One word? When seven would do…

last night, so didn’t finish my IM chat with Lucy (sorry Luce!) or write a blog post. I can only assume in the way I’ve been hoping all the outside stuff and fresh air would tire the children into early nights (it hasn’t :roll:) it has indeed done it for me as I seem to be tired lots at the moment.

We were heading over to Ali’s yesterday and Ady offered to take us and pick us up to save petrol, which as it also meant Ali and I could have a glass of wine in the afternoon which we missed out on at Hunstanton seemed silly to refuse. So he dropped us off earlier than we were due at Ali’s as he had to get to college for a mock exam. We went to Ali’s local corner shop to get crisps and wine. They had a special offer of 3 bottles for a tenner (or a fiver each) which was too good to refuse so I got three bottles of wine, some pringles and Davies spotted the latest copy of the W&G magazine on the shelf there. We bought the first few copies of it as it was before our Financial Crisis (TM) and he has had subsequent issues as and when we have had a spare £2.60 (:shock:) and always really made the most of them, with the middle pages poster displayed on his wall, the stories inside read to him over and over and the puzzles etc all completed. As I was managing to justify a tenner on wine for me it seemed a bit mean to refuse £2.60 to him and he was being nicely pleading rather than annoyingly so I caved. Which meant I needed to get something for Scarlett too. In the corner shop, which was quite a feat unless she wanted a Ghostbusters dvd, a tin of peaches in syrup or some frozen findus crispy pancakes. Retrospectively she would probably have been happy with one of the bottles of wine, but she chose a bag of fizzy cola bottles instead :lol:. Which she proceeded to share with Davies and I.

Then we headed off on a walk. We’ve done part of the walk with Ali and Freya before so lots of the ‘landmarks’ were already tagged with names including ‘Echo Tunnel’ and ‘Poo Lane’. The children were picking dandelion clocks for me and each other to blow while making wishes which then all magically came true (most of them were ‘I wish for a cuddle’ or ‘I wish for another one of Scarlett’s cola bottles’ but still, the magic of the dandelion clocks is truly a mystical and wonderful thing :lol:). We walked past the goats and alongside a stream (where I was remarkably calm given how close they kept getting to the edge and how discinclined I would have been to leap in after them to save them if they’d fallen, finally ending up at a plot of allotments. We walked around them admiring the well tended ones, identifying lots of the veg growing on them and for me at least, being all wistful at the chairs sitting on some of them thinking about the idea of sitting there on a sunny afternoon in relative peace and quiet. Some of them were very family-like with a couple of swings, a stick and canvas wigwam and a small pond on one. My friend Dayve keeps chickens on his allotment and I have been toying with the idea of one for a while even going as far as checking out details of local ones on the local council website a few weeks ago, so it was coincidental that we happened to end up there yesterday. I explained the idea of them to the children who really liked it and were very keen to assure me it would be something they’d like to do so I have since got our names down on the waiting list for our local plots (it first looked like there was no waiting list but I’ve been emailed back today to say there is one and my name is now on it:) ). We walked back retracing our steps and taking a different turning at the end to walk along the lane behind Ali’s house. As we were almost parallel with the back of her house she rang to say they were ready for us so we finished walking that lane, went down the Incredibly Steep Concrete Steps at the end and arrived at her house.

Ali has already blogged our visit most ably so I shan’t rewrite that except to add that it was lovely and faintly surreal in places, particularly the operatic parts when everyone only communicated in song to each other. Ali and I had a chat about fitness and health which consolidated some feelings I’ve been having anyway but probably deserve a seperate blogpost. Then Ady arrived to collect us.

We came home via the supermarket for supplies for dinner which we’d forgotten to take out and defrost and a load of half price muffins and crumpets which I’ve filled another freezer with. The kids had sandwiches for tea and then ended up in the garden with Ady when I was intending to pack them off to bed. They came in and had a bath instead so were late to bed, which meant we were late for dinner, and then I fell asleep.

And now, I am 15 minutes over the time I’d allowed myself for blogging so I need to get a move on or we’ll be late for today’s activities. Anyone care to guess what that might be? 😉

seen at Making It Up

January 6th

3 events
1066 – Harold Godwinson is crowned King of England.
1929 – Mother Teresa arrives in Calcutta to begin a legacy of work amongst India’s poorest and diseased people
1907 – Maria Montessori opens her first school and daycare center for working class children in Rome.

2 birthdays
1412 – Joan of Arc, Roman Catholic Saint and national heroine of France (legendary date) (d. 1431)
1955 – Rowan Atkinson, English comedian and actor

1 death
1969 – Daisy and Violet Hilton, British conjoined twins (b. 1908)

Holiday or observance
Epiphany

to be sung to the tune of King Of The Road 🙂

My Mum has apparently been ill for day although I didn’t actually learn about this until Friday. She was well enough however to go out yesterday 😆 so when I spoke to her last night she was adamant she was seeing us today and asked me to think of something for us all to do. Ady is working and as everywhere is heaving along the coast I would have probably chosen some sort of walk somewhere (Dad doesn’d do beaches 🙂 ) but she rang (‘first thing’ – 10am?) and suggested us all going round to my Granny’s taking some lunch with us. I suggested picking her up after she’d done her regular pilgrimage to Sainsburys – honestly, the woman goes there daily! as I didn’t want to drag the children round the supermarket but she was adamant she needed me incase she had to lean on someone to make it round every aisle (she is very weak apparently!) so I arranged to be over at her house in half an hour. She asked me to make it 45 minutes as she wasn’t dressed yet. I would like to pretend that it was going to take her 45 minutes to get ready to leave the house because she was so ill she needed to move slowly but actually my mother is utterly incapable of getting out of a house quickly anyway – Dad always says she perish in a fire because she’d still be checking the gas was off, the TV unplugged and reapplying her lipstick while everyone else was assembled on the other side of the road and the fire brigade were already tackling the blaze! 😆

So I finished making the blown eggs with the children – Davies had some stickers and little plastic chassis with wheels on to make vehicles and Tarly had some 3D stickers of flowers, bugs and butterflies to stick on hers, got us all dressed and put away 2 baskets of clean washing before heading over to my parents. The plan had been for D&S to go in their house and wait with my Dad while Mum and I went to Sainsburys but Tarly refused insisting she wanted to come with me so in the end we all went. Well actually we didn’t – there was a queue off the main road just to get onto the slip road just to get into the car park so I decided that on my deathbed I’d kick myself for having wasted about an hour of my life in such circumstances so I swept across 3 lanes and we changed direction to go to the CoOp in the town centre which is just never, ever busy instead. Indeed it was not busy, we got all the bits we needed for lunch and went to my Granny’s.

Now as regular readers will know my Granny annoys me frequently. She is my Mum’s mum and they are very alike and have a real love/hate relationship with each other which I have always strived to keep well out of. She is big on emotional blackmail and guilt trips and used to make me feel very uncomfortable as a small child by gushing over me almost non stop while pretty much ignoring my brother. She is always bordering on rude to my Dad, which he is big enough to rise above but pisses me off and does that really annoying thing of talking to people through the children. I love that the children see one of their great grandparents – they are light on relatives generally with only my Mum and Dad for Grandparents and only Granny as a great grandparent so I am keen to foster that and I think they get lots out of the stories of when Granny was a little girl, let alone the stories of when Mummy was a little girl but I recall spending time with her when I was little and her ‘feeding’ me and Frazer with things which we’d then talk to my parents about – lots of snidey little comments. She is just not a nice person to be around for long periods of time and very neatly fits the mould of a bitter old woman left alone because she was horrible to people who tried to care about her. Anyway. I’d said to my Mum that I wouldn’t put up with any nonsense from her today so at least twice I pulled her up on some rubbish she was saying to the children which was putting me in a generally grumpy mood.

We got there and as soon as we arrived we went into her garden where there was an ENORMOUS box with a MASSIVE red remote control car (a quick google reveals it to be this exact one) for Davies. He was utterly overwhelmed, as indeed I would expect him to be – way too extravagent a gift for no particular reason and given with no real explanation other than ‘it’s been here waiting for you to come to my house and see me, but it’s been so long’ FFS don’t put that on a 6yo and don’t entice them to visit you with the sort of gift they wouldn’t normally even get for their birthday! It took about 15 minutes and a screwdriver to liberate it from it’s packaging only to discover it needed to be on charge for 5 hours before first use which sort of diffused it a bit thankfully. Then, almost as an afterthought Scarlett was taken into the house and presented with a giant polar bear soft toy. She did a grand job of being grateful but said quietly to me ‘Granny shouldn’t have bought me a soft toy really, I have already got lots’ bless her. It did seem rather incomparable a gift and perpetuates that favouritism that both Granny and my Mum have demonstrated moving down the generations – both of them utterly dote on Davies and largely ignore Tarly, openly describing her as ‘difficult’ 🙄

There were further fractious moments over lunch but I tried really hard to be reasonable and rational and spent a lot of time just talking to one or other child or my Dad. Scarlett and I did some drawing and writing together (I’d got both children to pack a small bag with some stuff to take with them as I knew there’d be no toys there and they’d both chosen to take a notebook and some pens). Tarly is doing this ‘pretend writing’ thing at the moment where she’ll draw loads of lines and shapes on a page and then tell me what it says. She wrote me a message and read it out ‘to Mummy, you are so pretty and I love you so much, lots and lots of love from Scarlett’ which she got all giggly about reading out and finished with a big kiss – made me melt :). I then drew some pictures – a cat, a house and a fairy and wrote the words out for her to join to the pictures. She didn’t just draw a line between them, instead she copied my writing next to each picture. A bit later on Davies and I played noughts and crosses, then a version Davies made up with H’s and A’s instead and a bigger board, then boxes and then as I couldn’t think of any other pen and paper games other than battleships – too long or hangman – requires reading / writing skills. So I wrote out some sums for him which he did instead. I totally expected him to scoff and not want to but he’s been doing lots of chatting about numbers generally lately so he took that really happily and sat doing them. I popped to the loo with Tarly while he was still working on them and when I came back out Mum had taken over and written a few more for him too – hopefully she didn’t make too much of it and ruin his interest.

We left there at about 4pm, dropped Mum and Dad home and came home. Davies played some xbox and Tarly did some more drawing before tea. Ady got home and while he was brushing Tarly’s hair before bed (honestly the new hairbrush has changed her life, she is up for having it brushed as often as one of us will do it :shock:!) he told her that I had a tool which could ‘engrave’ her name in it which of course meant she wanted it done there and then. So he dug out my pyrography burner and I burnt her name and some flowers onto her hairbrush, which then meant Davies wanted something burnt onto something too so I burnt his name and (quel surprise!) a Gromit face on the back of his wooden chair. I would probably have carried on quite happily but I leant across the machine and singed a load of my hair which meant I had to call a halt to it so I could go and wash the stink out of it. I’d forgotten how nice a craft it is though so I might resurrect it again as I already have the kit. 🙂

Scarlett woke horribly early at 6.20am this morning. I staggered down to her room and tried to persuade her to let me into her bed to snuggle up with her a bit longer but she was having none of it, so together we crept into the lounge to see whether the Easter bunny had been. He had indeed and she spotted a little cuddly rabbit that the Thank You Neighbours had included in the piles of stuff they’d brought over for the children so she was happy to come back to bed and bring that with her.

But not for long 🙁 By 7am we were all up and the children were gathering together the various hidden eggs from around the room.

We had breakfast and then the children did some colouring amd mask making from some Shaun the Sheep printouts Ady had done for them.

Then we got out some egg decorating kits I’d got for them which required blown eggs. That’s not quite as easy as it sounds is it?! 😆

We mixed up the dye and dipped the four we’d managed to blow ready to do more with maybe tomorrow
(note viewing choice in the background 🙂 ). And all this before about 9.00am!

Then we headed off out car boot sale hunting. We went to the one in Tesco’s car boot sale – I think Tesco’s all over the place were holding boot sales in the car parks today and this one was massive. We got loads, most of it to be put away for presents including loads of jigsaw puzzles, an X box game, more construction toys and some Polly Pocket stuff. I also in the last few moments spotted a bag with a Barbie duvet cover and pillowcase and a set of curtains. We recently got Davies some W&G bedding on ebay and Tarly has been angling for some Barbie bedding ever since. She also had curtains which had been Davies’ up in Manchester in her bedroom too. It was marked up at a fiver but he took £2.50 for the lot and chucked in a lampshade too, so her bedroom is well and truly Barbie-d up 🙂 Not where I’d like to be waking up each morning admittedly, but she loves it 🙂
.

We had lunch (roast lamb, it was lovely 🙂 Davies spent some time asking me why the mother sheep didn’t protect her lambs when people killed them so we could eat them, but in a very interested rather than emotional way and then he complimented me on how lovely the lamb had been after he’d eaten it all :lol:. That’s my boy! 😉 ) and after a brief interlude in the garden with some rather raucous water fights (that was just me and Ady actually, the children cheered us on rather than got involved!) we loaded Davies’ bike into the car and drove down to a different stretch of beach. It was really busy down there but Davies managed a bit of a run on his bike and should easily manage to get the stablilizers off this Summer I reckon 🙂 Tarly walked along a very high wall holding my hand.
and then we parked the bike and went down to the sea where predictably the children got wet, took their clothes off and got wetter, played in the sea until their teeth were chattering and then we had to dress them in an odd variety of clothing (Davies – wearing Ady’s sweatshirt as a dress coupled with his shoes but no socks) / be piggy backed back to the car (Tarly – which meant my back got all wet from her soggy clothes.) but they did have a ball 🙂

We came home and the children had a hot bath to warm back up and then I used up the remaining blown eggs (I’d made yorkshire puddings with some of them at lunchtime) to make pancakes. The children had them with easter egg chocolate melted on top. Then I popped out to collect a camp kitchen from a freecycler. It is very in need of attention but a good going over with a wire brush and a coat of hammerite should fix it and coming from freecycle it was well within our budget ;).

There was a mammoth car boot sale on the localish green today so we headed over to that first thing. It was almost too big with no logic to the layout or organised rows or anything – car boot sales and the like should always be organised by people like Helen who like to categorise and order, in neatly formed rows, by type of merchandise on offer with clearly marked prices and so on. 😆 Scarlett and I went off together and Ady went with Davies as it is just not feasible to walk in a foursome round such bedlam. Tarly got 3 Barbie books including another annual which hasn’t been filled in at all so she’s been enjoying putting that right. Then we spotted a Barbie laptop (very similar to this one) – Davies has a V Tech one that my Mum got him from a charity shop ages ago and it’s one of those toys I’d have never bought him but have been surprised at how much he plays with it – often in bed at night or bringing it out in the car. The woman was telling me how she didn’t know if it even worked and how it had been in her garage for ages and then opened it up to find it did work and decided she wanted £3 for it. I offered £2, she refused and held out for £3 so Tarly and I started to walk away. She came chasing after us saying she’d take £2 after all. 🙂 It looked pretty grubby so I was thinking I might have still paid too much but when we got it home it cleaned up perfectly and she loves it, and they cost loads more than I’d realised new so that was a bit of a bargain – wish I’d kept it back for Christmas or birthday now! She then decided we needed to get something for Davies next so with her eagle eyes she soon spotted a Trapdoor annual and we got that for him – again totally unmarked so he has already filled out his own name in the ‘this book belongs to…’ bit. Grand total of £3.50 spent by Tarly and me.

Ady and Davies had got a free Shaun the sheep rucksack because Davies convinced the stall holder what a fan he was but Ady refused to shell out any money for it (we already have one at home in our ‘collection’ and it was very grubby. It’s been through the wash and is now drying on the line looking pretty much like new :). And two identical Wallace and Gromit alarm clocks, bringing our Wallace and Gromit alarm clock count up to 3 now 🙄 and a W&G air freshner too. Their grand total spend was £3.00 so bargains galore all round :).

We then popped into Sainsburys for a few bits and pieces, Boots where Tarly and I went and chose a new hairbrush each. She has suddenly decided she enjoys brushing my hair and as we were previously a non-brushing household (Ady clearly doesn’t need a hairbrush, Davies doesn’t need one either, I have never really bothered and Scarlett has always been averse to brushing) all of our hairbrushes were either cheap and nasty hair pulling ones or novelty pink plastic ones. Lucy has a lovely soft hairbrush which Tarly always likes to use on her own hair when we go round there and it makes it all shiny and glossy too so we invested in a couple of nice proper hairbrushes. :). We also popped into the next door shoe shop which sells real proper crocs rather than the cheapo imitation ones Tarly and I are sporting just to check what the difference is. The real ones are far more shoe-like, clearly better quality and maybe slightly heavier, but I’m still very happy with the ones we have in terms of price. 🙂

We came home for lunch and to make some rice crispie cake chocolate nests with mini eggs in them. I made the nests and Scarlett was in charge of putting out the cake cases and putting mini eggs in each nest. Then back out again to drop Easter eggs off for my parents and Frazer. My Mum is ill – some sort of flu bug which is laying her very low and she’s not someone prone to illness or giving in to it, so we won’t be seeing them this weekend. Dropped their eggs off and collection a couple from them to the kids, kept my distance from ill people and then we went over to Chris and Julie’s.

The children played in the garden, Julie made little Easter baskets which they all decorated and then we sent them inside the house while we hid loads of mini eggs round the garden before letting them out to find them. 🙂 We ate some of the crispie nests we’d taken over and I would have pictures but my camera appears to have died. Ady is convinced it is due to me keeping it in my bag /pocket rather than a proper case round my neck coupled with it going to the beach 3 times this week – I am more convinced it is just retired. Fortunately one thing we are not short of in this house is digital cameras, which is just as well as I peeped on ebay with a view to replacing mine and they still go for loads of money :shock:.

We left there around 6pm ish to get home in time for Dr Who (not to watch it, we did that later while eating dinner, just needed to get home in time to tape it) and bed for the kids. We’ve laid out the eggs they’ve had from various family / friends topped up with lots of hidden mini eggs and now we are actually without any arrangements tomorrow which is lovely. I think we’ll probably eat lots of chocolate, maybe have a roast dinner at lunchtime (lamb, just to complete the circle of life from earlier this week 😉 ) and then maybe walk down to the beach :). Had a very funny conversation with the children about what the Easter Bunny has got to do with Jesus and all his hokey -cokey dead alive shenanigans but managed to liken it to Jesus / Father Christmas without actually explaining anything. I think the lure of presents / chocolate is probably sufficient reason not to worry too much about all the politics of the season for your average 4 and 6 year olds really. 😆

you couldn’t see how….

Oh how I have loved today, it has been the most cherishable of days, the most held in high esteem, lauded, honoured and most splendid of days. 😆

You’ll never guess where we’ve been. Really, you just won’t. Well ok maybe you will actually. Maybe you’ll have looked at my flickr account and seen that although the scenery is the same the childrens’ clothes have changed, maybe I’ve even become predictable (perish the thought ;)) or maybe you just know me well. And let’s face it, if you don’t know me by now, etc.

So this morning started with Wonderpets, as all good morning should. I really like the Wonderpets (and yes, I did have to go back and amend the description of my emotions towards them there 😉 ) but you know, I’ve been similarly entranced with children’s tv shows before so let’s not dwell on that (I had a favourite Wiggle once and I can still talk with eloquence on why I don’t like Sarah Jane from Tikkabilla as those at NicCamp will atest). The children were playing with wooden blocks and geomags so they tidied them up and got dressed while I hung washing out (hurrah for the weather which means although we get home all sandy and salty each day I bung clothes straight in the machine as we walk through the door and they are ready to wear again two days later 🙂 I erm, really like it ;)) and chucked lots of picnic food in a bag.

We headed over to Lucy’s where the children instantly went out to join Richard and Rebecca in the garden allowing Lucy and I to actually talk. 🙂 Well actually Davies went out in the garden, Tarly sat and played with a necklace machine but she did it quietly. They came back in to play with playdough (but in the kitchen so we continued to talk) and then we had lunch. They all went back in the garden for a while and then we walked across to the beach.

Having learnt my lesson about the child abuse that is taking kids to the beach and forbidding them to actually go in the sea we were appropriately togged up for it and they spent a mostly happy hour or so playing on the rocks. The rocks which have big signs saying you should not climb on them but attract my kids like magnets and despite them both having rock induced injuries currently would still be the first thing they chose to clamber on at the beach so I am considering to be enhancing all sorts of skills such as climbing, judging danger and peril, spacial awareness and as Lucy said some children their age live on rocks 😆 !!

They then stripped off to play chase the waves, built some sandcastles with their bare hands and generally had a great time. It was ace 🙂 Obviously there are photos on flickr ;). As we left the beach there was an older boy doing impresssive stuff like riding down the steps on his bike and performing stunt-y type tricks so the children stood and were impressed by him for ages before we persuaded them to leave. They ‘played bikes’ on the way home and in Lucy’s garden when we got back. Scarlett was very funny – I told her we had to go home and she said ‘but we’re playing bikes and we need a big area ‘ to which I smiled and she elaborated ‘we can’t play it near the road that would be dangerouser’ – adore, erm, love, erm, quite enjoy that four year old expression and vocab :). Davies had copied ‘PUBLIC TOILETS’ from a sign yesterday using chalk from the stones on the beach onto the concrete path so he was pleased to see it was still there and I admired once again how clear his letter formation was – I know it was copied but it’s interesting to see how he now copies up to 3 letters at a time and actually says to himself out loud ‘t, o, i’ before looking down to write rather than referring back each time to see how the letters are formed.

And that was it. I’m sure I’ve forgotten loads of incidental conversations or nuggets of information but mostly it’s just been a lovely week. The children have had their absolute fill of sea air, played with their friends and cousins, enjoyed the sunshine, learnt stacks, been wonderful. I’ve worked a couple of mornings which has felt perfect as it’s not interfered with our afternoons out but has earnt money and given me some time other than being Mummy. And I know it’s been the Easter holidays so they wouldn’t have been in school / nursery this week anyway but every time Ady has rung me from work to ask where I am and my answer has been ‘on the beach’ I have sat and watched my children having the time of their lives and thanked once again the fact that this is not just a brief two week window out of our normal routine, school based life style, this is actually what we do each and every single day if we choose to. And you know what, I’ve really rather ‘liked’ it. 🙂

On Wednesday evening Ady was tidying a shelf in the playroom and came across a cd and book from Usborne which had come in the starter pack when I joined as a rep to get loads of cheap books ;). Scarlett was desperate to have it so while she got the kitchen scissors out and set about liberating it from it’s totally OTT plastic wrapping Ady got the cd walkman thingy for her.

She then sat utterly transfixed with it and listened to it twice over, all the while following the words with her finger. I’d thought she was just randomly turning pages (although it must have some noise on the cd to tell you when to turn) but she did indeed seem to be following it properly. When I was little my Mum got us the Storyteller magazine and tapes which I so looked forward to and sat for hours listening to and following the stories in the magazine (having just googled that I can’t believe I would only have been 8 then). We’ve a good selection of books and cd stories in the childrens’ section at work, I must pick some up for her 🙂

and I would like to take single handed credit for any revival the Proclaimers are about to enjoy, I almost single handedly discovered them 😉 after all!

I worked this morning, having already done a fair amount of chasing about before actually going to work. My Dad is without his van this week so he asked if he could have my car this morning which necessitated picking him up (with children) and taking us all back home in time before Julie, Jack and Maisie arrived to look after D&S while I was at work, Dad taking me to work (I drove) and then having my car for the morning before coming and picking me up at 1pm when I finished work (he drove that time). But we managed it 🙂 I don’t often see such hours of the morning and even more rarely do I venture out into them fully dressed with fully dressed children (of course we frolick naked on the front lawn on a regular basis 😉 ) but I adore this time of year so it was lovely to be out in morning fresh air with the children off to collect Grandad. We were singing the Pink Panther theme tune on the way and Scarlett declared ‘Grandad is the pink panther!’ when he got in the car which led to a faintly surreal deconstruction of why Grandad cannot possibly be the Pink Panther as he is neither a Gentleman, a scholar or an acrobat. which led to full and much discussed explaination of the term ‘scholar’ to which Scarlett justified her belief in Grandad as the Pink Panther with ‘well he is a builder’
Me, Dad & Davies ‘ye-es?’
Scarlett ‘well he has a hammer!’
😆
I do get all my flights of utter fantasy from my Dad so to have he and I in a confined space along with a six and a four year old also prone to utter nonsense for prolonged periods of time is a recipe for the construction of an entire alternative universe, which we’d managed before we got back to my house. 🙂 When he’s on form there is no better company than my Dad :). I updated him on all things CCCS when we’d regained our composure and then Julie arrived so Dad took me to work.

It was busy again this morning – I quite like working mornings actually, aside from the nightmare of logistics that is childcare in the mornings as I am forced to get my lazy arse out of bed long before The Wonderpets is on and I am home shortly after 1pm which still leaves loads of the day to do ‘stuff’. I had a nice morning, finally confirming that I won’t have to do a mercy dash back to work on the last Friday of Kessingland 🙂 and having great fun doing the de-brief from my last training session (the one with the chaotic parking!). I also sat in on storytime this morning – the half an hour or so every Thursday that is dedicated to under 5s coming in for stories, singing and colouring in type stuff. I was introduced in the style of a TV presenter as ‘my friend Nicola’ by my colleague and I sat on the floor cross legged and sang along with Ten Fat Sausages and the Wheels On The Bus. It was ace 🙂 I’m due on a training course to learn how to do it properly but frankly if I can be paid my hourly rate for sitting cross legged on the floor talking to 3 yos about power rangers and singing Incey Wincey Spider I have totally fallen on my feet :lol:.

Dad picked me up and came back for lunch. I made all the children tidy up on the basis that I hadn’t played with any of the toys strewn around my house so I shouldn’t have to tidy them up and then I dropped Dad home again before coming back and leading the way to the beach (again!). Julie and I sat in a sheltered bit while the wellied up children had a whale of a time clambering on rocks, playing chase the waves and generally getting utterly drenched. Scarlett jumped down some steps on the way back to the car and we were all hysterical when the water sploshed out of the tops of her wellies as she landed! 😆 Pics on flickr – I tried to sort out the easy way to blog them but failed miserably and am now in a huff with the whole thing 😆 While I was at work the children had all been doing loads of Easter crafts as supplied by Julie who is just the children’s activity queen bless her 🙂 So Ady spent ages hoovering up bunny and chick shaped confetti tonight :lol:.

The kids are so enjoying the beach and all our regular outings to it. There is no denying that the main attraction is the sea itself – they adore teasing it and chasing the waves which I recall loving myself as a child. They enjoy climbing on the ‘danger, do not climb on these rocks’ rocks and daring the sea to splash them :). Last week while we sat on the beach Ady said to me ‘and this is why our house is worth so much money’ and I guess he’s right. It’s not the nicest beach in the country, possibly not even the nicest along the south coast but it is where 1000s of people choose to spend their hard earned money on a two week holiday every year so I guess it must have something going for it. We are here, we did miss it when we didn’t live so close and now that I can actually sit from afar and watch them enjoy it rather than be there holding hands the whole time it really does seem to be offering ‘fun for all the family!’.

We finished off tonight with me reading The Easter Story as borrowed from work which still didn’t answer Davies’ question about why it is ‘good’ Friday if Jesus died but at least gave me a slight edyoocatin’ buzz 🙂

yesterday, that I had the annual review with the CCCS last night. Full details over on buy me love for anyone interested. 🙂

I worked this morning but it was super busy and the four hours flew by. I got home to find very happy children and Lucy still ploughing her way through ‘The Naughtiest Girl in School’ :). Davies was thrilled to have gotten to the next level on his Were Rabbit X box game (he’s not played X box for a couple of weeks but picked it back up again this week, mostly to play Monkey ball with Scarlett but as ever when he leaves something alone for a while, when he comes back to it he has somehow improved). I got changed (Lucy ordered me to – she insisted she wanted her friend Nic back rather than library woman :lol:), had something to eat and drink and then we headed off out. Scarlett’s croc-a-likes had arrived so we gave our shoes their first trip into the world together.

We went up to the farm doing lambing – I think I linked to it earlier in the week – and Lucy, R & R came too. It is just the other side of the downs from where we live. At first glimpse it looked like it might be a disappointment as there was only 3 sheds – one with cows and a couple of calves and two with sheep. But we paid our £7 and ploughed on in anyway. Frankly they are coining it in for not a lot but actually we more than got our money’s worth. There were two sheds set up pretty similarly – in larger pens were pregnant ewes and in smaller ones there were individual ewes with the single, twins or triplet lambs she had birthed. There were two large pens in one of the sheds with 5 or 6 lambs each in for you to climb in and pet and play with which all the children loved. There were lambs being born hither and thither with lots of ewes inbetween their first and second lambs being born, plenty wandering round with amniotic sacks hanging out and lots of newborn lambs with their umbilical cords still attached. We’d been there a while before Davies and I managed to be in just the right spot to watch one being born though. It was the first live birth I’ve seen of any creature so I just thought it was magical 🙂 Davies asked lots of questions and learnt (whether he liked it or not) about waters, contractions, labour, birth, transition, placentas and why the birth might smart a bit but the bleeding afterwards is not painful. I found myself telling him in a loud enough voice to make myself shush a bit how the blood is similar to monthly menstrual blood in that you are not bleeding because you are hurting or injured. 😳 He really loved watching it all though and looked at me with eyes shining when the lamb came out with the final push and slithered to the ground to be licked clean by it’s mother.

The children also played on the haybales and generally had a great time. Davies’ favourite animals are sheep (partially due to Shaun the sheep and partially from way back when we went to the South of England show when he was four and he fell in love with one there) so this was his dream afternoon out really. 🙂 Pictures on flickr – I might edit some in this post tomorrow.

We had a quick wander up to the little church next to the farm where the children had a poke around, Lucy and I admired the 11th century wall paintings and Davies wanted to ‘play churches’ before some more people came in so I ushered everyone out incase they wanted to view the church in peace. We dropped Lucy & co home and came home ourselves. Ady pretty much followed us in and was an able assistant in the kitchen as I made quiche for our dinner and the kids tea. The children had a bath to wash the straw out of their hair and then I took Davies up to bed.

As promised I brought my laptop and asked him to dictate his Velveteen Rabbit sequel. That needs some editing but he also dictated a story about a fish and then I got him to dictate a guest blog post for Monster & Teeny, which was an interesting exercise as I literally just typed without any prompting him so it was intriguing to see which bits of the day he pulled out as worthy of note. 🙂

Apprentice watching this evening for real shouting at the TV stuff – love it 🙂 Tomorrow I’m working again in the morning and then doing *something* as yet unplanned with Julie & co in the afternoon. Busy, busy, busy. 🙂

By pure coincidence I’ve done a lot of trawling through memories the last couple of days. Yesterday I was trying to find a disc containing some writing I did about 10 years ago. I didn’t find it but I did come across loads of discs of photos from 2001 – 2004, many of which were previously unflickrd. So I sat and did that, smiling at the chubby baby that was Davies, the practically hairless toddler that was Scarlett (oh how that has changed!) and remembering all the happy days of years gone by with very little children through looking at their images.

Today I was thinking about those first months when we started to think about Home Education. I knew I would be able to chart it by finding archives of the newsgroup uk.people.parents where I’d been posting since 2000 and first met Alison, Chris & Helen and various others who are now real life friends. So I spent a very happy hour finding my early postings from there when I had a newborn Davies, again when I had a newborn Scarlett and a toddler Davies and finally tracked down my first questions on there about Home Education, which led to me finding Muddlepuddle. And the rest as they say…I was actually looking so I could do a post on Monster & Teeny about how we found out about HE, which I did indeed do, but I got more caught up in a trip down memory lane about the things which concerned me 4 and 6 years ago, the toddler years, the potty training, the sleeping and so on. Now of course I have my blog so I can go back and see what I was pondering on this date two years ago or whenever but it’s nice that actually all of the children’s lives are charted by images and my words at the time right from the very beginning.

I’d wanted to do *something* with the children today, having been working for a day and a half last week followed by all of Saturday away and then Davies out on Sunday I wanted to grab some time with them again before I am back at work again tomorrow. There is a localish farm advertising Lambing which we’d talked about taking Tarly to see when Davies was bunny hunting but the shoe hunt meant we didn’t so I had that half in mind depending on the weather for this afternoon. The children played Xbox first thing while I was doing my online stuff, then Tarly played with her Polly Pockets for ages and Davies and I planned to get out his potters wheel (birthday present from Em which we’ve been meaning to do something with for, well six months :oops:) but it needs batteries so that was written off until we get some. Davies had a plan to make bowls to collect easter eggs in on Sunday (we always hide loads of mini eggs around the house for them to find in a drunken Saturday evening annual tradition the night before Easter Sunday :lol:) so I’ll try and remember to get some batteries for it so we can have a go at that maybe tomorrow. So he got down a mecchano kit (another birthday present we’ve not got round to looking at before) and we did that instead. Bloody fiddly stuff that isn’t it?! He did a good job of following the pictorial instructions and gathering the right bits and putting it together was a collaborative effort based on whether it required strength, dexterity or littler fingers in order to do each bit 😆 Scarlett finished with her Polly Pockets and did some more colouring and drawing in her princess book. It was an activity book she chose with her world book day token (I think I put another quid or two towards it) but it has been out pretty much every day since. She has syphoned off her favourite pens and crayons from the playroom and keeps them in an empty chocolate box which she takes off to her room every night to sit and colour and ‘write’ in bed and then brings into the lounge every morning to continue through the day. She is constantly forming letters, writing her name and copying words from things. I’m really enjoying watching it all from such a relaxed viewpoint as with Davies at that age I was still fretting about pen grip, whether he was starting a letter in the ‘right’ place to form it and so on. Her colouring is really tidy and she is constantly amazing me with how many letters she knows and that she knows all the numbers past 10 written down.

Then we had some lunch! 😉

In the afternoon the children wanted to play with the wooden train track and it had clouded over and infact did rain very briefly so I put the lambing plan on hold and had some laptop time while they built an enormous train track round the lounge and shared out all the trains and people.

Another feature of today was Scarlett brushing my hair. She must have done it for a couple of hours in total, spraying it with anti tangle spray and sitting brushing it for ages at a time, then coming back an hour or so later and doing it all over again. I *adore* having my hair played with / brushed so I was in heaven 🙂 I also spent the day wearing my new shoes to check how comfy they were and because like a little kid with new shoes I had to keep looking at them and smiling. 🙂 I’ve wanted some crocs ever since Layla and Claudie got their’s last summer but haven’t been able to afford any. Lucy’s SIL has a lovely green pair which I’ve been coveting having seen her twice in the last week so I looked on ebay and found some very cheap copies so ordered them 🙂 I’ve no idea how they actually measure up to the originals but I’m loving them lots. 🙂 Tarly also fell in love with them so I ordered her a pink pair of copies which should be here tomrrow or Thursday hopefully. 🙂 We’re the pretend croc girls 😆

Ady came home with some ladybird books (we seem to be collecting them – really must sort the bookshelves out around the house properly. I’ve swapped a load of story books over between the children’s bedrooms so they both have some new bedtime story material but I really need to clear my chicklit shelf once and for all, get shot of all the board books and sort the shelves out properly. I feel some spring cleaning coming on :). Scarlett and I sat and looked at a very basic book which had very little writing but lots of interactive stuff like showing four pictures and asking you to tell the story. She really liked that. :). I took Davies up to bed and read him Mr Nosey, a book about a treemouse in a forest which I’m pretty sure we’ve also had a version of from the library (it was a Book People special offer one in a set of 6 such tales IIRC) and then as he was being so lovely and I don’t read him stories anywhere near as often as I should I went and grabbed a load of the books from Tarly’s bookcase and chose The Velveteen Rabbit to read him. I’ve never actually read it myself although I know it’s a bit of a classic. Our version is from M&S (originally, I picked it up in a charity shop somewhere over the years like pretty much all of our books – either book people, ex library or charity shop 🙂 ) and the illustration of the rabbit is all but identical to his current favourite soft toy rabbit (which he’s been taking everywhere saying it’s the Easter Bunny – now it is the velveteen rabbit 🙂 ). He sat enraptured for the whole story, despite the language being very flowery and some of the words requiring me to explain them. He was so taken with the story he has already started speculating what could happen next (he wants the boy to realise that the bunny he sees was indeed once his toy) and he is also intrigued at the idea of an illness called scarlet fever 😆 so I suggested he could write a sequel if he wanted. He is planning one called The Velveteen Rabbit Comes Back and he is going to tell it to me while I type it out, then we’re going to print it off and then he’s going to illustrate it apparently. So that’ll be a nice thing to do. He went to sleep still muttering about plot lines with the intention of dreaming about it so he could get some ideas in his sleep :).

We’re going to catch a big one. What a beautiful day, we’re not scared.

Etc.

Davies had a bunny hunt to attend today run by his Beaver group at a local scout campsite. There were loads of local Beaver groups there, so about 50-60 little boys in all. Loved the fact that another small mammal was introduced into the day’s agenda. 😆

This morning we went out to a newly opened local farm shop, on the hunt for good prices and quality for our free range / organic meat other than at the supermarket. This month I’m aiming to do our food shopping even cheaper and by doing some shopping around – hopefully meat from the butcher / farm shop, fruit and veg from the greengrocers etc. just making use of the supermarkets for the cheaper bulk value lines. We’ll have to see how that goes, but we didn’t get anywhere with the local farm shop anyway. 🙄

Then we went to the big shoe shack type out of town shoe emporium as both children have been complaining of rubbing shoes this week and at the beginning of March when I took them to be measured they told me to come back in a month. We walked in and managed to attract the attention of one of the assistants who came and confirmed that yes, both children needed new shoes and then put them on the spangly measuring machine which by the power of the footrprint comes up with their shoes size on a magical screen after they’ve trodden on it for a few seconds. Unfortunately being mid season all that was on the shelves was half price fur lined boots or sandals. Or trainers. Tarly really dislikes trainers – I’ve previously bought at least three pairs over the years that she’s reluctantly agreed to in the shoeshop but once home has refused to wear, fur lined boots while a bargain at half price are not the thing to be buying in April when the weather is looking promising and the sandals were a little too premature when we were still having hail storms last week.

So we came home and had a grand shoe trying on session. Tarly had one pair of My Little Pony flip flops which came free on a magazine which fitted and that was about it. Davies had a pair of purple DMs with silver stars which he has finally grown into, his trainers which still fit and his black Badger shoes which he will still be fine in for the sake of one hour a week. Davies’s feet haven’t actually grown in shoe size, just in width so currently his sandals from last year also still fit. So I’m hoping he’s on the verge of a growth spurt and will hold off buying him anything else until he hits a size 12! 🙂

We had lunch, Ady got the roast dinner on for later and we headed off to drop Davies off for his bunny hunt. He was really confident about it despite Ady and I both remembering (not within his earshot) about how nervous we’d have been as children about group things like that. When we got there he quite happily went off with a leader (not one he’s actually ever met before either) before spotting his pack of Beavers and dashing off to join them. Apparently they did some hunting in the woodlands for chocolate eggs to bring home (he had quite a haul in his little plastic bag, which he shared with Tarly with only a little parental encouragement 😉 ) and plastic ones to win points for their team. We arrived back early and watched him dashing around with the others looking like he was having a whale of a time. 🙂

Meanwhile we took Tarly off on a shoe hunt (we’re going on a shoe hunt, we’re going to catch some size tens, what a beautiful day, we’re not scared’ etc.). We tried Tescos, we tried M&S where they had lovely shoes but too narrow for her feet and we drove to the nearby big Woolworths which also only had trainers, dressing up shoes or fur lined boots. Finally with a mere half an hour to go before a) the shops shut and b) we needed to go and collect Davies we stopped at a Peacocks (cheapo store selling high fashion items at bargain prices 🙂 ) and got her a pair of bright pink sequin covered baseball boots in the style of Lelli Kelly shoes but for a tenner reduced to £2! And a pair of pink flowery toe post flip flops too. 🙂 And a new swimsuit each for her and Davies – all for under a tenner 🙂 Result!

We collected Davies and came home for dinner. No idea now what happened to the rest of the day, it all seemed to blur away somewhat.

Today we had to go into town first thing to move money about and amazingly for us were out of the house dead on time. We parked and walked to the Halifax where we joined the many other mothers with young children getting asked lots of questions about everything. The difference of course being that everywhere around us I heard tsking and people exchanging dismay at it being the Easter holidays. You know I hate this trend for openly telling strangers infront of your children that it is a nightmare to be spending time with them and you can’t wait for them to be back in school. I can’t think of anyone I know that I would make a comment like that about infront of them without seriously hurting their feelings. Why the hell would you want to do that infront of your children? Why the hell would you feel like that anyway? 🙄 And I’d far rather be standing in a queue in the building society with them, talking about the ‘cashier number X please’ sign and guessing which it will be next, talking about how a cashpoint machine works, explaining why there were lower down counters with pens for people the same height as them (no, they aren’t for children, they’re for disabled people) etc. than standing there alone. We went to the other bank and popped into a couple of shops for various things before getting back to the car with moments to spare before our parking ticket ran out.

We went round to Lucy’s where her SIL and nephews were already and the children played out in the garden. After lunch we debated what to do next and decided to head over to the beach. I did ask D&S *not*to go too near the sea and they did listen for a while but the lure of the ocean proved too much and eventually they walked out on the row of sea defences laughing as the sea came flooding in below them. They got braver and started to swing on the poles until Davies slipped in and drenched one leg / foot. They both got splashed until eventually they were wet up the knees and it became no worse to just paddle in the sea. I let it go as they were having a great time and it does seem pretty cruel to take small children to the beach and tell them not to go in the sea which is sort of the main attraction. But I did lecture them on the way back to Lucy’s about listening to what I’d said and that their shoes probably wouldn’t be dry tomorrow, so they were both remorseful at least. And they did have a really good time 🙂 We had no spare clothes (really must sort my car out ready for summer pursuits with spare clothes and towels and suncream) and they were far too soggy and sandy to stay dressed so we headed for home where they spent ages playing X box monkey ball together and then did loads of drawing.

Ady got home late and I went out to do the food shopping which made for a very late dinner.

Hatchwatch is now at day 22 which is somewhat concerning for eggs which are supposed to have a 21 day incubation. I candled them again tonight and I reckon there are at least a couple which still look promising along with several more which look very unpromising. We’re going to keep candling them each day and see how they go this week.

Friday I worked yesterday, all day. It was terribly, terribly boring with an average of one person coming into the library per hour. Julie was with the children in the morning and my Mum in the afternoon. This is a good combination for all concerned as Davies gets to play with Jack, Scarlett gets to play with Maisie and Julie has an excellent no-nonsense approach to dealing with lots of children which D&S respond well to. Then for the first time since I started working, nearly four months ago, despite early promises of all sorts of help, my Mum came over in the afternoon. I’ve no idea what she did with them – I now she fed them chocolate eclairs and lemon mousse and I know she did some sort of ‘learning’ with them (smirk!) because she tried to get Davies to recount ‘what you’ve learnt’ when I got home – he refused! But y’know all very family orientated which is nice. 🙂

I was having wobbles all over the place about work, childcare and various other things by the time Ady got home from work, whereupon I did some classic venus-type wailing and girlieness while Ady did some even more classic Mars-type problem solving rather than just inserting wine and chocolate and cuddling. We ironed it all out including some talking to the children about ‘Mummy working’ and ‘other people looking after them’ which reassured me but did render me incapable of driving over to Brighton in the pouring rain to have an adults meet up of MM home ed group. It’s been something of a rollercoaster week one way and another and I reached Friday evening really just needing to sit and drink wine with my husband. So that’s precisely what I did, while watching Little Miss Sunshine which was in so many ways the antidote to all that ailed me / us 🙂

Today was a one day writing course – my birthday present from Ali 🙂 We joined 6 other students at a teacher’s house to do writing exercises, share ideas, do fluffy stuff like exchange notes with compliments about each other at the end and do some serious, proper, grown up writing type stuff. It was fab 🙂 Really enjoyed what was probably the single most selfish, all about me, thing I’ve done in many years. I probably need to digest and ponder more about what I got from it but I know I got a lot from it and I’m determined to take that and do something with it – if nothing else this will probably mean another blog 😉

Meanwhile back at the ranch Ady and the kids were spending a day in the garden. They did some planting up of various vegetables

and adding to the painting on the garage wall

I got home around 630pm just as the children were getting out of the bath. Ady had done several washes including ironing , tidied up the childrens’ bedrooms with them, changed our bed and was about to get dinner on 🙂 I read the children a few bedtime stories each then had a bath and enjoyed said dinner. We watched Dr Who recorded from earlier and I’m currently watching one of those countdown programmes about the most irritating pop songs ever which I clearly can’t go to bed until I find out what number one is :).

TES

I overslept dramatically today – Davies woke me at 9am (in fairness we had had a bad night with Tarly in our bed from about 3am and I’d not gone to bed much before 1am anyway) but I was in the middle of a lovely dream so I told him to let me finish my dream and I’d be down. I didn’t finish my dream and I was semi awake listening to the children playing downstairs but the next thing I knew it was 10am 😳 and we were supposed to be at Lucy’s house at 1030am!

So I dashed downstairs, fed the children and gave them clothes to get dressed into, cursed at Ady for having left a sink full of washing up so did that, dashed back upstairs to get dressed myself and came back down with just enough time to make a cup of tea and a picnic lunch before heading out dead on time. Except the cat had crapped in a door way, which children had then closed the door over without realising, thus spreading said cat crap across the carpet and smearing it on the underside of the door. Urgh! 🙁 So sorted that out retching and gagging as I did (which made me grateful I’d not had time for a cup of tea as I would have been struggling to keep it down), disinfected the whole area and then made the picnic lunch. I think we did well to be out of the house a mere 45 minutes after I got up with that in mind 🙂 And only about 15 minutes late to Lucy’s house. Davies and Scarlett were making up songs about birds in the car on the way to Lucy’s which they carried on with a little bit after we’d picked Lucy, Rebecca and Richard up but it didn’t last much longer. They were funny though, cramming loads of information into them including Davies’ song about ostriches who can’t fly but are still birds and have long necks to reach food high up from the ground 🙂

We got to Julie’s where there was another woman who has a nearly 2yo son who she is wanting to Home Educate but she doesn’t have any contacts anywhere yet and had loads of questions. It was lovely to sit and talk to her and really feel like we were giving her good information, helpful advice and lots of reassurance. I told her a bit about autonomy which she seemed very interested in the idea of and have promised to follow it all up with some links and online support like Early Years etc. She left in a flurry of toddler past his nap time noise and the children continued to play outside in a mostly harmonious way. 🙂 We left around 3pm as Maisie has ballet on a Thursday afternoon and it started to rain and then hail just as we called the children in from the garden.

We dropped Lucy and co home and came home for tea. Ady arrived not long after us and he sat playing games with Davies on his laptop – I think they’d found some Flushed Away game, while Tarly and I looked at educationcity again. She’s done all of the reception level science so I showed her the maths bit. She did the first 3 games but by question 3 of 6 she was realising it was asking her to do the same thing she’d already gotten right twice before so clicked on quit claiming it was too easy and not worth doing 🙂 – actually it demonstrated to me that both her maths skills and her ability to recognise numbers is better than I’d realised. So I set her up on the year one science which proved just as easy for her with questions about waterproof materials, magnetic things, living and non living things and so on. Again I found the whole making it into a story thing utterly aside from what it was actually asking you to be tedious and annoying and given both of them only seem interested in the science questions which we’ll have done both their actual ‘school year’ and the year above for them both by the time the free trial ends I guess it won’t be something we’ll be paying for :). Glad I looked at it again though, if only to reassure me we’re not missing anything by not having it. I’ve got a couple of question and answer general knowledge books on order from work which I think they’l both enjoy far more being straightforward without all the fannying about with crap animations just to satisfy their testing’ needs ;).

Tonight we’ve watched World Trade Center which I didn’t particularly want to watch but Ady did. Don’t quite know what to say about it really but I bet it shapes my dreams tonight. And now, as I’m off to work all day tomorrow I really should go to bed!

Worked this morning, which all seems rather a blur and a long time ago now. So nice to have a job where having a week off doesn’t mean you walk back into all the things you would have done if you’d been there for that week backed up waiting for you to wade through :). But also a list of my hours for the next couple of weeks over Easter which pose me childcare issues again – will start doing my rounds of asking for help again on that one tomorrow 🙄 I’ve just about got my normal working hours covered now but the three days closing over Easter means we need to make hours up elsewhere and there is no real flexibility on when we do that unfortunately – I’m sure I could be awkward but I’d really rather save that for when it’s a dire emergency.

I got home to find children playing with walkie talkies with delight and doing a variety of other activities including drawing (Tarly) and geomagging (Davies). We had vague ideas of going to a park or the beach to make the most of the sunshine but Richard and Rebecca both fell asleep (Birthdays are tiring work 🙂 ), Scarlett got really into her drawing and Lucy and I got chatting (with helpful asides from Davies on topics such as Education City 🙂 ) and I for one couldn’t be bothered to move actually 🙂 😳

We took Lucy and co home and got back to find Ady hanging about in the garden having gone out without any keys. The children had tea and then Davies and I went to Badgers. I popped to the supermarket for a few bits and came back to sit in the car and read my book (for book group this month we are all reading as many of the nominated long list orange prize books as possible ready for an event coinciding with the winner being announced during the local festival which the library plays an active role in – my first one to read is Poppy Shakespeare which I’m enjoying so far). About 20 minutes before the end of Badgers they all came piling out to play on the grass outside the building – there was about 15 children all playing ‘stuck in the mud’ and I actually out my book down to sit and watch them, laughing out loud at their antics. It sounds crazy to say I was proud of Davies and actually that’s probably the wrong word but I just felt so overjoyed to see him so much part of the group, laughing with the sheer delight of playing a game, being popular and really just enjoying being a child. I never was that child, never was part of a group, simply accepted for who I was and enjoying just being me. I never got any delight from running around or playing physical games and certainly never did anything like Badgers out of school anyway. It is so hard to equate Davies as he is in that group, and indeed as he is when most of the people who read this blog meet him with both my own experience of childhood and with the clingy, shy, unsure of himself and desperate not to be by my side four year old Davies once was. I know I harp on about this but having had such a lovely couple of days watching Davies just enjoying his life so much really reinforces the choices I have made for him and the pace we have taken things too.

He came out with a new baseball cap which he’s been wanting a while to go with his Badger uniform, two badges and certificates (first aid and a bronze badgers award) and a rabbit he’d made and decorated filled with chocolate eggs. Loving the crafty gifts that Beavers and Badgers is supplying – he came home with a sealed Easter card from Beavers on Monday too :).

I’m hoping the lovely weather is going to hold for at least one more day as we’re off to Julie’s tomorrow planning a nice day in her garden, oh and finally in hatchwatch news I’m pretty sure I saw movement inside at least two of the eggs when I candled them tonight – will take photos / video tomorrow when I do them.

I read Gill’s recent post on the difference between autonomy and educational neglect with both interest and a small degree of unrest. I do hold my hands up in the air to being really quite lazy and certainly one of the big reasons why autonomy suits us quite so well is that I would probably start each school term filled with the joys of homeschooling, with neatly sharpened pencils, coloured in timetables and vast quantities of new stationery. This would run smoothly for approximately a week and a half before I lost interest and having removed educational responsibility from my children I would leave us all in the lurch! But I did rather gulp guiltily when Gill cited an adult available at all times to facilitate education at child’s will or a very similar sentence as of course that doesn’t always happen here a great deal more than the colour coded paperclips and brimming shelves of workbooks does. Mostly of course because we are not a family who spend a great deal of time just ‘being’, we are more of the ‘doing’ variety which means in the same was as we wouldn’t have time for normals or scheduled work each morning we also don’t have time to answer all questions as they arise either. So I do, from time to time, for very brief moments wonder whether it mightn’t just be all a bit easier to get some pre-packaged curriculum, or even write my own (and yeah, I do reckon I could lay on a key stage one years worth of stuff based on Mr Blobby if pushed 😉 ) and roll it out to them for an hour or two a day and then relax back into doing not a lot with them. Except of course it does indeed go against everything I (currently 😉 ) believe in so I don’t. I wait and know, in more confident moments, that actually when they decide they ‘want educating’ along they will come with their questions and their demands and their needs. I trust them to ask, me to listen and all of us together with the process to make it happen as we go along. And of course it does :).

This morning while I was putting clean clothes away in Davies’ room he came to chatter to me and tidy his bedroom up a bit at the same time. He has a ‘collection’ of empty loo rolls which he spirits away before the slovenly housekeeper (that’d be me then 🙂 ) chucks them in the recycling. He appeared to be just bunging them in the cardboard box I’d told him to put them all in, but he suddenly stopped with the last one in his hand and said ‘when I get one more I’ll be able to count in twos all the way up then’ I looked at him and he said by way of explanation ‘I’ve got eleven now, when I have twelve I’ll be able to count in twos all the way up’. He’d not actually counted in twos up to ten as when I asked him he got to six confidently and then faltered, but he had put them in in twos so he knew what he was on about. 🙂 He then talked to me about the Mr Men books he was putting back on his bookcase, telling me that (Ros’s) Buzz has the whole collection. I explained that Buzz was starting to read so Davies started talking about reading and I explained that it will really only come with practise. It is up to him but if he wanted to get quicker then I would happily sit with him every day looking at books and practising reading, or get him whatever books he wanted to start with from the library. He pulled some red nose reader books off the shelf and told me that they were good for starting to read and that he often looks at them in bed (which I already knew as I frequently remove them from down the side of his bed and put them back on the bookshelf :lol:) so he brought several of those downstairs and we sat and looked at one together. He got well over half way through it and although I wouldn’t say he was reading as such, and don’t for one minute think he will want to do that every day it did reassure both of us that he can indeed do it when he wants / needs to. Very spookily I was telling him about remembering when I learnt to read and explaining about the Peter and Jane books we used at school. I was sounding out ‘Peter and Jane play with the ball’ for him to demonstrate and Ady arrived home not 20 minutes later having stopped at a charity shop and picked up among other things a Peter and Jane book with mention of that very ball!! 🙂

Scarlett was doing more of her princess annuals / activity books, doing some very tidy colouring in and various bits of writing and pretend writing including starting to write her name in all sorts of places (all allowed places I hasten to add). I don’t recall where the request had come from but Davies had asked to make cakes so I’d told him he could make some all by himself with a tiny bit of help. We got out the ingredients and the scales and I told him how to make sponge cakes by weighing the eggs and then equally that weight with butter, sugar and flour. He weighed two eggs at 5oz so measured out 5oz each of butter and sugar and creamed them (I helped a tiny bit with that), he cracked open and added two eggs (no help at all for that one), then weighed out, sifted and mixed 5ox of flour – again a bit of help with the final stirring. Then he put out 12 paper cake cases and split the mixture between them and I put them in the oven. He and Tarly licked the spoons :). They had lunch while the cakes cooked and I got Davies to keep checking them to see if they were done. He took them out of the oven too. Later on this afternoon I asked him if he remembered how to make cakes and he reeled off the recipe and the terms ‘creamed’ and ‘fizzed’ (what he was calling sieving!). I made buttercream icing and he and Tarly decorated them later this afternoon.

After lunch Ady went off to college and while I was hanging the washing out Davies and Scarlett came out dressed as Mike and Sully (thanks Jan 🙂 ) which made me laugh lots. They looked very cute 🙂

When I came in and looked at the clock to find it was only just gone 1pm and it had been so lovely and sunny outside I suggested that we go to the beach instead of staying home indoors. They didn’t take much persuading so we grabbed a couple of carrier bags for shells and other finds, put on wellies and off we went. We’d only been there 15 minutes or so when Ady rang to say his college course wasn’t running today as it was a study day for revision at home, so I told him where to find us and 20 minutes later he was there with us on the beach. The children got wet, scrambled over rocks, found shells and stones, commented on all the differences between Lancing and Hunstanton beaches, threw stones in the sea and made all sorts of sand creations from pictures and writing in the sand to sandcastles with no buckets or spades. Loads of pics on flickr, I might pop some into this post tomorrow, but it was just a lovely, lovely afternoon. 🙂

I’d promised to consider purchasing ice creams so in the end Ady came home via the supermarket and got ice creams while I took D&S home and ran them a lovely warm bath to wash all the sand off. They had their ice creams then a long bath while I mixed up some butter icing for the cakes. They then decorated them, had their tea and ate cakes and fruit for pudding.

Then my parents arrived for dinner. They had a happy hour or so with them while I got dinner on then the children went to bed, we candled eggs, had dinner and a fairly pleasant evening. Tomorrow I’m back to work in the morning so I really shouldn’t still be sitting here at nearly 1am. So I will be off.

Davies and Scarlett were rediscovering the fun of having each other to play with all the time today. Last week they were rarely spotted in each others’ company and at the weekend they were still shaking down back into not having 12 additional children around them at all times, but today they were back to being bestest friends again.

I laid in bed snoozing while listening to them playing downstairs and agreeing to the occassional request from a visiting child to eat something else out of their party bags from Leo’s party yesterday. When I did come downstairs they were playing with wooden blocks and geomags and being totally lovely to each other. 🙂 I made them some ‘proper’ breakfast which they ate while watching Class TV. It’s funny how sometimes Class TV totally entrances them and other times they don’t seem to register it at all, they both seem very receptive to all sorts of learning-y type stuff at the moment with Scarlett getting really into writing and asking outlandish maths questions like reeling off a load of numbers and then asking what they all are added together. She has no concept of the amounts she is asking about but just delights in seeing me pulling faces trying to work them out and then supplying her with another, even bigger number as the answer. 🙂 Davies is equally experimental with numbers suddenly telling me what various little sums are he’s tasked himself with working out. It’s funny to watch them make a sudden leap in something and start to demand things to do to test themselves. They’d also brought down a load of early reader books from Davies’ bedroom that they’d been looking at too.

Due to the Class TV watching we were slightly later than planned getting round to Lucy’s (although I imagine we were still earlier than she was genuinely expecting us to be with our notoriously bad timekeeping :oops:). Lucy’s SIL and 2 nephews were also there celebrating Richard and Rebecca’s birthdays and the six children all very quickly found things to do, mostly either cooperating or working around each other. One of the new presents given to Richard was a domino truck thing very similar to the domino train that we had a couple of years ago for Christmas so Davies and Scarlett were quite happy to mess about with different pieces of that. And of course shiny new toys are shiny new toys regardless of the fact they were for a two year old so if I secretly wanted to get down on the floor and have a good old look at the new bits of plastic it was no wonder that Davies did too :). I sat and chatted to Lucy’s SIL, we had lunch, the children all disappeared into the garden to make the absolute most of the gorgeous weather and we ended up staying til gone 4pm in the end with Tarly protesting at leaving even then.

We got home and I made the children’s tea and brought in line fulls of clean dry washing. They ate their tea, having tidied up the blocks and geomags with no fuss at all :shock:, then Davies got changed for Beavers and we all walked round there. So lovely to see him call ‘bye then’ at the door and dash in to be part of it all without a backwards glance :). Tarly and I walked home looking at all sorts of plants and insects and then rather than waste the hour without Davies we snuggled up on the sofa and I put Education City back on for her and she worked her way through all the science ones for reception. Such a wide variety of things on there with plenty of answers she gave considered wrong but I would argue over – eg there was a transport one which asked questions like ‘which transport is used to move lots of people between cities’ – Scarlett chose ‘bus’ which is not altogether incorrect but they insisted the answer was ‘train’ when actually it could also have been plane. Another was asking which transport do people use to bring home their shopping with the answer being ‘car’ – again I would have said bicycle, bus, train and car were all correct actually. Then it made me laugh by asking ‘which transport is used to travel to a crime scene?’ – answer is police car but she needed both words in ‘crime scene’ explaining – as I would imagine would most four year olds actually? Then there were others which were just so easy she was getting bored and others still which I’d have not realised she’d know but she breezed through (noteably one about which animals are vegetarian or carnivore – it had animal noises as clues which she didn’t even register, merrily clicking on the right answers and saying ‘cows are vegetarian but cats aren’t’ 😆 It’s funny how her ‘education’ is so much a result of what Davies is doing / saying / learning rather than the ‘early years’ type stuff I seemed to cover as a matter of course with Davies without even thinking about it. The books I read him, the tv shows we watched all led Davies and I to do things in a fairly routine sort of way whereas Scarlett knows loads of things she has learnt alongside her older brother but has the odd gap here and there of things I sat and did with him when he was two but never did with her because we were doing four year old stuff with Davies by then. It’s all swings and roundabouts of course and I don’t think for one minute she’d have gotten to ten without knowing what a crime scene was but it’s offering me a very interesting glimpse into the sorts of things children might learn at school / nursery.

Ady went to collect Davies from Beavers which I think Davies was utterly delighted about. The children went to bed, Davies taking Ady’s laptop so he could do some Education City in bed (Science again, need to sign up for the trial to the next level for him, he’s practically worked his way through it and it seems rather easy for him although I’ve no idea whether he’d consider the literacy and numeracy bits, will ask him tomorrow). Then I popped out to Sainsburys for various bits and pieces including a load of fruit for the kids, who goody bag contents this morning aside are on a more healthy eating kick. They neither are into vegetables which I would be a hypocrite to say much about really but we talked yesterday about the different requirements for a healthy diet and they both love fruit anyway so we’re going to start aiming for their five a day in fruit if not veg.

Both children were still awake when I got home and actually Davies didn’t go to sleep until gone 10pm but the hour difference means that’s all but normal for him anyway – need to work even harder on filling him up with fresh air and wearing him out tomorrow 🙂 And finally in hatchwatch news we went through the eggs candling again tonight and identified 3 which we thought were bad – two were indeed empty but for yolks but one sported evidence of a baby chick in very early development. No idea whether if left alone it would have continued to develop or whether we were right in thinking it had the markings of a bad egg and was one that had already stopped forming but we’ve decided to continue candling daily but only remove eggs we are 100% convinced are not doing anything – so we have 14 eggs left and theoretically they should start hatching this weekend :).

I always consider myself to be a pretty sociable person. I enjoy the company of others and spending time with other people. I love to talk, I love to listen. But I also enjoy my own company, I am equally happy with silence than I am with chatter. Perhaps if I had the chance I might experience loneliness but I don’t ever really get the opportunity. I live in a fairly busy house, with pretty noisy people, we lead an active and sometimes bordering on the frantic life. I’m utterly confident it is the contrast I enjoy but very often my favourite part of the day is the hour or so after everyone else has gone to bed when I turn the tv off and sit in peace and quiet, sometimes I look at blogs, sometimes I look at flickr, sometimes I go back and read my own words from days, weeks, months and years gone by. Equally I love my bath time – I sit, again in silence with my book, or my thoughts and just enjoy not being needed for anything.

I always find that by day 3 or so of living with lots of other people at camps that I am craving a bit of time with noone else around, Davies seems to get similar feelings on camps and is often really flagging by the end of the week (I tend to recover slightly quicker by taking myself off with a book for an hour – he is getting better at recognising and dealing with it and twice last week he happily went off to our room to watch a film and lie on the bed). I didn’t feel it so much last week but on Saturday while we were out shopping I realised how much Ady and the kids were annoying me just by talking to me. I think Ady realised and that was part of the reason he took both the kids back to the car when the meter was running out but of course I bumped into friends so my dazed wandering round Woolworths was interupted.

The clocks going forward invariably cocks up your body clock for a good week or more so today although the kids didn’t wake until 730am old time / 830am new time it still felt all at odds and although now at 11pm it really does feel like 11pm it’s been an odd day with the usual vague idea of what time it is even without checking a clock totally gone to pot. As a result I’m not really sure where the morning went. Persuading the children to get dressed seemed to take forever, which was very wearing. Ady suddenly realised he had 2 almost bald tyres so shot off to get them replaced before his car gets MOT’d tomorrow (fortunately not costing us any money but still a hassle) and the children did some drawing. Scarlett has various annuals she’s been given over the years and is suddenly really into doing all the activities in them. Some she does alone, some need assistance or guidance and some she just makes up her own ideas on, so she’s been doing lots of colouring, dot to dot and copying bits. Davies and I made a birthday card and some wrapping paper for Leo with a dragon card which Davies wrote really nicely on and in with Tarly coming to sign her name. She has learnt to write without any real guidance so some of her letters are quite queerly formed when you actually watch her write – her ‘C’ for example is a straight line with a top and a bottom curve drawn on seperately. So I showed her how I would form each letter and although you wouldn’t really notice any difference in her finished name it appeared to be an easier task for her. Davies then remembered how to write ‘Leo’ by himself so that was good 🙂 but he refused to write on the envelope anyway. As we didn’t have any wrapping paper – and I am always so impressed with Em’s idea of recycling children’s drawings as wrapping paper I got Davies to draw a picture instead for us to use. He says that Leo likes ‘dragons, Star Wars and Doctor Who’ so set about drawing a scene with various characters from those shows – amusing as he’s never actually seen Dr Who and only a brief bit of Star Wars. 😆 but he did a good job.

Mildly entertained by the latest blogring craze of Education City (again! 😉 ) I was trying to recall exactly what it had been that I’d not really liked about it when we’d done a succession of free trials a year or two ago so I signed back up for a free trial for reception, year one and year two to have a nose around. I decided to test run it on a real child so called Davies over to play on a year two Science bit and then gave Tarly a go too. Despite the few bits we did being quite ridiculously easy (they both scored 100% with relative ease on all of the bits they did) they both seemed to enjoy it. I do recall hating the idea that it made it fun to get things wrong by setting some comedy sound effect or happening off which Davies used to try and do rather than answer the question (although I guess you need to know the right answer in order to deliberately click on the wrong one) but they seemed to have forgotten that this time. I think my other big issue with it is that it is basically testing, which I have general issues with, and testing to a level according to age which totally puts my back up, but Davies recently got very into watching Junior Mastermind and I have two ‘questions and answers’ books on order from work to recreate it for him at home and increase his general knowledge so I guess in the spirit of autonomy if a child is after being tested then testing is what I should offer! 🙂 Neither of them had any inclination to do other topics than science and IIRC it was specifically the literacy bits which I didn’t like much last time, along with the repetitiveness of some bits (Tarly was doing a bit where the character is on a desert island and you have to shelf or bin stuff according to whether it requires electricity to work and is therefore of use or not on the island. It really didn’t need 9 or however many examples it went through to hammer this home, she’d gotten the hang of it after 3 and the whole desert island thing seemed rather unnecessary – the year two stuff seemed a bit more sensible though). No idea whether we’ll revisit it, we have so many other computer resources and free online places to go we’d never bother subscribing but we might try and work through the science bits over the next 10 days if the kids show any more interest in doing so, particularly as we can hook them both up at the same time on different laptops.

Ady returned home and we headed off to Leo’s party. The traffic on the way to Brighton can be so changable that we arrived about 20 minutes early and were spotted by Pearl sitting in the car so invited in where we tried to stay out of the way of last minute party preparations. 🙂 It was held where we have MM Home Ed group which was great because D&S are both familiar with the hall and enjoyed showing Ady around. It was a circus skills workshop party with trickswop teaching us how to juggle, tightrope walk, diablo, spin plates, flower stick and loads more. Davies was really into it and despite being an amateur at even basic throwing and catching had a good go with the juggling balls (and having spied Dani being most impressive with her juggling I’m determined to practice that now 🙂 ), the plate spinning and the diablos. He also did some tightrope walking at the end. Pics are on flickr, I’ve family & friended them as they show glimpses of other people’s children (Dani / Allie, not sure if you have a flickr account – if so let me know so I can add you as a friend and you can view them 🙂 ).

Scarlett was being very four, at the end of a very busy week, with Ady around. So she was not at her best and while not particularly badly behaved or disruptive to others she did prevent me & Ady from joining in as much as we’d have liked and indeed having more of a go at some of the stuff ourselves. She did rally towards the end and sat playing with the lego for ages – mostly once I’d persuaded Ady to just leave her alone to get on with something and to go off and do what he wanted instead of watching over her. The trickswop guy mentioned their intention to set up some circus skills workshops for children aged 6 plus to which Davies’ eyes lit up and he insisted I go and put our name down for more details. Actually this is the most enthusiastic I’ve seen him about something like that and as potentially it could be a fairly reasonable cost, not to mention something I’d like to go along to aswell and a pretty cool set of skills to learn I hope something more comes of it 🙂 . So Happy Birthday Leo, thanks for having us along, it was a pretty cool party :).

We came home and having scoffed party food most of the afternoon the kids were not too fussed about anything much for tea so we watched TV before packing them off to bed where neither of them fell asleep until about 9pm, I cooked a very late dinner and am enjoying my hour or so of peace before heading to bed myself.

A fitting birthday tribute I feel 🙂

It’s been bloody freezing here today, I did hang some of the holiday washing out to dry but I suspect it’s more frozen solid than dried. We had to get several birthday presents today for various small people having birthdays this last week or so so we went into town. We found some suitable gifts in Woolworths but wandered around a bit more as we’d got two hours on the parking ticket, so spent some time in Hawkins looking at all the cool stuff and then ages in the Oxfam bookshop where we got a whole pile of books for seven quid including a couple of Ladybird books (one on camping and one on scouting which made us giggle), a copy of politically correct fairy tales and some craft books. Davies got a Dr Seuss we didn’t already have in our collection and Tarly got an old Twinkle album (1983, I’m pretty sure I had the same one actually 🙂 ) and a copy of the Oxford dictionary of cockney rhyming slang for my Dad’s next gift (Fathers Day probably) as rhyming slang has been a source of amusement in my family since I was tiny. We also went to another charity shop and got a book on The Aristocats for Tarly that she’d wanted in Oxfam but I’d refused to pay a quid for for just 20pence and a bargain big box of klikko stuff for £2.50 – hurrah 🙂 By which time we’d run out of time on the meter so Ady took the kids back to the car while I returned to Woollies to get all the stuff we’d seen first. I seemed to wander round for ages trying to track down the last gift on my list and while walking round in a daze suddenly found someone stood infront of me blocking my way with a ‘wakey wakey’ look about them! It was our friend Matt who’s pregnant wife Clare was having a sit down nearby while their son was looking at the toys so I stood and chatted to them for a while, before remembering that Ady was sitting in the car with the children so I hurried back to them all.

We came home for lunch and then decided to head back out again to a localish garden centre with a big camping shop onsite. We’ve been looking at tents on ebay but wanted to look at a few in the canvas to check exactly what our requirements are. We’re really looking forward to camping again with the children already counting down the days to seeing their mates and sleeping in a tent again, although being outside for even a short time today was not condusive to longing for the outdoorsy life :lol:. We stopped for petrol on the way home and Ady left the car door open, prompting me to tell him to ‘shut the bloody door’. Now D&S, particularly D have sussed that ‘bloody’ is a ‘naughty’ word so always tell me off for saying it (little do they know that many of the words I say are naughty ;)) so it had us all in fits when Tarly said ‘yeah, shut the bloody door!’ which of course prompted her to use the word ‘bloody’ as a prefix to everything she could think of for the next ten minutes. Of course we shouldn’t encourage her but it was, erm, bloody funny! 😆

We came home for tea for the kids and then they watched Mr Bean on a sky channel before bed (it was the maths test clip, for anyone who’s ever watched any Mr Bean which delighted the kids as one of his lucky mascots was a bendy Pink Panther, exactly the same as the one I’d been describing that I had as a child to the kids the other week when we were singing the Pink Panther song). Davies is still on NicCamps time and didn’t go to sleep until about 930pm, so the clocks going forward will totally mess him up I suspect 🙄 – surely he will need to catch up on some of that missed sleep soon?

Tonight we’ve candled the eggs – we’re on day 13 of 21 but even the pictures on the internet don’t really assist with knowing what we’re looking for although it seems to be that we should start to actually see chicks moving inside the eggs in the next couple of days which should be easier to identify. One of the eggs had a real smell to it and was very streaky so we bit the bullet and decided it was a bad one and took it out of the incubator. Indeed it was a bad one – I made Ady crack it open to check we hadn’t called time on some nearly born chick and it was indeed just a very rotten, very stinky, non fertile egg (which he promptly spilt some of on the carpet :roll:) so we’re down to 17 now with none of them looking certain by any means. Will start to candle them daily now and hope for some movement soon.

So there you are, happy to be home and still rather tired. Tomorrow we’re off to a birthday party in the afternoon (well the kids are, we’re going to watch 🙂 ) and will probably be spending time mostly trying to work out what the time is, what the *real* time is and whether we should be more or less tired considering.