali’s, there was pesto pasta (which Tarly decided she ‘loves’ and ate most of mine :roll:) and chocolate and chatting and tea and xbox and zoombinis and lego train track and My Little Pony and the odd sudden yelling of one person to be joined in with by everyone else of ‘it’s CHRIIIIIIIIISTMASSSSSSS!’ just for fun. 🙂

Ali and Davies and I played Mastermind for a bit which was cool, and made doubly tricky by a lack of pegs meaning we had to keep nicking them from the row above. 😆 then we drove home again in the dark singing more Christmas songs.

Tea and early to bed for the children, wine, bath, dinner and late to bed for the grown ups. Which is where I’m off to now.

I suddenly realised that all the things on my list of things I needed to get done before December sort of had to be done today today. So we planned on leaving the house at 9am, which was an impressive aim given I didn’t get up til gone 8am. But we would have pulled it off if Julie (SIL) hadn’t rung for a chat at 9am. As it was we were still out before 9.30am, at the library car park, straight into a parking space and taking back overdue books. I saw my new boss but I was all disorganised and trying to persuade one child to put the Bambi video back while agreeing with the other that yes, this is where we have to be super quiet but actually I think coughing is probably allowed so I didn’t do more that smile and say hello. I’ll be so relieved when I actually start working there, it’s been really weird going in and seeing my boss and soon to be colleague without feeling strangely embarrassed – I’ve almost avoided going in, but that would be too weird. 😆

We popped to Woolworths for a quick look round, then to the stationers for advent calendars -this year I was adamant they were not having chocolate ones and even if we didn’t get ones with baby Jesus in a stable full of animals we would have something more festive than Thomas wearing a bit of tinsel. So unlike last year I took the children to a shop only selling ones with pictures behind the doors instead of chocolate and gave them the choice of three or four different designs each. They both went for one with Father Christmas on. Whilst in the queue sandwiched between several old people we talked about why I loathe the chocolate ones and what the actual point of advent calendars are – Davies made me laugh by saying ‘I do agree the chocolate ones are not so good Mummy, but there is one good thing about them you know. When you have eaten all the chocolate you can rip the cardboard off and use the plastic moulds to make more chocolates with melted chocolate’. True point, but not a good enough one to win a chocolate advent calendar :lol:. We then went back to Woolies having remembered that our other task was to get a box of chocolates for Julie for her birthday this weekend. I also picked up a couple of boxes of candy canes for decorating the tree at home which meant we spent over a fiver and could choose a half price dvd. I got the Jim Carey version of the Grinch as it is a book they love and it is festive. Might watch that this weekend :).

Back to the car and off to collect Lucy, Richard and Rebecca. After a stop for petrol and chocolate (thanks Luce 🙂 ) we arrived at the woods and met up with Julie, Jack and Maisie and Elaine, Jessie and Maddy and their mad dog Orlaigh. Tarly instantly remembered the dog from a walk we had with them way back in the spring and was delighted to see her again. Maddy was delighted to see me again and spent the whole walk holding my hand and asking to take pictures with my camera :lol:. Jack was not feeling so well so Maisie stayed with us (holding my other hand) and Julie took him off with her to do a few errands. We had a nice walk although it was very strange to be walking along holding hands with two small girls, neither of whom belonged to me while my own children ran off ahead – strange and not altogether what I was that comfortable with tbh ;-). We paused for a while at one point while all the children scrambled over tree trunks and threw sticks for the dog. Tarly was looking very much like she should have been on a woodland photoshoot rather than a messy walk today, due to wearing the long skirt she’d had on yesterday and a trendy coat which needed a wash anyway so I got her to wear knowing she’d get muddy. She liked the suggestion of a photo shoot though so I got her to strike some poses 😆

Davies was not to be outdone and called me over to take his picture in the tree
but Tarly definitely had the best accessory!

We had lunch, which included Richard falling backwards off a log – heartstopping and one of those moments where everyone stands and flaps their arms rather than actually catching the falling child, but he recovered quickly and was more than happy to sit back on the log. We headed back into the woods again (well Lucy and I did, taking Maisie and our four children) for a short play before deciding we’d had enough even if the children hadn’t. I had to stop in town on the way home to pop to the bank but having Lucy to stay in the car and mind both the car on double yellows and all the children while I ran in made a huge difference.

Once home various bits of post meant I had loads of phonecalls to make but I did manage to make a drink for us both before Ady got home. What it did all show was that Lucy is going to be just fine looking after Davies and Scarlett, they are totally at home in her company and clearly feel very safe and comfortable with her, which is a massive weight of my mind. 🙂 It’s making all the difference to me being able to look forward to starting work next week and worry about trivial things such as what to wear and how to style my hair instead of whether I am giving the children therapy fodder for years to come :lol:.

I dropped them home and returned to bath very grubby children. We all watched Supervets or some other such vet related titled programme which we caught last week too and then they finally had a relatively early night. We had phesant and partride for dinner (lovely) and I’m about to head to bed myself.

Quiet morning planned tomorrow although I have various ideas for films I want to talk through with Davies but I think it might be just too ‘end of a long week’ to try it tomorrow morning with him, and then we’re off to Ali’s in the afternoon. It’s all go here :lol:.

None of the above!

Alison and children arrived (very) late on Monday night. Ady had already gone up to bed and I’d already drunk plenty of wine to keep me awake while listening to all the music videos I linked to (and maybe done some dancing round the lounge too :lol:). Davies and Scarlett hadn’t gone to sleep until about 10.30pm, because they have always slept in their own rooms which since we’ve been back in Sussex have been on opposite ends of the house on different levels they don’t disturb each other once they’ve gone to their rooms regardless of whether they are asleep yet. But they love the idea of sleepovers and often ask to sleep in each others’ rooms which we almost always say no to. I think I’m going to start letting them do it a bit more though as they are so giddy when they are allowed to that it takes them bloody hours to get to sleep :roll:.

The evening finishing and the next morning starting are something of a blur, possibly because there weren’t many hours between the two 😳 😆 so Tuesday was a quietish day marked with a walk to the post office en masse in the middle and some baking of snickerdoodles helped by a changing conveyor belt of helpers at various points. Davies and Lije were not really removed from the X box all day but Davies was loving having someone to play his W&G with and between them with Davies’ familiarity of the game and Lije’s superior control skills they got way further than he’s ever got before so that was nice. 🙂 The dual controls on that game mean you work together rather than in competition with each other. There was also a play put on for us by all the children except Tarly which was most entertaining and amusing, particularly Davies’ reluctance to complete the Happily Ever After by getting married :lol:.

In the early evening Ady and I went off to give blood. When we arrived at the hall we both confessed to actually being slightly nervous as it was a first time for both of us. We were both called into seperate booths for initial finger prick testing and a clarification of the answers on our forms about drug use and sexual history which might put us at risk of diseases. The doctor who saw me was a real comedian, but in a very deadpan manner with a straight face throughout. He asked me to read the questions again to be sure my answers were all as I’d indicated and then said ‘I draw your attention in particular to question 4 – have you ever had sex with someone for drugs or money?’ – that also includes sleeping with pensioners in exchange for Argos gift vouchers’ – I looked at him and he said ‘well we are in Worthing!’. I asked if it also included Ratners coupons and he assured me that was OK and didn’t count! 😆 Which meant that when my drop of blood floated at the top of the test tube instead of ‘sinking like a bullet’ as it was supposed to we both looked a bit concerned. This meant that I had to have a further test to ensure I wasn’t anaemic. At which point I confess to fretting about the volume of alcohol I’d consumed in the previous 24 hours 😳 I got called into the next booth where the next doctor spent ages checking my veins before drawing more blood from my right arm to test some more. He said my iron levels needed to be 125 or something and mine was 126 so I was ok but only just (all went rather over my head but it was nothing to do with the Ratners vouchers or the dry white wine!). Ady and I got called to the beds for the blood-draining at the same time but while his went all smoothly mine was not to be. The guy struggled to find a vein and when he did stick the needle in it really hurt, like REALLY hurt, right down my lower arm with a real tugging feeling. I seriously don’t think I could have managed it for 10-15 minutes. He called over another two nurses and then said to be ‘does that hurt?’ and I admitted it did, so he took the needle out again. He said the vein was very deep and he might have caught a nerve or something. They couldn’t use the other arm because I’d already had the retest from that one so they are calling me back again in a couple of weeks. My arm really ached last night but is fine today, so no lasting damage. 🙂 I’ll probably take the children next time, I reckon they’d find it really interesting.

The children – specifically Tarly and Lulah took forever to go to sleep and Alison and I were almost early to bed ourselves. Almost :lol:.

Today we had a plan to go to the local park and meet up with Lucy but in the end Lucy just came here with Richard and Rebecca. It’s been a really nice day with Davies and Lije playing pretty much non stop X box, Tarly and Lulah holed up in Tarly’s bedroom for hours and all of the others playing various games. Alison cut my hair (under much pressure – it looks lovely but was a trim rather than a restyle) and then did Tilda’s too and inbetween we managed lots of chatting.

A lovely visit, as always. 🙂

The children conked out fairly quickly (unsurprisingly!) and I think I’m heading for bed pretty soon too. More socialising happening in the next couple of days before a quiet weekend.

I simply can’t work out how to get ‘free’ music so I’m satisfying my clompy DM footed meander down memory lane with youtube 🙂

Stevie Nicks – Rooms on Fire

James – Sit Down

EMF – Unbelievable

KLF – 3am Eternal – this one takes me back so quick I lose my breath!

KLF – Justified and Ancient – has it’s own story and makes me smile

Arrested Development – Tennessee

Ace of Base – All that she wants

Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby alright stop, collaborate and LISTEN!

Simply Red – For your babies

Mr Big – To be with you

En Vogue – My Lovin’

Alright stop.

Hammertime!

and anyone get this?

sunny day sweeping the clouds away…

because it is cocking up my template I’ll blog about today now. Also because we have house guests arriving later and I have not remotely prepared for them so I’ll not get the chance to blog later.

I didn’t do a lot this morning, mainly because I got up really late (I wasn’t actually asleep, I was in the middle of a very interesting dream that I wanted to know the end of and trying to get back to sleep to get back into it but the children kept coming and hassling me to get up so in the end I gave in and got up!). They had three bowls of cereal each – we’ve had a poor selection of cereal and I’d been food shopping yesterday and stocked up again so they were celebrating! 😆

We went to group which was good. They both did some sticking of leaves onto paper which is The Law for Home Educated children at this time of year 😆 They did plenty of running around pretending to be Wallace and Gromit which at MM has the added surrealty of joining in a Dr Who game which somehow seems to effortlessly integrate Wallace and Gromit. 😆 They also did some of the (banned by me) clambering up and down a wall with railings with a big drop on one side, Tarly doing so in bare feet. 🙄 I like group a lot but I am still struggling with my own ‘what will people think’ feelings about large amounts of Home Ed children all together and as it is situated next to a school which has it’s lunchhour in the playground coinciding with group I am very aware of my bare foot, non coat wearing offspring running around dicing with death climbing up walls and messing with things like broken glass and old tins while brandishing hockey sticks in full view of the dinner ladies! My issue I know but I remain convinced that it will one day be one of my children splashed across the Daily Mail to illsutrate just why all children really should be in school :lol:. So the kids got the full lecture on social services and how I am failing in my role as their protector and carer if I don’t prevent them from doing things which could injure them, particularly in full view of people who might report us! It is such a double standard really as if I’m honest if the area was not overlooked then I probably wouldn’t have such issues with it and I hate that about myself.

I had a nice time anyway. Ali brought bath bomb making stuff so I made one of those and heckled her while she showed other people how to do it 😆 and made some paper planes – oh and thank you Allie, I was called ‘Nic’ all day :-).

We came home, I wrapped several kids’ dvds I’ve sold on ebay and we walked to the post office to send them. Chatted with David (thank you neighbour) on the way, talked about crossing roads and looked at all the many flowers which are still in full bloom even though I’m sure they are out of season to be so. Davies and Scarlett had several ‘races’ to various points and I noticed something again which I realised last week which is that Scarlett is actually easily on a par with Davies and is probably faster than him, certainly over short distances. No idea which one of them this reflects on, or indeed if they should be much difference between their speed at their age but interesting anyway.

They were indeed well behaved in the post office so got their choice of sweets – Tarly chose a 5 pence pack of fizzy things, Davies chose a 31p pack of Tooty Fruity sweets which I told him I used to have when I was little along with the Tooty Mintys which they also used to make. I didn’t tell him about the time I ate a whole pack of Tooty Fruitys (which were definitely in bigger packets when I was small) and promptly threw them all back up again in a very pretty pile of vomit incase it put him off them. I can only have been about Tarly’s age but I recall my Mum’s horror to this day! 😆

Since we’ve been home I’ve further disturbed their eating for the day by giving them a late and large lunch and then a bowl full of fruit each for tea just now. They are playing with geomags and trying to compose myself to go and sort out sleeping arrangements and tidy away various things in the playroom ready for a houseful for the next couple of days.

Way back when I first started to think about Home Education I spent lots of money amassing the various ‘tools’ I thought I’d require in order to do it properly. These included some things which have indeed proved useful – a laminator, a subscription to enchanted learning, a blog ;), membership to all the various yahoo groups and so on. Also included were the rather more expensive things, many of which have simply never been used. We do indeed have posters of the times table on our playroom wall, we have several jigsaw puzzles depicting maps of the UK and the world. We have a whole bookcase shelf crammed with workbooks. I’m not saying these will never get used, I’m not saying they were a complete waste of money, but I certainly was foolish if I thought that without them I would be unable to Home Educate.

One of the things I very quickly realised about Davies is that he simply doesn’t learn stuff the same as I do, or the same way as Scarlett. And none of us learn like Ady does! Ady is currently studying and revising and learning as much as he can about Health and Safety for a qualification he is working towards next year. It appears to be a quite academic type of exam with lots of essay style questions and whilst you do need to have an understanding of what you are talking about a great expanse of it is simply remembering facts and quoting the correct wording of great lumps of text. I imagine it is rather similar to a law qualfication in that there are aspects which are open to interpretation but you need to be 100% clear on what is written before you can start interpreting it.

Watching Ady try and cram as much of this information into his head as possible has reminded me of my own time spent revising for GCSEs and A levels back at school. I have a pretty good memory, specifically for things with numbers in – I can recall lots of phone numbers, birthdays, the five lines we used to do in the National Lottery when it first started. I also remember song lyrics and poems very easily. I have never got the hang of that memory trick where you associate things with something else to remember them though. But you know so much of the stuff I have filled my mind with on a temporary basis has been with the sole purpose of proving I can really. I have a GCSE in French, but the other day I couldn’t remember what the French word of ‘eye’ was. I have a GCSE in History but although the period we covered for the last two years was the Tudors and the Stuarts I couldn’t possibly tell you anything more about Henry VIII than I have recently learnt with the children from the Horrible Histories song. I have GCSEs in Science for which I learnt the chemical symbols from the periodic table – I could probably rustle up a few on demand but not the whole lot. For my A level in Government and Political Studies I could rattle off every post war election, who won and who was the leader of the opposition – I couldn’t tell you that information now.

I could however probably still recite chunks of the poem from James and the Giant Peach that we covered when I was 11, I could sit and rewrite all but from memory the essay that passed me my A Level Sociology (Marx claimed that ‘religion was the opiate of the masses’, discuss.). I could still recite the poem I wrote about every single one of my junior school teachers when I left the school aged 11.

What stuck, what was meaningful, were the things that inspired me, that I created myself, or that I have used in everyday life since. Reading, writing and arithmatic are things I use every single day in some capacity. I dropped Home Economics, cookery, music, textiles and PE in favour of Electronics when I reached 14. I do still know how to wire a plug, change a fuse and what a two gang, one way switch is but I don’t recall the last time I ever used those skills. Cooking, singing, dancing and even sewing are things I quite often do on some sort of daily basis nowadays though.

If I had to define the most useful lesson I ever learnt at school it was how to deal with people. And that was a very hard lesson – it took me the entire 11 years I was there and actually it was only in coming away from it and analysing it and then going to sixth form and trying a different approach that I cracked it anyway. Frankly I’ve come a hell of a long way from being 16 and leaving school in every single area and a lot of the ‘good work’ I’ve done was merely undoing what I’d learnt at school in many areas.

Anyway, learning styles :).

I think it is pretty much accepted that people learn things in different ways, we’ve all done enough of those blogthings and quizilla quizzes about whether our brains are left or right handed etc to know that we are all quite different. We all have different things that come easily to us, things that drive us etc. I won’t sit and list all the various skills and ‘things’ that all of my readers have but suffice to say I could choose something about every one of you that would be way beyond me and similarly I imagine I can do at least one thing that every one of you couldn’t too. Part of that is education, part of it is effort, part of it is natural skill and talent but I suspect a larger part is just our hardwiring – what makes us who we are. And I think how we learn is a big part of that too.

In that very unscientific post about how you’d process that maths question just in our little group we had several different answers. For people who don’t ‘get’ maths learning things like times tables is a tremendous help – you can learn by rote that 8 x 8 is 64 without visualising the numbers at all and if you are blessed with a photographic memory then maths is not beyond your reach even if you never really get the concept of ‘playing with numbers’. In that post I talked about being able to work out 80% of something as that would be the price less staff discount for most of the retail outlets I worked in over the years. I didn’t actually work it out by calculating 80%, I worked out 10%, doubled it and subtracted it from the total. Similarly if I had to work out 5% of something I would do it by working out 10% and halving it. I remember some maths concepts just made perfect sense to me at school – percentages, ratios, fractions, algebra were all pretty straightforward because I saw them as problem solving sort of questions. Things like long division and long multiplication were trickier because it was all about the numbers and not about a concept – does that make sense? There seemed to be a logic puzzle aspect to something like fractions and those questions like ‘Johnny has twice as many apples as Mary, Mary has half the amount that Fred does and Fred has one more than Susan. If all the apples together add up to 22 how many does each person have?’ (by the way that is not a real question, I have no idea if it would work out to whole apples each and might come back and try later and edit it :lol:) made far more sense to me and were also something I would enjoy trying to work out.

Autonomy allows children to play with numbers, maths is an area which I never fret about for the children. They can see at a glance if one of them has more sweets than the other, can divide a plate of sandwiches between six of them equally and will quite often sit pondering before saying to me ‘5 and 5 and 5 and 5 is 20’. In workbook world it would probably be more important that Scarlett could recognise numbers up to 10 written down and maybe even write them herself than counting any higher that that. Actually I don’t think she’d recognise the number 8 written down but she can all but count to 20.

So if we agree that we process information in different ways, we recall it in different ways then it stands to reason that we learn it in the first place in different ways. Some people have a knack for training, for identifying what it is that will make an idea or a concept or some information click for someone, how to make them ‘get it’. I’ve done a lot of training sessions (as both trainer and trainee) and some people respond really quickly to the whiteboard, teacher at the front, calling out ideas, being prompted and maybe having a summary or a handout given at the end about ‘what we’ve learnt’. Some people loathe that style of training and would rather learn on the job, out on the floor, doing the job as they learn. For others sessions like role play, watching films to demonstrate the training, examples and anecdotes and case studies are more powerful training tools. Some people require a personal aspect, something to empathise or identify with, something that resonates with them personally. I ‘good’ trainer will develop the knack of finding out which method works best for each individual and work on targetting their training accordingly.

I think there are two ways of getting a qualification in something. One is the total recall method, cramming as much information into your brain as possible and regurgitating it on demand. The other is actually understanding the subject. And understanding it to such a degree that any question posed about it would be one you could answer. And then I think in life generally we rely on a combination. Reading is a bit like that. You could learn whole words, rely on being able to recognise them without spelling them out – which is how we read once we are fluent at it, but we combine that with some knowledge of phonics or letter sounds so that when we come across a new word we are able to decode it – but added to that it needs to be a word we have in our vocabulary anyway. One of the words on that reading age list that several people had their children do recently was ‘poignant’ I believe (someone told me, I never looked at it 😉 ). Now if you didn’t know the word then you would be unlikely to work out what it said, whereas if it was a word you already knew then you’d be in a much better position to have a stab at guessing it. I had come across the name Hermione in books years ago (Jilly Cooper actually!) but never knew how it was pronounced until the Harry Potter films came out and I heard people saying the name and suddenly realised ‘oh that must be how you are supposed to say that Herm y one name’.

So with Maths you could do it by simply reciting times tables or you could truly ‘get’ what the numbers mean, you could visualise them as balls or cakes or whatever and have a mental image of what those numbers might ‘look like’.

There has been a thread on a yahoo group recently about the periodic table – I used to know quite a bit of that by memory but never actually understood it – that would have been a far better way of learning it I reckon, to have actually understood it.

Little kids constantly ask ‘why’ – I think that is because they start off with the learning style of making sense of something first, really trying to understand it. We seem keen to stamp that out of them though and by age 7 you rarely hear a child ask ‘why’, their lose their skill for lateral thinking, their wonder at how things happen and worse than that they lose that delightful ability of cross referencing everything back to everything else. They are pushed into only thinking about one thing at a time, categorising everything into curriculum headings, exercising only one area of their development at a time. Today I told the children that if they were really well behaved at the post office and didn’t touch ‘anything’ (it is crammed with all sorts of aladdins cave type goodies all very precariously balanced on the shelves and we have frequently brought piles cascading down by poking at interesting looking things!) I would buy them some sweets. Tarly wanted to know how that could happen when her feet would be touching the floor. Now she is not four yet, she was not being cheeky or clever, she simply hasn’t done the early years stuff about the senses and been shown the picture to demonstrate touch as being something we do with our fingers and hands. She has learnt some stuff about gravity and being pulled to touch the Earth at some contact point and that’s how she relates it. Scarlett can still listen with her eyes, taste with her nose and hear with her fingertips – hope she always can. 🙂

So maybe there aren’t learning styles, maybe we’re all hardwired to learn through experience but somewhere along the way we lose the right to learn what we want when we want and have it all prescribed to us in hour sized chunks under seperate headings and drip fed to us over 11 years. But think back to how you revised for the last exam you took? Did you sit listening to heavy rock music in your pit of a bedroom while reading and rereading? Did you hang upside down in complete silence with your eyes shut perfecting total recall? Did you develop some clever mnemonic for it, set it to a song, equate every bit of information with a step along a familiar journey? Did you write and rewrite it with different coloured pens as part of a timetabled study guide? Or did you just really, really love what you were learning about, still hold that knowledge today and just understood it because it meant something to you?

Anybody? And if you get that one will you get this?
‘Your purple prose just gives you away’.

I drove past my old sixth form college on Friday and pointed it out to Davies and Scarlett. Now I can’t pretend for one moment that I did the whole sixth form thing properly, like so many things in life it was all a bit of an anticlimax really. But the promise, oh the promise of it was huge. I was going from an all girls school with very strict uniform, teachers and halls and classrooms I was tired of to a mixed sixth form, to wear whatever I liked, study exciting subjects like Sociology and Politics and reinvent myself to whomever I decided to be. I had a part time job which I loved and brought me in plenty of cash for buying DMs and little skirts, snakebite and black and for a few short months I utterly revelled in being 17, skinny, loud, interesting, opinionated and a very different person. It didn’t last of course, but that year or so that I toyed with what being a ‘proper student’ might have been about remains a treasured memory of my past. I did all sorts of crazy things, some of which had long lasting far reaching effects into my life still today but it was my first real taste of freedom and the very chance to cock it all up was what mattered most I reckon.

I had a very definite style, it was fairly deliberate and possibly not a million miles away from the rest of the crowd but it felt individual, I wore my jeans ripped – all the way up to the thigh, I wouldn’t do that now but I’m kinda glad I once had the thighs to do such things :lol:, my eyeliner thick, my jumpers big and baggy, my DMs clumpy and my bags and folders clutched under my arm were decorated with my own colourful artwork. I drove a bright yellow mini with a stereo that was not fixed to the dashboard and had to be held onto when I went round a corner otherwise it would come unwired! It used to regularly stop at traffic lights and I was dead proud that I knew how to open the boot and get it started again.

Today I happened to be wearing ripped jeans (this time they are ripped becuase I have genuinely worn a hole in one knee and show very little flesh, none of it deliberately), my green DMs and a very big baggy jumper, I caught a glimpse of myself in the shop window at Tescos where I went food shopping and thought ‘blimey I look young’ and I felt young, a bit like I shouldn’t really be out doing something as grown up as food shopping all by myself. And then on the way home the song which the post title lyrics came from was on the radio, so I turned it up super loud, sang along at the top of my voice and reminded myself of a very Happy Christmas filled with college parties, drinking my snakebite, blowing the train fare home from Brighton on another pint of it and ringing my Dad to get him out of bed to come fetch me and my mate instead. Ah, the glorious irresponsibility of it all!

Anyway. 🙂

Today, when I have not been locked in past memories of a time long since gone by, we have had a Very Nice Sunday. It was my turn to get up this morning and Tarly was on top form awake by 6am ish. We did sofa snuggling and watched Little Bear together (I like Little Bear, it reminds me of innocent cartoons of my childhood) and then Davies got up. Tarly spent ages playing on the Barbie website on Ady’s laptop. She’d been playing it yesterday and is actually very proficient at all sorts of computer-y type stuff. She needed to keep typing her name in at the start of each game so I wrote her name out for her in capitals and by the end of it she was barely looking at the bit of paper – and was (rightfully) very proud of that. 🙂 Davies really made me laugh by saying to her ‘but you could just hit a few random keys and press enter if you wanted’ to which she made me laugh even more with her reply ‘No Davies, they need to know EXACTLY who is playing the game. If I did that then they wouldn’t know it was me!’. I set Davies up on my old laptop with his animation software and they both spent most of the day playing on the laptops. Davies graduated to Cat in the Hat (which I have the xbox version of for him for Christmas) and then Zoombinis – he has totally cracked Zoombinis now, the logic and everything is within his grasp and Scarlett loves to sit and watch. He is continuing to play with numbers a lot and getting progressively larger in the numbers he is playing with so that is great. 🙂

I knew todays food shop for the month was going to be a mammoth one so I set off early and arrived at Tescos shortly after it opened. Our local Tesco is having a massive refurbishment and must be getting on for two and a half times it’s previous size. It is still not finished but is already vastly improved in the range of food it is selling. We eat a lot of Chinese and Indian style food and they now have a fab range of authentic (and cheap!) bits and bobs to go with that. 🙂 I realised when I was not even half way round that I simply wasn’t going to fit everything in one trolley so I did half the store, went through the till and paid, loaded it all into the car and then went back in again and did the second half! We’re totally fooded up now and I got a few more bits and pieces for Christmas and birthday collected together too. 🙂 I also carried out our vow made watching Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s latest show to go organic / free range wherever possible for meat. It clearly added a few quid to the bill, which on one hand we can’t really afford but as it probably was only the equivalent of a couple of bottles of wine each month I reckon we can go without that instead. I am not remotely fussed about organic vegetables but I did come to the conclusion that while I am always going to eat meat I would rather feel it had not been quite such a shite life for the animal before it died so I could eat it. I’m still faintly dubious about the real difference guaranteed other than paying double but chicken particularly is one of our staple foods and some of the footage on the Hugh show was enough to convince me to go for free range organic, so we have. 🙂

When I got home (with comedy loaded up car with shopping filling the boot, the back seats and the passenger seat too) Mum was there having been dropped over by Frazer to collect her car from last night. Ady and I took the best part of an hour to unload the car and put all the shopping away so she entertained the children while we did so. She left.

Davies was occupied with Zoombinis so Tarly and I got out the plastic glasses for her party. I had this idea that it would be nice to have plastic goblets to drink from and that we could decorate them so I wrote each child’s name on one with a gold pen and Tarly stuck fake jewels and glitter on them. I think they look fab :). I also showed her some of the activities I’ve got planned for the party and we talked again about who is coming. She is so looking forward to it and actually so am I – can’t believe my baby is going to be FOUR!

Ady was cooking roast beef so we had that around 2pm altogether then had a lazy afternoon. I listed a few more bits and pieces on ebay after a very successful auction of various outgrown kids dvds ended yesterday netting me about 4 times what I’d hoped for in total. The stuff I listed today could go either way really, but at least it is less clutter round the house again which can only be a good thing.

I’m gearing up for a last week of freedom this week. I have plans every day and then next week will be manic with me starting work on Tuesday, Tarly’s birthday Wednesday, working Thursday and her party on Saturday -can’t wait. 🙂

Friday – The children and I had been out and about all week or having people over so I deliberately kept Friday free for some time at home. Ady ended up working from home as his car spent the morning in the garage having some work done to it. I took him to the garage to collect it mid morning and we shot over to Toys R Us as Tarly is being very indecisive about just what she wants for her birthday / Christmas and can’t seem to decide between baby dolls and baby doll stuff and the leap into Barbie World. She does already have an amount of ‘baby’ doll stuff and tbh doesn’t really seem to get a lot of play value out of it so despite my own personal aversion to all things Barbie I can see this would be a better way forward. (Also there is loads of second hand Barbie stuff around at car boot sales and charity shops so it will be an easy set of stuff to add to.)

Ady and Davies walked round together looking at various things while Tarly and I looked at the Barbies, the babies, the Sylvanian Families (which she sort of liked the idea of but didn’t sway her from either of the Barbies and Babies) and various other bits and pieces. We’ve spent the rest of the weekend talking about it and looking at things online and I reckon we’ve decided on Barbie now – it’s the thought of a Barbie horse which finally tipped the balance :lol:.

I really enjoyed that half an hour or so with her, she was quite literally like a child in a toy shop, filled with delight and wonder at all the stuff crammed on the shelves. Scarlett has always been very undemanding about things like toys – from a very early age she was able to accept ‘not now, maybe for your birthday’ as an answer to a request for something – and not once in the whole Barbie vs Baby debate has she simply said that she wants both, she understands it is a choice between the two. I was quite shocked at the realism of the baby doll toys actually – they are a million miles away from the ones I played with not 30 years ago. I recall desperately wanting a baby doll called ‘Bella’ from the Argos catalogue for the Christmas before I was 7 or 8 and being so thrilled when I got it. There was a particular smell about baby dolls back then and I was instantly transported back 25 years or so when we were looking at them in Toys R Us as they still have that exact same smell. But now they do way more that take water through their mouths, pass it through enough tubing inside to cause a few minutes delay before emptying it into a toy nappy, close their eyes when you lie them down and maybe say ‘Mama’ if you have a really pricey one. For under fifteen quid you could get one that when you held it’s hand yawned, closed it’s eyes, made contented sucking noises and little newborn baby gurgles. Amazing!

We came home for lunch and spent much of the afternoon making another animation. This time of a geomag figure dancing – you can see that over on Davies’ blog. Ady went off to give Jim a lift to Butlins and after we’d made the film the children played with the geomags.

Ady came home and I popped out. I had some ebay parcels to send and a few things I wanted to do in the local town. I didn’t manage to get any of the things I was aiming to find so added them to my list of things to do on Saturday instead. After the children had gone to bed I rang my Mum to arrange for her and I to go out on Saturday for various bits of shopping and she ended up getting in her car and coming over to talk about it instead (she only lives a mile away).

Yesterday was the day we’d earmarked for going shopping for various bits and pieces for Scarlett’s party, her birthday and some Christmas shopping. We’ve pretty much sorted the children’s presents already with a few last minute bits still left to get but Mum wanted to get a birthday present for Tarly from Frazer (my brother – who at 30 still doesn’t do his own shopping :roll:), a little gift for Davies on Tarly’s birthday from her, Christmas presents for both children from Frazer. We got a dvd each for the children for Scarlett’s birthday (always a winner for presents for our children, films) and more geomags for Christmas (hurrah! Got the pastel ones for Tarly and some new black and orange ones for Davies). I got some pretty party shoes for Tarly to go with her Princess dress ready for her party and a pair of Christmassy pjs each for the children. We started a tradition years ago that on Christmas Eve they each get one gift – which they don’t seem to have worked out yet but is always pjs to put on there and then. I also got several pairs of trousers for Davies who has finally grown enough for all his trousers to be too short now – Mum put some money towards them as she insisted I bought the slightly more expensive than value brand ones so she paid the difference! 🙂

We came home, bringing food for lunch and Dad arrived over at our house for the afternoon too. Dad, Ady and the children were playing a rousing game of ‘Crackers’ – a fairly antique Wallace and Gromit board game Ady found in a charity shop for D’s birthday. It’s a fairly mental game with loads of crazy tasks to carry out so they all seemed to be enjoying that.

Then Mum and I headed back out again for party supplies for Tarly’s birthday party. We got everything on my list and a few extras, all at bargain prices from the pound store so that was very pleasing too. 🙂

Came home again and Davies had decorated and arranged the playroom to put on a show so we all went and watched that – it made up for in style what it lacked in substance and was heavily reliant on lots of audience participation but give that boy a (toy) microphone and he’s ready to charm the crowd! 😆 The children had a bath supervised by my Mum, who was then allowed to brush Scarlett’s hair :shock:. The children went to bed, Dad and I went out to get fish and chips for dinner and we had a really nice evening.

I had a glimpse today of what it might be like to teach. It was a nice enough half hour given I relaxed a long way from what I had planned to do and went with the flow but of course teachers wouldn’t get luxuries like that, and they’d have way more than three children of mixed abilities and interests to deal with at once.

This morning Davies xboxed while Tarly played with Tap a shape. This has easily won ‘toy of the week’ here this week. Sometimes they do seem to fixate on one thing for a while before losing interest again. The tap a shape is a cork board with a little hammer and pins and a variety of wooden shapes with holes in the middle. You attach them to the cork board using the hammer and pins to make patterns and pictures. It was a cheap Christmas present about 2 years ago and goes through periods of being played with loads by one or both of the children. I bunged some pizza dough ingredients in the breadmaker. We turned the Xbox off at 10.30am and I put ClassTV on, every so often we watch it and it usually grabs their attention. It was Numbertime and as Davies is currently into playing with numbers and counting in a big way and Tarly loves anything to do with ‘pennies’ it caught them both for a good half hour. I hung several loads of washing out (which promptly got rained on for most of the day :roll:) and we headed off to Lucy’s.

We’d planned last night to do pizza with the children for lunch so we sat round the little table in their kitchen with a ball of dough each, shaped it (Davies’ was ‘Gromit shaped’ while Rebecca and Tarly went for the more conventional circular choices), spread it with ketchup, sprinkled it with grated cheese and the girls added some chopped up ham to theirs, cooked it and ate it. I tried to talk to them about the ingredients in the dough and what part of the baking each one played – the important one being yeast, but it didn’t quite work out that way 😆 and there lies why I am an autonomous educator really! Rebecca and Davies were really quick and efficient and their pizzas went in first, Tarly was a bit more into the idea of playing with the dough and making pretty shapes until I explained that it was sort of like the plate for our pizza but we could eat it, it was to hold all the ingredients on together and keep them in one place while we cooked it and ate it. That seemed to do the trick and she was happy to roll it out then. She is pretty handy at spreading things having done a lot of peanut butter, marmite and chocolate spread on toast type activities and hers and mine went in next. Davies ate over half of his which was rather surprising as he was insisting he didn’t like it, Tarly picked all the ham off hers and then all the cheese, Rebecca and Richard ate all theirs. 🙂

They played nicely, if noisily for the afternoon and did drawing, running around, we read some stories and ate some flapjack. It was nice :).

Our friend Jim, who lives in Ireland is over this weekend for a stay at Butlins with some mates so he came over last night to catch up with us before heading to Butlins today. We had a great night talking about old times, catching up on each others lifes now, lining up loads of empty bottles along the fireplace and laughing. We played our usual game of flicking between the music channels on Sky and guessing the song title, artist and year with additional bonus points for facts like album title etc and it was a really, really nice evening.

I’ve got me, Ali, Helen, Merry, Sally (can you email me your address Sally please), Kirsty – anyone else?

Happy 10th Birthday to Poppy Portico! Have a wonderful day, love from Ady, Nic, Davies & Scarlett xxx

I had the dentist first thing this morning for the check up on my wisdom tooth and review of the xray from the hospital. Lucy came and sat in the house with all the children while I dashed across the road to the dentists – love being walking distance from the docs and the dentist, it’s fab :). She was happy with the way the tooth is looking now, all the infection has cleared but it is still not fully erupted so will require further monitoring. The surgeon is at the dentists once a month so she is planning to show him my xray and get his opinion on further action if any. But she did notice that while my teeth are pretty healthy my gums are not. My Mum suffered really bad gum disease whilst pregnant with me and never really recovered, to the point that they receeded so badly she actually lost all her top teeth a couple of years back. The teeth were all in fantastic condition still but the gums couldn’t hold them. Dentists have always kept a close eye on my gums as I think it can be a hereditry thing and sure enough mine are not good and worsened with both pregnancies. My teeth also stain really badly (due to all the wine and tea mostly :oops:) and when we used a private dentist I actually went 6 monthly to the dentist and 6 monthly to the hygienist to keep them in check and she suggested I start going to them 3 monthly to keep an eye on the health and condition of my gums. Then told me that today would be free and if I could manage to come back again within the next two weeks she do a scale and polish for me free too all under the banner of what I paid a couple of weeks ago – which was £15.50 and will have covered three appointments, a scale and polish and an xray at the hospital. I dread to think what that would have run into at my private dentists but it would have been more than I spent on a months food shopping nowadays for sure. Hurrah for the NHS (on this occassion!).

Julie, Jack and Maisie arrived and we headed over to the local park for about an hour. Davies and Scarlett really enjoyed it, I’m not so sure the other children did quite so much :(. Davies had been watching dead leaves blow about in the wind and decided to do ‘a science experiment’ to see if enough leaves would carry his weight in the wind. He knew he needed to collect loads because he is heavy so he got a good sized handful, climbed up a climbing frame and waited until a gust of wind came and then holding the leaves aloft jumped to see if he’d be carried. He’d already said he didn’t think it would work but he wanted to test it. He then tried again by collecting more and climbing slightly higher on a different climbing frame but this time I had to stand beneath and catch him if the wind didn’t. I really loved how he knew it wasn’t going to work but wanted to test it to prove it. We talked about what might work and decided something like a sheet would maybe work for longer in a far stronger wind, we talked about how parachutes work when used from higher up where the wind is stronger. They then went and played on a skatepark style couple of concrete ramps for a bit. Davies was still in rather a boisterous mood from last night playing with Liam and was a bit too ‘mean boy’ a couple of times but hard as that is to witness it is also somehow reassuring given how I once spent a period of time worrying that he simply didn’t know how to play like a child or be all rowdy like other boys – no such fears nowadays!

Lucy left us to call in at her parents while Julie and I came back for lunch. I enforced a ban on playing in bedrooms to combat the ‘every room in the house is trashed’ issues from last time and Scarlett & Maisie dressed up as fairies and then princesses and playing with My Little Ponies while Davies and Jack played with some cars and some dinosaurs – with plenty of crossovers between the two games. Then we got out the wooden train track and a very elaborate collaborative track was built spanning most of the downstairs of the house. Lucy, Rebecca and Richard arrived in the middle of that and managed to find space to sit among the track and helped with the building too. Julie, Lucy and I managed some chatting about the future of Home Ed in the UK, parenting, politics and society, the welfare state and just who is responsible for what and who really should be. Ah such interesting and powerful stuff.

Julie, Jack and Maisie headed off, Lucy, Richard and Rebecca stayed awhile longer. There was more dressing up, some tidying up, some bead threading for Tarly and Rebecca and more chat. Pretty much my perfect sort of day really. There was education – obvious and not so obvious, socialising and running around for the children and plenty of sitting, drinking tea and putting the world to rights for me with my friends. Bliss 🙂

And now, dinner, not cooked by me and Torchwood. Oh and I’m drinking snowballs and pretending to be 17 which is always fun too!

I would have donned a bee outfit and been all stripey black and yellow with all the busyness I buzzed with. But of course that would be mad, who knows in advance what the day is going to pan out like? What if I’d worn a stripey outfit and a pair of those bouncy shapes on springs attached to a headband to look like bees antenna and then all the engagements that kept me so busy had been cancelled at the last minute? What then eh? I’d have looked pretty bloody silly wearing yellow which is so not my colour wouldn’t I? 😆

Ady’s car is doing all sorts of funny things with lights lit up on the dashboard indicating it’s imminent death so it is at the garage (another of those times we are truly pleased to be running a company car rather than caring at all about the potential cost of fixing it.) and he worked from home this morning before taking my car to go to college this afternoon.

First thing this morning Davies and I made another film – details of that over on monstermovies to save me going over it again. Then came the saga of the BT man which had us occupied for ages. They also watched The Christmas Carol on dvd which spawned several conversations. After making the film Davies and Scarlett got engrossed in one of their games. It involved a pile of cuddly toys, the foam blocks, some foam beads, the toy scales and a calculator. Oh, and lots of shouting :lol:.

We had lunch, I made some flapjacks inspired by them at MM yesterday, Ady went off to college and Lucy and Rebecca arrived. For some reason the three of them didn’t manage to play together although they all played together in various twosomes but by the end Davies and Scarlett were both getting rowdier and squabbling with each other so I sent them both to their rooms to calm down a bit while I finally finished a conversation with Lucy and said goodbye to her. We had Mel, Liam and Lily coming after school for a play and tea and I needed them to just calm down a bit before they arrived otherwise it would have been utter bedlam. They did indeed calm down and were playing quite happily with the pretend food and the till when they got here.

A variety of playing went on including dressing up, running around and generally being very noisy while Mel and I endeavoured to chat. The children were all fed and disappeared off to play again, with them finally leaving about ten minutes before I needed to leave for book group.

Book group was good tonight, I was introduced to the couple of staff working as the newest member of the team. There were only six of us tonight and only three of us had even finished the book (I was not one of them :oops:) but it was a really nice meeting with lots of general chatter. We’ve got an interesting looking book for this month and have chosen two short books to read in December, one of which is ‘The five people you meet in Heaven’ which I read earlier this year and all but one of us have read already but agreed would be a book we’d like to discuss, the second is ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ which I am also looking forward to reading.