One word? When seven would do…

We needed more kiddie drugs today (along with some grown up ones) so I did a bit of a stock up bulk purchase including some Evening Primrose Oil tablets for me (I’ll keep you updated on progress with that – I am slightly sceptical with the same level of belief I reserve for arnica really, but it’s worth a go). At the pharmacy counter I went to ask for Medised and realised that is for under sixes – so I proudly bought the over six version. As the over six I was purchasing it for wailed into my leg because I’d refused to buy him a fifteen quid Shaun the sheep hot water bottle cover :roll:. Lovely to reach this new era of maturity!

Davies suddenly started fading fast as we were about to leave Chris and Helen’s on Saturday and spent the whole journey home coughing. I may have mentioned previously that I find a cough slightly irritating :roll:, we got home, they had a bath and something to eat and he was asleep really quickly. He woke really early on Sunday (and I always get confused trying to decide if it’s early or late when the clocks leap backwards or forwards but it was still dark and Ady and I didn’t intend getting up) but sat and played with his X box which he has missed terribly while we’ve been away, despite regular goes on the DSs which were at camp belonging to various children.

Yesterday we had a really quiet day at home, the children stayed in their pjs all day, only getting out of them at bedtime to put clean ones on to go back to bed in. I went and did the food shop for the month and cooked a lovely roast, I also made a start on the holiday washing (cos admit it, that’s been on your minds 😉 ) and unpacked the last few things from the week away. The children mostly watched films, played x box or played with the geomags which were the other thing they missed while we were away.

At bedtime last night Tarly developed the cough which meant she had a really fitful night’s sleep. Davies woke early from a bad dream and although better with the coughing is clearly really generally crap with the cold and a weeks sleep-lag. And I have been having twinges from my last remaining wisdom tooth (I only had 3, two of them were taken out when Davies was tiny and the last one is still only partially errupted and is doing some more pushing through the gum at the moment which bloody hurts – my jaw and cheek really ache and have that tender tooth-achey sort of feeling. Oh and I have the sore throat and blocked up nose suggesting I am getting the cold too.

So a merry bunch of folk are we – not! 🙁

In the interests of not spreading our germs, inflicting others with our grumpy company and me not being arsed to drive over to Brighton we’ve decided not to go to Home Ed group today. It’s a friend’s birthday tomorrow so we need to walk to the post office to send a card to Ireland for her and I really need to start sorting out this shoebox swap thingie. Davies is doing a make a clock kit he got for his birthday, Tarly is rummaging through the lego and I am promising myself and them I will spend a while on the laptop this morning and then do stuff with them today.

Last year we did a christmas card list through my blog, so that we can still do the whole making cards for friends thing without having to make 100 or so for people we don’t actually know!

I think I probably still have the addresses somewhere but if anyone else either wants to join in or wants to get the addresses from last year (so just the people who read my blog basically, which will likely have various duplicates from the Early Years list) leave a comment 🙂

I mentioned last week that I am thinking about another camp in March / April. If anyone is interested please let me know – or come and join the yahoo group Nic Camps . Location and dates to be decided but an initial shout of interest would be good. 🙂

First of all many thanks everyone for adhering to the vow of silence I swore you all to before we left 😆

We’ve been away having hired a youth hostel for four nights in Yorkshire to have a Halloween camp. We stopped over night at Babs’ on the way up to celebrate Ben’s fifth birthday, I got to see Kirsty’s new house and Babs regaled us all with an impromptu piano performance (and no, it’s not stopped being funny yet! 😉 ) .

Monday we left fairly early to get to the youth hostel, look round the nearby area and get the food shopping in for the week. Ady and I had the same brainwave simultaneously when spotting a Tesco delivery van that we should have just done an internet shop a couple of weeks ago and scheduled it to arrive an hour after we were due to, but next time eh?

The youth hostel is / was lovely. Quite the nicest I’ve ever been in, but as that one took my quota to the grand total of three I guess I am not the very most reliable source of youth hostel reveiwers ever ;-). A really nice big living area, a good sized kitchen (with dishwasher 🙂 ) and really nice rooms all with sinks and individual bedside lights. Helmsley is lovely too, I do like Yorkshire and despite being rather more of a touristy town than a slice of real Yorkshire living it was very nice with the shops just a few minutes walk away. We had a large garden area complete with several apple trees which we made full use of, sending several children out apple collecting with carrier bags which we turned into a crumble and used for apple bobbing too.

I won’t bother doing a daily account but Ady, the children and I had a fab week. It was lovely to spend time with some of our favourite adults and children. It felt like a relaxing, happy, comfortable week with loads of communal living, lots of people doing what they did best and adding it to the group mix, a constant supply of children to play with and adults to chat to with added peace and quiet to sit and read or wander round the town as and when we felt the need. We had lovely late nights sitting up with friends, we filled the recycling box twice over, there was Jenga tournaments to end all Jenga tournaments, there was conga-ing, Anthony read us our rights and the bathroom facilities were suberb ;-).

We had a Halloween party on the last day, which was pretty much as child led as it gets. We’d brought along the bin liner full of stuff which had been dismantled from our Halloween party last year and just bunged in the garage. The children fell upon it and with very little help decorated the hostel beautifully. They collected apples for apple bobbing, Tilda helped with cooking and food preparation, Poppy, Anna and Tilda made potions and concoctions of party drinks and named them, Poppy came up with various party games using the bits and pieces from last year as props. It was pretty damn near perfect I reckon.

Did I mention we had mulled wine? 🙂

I won’t be mentioning the playdoh or the couscous naturally! 😉

Loads of pictures on flickr which I’m sure sum it up and I’ll look forward to reading others’ accounts of the week too. But thanks to all who came along and made it a fab week. 🙂

On the way home we had another overnight stop, this time with The Beans, which is always a winner with all of us. We barely saw any of the children, to the point of all getting a lovely lie in this morning while we listened to the children all playing really happily together. I do love Chris and Helen’s, it’s relaxed, there is wine and tea, the children love it there and we even got to bring fish into their house from The Chippery. 🙂

We got home around 6pm this evening – already dark and dark even earlier tomorrow of course. Davies fell asleep as his head hit the pillow, Tarly, who had had a restorative nap on the way home in the car was rather later to sleep but we have a quiet day at home planned for tomorrow before launching straight back into real life again on Monday. 🙂

Alex – 5 today!!

Have a lovely day darling, looking forward to spending it with you,

Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx

Ben 🙂 Have a lovely 5th birthday – look forward to celebrating it with you! Lots of love, Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx

newsflash.

Davies appears to have actually, finally, really and truly, no kidding, seriously, at last, can’t quite believe it’s true…..

grown.

His age 4-5 years trousers are finally a little on the short side.

Which is good, if for no other reason than Tarly is about big enough to be wearing them! 😆

The car alarm still rings. David is looking somewhat crazed with hair sticking out in all directions, bags under his eyes you could pack clothes for a week away for a family of four in and a demented look in his eyes. The policeman neighbour is sporting ear plugs and muttering about ‘having contacts to sort it out’. We don’t much care actually because a) all our bedrooms are on the other side of our house and actually you really can’t hear it – well you can’t after sufficient wine anyway and b) we’re going away tomorrow and by the time we come back again either Carolyn and Owen will have returned and with one simple click of a button on the car key have disabled the alarm, or the neighbours will have finally been pushed over the brink, formed a bounty hunter style gang complete with bandanas and torn vests and either smashed the car in with bricks, picked it up (it’s only a wee sports car don’t forget) and carried it off to another location or snipped the cable underneath with cable cutters or the battery will have run out on the bloody thing.

This morning I mostly pottered including reading a couple of stories to Tarly and looking at the illustrations in some of our lovelier story books, Davies played with the animation software Ali got for his birthday then we walked into town to return some library books where we bumped into Lucy. We had a browse in the charity shops. Tarly got a free cuddly toy from a charity shop desperate to unload some of their excess of cuddly toys 🙄 because we’re desperate for more of those in our house. Ady got a Blue Peter jigsaw from the 70s for 50p which he used to have as a boy and do with his Dad and then we went to the sweet shop which still sells penny sweets you put into a tub individually (probably containing 47 traces of human urine, bird flu and child’s snot) – which was the same sweet shop me and Frazer used to spend our 20pence pocket money in, probably using the same tubs actually, some 25 years ago. So nostalgia all round this morning :-).

We walked home laughing at Tarly and her odd ways and at one point Ady and I ended up infront of the children. We get to walk holding hands now after 6 years of pushing pushchairs, carrying children or holding hands with them and it’s rather lovely – hey next summer maybe they’ll even be eating whole ice creams ;-). Anyway, we were walking along infront of them and stopped to turn and look at them – our lovely crazy boy, shouting and finding something to draw everyone’s attention to every three paces, our lovely messy girl with her scruffy hair, short skirt and great big sparkly boots, insisting she’s not doing everything we can clearly see she is doing right there. Both of them happy, inquisitive, loving life and as wild, free and individual as all children really should be. Was a lovely moment. 🙂 And it happened just as we arrived back at our house, having been speculating that it would have been pretty much right about this time of year in 1993 that we first came and saw this house. There’s something about walking up the path to the front door when the trees and bushes are in the same state of turning autumnal colours as they were back then and the grass is all green and squishy underfoot and the sun is dappling shadows on the same places on the walls as it was that time of year that makes me feel that this really is the house we were supposed to be living in. It’s not huge, it’s not grand, but we knew when we walked in the front door for the very first time it was ours and it was where we were supposed to be. Who knows if we’ll be here this time next year, but it was nice to feel how much we’d moved on at the same time as keeping still somehow.

This afternoon I’ve been to Tescos while Ady and the children ate popcorn and watched films – cos they truly aren’t filmed out even this week 😯 then I did loads of baking (chocolate brownies, chocolate gingerbread, banana loaf) while Ady cleaned out both cars, mowed the lawns and dug out a bin liner full of Halloween-y stuff from last years party ready to pack. The children made birthday cards for the friends they will be spending birthdays with next week.

Tonight I’ve packed everything in a super organised manner with a bag to take into Babs’ tomorrow containing just overnight stuff rather than hulking our whole weeks worth of stuff in, done route finders and generally prepared for a week away.

Looking forward to seeing those of you we will be with or visiting along the way – I’ll be back next weekend.

I can’t quite believe this story.

Your Hidden Talent

You have the power to persuade and influence others. You’re the type of person who can turn a whole room around. The potential for great leadership is there, as long as you don’t abuse it. Always remember, you have a lot more power over people than you might think!

You Are 8% Bipolar

You’re so stable, people wonder if you’re really human. You totally have your emotions under control – and know how to deal with life’s ups and downs.

and I didn’t even tick the nail varnish remover answer!!

You’re a Wild Drunk

You can get enough drink. Seriously, you’ll just go puke and start pounding them back again!

You Are Blitzen

Always in good spirits, you’re the reindeer who loves to party down with Santa. Why You’re Naughty: You’re always blitzed on Christmas Eve, while flying! Why You’re Nice: You mix up a mean eggnog martini.

but whether or not you’ll want to post the results is another thing….

You are 67% Capricorn

For anyone who doesn’t already know / isn’t already coming, a bunch of us will be staying Monday to Friday at Helmsley Youth Hostel. We have a day trip out planned on Tuesday but are planning to do plenty of sitting round chatting on Wednesday and preparing for and having a Halloween party on Thursday. If anyone is local enough to pop over for the day during the week please let me know in advance and we’d love to see you. 🙂

In which clearly I am pre-menstrual. Yesterday my tolerance for friends, family, pets, the world in general and actually even inanimate objects was fairly low. Today it has further plummeted.

I saw a car sticker yesterday which said ‘tested negative for patience’ and it made me smile. Today it would have made me nod in empathy.

I signed up for the Home School Shoe Box Swap scheme which is one of those ideas which I think is probably excellent in theory and utterly stupid in practise for me as it is simply adding yet another thing to do to an already rather teeteringly full job list. So of course with that firmly bunged down my list of things as something to think about when we get back from Halloween camp I have managed to be paired up with the most enthusiastic swapper ever. On the plus side I think she may well be a great character for fictional writing inspiration 😉 but she is bombarding me with emails and then emailing to check I got her earlier email and then emailing to apologise for emailing me so much and then emailing me to thank me for reassuring her that she is not annoying me by emailing me so much. Clearly I need to match make her with David and Doreen the Thank you neighbours – it would be the perfect international friendship.

Oh and talking of neighbours – Carolyn and Owen our opposite neighbours (they are semi attached to Don and Maureen the retired neighbours on the corner who work as dinner supervisors and bring us cartons of juice and raisins and next door to David and Doreen (and sometimes Jeanette) the Thank you neighbours, who are semi attached to the policeman and the nurse who keep funny hours – he’s friendly, she’s less so and they in turn are next to the newer sexy builder neighbour who is redoing his drive -are you still with me?) who none of the neighbours really know that well. They have his and hers sports cars and both work long hours and have no children and go on lots of holidays and have a cleaner and he supports Chelsea and at least one of them smokes judging by the colour of their nets 😆 Well we think Carolyn and Owen are on holiday this week as Owen’s car hasn’t been there all week but today at about 11am Carolyn’s car alarm started going off and is still going off now. This started as a minor annoyance. It is now probably cause for taking to the car with my Dad’s sledgehammer if he’d not taken it home with him last night when they came round for dinner.

And talking of my parents they really annoyed me last night too, not with anything specific, just by being here really. And they both nagged me about not talking to my Granny lately who had been nagging them about not hearing from me. Because of course she can’t contact me and it’s not as if I’m busy with a life or anything is it.

And talking of busy lives…. you get the picture.

Nic. Not the best company to be in today :-).

So my plan was to do some playroom clearing today as that is a fairly regular once a month activity. I get all PMTy, rant lots about living in a shit tip and how no one ever does anything around here but me (not true!) and set to tipping everything in the playroom onto the floor, clearing a bin bag or so out of it, putting it all back away again and feel much better. But I also wanted to do some baking this morning and I’d said I’d make some playdoh and we’d run out of vegetable oil for the playdoh which meant we had to go out (in the pouring rain, naturally) to get the oil. So by the time everyone was dressed and we’d been out and come back I didn’t have enough time to do both and as I had to make the playdoh – well I didn’t have to but I wanted to – and would be in the kitchen anyway I thought I’d just do the baking. So I made snickerdoodles, which I accidentally put peppermint essence in instead of vanilla (you can’t taste it fortunately, and they do leave your breath minty fresh!) and some flapjacks, which by some fluke didn’t burn or anything and look lovely, although on tasting we’ll probably find that in a comedy twist Ady had refilled the syrup tin with varnish or something and they are actually toxic. Tomorrow’s arrangements to see Chris and Julie have been cancelled so tomorrow is now a free day to do more baking (I’m planning chocolate brownies, chocolate gingerbread, banana cakes and maybe some savoury stuff, perhaps cheese scones?), tidy the playroom if I’m still in the right mood for it and pack up ready to leave Sunday morning for Babs’.

So the children fell out with each other, screamed and shouted – oh how infectious is a grouch, even more so than a smile. I ranted and threatened, you can probably picture it all just reading about it. Lucy and Rebecca came round and Rebecca really happily came in and played while Lucy popped home to drop Richard back so that was a massive step forward. Lucy came back, we had lunch, tidied away the geomags and got out the playdoh. It was a bit sticky – unsurprisingly given how the day was going, but the children all made fairly creative things before we all got bored and suggested a trip to the park. Lucy collected Richard and we had a nice enough half hour or so at the park with reduced whinging (mostly mine I think actually :oops:) before heading back to Lucy’s for tea. The children all disappeared and appeared to be playing nicely, although there were rather too many puddles on the floor and soggy clothes for us to be altogether pleased at the peace :roll:.

We’re home again now, the car alarm is still going off (or is that just the ringing in my ears?), peace is restored with some enforced quiet watching of Discover kids while I rant here and their tea is cooking.

But you know what, it’s Friday, Ady should be home any moment and I’m barely an hour away from opening the wine – things can only get better!

A couple of weeks ago I went into the local Woolworths and was horrified to realise they were playing Christmas music in the store. I mean, I’ve worked in retail, I’ve been on week two of a two week plan by the beginning of October, I’ve been worrying about Christmas temps in August and I’ve been panicking about the January Sale by October but those days are behind me now. Sometime this year I realised that Davies had already gotten doubtful about the whole Santa idea and frankly if Tarly ever believed in the first place I’d be surprised 😉 my orgy of spending excused with festive reasons is no longer available to me and Ady and I have been spending hours fantasising over running off somewhere remote to spend Christmas either just the four of us or with friends rather than family and trying to ‘recapture the magic’ a bit. If Christmas doesn’t have religious implications for you then possibly you shouldn’t celebrate it at all but for me certainly it is a time of traditions, warm fuzziness and lots and lots of tinsel.

So today we went to see Polar Express, a rather charming film about the doubters in Father Christmas being picked up on Christmas Eve by the Polar Express train to the North Pole where they meet F.C. and one of them gets picked to recieve the first present of Christmas as the clock strikes midnight. And of course there is the whole ‘personal journey while on the physical journey’ type stuff along the way. Hugely predictable of course but I could probably count on one hand the amount of films I’ve seen in my whole life which weren’t. Plenty of action and humour and touching bits and although it was pretty long it kept a good pace and had Tarly easily the most captivated she has been all week. And as I happen to really rather like Tom Hanks the fact he was to Polar Express what Magnus Scheving is to Lazy Town (and Dennis Waterman was to Minder 🙂 ) that was all good too.

So we left the cinema feeling really rather festive and this afternoon we’ve been to the Wizard store where I spent just over a tenner and got loads of bits and pieces for Christmas pressies including things like diaries, pens, craft kits etc and I’ve spent ages on ebay this afternoon bidding on stuff for Christmas presents too. Retail therapy on an electronic and far smaller level, with no added annoying shoppers or shop assistants. 🙂

The children have played with geomags and plastic animals again for ages, leading me to wonder yet again why we have quite such a massive amount of toys in the playroom when they almost always choose these ones – I have a bit of a sort out in there planned for the morning followed by playdoh in the afternoon featuring Lucy, Rebecca and Richard. Tonight my parents are coming over for dinner, hence the early blog.

Another day, another film!

Today it was Ice Age: The Meltdown we’ve got the first Ice Age film on dvd and although it’s been watched I wouldn’t really say it was a favourite but this was the film the children enjoyed most so far this week.

We managed to leave on time to get to Brighton and park and dash into the cinema, I’d taken popcorn and maltesers with me stashed in my bag 🙂 We listened to Phil Collins all the way there with me singing very loudly and playing the drums on the steering wheel 😳 We took the same seats we’d had yesterday but the cinema was far less busy than it had been yesterday. We’d been spotting Home Educated people then and trying to decide what marked ‘us’ out and decided it was mainly messy hair and rainbow clothes (oh what a stereotype!) along with small groups and better manners (how cross do I get with the groups of schoolchildren with zero manners barging past littler children on stairs and in narrow corridors at the cinema!!!). Scarlett really enjoyed this film and ‘participated’ in it, gasping, exclaiming and saying ‘oh no!’ and ‘don’t die!’ in the appropriate places and deciding that ‘the squirrel is my favourite character’. Davies made several comments throughout which made me laugh / agree / smile accordingly. It was nice. 🙂 Davies and I also had a whispered conversation about the fact there really had been an Ice Age in past history during a slow bit of the film.

We talked about it a bit on the way back to the car with Davies planning to build an ‘Ice Age’ scene and us discussing making fimo characters to play with in it. We talked about our favourite bits of the film and laughed over a few of the funny bits again. We talked about mammals and how they are still around today, I mentioned that birthing live young and feeding them mothers’ milk were good indicators of mammals in much the same was as the walking on two legs is a carnivore and four legs is a herbivore rule to the dinosaurs – not exhaustive and with exceptions, but a good starting point. So we talked about examples of mammals we could think of. Then Tarly requested James Blunt on the stereo so we stopped talking and listened to him instead. 😆

We popped home as I’d managed to forget my mobile (again :roll:) and then headed round to Lucy’s. Julie, Jack and Maisie were already there so we joined the general melee and had a thoroughly lovely afternoon. Tarly had a potential moment which I managed to avert and deal with in a way I felt proud of, Julie, Lucy and I had various interesting conversations about sexuality, nature vs nurture, parenting and residential Home Ed get togethers. I do enjoy the time spent in that company and I know the children do too. 🙂

Julie, Jack and Maisie left but we trailed along for another hour or so before heading for home, which meant Davies and Scarlett had eaten another few sandwiches and didn’t need any ‘real’ food (not that I am in the habit of giving them ‘real food’ anyway 😉 ) so they had fruit for tea while watching Wallace and Gromit and were both fast asleep not long after 7pm. 🙂

I’ve had lovely email and IM chats with a couple of people, further increasing my warm fuzzy female friendship vibe (along with a couple of glasses of wine 😉 ). Tomorrow we have the last in our film fest with Polar Express which I’m about to read some reviews of so I at least have some idea of the plotline before we get there. And that will leave me pretty much all filmed out and glad of the chance to not sit in the dark watching animated animals with American accents save the world, learn all about friendship, families and loyalties ;-).