One word? When seven would do…

Been a bit remiss really haven’t I?

Tuesday – Bit busy really. A couple of months ago I decided I needed A Plan. So I made one. A multi-faceted one really but with one element being that I wanted a second pop at a career at some future point and having decided that 40 would be a good life crisis point I’d decided that by 40 I’d be ‘available for work again’ whatever path the whole Home Ed life led us along. So I’ve been looking at further education courses, doing lots of physcomatic tests and thinking about myself in the 3rd person ‘who would Nic like to be?’. When I was little I had several career ambitions based on nothing other than snapshot ideas of what that job might be like – for a while I liked the idea of hairdressing due to the highly satisfying noise the snipping scissors make. I also really wanted to work in a post office for a while because I quite liked the idea of stamping things with a big chunky rubber stamp – and having occassion to use one of those finger moistening sponge thingies they have. But I have, slightly hilariously even I can agree, often thought I’d quite like to be a librarian. So with this Plan in the back of my mind I went to the library a couple of weeks ago and saw a sign advertising a Library Assistant vacancy. I looked into the position and with a little help from my friends decided that being so very part time it would be a possibility to do, so I completed an online application form, updated my CV and applied. And was offered an interview. Which I attended on Tuesday.

Lucy had offered to mind Davies and Scarlett and with a sense of foreboding ahead I deputised Ady to do the actual dropping off of the children at Lucy’s and headed off in my best Librarian Interview Attire. 🙂 The interview was a very strange experience. Way back long before children I did a fair amount of flitting about career wise and never stayed happy in any one job for more than about a year. Ideas about breaking out of Retail Management coupled with lots of easy come, easy go positions within Retail Management meant I applied for, and attended interviews for a hell of a lot of jobs. I must have been to well over 50 job interviews and there was a time when I almost interviewed as a habit! 🙂 But it’s been a long old while. My last *real* interview was for the job I had while pregnant with Davies – so nearly 7 years ago. I had a fairly high profile job with Miranda up in Manchester but as the interview for that consisted of her inviting me out for lunch and told me ‘I think you’re great, I’d really like you to work for me. Think up a job description, a salary and what you’d like to do and I’ll take you out for lunch again in 3 days to discuss it’ – I can’t really count that! 😆

So I had the job interview, which for some reason hadn’t occurred to me might be with the women who run the book group I go to at the library once a month. So once we’d all gotten over our slight feelings of oddness about being in an interview situation with people we debate books with on a monthly basis it was a fairly straightforward interview. My main task was not convincing them I could do the job, but convincing them I was not too ‘over qualified’ for it and would not be bored or fail to be challenged by it. I think I managed to do that and explained to them that it was very much a challenge by virtue of being a whole new career path for me and something I would one day hope to turn into my ‘next’ career when the children were no longer my chief responsibility.

I went back to Lucy’s to have lunch and see Davies and Scarlett. Davies had not been at all happy about being left although Lucy had done admirably managing him and he was soon over it. Scarlett seemed utterly unbothered and was having a great time playing with R & R. We had a nice couple of hours there and then came home for one of those evenings where time seems to get sucked away and none of the things you intended getting done seem to happen!

Wednesday – up Very Early Indeed to pack (one of things which dropped off the night before’s to do list) and head off to Merry‘s for a couple of days. We took a slight detour so Ady could visit a garden centre on the way up there, arrived in time for lunch and then Ady headed off again for some more local garden centres up there. Chris and Helen were already there and the children wasted no time in getting stuck in, making themselves at home and having a great time tearing about, digging about in the garage for things they really shouldn’t be touching (sorry again :oops:) and generally being children. I overheard at least two pretend wedding ceremonies 😆

Helen, Merry and I busied ourselves in thorough testing of Merry’s latest product line on BeadMerrily.

In the evening after Helen and Chris went home, Ady and Max went off to the pub, the children collapsed and Merry and I set to work on a whole montage of fimo making. 🙂

I heard from the library on the way up to Merry’s that I had been unsuccessful in the job, but was assured it had been a very close decision and offered the chance to join their bank of relief staff who they call on to cover sickness, holiday, busy periods etc which I accepted and once my paperwork and CRB checks etc have gone through is something I hope to get at least a little bit of work from. So not the decision I’d have hoped for, but not a total blank either.

Thursday I had the tour of the hub of BeadMerrily including being allowed to mix and weigh some bead mixes. Then I got to use probably my favourite of Merry’s business ‘toys’ – the postage label printer! I’d brought some of my own ebay parcels which Merry kindly allowed me to print labels and pay her for rather than send Ady to the post office :-). I was saved from looking after six children on my own when Merry went to the dentist by the well timed arrival of Chris who came to collect Helen’s forgotten handbag from the night before and left only a few minutes before Merry returned again. 😆

In the afternoon Merry and I played with more fimo while the children mostly entertained themselves, except Tarly who insisted on sitting with us and chattering constantly which veered between endearing, charming and cute and downright bloody annoying! 🙄 She did eventually go off only to return wiping her face with perfume from an air freshner 🙄 again!

In the evening we had a beautifully cooked meal ;-), set up a studio for the fimo photographing, drank wine and chatted. Ady and Max left us to it very early and I was driven to bed in the end by streaming eyes which probably had a bit to do with the air freshner from earlier.

Friday We left Merry’s fairly early having had a lovely couple of days – thanks again 🙂 – and yes, we did leave having made purchases! 🙄 A very straightforward journey home although it tipped with rain all the way down the country. My car had it’s MOT in the afternoon so I popped out to do that and wonder round the local shops to the garage. I was convinced it would fail on something costly this year as two years ago it scraped through according to the garage who really put pressure on me to have the exhaust seen to and told me it wouldn’t last for another 2 months – when it was still going strong last year I took it somewhere else for it’s MOT which it sailed through so I went back there again this year and except for a tenner to fix a clamp (no, I have no idea either, I was so relieved to get away with a tenner that I didn’t ask!) it passed again! Hurrah 🙂 🙂 :-).

Today This morning Lucy came round super early and we headed off to meet my Mum at the local NCT nearly new sale. We jostled and elbowed and grabbed and filled our bin liners very full of clothes. I’ve been previously with Julie a couple of times and followed the same technique – grab anything remotely interesting looking and when your arm is about to fall off from the weight of the bag and it is splitting from being so full, find a quietish corner, tip it all out and go through it ruthlessly deciding what you really, really want and putting back the rest. Mum was gathering on my behalf so we had two brimming bin liners and actually not a lot made it back to the sale 😳 Mum did pay a third though, which is probably about what I would have put back if she’d not been encouraging me (I so get my mad shopping ways from my Mum :roll:). Then we came back home for a big trying on session. As usual Tarly got far more than Davies – boys clothes just aren’t so inspiring – or indeed plentiful in the larger sizes at NCT sales, but Tarly did really well with loads of posh brand stuff for a couple of quid a piece. And now I know that the right brands will fetch money on ebay when she’s outgrown them too I am quite happy for her to have a rather bulging wardrobe at bargain prices, knowing when she outgrows it selling it will fund the next size up.

We had lunch, then Ady headed off to my parents to help my Dad cut the hedge while Mum played with the children and got a masterclass in Xbox from Davies. I made some millionaires shortbread (not as good as Layla’s by a long way, but not bad) and then made our Christmas cake. I’ve never made a Christmas cake before, actually never made a fruit cake before but for at least the last two Christmases I’ve meant to and not got round to it in time. I used a recipe online as a guide and added a few extra ingredients and left out a few I either didn’t have or we don’t like much. We all had a stir and made a wish, including Mum and Dad who were both here. We’ve just taken it out of the oven and onto a cooling rack where we needed to perform emergency first aid with tin foil as it started to bulge a bit at the sides – the crumbs taste lovely though, so aslong as I can keep it together through it’s weekly injections of alcohol between now and Christmas I reckon it will be good :-).
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Mum and Dad left, we watched The X Factor, which this year the children, particularly Davies have gotten into. It’s funny how he is starting to develop viewing taste beyond Nick Jr and ‘children’s programmes’ and heading into ‘family viewing’ that bit more. He likes programmes with the competition element and has really enjoyed the last two series of Masterchef too. I let him stay up a bit later to watch a bit of Ant & Dec tonight (I wasn’t watching myself you understand, I was internet surfing!) but that didn’t hold him.

And I think that’s me about caught up.

01. Bought everyone in the bar a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said “I love you” and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Bungee jumped
11. Visited Paris
12. Watched a lightning storm at sea
13. Stayed up all night long and saw the sun rise
14. Seen the Northern Lights – been to the Blackpool illuminations – does that count? 😉
15. Gone to a huge sports game (and survived the crush afterwards)
16. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
17. Grown and eaten your own vegetables – it just tastes better
18. Touched an iceberg
19. Slept under the stars
20. Changed a baby’s diaper – too many to count
21. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
22. Watched a meteor shower
23. Gotten drunk on champagne – one memorable new years eve we *only* drank champagne – how decadent were we? 😆
24. Given more than you can afford to charity
25. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
26. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment
27. Had a food fight
28. Bet on a winning horse
29. Asked out a stranger
30. Had a snowball fight
31. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
32. Held a lamb
33. Seen a total eclipse
34. Ridden a roller coaster
35. Hit a home run
36. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
37. Adopted an accent for an entire day
38. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
39. Had two hard drives for your computer
40. Visited all 50 states
41. Taken care of someone who was drunk
42. Had amazing friends
43. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country
44. Watched wild whales
45. Stolen a sign
46. Backpacked in Europe
47. Taken a road-trip
48. Gone rock climbing
49. Midnight walk on the beach
50. Gone sky diving
51. Visited Ireland
52. Been heartbroken longer than you were actually in love
53. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger’s table and had a meal with them
54. Visited Japan
55. Milked a cow
56. Alphabetized your CDs
57. Pretended to be a superhero
58. Sung karaoke – I’ve done The Joker by the Steve Miller Band, Love Shack by the B52s and most memorably sung The Banana Boat song on bin liners full of helium with a trio of bartenders in an impromtu group calling ourselves ‘The Dubious Brothers’.
59. Lounged around in bed all day
60. Played touch football
61. Gone scuba diving
62. Kissed in the rain
63. Played in the mud
64. Played in the rain
65. Gone to a drive-in theater
66. Visited the Great Wall of China
67. Started a business
68. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
69. Toured ancient sites
70. Taken a martial arts class
71. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
72. Gotten married
73. Been in a movie
74. Crashed a party
75. Gotten divorced
76. Gone without food for 5 days
77. Made cookies from scratch
78. Won first prize in a costume contest
79. Ridden a gondola in Venice – in the Venetian hotel in Las Vegas?
80. Gotten a tattoo
81. Rafted the Snake River
82. Been on television news programs as an “expert”
83. Got flowers for no reason
84. Performed on stage
85. Been to Las Vegas
86. Recorded music
87. Eaten shark
88. Kissed on the first date
89. Gone to Thailand
90. Bought a house
91. Been in a combat zone
92. Buried one/both of your parents – does it count if you are only 18 months old at the time?
93. Been on a cruise ship
94. Spoken more than one language fluently
95. Performed in Rocky Horror
96. Raised children
97. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
99. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
100. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
101. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
102. Sang loudly in the car, and didn’t stop when you knew someone was looking
103. Had plastic surgery
104. Survived an accident that you shouldn’t have survived
105. Wrote articles for a large publication
106. Lost over 100 pounds
107. Held someone while they were having a flashback
108. Piloted an airplane
109. Touched a stingray
110. Broken someone’s heart
111. Helped an animal give birth
112. Won money on a T.V. game show
113. Broken a bone
114. Gone on an African photo safari
115. Had a facial part pierced other than your ears
116. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
117. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
118. Ridden a horse
119. Had major surgery
120. Had a snake as a pet
121. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon – no but have had lunch there – on my wedding day!
122. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
123. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
124. Visited all 7 continents
125. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
126. Eaten kangaroo meat
127. Eaten sushi
128. Had your picture in the newspaper
129. Changed someone’s mind about something you care deeply about
130. Gone back to school
131. Parasailed
132. Touched a cockroach
133. Eaten fried green tomatoes
134. Read The Iliad – and the Odyssey
135. Selected one “important” author who you missed in school, and read
136. Killed and prepared an animal for eating – no but clearly a major life ambition 😉
137. Skipped all your school reunions
138. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language
139. Been elected to public office
140. Written your own computer language
141. Thought to yourself that you’re living your dream
142. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
143. Built your own PC from parts
144. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn’t know you
145. Had a booth at a street fair
146. Dyed your hair
147. Been a DJ
148. Shaved your head
149. Caused a car accident
150. Saved someone’s life

We were away this weekend, staying with Layla and Si on Saturday night where Ady and the children stayed with Si and Claudia while I went out for a meal with Alison, Layla, Ros and Sarah. And very nice it was too 🙂 I was still suffering with my cold and stiff neck/back/shoulder and feeling very tired at the end of a long and busy week so I failed rather to live up to my usual wild reputation but it was a very nice evening just the same. Sunday morning we had bacon sandwiches back at Chris and Alison’s before rushing home to get back before the supermarkets shut so I could do the food shopping for October – yep, a frantic and fast paced life we lead. 😉

Today we dodged the downpours to head out to Magical Mondays. We were running slightly late due to a variety of things, mostly me failing to motivate myself! 😳 It was a really good couple of hours again and despite it only being week 2 we all already felt part of the group so that is lovely. 🙂 Tarly painted her air drying clay worm from last week a rather lovely gold on top and yellow underneath with the acrylic paints – she did it really carefully and precisely. Davies directed me to paint his snowman but didn’t do any of the rest of his. They both did some general painting on paper – Tarly made me laugh by painting a whole sheet really slowly and carefully with a really methodical approach fading from yellow to orange to red, then mixing all the colours together on it and creating one orange sheet! 😆 She does love painting though. They did more than their fair share of running around too including going out in the rain and the sodden ground, having first taken their wellies off 🙄 – they slightly redeemed themselves by making interesting observations about the footprints they left on the floor with their wet feet before I removed Tarly’s tights though 😆

We then got them to join in the end of a protracted attempt to make a milk bottle suck an egg in through it’s neck by having a flame inside it trying to get oxygen when the egg blocked the neck. We had a vast array of material to try and burn to create the flame but Davies observed that we would probably run out of matches first 😆 I think most of the adults had a go, folding things like newspaper, paper towels, bits of stick etc and speculating on whether to go and syphon some petrol from one of the cars until finally one of the group demonstrated her skill as The Firestarter with the correct folded newspaper shred technique. So we called all the children in and most of them had a go at popping at egg on the top of the bottle and cheering when it got sucked through. Excellent fun!

In the morning at home Tarly had gathered a bag of carrots, the veg peeler, a sharp knife and a small bowl and brought them to me to peel and end the carrots for her. She adores raw carrots and could easily sit and munch through a bag in one sitting. I chopped the ends but she tried to peel them herself and was delighted to find she could do it, and do it pretty well. Which led to a conversation about peeling fruit and vegetables and naming as many things as we could that you peeled. So it was very happily coincidental that someone had brought along a load of fruit, some juice and milk and a blender for making fruit smoothies and shakes. So I peeled a kiwi and a banana for Tarly and she chopped them up along with a couple of strawberries, while Davies chopped banana and strawberries. They added them to milk in the blender and whizzed it up to make shakes which they both loved – something to try at home again for sure. 🙂 They both seem to feel very at home at the group and happily chatter away, ask for and accept help from the other adults there and I heard Davies even teasing one of the other mothers today which is great, I love that they are specifically happy there and that they are so brimming with confidence to talk to adults – I notice most of the other children are the same there with a 3yo little girl happily chatting to me about paints and clay. Ali, Allie and I managed a brief chat about phobias and quirks in children and how so many behaviours when finally explained have such obvious and normal roots in their beginnings – which led me to ponder whether conditioning in the way of positive phobias could be a good thing 😉 If someone had drummed into me a morbid fear of the credit card maybe things would have been very different! 😆

Finally Allie brought out some of those blank jigsaws to draw your own picture on. I listened to Ali and Freya draw one for each other, explain it and talk about what might be behind the scene on the picture and then go and make their puzzles. I coloured all the pieces (I think there is about 20 bits to it) a different colour in felt tip, then coloured over it all in black crayon and then scratched my name off to show the rainbow below. Davies had come over and drawn Wallace for Scarlett on one and she had done something fairly abstract for him on another. Davies loved the effect of my one so he coloured five horizontal strips of colour and then I blacked over it ready to make something later at home as we’d run out of time. I remember sitting in the classroom the year I was 7 doing firework night pictures like that and then writing poems about fireworks – hard to believe I was only a year or so older than Davies is now…

We left there and as Davies has been saying for 4 weeks that his black Badger shoes are hurting despite them being the right size (I think they are too shallow as they appear to be pressing the top of his foot / toes) and Tarly’s wellies are a size too small too although as she always wears them bare foot underneath she is getting away with it at the moment. I’d also had a few items missed from the month’s food shop yesterday so we called into Asda which was on the way home – no shoes or wellies in their sizes but we did pop to Brantano and got a tenner pair of black shoes for Davies and some purple sparkly wellies for Tarly, so that’s them sorted. 🙂 In the car we listened to some Vicious Vikings and Rotten Romans with plenty of singing along for the songs.

Home briefly for some Xboxing for Davies and some jigsaw puzzling for Tarly and then I took Davies back out again to Badgers. He came out having sat and listened to a talk from a bloke called Terry who is there a couple of times a term and apparently all the children think he is an alien! 😆 He’d been telling them about St George and walkie talkies according to Davies, but as he refused to elaborate any further I have to assume that is what he did! 😆 We got home to find Tarly playing some sort of Barbie game on Ady’s laptop.

Up and out super early this morning to nip to the bank and then to Lidl for snacks and nibbles for a day filled with guests. Lucy, Rebecca and Richard arrived fairly shortly followed by Chris, Helen, Elinor and Alys. Davies and Elinor disappeared almost imediately together, Alys pottered and there were occassional moments of all children disappearing together. They played outside between showers and inside with the dressing up clothes, the toy cars, some soft toys and loads and loads of imagination! Safe to say a great time was had by all I think. Richard and Rebecca were slightly less inclined to leap into the mix but seemed to have a nice enough time picking and choosing when to join in and when to observe. 🙂 We managed chats about Home Ed camps, specifically Melrose which Lucy is thinking about going to in 2007 and a whole host of various other things.

Lucy left, Ady arrived home, Chris went off for vegetarian provisions which are in short supply in the Goddard house, Ady cooked meals for carnivores and herbivores, the children – at least two of whom had appeared on the verge of sleep – played with glowsticks and the Beans headed off at the very last moment of their alloted time window to get back into the campsite before it shut for the night and they’d have to walk across the field rather than drive in. A lovely day.

I am feeling generally much better today although still very stiff of neck and back. The children are suffering in waves with mornings and evenings being tricky times – so I’m sure tonight’s late night didn’t help but they had such a good time playing with Elinor and Alys it was well worth it. 🙂

We had a lovely time with Dayve here despite earliness to bed all round. He told us last night that he is getting ‘married’ to his partner which is excellent news as his previous two relationships had been really messily ended and left him quite commitment-phobic so it’s lovely that his new bloke – Nick – has restored his faith in men! 😆 Only trouble is during a previous drunken text message exchange Ady had agreed to be a bridesmaid if he ever got married and wear a pink frilly dress so I think he is slightly concerned about having to see it through – pink is so not his colour! 😆 Dayve has previously always been pretty terrified of children, which I completely understand, with the exception of my own two and a very small selected number of other children I know well I am fairly terrified of them too. Usually he either hissed at me to ‘not leave him alone with them!’ or followed me if I left the room – inconvenient if I was going for a wee really 😉 but he appears to have had something of an epiphany having worked on one of his last promotional jobs with loads of children. So he was actually very comfortable with Davies and Scarlett, who, having been brought gifts by him were his new best friends! Last night we chatted a bit about Home Education with him *totally* getting what it was all about and thinking it was a wonderful thing and everyone should do it – which is an easy thing to think I guess when you are a gay man with no intention, or danger, of accidentally fathering children! 😆 This morning I came downstairs to find him flanked by them on the sofa, looking really quite relaxed considering. He said Davies had told him he was going to be a film-maker and Scarlett had said she intends being a pilot – so he certainly went away with the impression that HE works just fine! 😆 He left with Ady Very Early this morning to get a lift to the station to his next job, he’s been handing out supernoodles to uni students at freshers fairs for the last couple of weeks up and down the country and was off to replace mobile phone displays in Sainsburys mobile phone concessions today before heading off to set up a new coffee shop somewhere else tomorrow. Interesting life although he always reminds me of The Littlest Hobo somehow. Must tell him that, he’d like that as his theme tune I’m sure. 😆

Davies spent an hour or so on the xbox and suddenly blasted through 3 whole levels of a game he’s previously needed help on every level with before all by himself, so he was feeling super chuffed – and then on a roll cracked a bit of the other game he’s never managed before either. Very proud of himself for that :-). Tarly wrote me lots of ‘notes’ in her banana paper notebook. Then we gathered ourselves together and went to Lucy’s via the post office.

Sam (routine lady from yesterday) was there too and I had brought her a couple of books on Home Education to look at. It was really interesting to observe Sam who was obviously in her element with a group of children around her sitting with Davies, Scarlett, Richard, Rebecca and her own son Alex. Particularly so soon after having watched Dayve with Davies and Scarlett. Sam is very good with children having been a nanny so dealt with them in a professional capacity for years but it is that very professionalism that somehow grates on me – and certainly D & S are slightly suspicious of it too. Ady is excellent with children but it is far more a relating to them and enjoying being with them natural part of his personality rather than something he has ‘learned’, I (and Dayve) am utterly uncomfortable with children and can only really talk to them as people and hope they respond. So it was really funny to observe that just a few hours after Dayve had sat talking to my two and gleaned from them that they had ambitions to be a film maker and a pilot – with all the background information about how they had come to those career choices, no doubt, knowing them, to see Sam asking them things like ‘if you were a bird, what colour would you be?’ 😆 😆 I often get cross with my Mum for not ‘challenging’ the children or helping them with things they are more than capable of doing themselves but actually I don’t think it is to do with challenging them, I think it is to do with not patronising them. Really a child will act up to the expectations placed on them and if they get ridiculously over praised for that then why bother to strive harder. Very much a generalisation I know but very clearly illustrated today within a matter of hours.

I did watch Davies though and started to detect a bit of a narrowed eye look in him and when she suggested that ‘we all act like bunnies and collect all the crumbs up off the floor’ he physically backed away and said ‘er no I don’t want to do that!’ which really made me laugh, particularly as not five minutes earlier I’d asked him to pick up a few dropped sandwiches from the plate and he’d happily done it . Even Tarly, who’s favourite game currently is ‘pussycats’ where she only communicates by the power of the miaow looked doubtful at a grown up suggesting such a thing! 🙂

Sam then took all the children into the garden to play football which went down well for a while but again I think a grown up determining who’s turn it is next between four children who spent lots of time in each others’ company and are fairly adept at deciding who’s turn it is next between them threw them off kilter a bit so we decided to go to the park. Davies had a great time climbing really high up one of those rope climbing frames while Tarly rotated playmates with Davies, Richard and Rebecca enjoying everyone’s company and particularly Richard’s. It’s nice to see the Davies:Rebecca split and the Tarly:Richard one – Davies retains his status as oldest and Richard keeps his position as youngest but Tarly and Rebecca get to swap roles a bit and test out being the older sibling / younger sibling in reverse to their normal family situation – quite funny though because Davies and Rebecca would make a very different duo to Richard and Scarlett in that pairing, but in their real life couples they are similar really with the oldest being pushed forwards by the daring younger one in order that they don’t get overtaken.

Sam (who kept calling me Nikki, must tell her not to do that!) seemed to be interviewing me on a prepared list of contentious topics to do with parenting and education and is so often the case when you are feeling a bit interogated you get slightly defensive and either shut up about your true feelings or swing to an even more extreme viewpoint. We talked about smacking, discipline, rewards and punishments including stickers and star charts. And I remembered just how hard it is to spend any length of time with someone with a much different aged child to you if that is all you have in common. I am so not interested in baby weaning, sleeping through the night, how to prevent them from posting sandwiches into the video – it all just seems so many years ago I was there and actually intellectual wavelength wise unless you are meeting someone on sort of common ground it becomes a pointless conversation if you are both quite happy with your approach and have no interest in selling it to the other person. I can quite see the next generation of Home Educators being active choice from the start rather than failed school experiments who find their own way of doing it and very possibly go down the almost schooly route of clumping together in groups to skill swap ‘teaching’ areas. And actually for a while that was the sort of vision I had of how it might all work and I am sure for many it would be the perfect solution. But once you’ve moved on, you’d really rather be getting on with helping your budding film maker and pilot realise their dreams by making movies with a digital camera and drawing story boards and making characters out of magic maize, seeing how quickly a rock falls when dropped from the same height as a feather to learn about aerodynamics than worry about whether you should laminate your worksheets to make them wipe clean or photocopy lots of them instead? Anyway, enough ranting 🙂

We left the park and headed back for a last cup of tea, Davies, Scarlett and Rebecca disappeared upstairs and made the enormous cardboard box Rebecca’s new bed had arrived in into a space rocket complete with coloured in chalk decoration (which Lucy very kindly washed off my children before I had to deal with it – I have chalk ‘issues’) and were having a very loud, but very enjoyable time. I have no idea what Lucy, Sam and I talked about then so it must have been non confrontational and neutral 😉 and by about 4pm we headed for home.

Scarlett started to get all snotty and tired as soon as we arrived home so she has been mediseded up and sent to bed early (it was a late night for them last night too with their sleepover in Davies’ room), Davies and I played some more X box and he got all the way through to a Mine Machine bit straight away and then to continue his run of luck I managed to complete the Mine Machine bit 🙂 yay! So we saved that ready to start a brand new bit of game for next time. And then he was fast asleep really early too.

Lovely dinner of slow cooker chicken with potato gratin and an aborted attempt to watch a dvd when it started stopping and freezing half way through. I’m expecting The Beans tomorrow thanks to a surprise text yesterday to say they’ll be down this way so we’re all looking forward to that and then I have a feeling we’ll be off on yet another rollercoaster of a weekend heading into next week with loads planned.

Woke after a dreadful night during which every single person I have ever met – and some I haven’t including a wide array of fictional characters – came to visit me in my dreams. Which were somewhat squashed by virtue of the fact I think I only slept for about half an hour between waking to wipe / blow my runny nose, cough pathetically, shiver from being too hot or snuggle deeper into the duvet from being too cold. Oh and at one point I woke to find Davies in bed with us too – which I had thought was a surreal part of my dreams but clarified as fact with him this morning. I staggered downstairs at about 6.30am where Ady was washing up and Davies was Xboxing because I could hear Scarlett wailing quietly ‘Mummy, Mummy’ through the baby monitor. Told Ady I felt shite and stumbled back to bed. He came up about 7.30am with a cup of tea, a glass of water and a side helping of Daynurse drugs. I believe I have blogged before about cold and flu medication and how I consider it evil and mind altering. It has the same effect as cocaine on me, makes me go all hyper, glittery eyed and chattering with the belief I am invincible and should start climbing mountains with imediate effect. But I took it cos I feel so crap.

It kicked in and had me and the children whirlwinded into being dressed and ready with picnic packed way before Lucy arrived with a frantic gleam in my eye, my pockets filled with tissues and a ‘I can take you on, I can take you ALL on’ attitude. We set off to meet Julie, via services on the way where we collected Lucy’s friend Sam in convoy with her son A. We arrived slightly ahead of Julie so set off into the woods at a slow pace to allow them to catch us up. Julie arrived with Jack and Maisie and her Mum and Mum’s boyfriend Gunther so we were quite a crowd. We had a walk round with Davies and Scarlett running ahead, mostly joined by Jack and Maisie with occassional helpings of Recbecca and Richard. I managed a bit of walking alongside Sam, Julie and Lucy in turns which was nice and made for a wide variety of conversations – some more amusing and entertaining than others – with special mention to Sam telling me she is really into the idea of Home Ed and is qualified to teach her son until he is 8 – this made me laugh lots as I stood, highly ‘unqualified’ and slighty high on cold and flu relief while my six year old who should have been sitting in a classroom full of other six year olds that he has spent the last two years closeted away with at 11.45 on a Tuesday morning was climbing a tree, entering into a wild and riotous role play game with his sister and cousins, talking about dead trees being lighter than live ones and how they rotted away and identifying holly, acorns, oak trees etc. Shame I’m not qualified eh? 😉

We went back to the car park and had a picnic lunch which was lovely with lots of sharing of picnic food before Sam headed off (she had already disturbed her routine with a 15 minute late penalty for lunch so naptime was at huge risk of being disrupted :lol:) and the rest of us re-entered the woods for The Walk Part II – This Time It’s Personal!

Davies and Scarlett were having a whale of a time with loads to see and investigate, lots of open air to fill with noise and laughter and plenty of props for their ongoing games. Jack and Maisie were mostly happy followers and when we rounded a corner and discovered a teepee type structure made from branches it was not long before Richard and Rebecca got stuck in too. They children clambered about in it, found sticks and branches to add to it and generally enjoyed it. At which point we should have turned back the way we’d come and headed back to the car. But we didn’t.

Instead we allowed Davies to lead us, confident in the knowlegde that all paths round there are cyclic, if they children were already so far ahead and enjoying themselves then it would be silly to pull them back and personally I was in phase three of cold and flu tablet induced energy buzz I could have walked for miles! Some hour and a half later with six children none of whom wanted to walk another step, a complete come down from my medication leading to a full on relapse and that slightly other dimension type feeling you can get when you start to fully believe you may never see home again I got a phonecall with good enough news to buoy us up for the last leg of the journey. I reckon we must have walked a good 4 or 5 miles today – Davies walked all but the whole way, Tarly had a brief spell of piggybacking – which tipped the balance between a slight twinge in my neck / shoulder / back related to cold and glands into full on can’t look over my own shoulder let alone turn my head quickly or raise my arms above shoulder height.

We were all mighty glad to fall upon the car park again and with a small bar of chocolate each to sustain us we headed for home. Tarly, Richard and Rebecca all fell asleep with Davies coming pretty close too. Lucy came in for a drink and a chat before heading off just before I got a text from my mate Dayve to say he was about to arrive at Lancing station.

We hopped back in the car to collect him and brought him home, where he instantly made friends with the children by bringing them a cool array of gifts including a notepad with a cover made from recycled car types, a bandana with a skull and crossbones and a rubberwood stamp with a tree / sun / flower on it for Davies and a cuddly cat wearing a dinner jacket, a notebook made from bananas and a small wooden container with lovely colouring pencils for Tarly. Oh and a bottle of red wine for me which came in a really cool shaped bottle with a very pretty label which I am shallow enough about packaging to appreciate and I consider did make the wine taste better! 😆

Pizza for tea, enough wine to top up the drugs still clearly in my system, a sleepover for Davies and Scarlett who decided they *really* love Dayve for that and a few happy hours of reminscing of our lives in Manchester complete with home video footage of the setting up of Dreamieland and lots of ‘do you remember when?’ stories from those early days.

Dayve – who can’t hold his drink was slurring words and staggering on his feet and has to catch a very early train in the morning, Ady has been driving lots and I am in bed blogging and wondering where I can find a dealer to supply me with Beechams and cut price costs 😉

I’m top to toe hurty today, partially by accident, partially by virus, partially by being female and partially by being silly. First thing this morning I was about to come downstairs with an armful of dirty washing and I dropped a sock. I bent down to retrieve it and smacked my head against the wall / top of the bannisters. And I saw stars and little cartoon bluebirds flying round my head tweeting! I still have a big old lump which is really painful to touch and a background-y headache. 🙁

The cold is definitely a cold. Not the sort you are likely to need medical attention from (although it might be if I were a bloke) and I suspect without the additional hurty stuff it would be fairly easily shrug-off-able. But I’m snotty, with a dry cough and a fair bit of acheyness and a desire to sit on the sofa with my duvet watching comforting children’s TV like Little Bear (or even childhood stuff like Bod and The Flumps) drinking warm honey and lemon.

And I’m having a real git of a period too with full on cramps and general crapness.

And finally, because of course you would if you felt like I do today, I thought I’d try and have my twice weekly walk, return some library books, get some fresh air, clear my head, exercise would do my good type thing. And briefly it probably did. But when I staggered home nearly an hour later feeling all cold sweat-like and even more hurty of head, streamy of nose and dry of throat I had a big throbbing blood blister where my trainers had rubbed -just to complete my ailments!

But that aside I’ve had quite a nice day! 🙂

This morning was a bit chaotic – Ady worked from home which always upsets the balance of things somewhat. I’m sure if he did it regularly we would find a pattern to accomodate it but on an ad hoc basis it just disturbs the peace really. Davies was playing X Box which he always takes a while to get out of the mindset of somehow with him getting irrationally upset about small things. Tarly gets all stroppy when he plays the X Box for too long as well as she loses her playmate – it’s definitely a pursuit we need to choose the right time to follow rather than have as part of our daily lives. A couple of the ebay games have arrived and I’ve had a quick test of them to check they are OK before leaving feedback. So hopefully more games will attract Tarly to play too and they can use it together. Those are put away for Christmas though. Anyway, we managed to sort ourselves out and Ady went off to work. I finally found some sellotape – the misplacement of which was what had kicked me off into being cross with the world in general and the children in particular! – and parcelled up more ebay stuff and we headed off to the post office to get them sent. The children ran ahead which meant I got to walk at a decent pace rather than toddler speed which was rather nice. They were after something to do so I tasked them with spotting all the letters from Davies’ name – that done very quickly they found the letters in GROMIT as well. I was quite impressed that I only said the letters for Gromit about twice for Davies to remember them all. He also learnt to read the word ‘WATER’ by virtue of it being on pretty much every metal cover we happened across. They also found letters on car registration plates, road name signs, house names, telegraph poles etc.

Home again for lunch and Laura’s Star which arrived from Tesco dvd rental this morning. Our 2 month free trial is about to end and I thought I’d managed another 2 months by registering in Ady’s name instead of mine but they emailed to say we’d already had a trial at this address and couldn’t have another one – clearly cleverer than education city then 😆 They seemed to like Laura’s Star – I didn’t watch it, I’m reading a book at the moment which I’m really into so I read that instead.

Inbetween all this I was doing mammoth loads of washing and pegging out having realised that we are right at the very end of drying washing outside now – unless I get it on the line first thing in the morning stuff isn’t drying out there – and then I keep leaving it out all night which means the really heavy dews soak it and it doesn’t dry again the next night. I’ll be being very frugal with both the tumble drier and the central heating this winter so I’m still pondering clothes drying logistics.

Davies then had another hour or so on the X box while I did a shmuzzle puzzle I’ve had kicking round for a while. I was surprised at how easy it was actually and I finished it, even with the assistance of the children 🙄 then they played with the salamander side of the pieces fitting them together.

I cooked them some tea, had a lengthy text message conversation with my friend Dayve from Manchester who is down this way and is coming to dinner tomorrow – and is now actually coming to stay the night too. Then Ady came home and I went on my walk. Which is sort of where we came in really.

Tomorrow we’re off to some local woods for a walk, you know the sort of thing – summer turning into autumn, collecting acorns, chestnuts and dried leaves for a collage 😆 Oh, and all my ailments will be improved too!

Took Davies off to Badgers while Ady and Scarlett did their Monday night bonding. I sat in the car reading my book – which was only a trashy chick lit but had a happy ending and made me cry 😳 When I went in to collect him the leader, assistant leader and the leader’s 16 year old daughter were all at the front of the assembled children singing and dancing a song about Zombies which the children were joining in with. Except Davies. He seemed happy enough and was watching them all and laughing, but he was standing to one side, next to the leader’s daughter’s baby (yes, the 16 year old).

He came out with a cup and string telephone he’d made and along with all the other children coming out with them showed me how to use it. He’d coloured one cup red and one cup pink as red is his favourite colour and pink is Tarly’s. He said he’d made it to share with Tarly and they were going to take it everywhere – even on holiday! I asked him about the Zombie song and he explained that the adults had performed it and then asked ‘who wants to learn it?’ everyone else had said yes of course, but Davies, having been given the option had weighed it up and decided it was ‘a bit too mad!’ so declined and stood with the baby instead. I love that he is so confident of his own decisions and would rather mark himself as the odd one out by standing alone than participate in something he is not keen to do. Not such a follower my son…

He’d missed out on our semi-regular McDonalds after leaving Chris and Julie’s yesterday as we left so early and just after lunch so Ady had told him if he was well behaved today I might take him there after Badgers, just him and me. I don’t know how contrived this was on Ady’s part but it was actually just what Davies and I needed. We’ve had a bit of a rough patch the last week or so, ending with a rather tough line drawn under it at the weekend. But it has opened lines of communication back up and we’ve had lots of very informative chats, with me finally learning to listen to him and learning a bit about him (and me) in the process. Funny how you can learn from a six year old and feel quite so in awe of their wisdom at times isn’t it? He’s working really hard to explain and understand why he does stuff, which is helping him to start to think before he acts at times and helping me to realise that all behaviour has a reason, sometimes it is actually very justified and at others it is the reason we need to deal with rather than the behaviour. Anyway, he has made huge efforts to work on the stuff he knows upsets me the last two days, I have made similar efforts and we have both been rewarded by two lovely days. So an hour or so of taking him to McDonalds for a Happy Meal – which I just gave him the money for and he went up and ordered – and sitting and chatting with him while he ate it, then walking round Tescos for a few bits of food shopping with him afterwards was lovely and just what we needed to reconnect. There is also a small swimming pool on the same site so we called in there and put his name down for swimming lessons – there should be a space after Christmas for him so that is good and another thing ticked off my list of things I really must organise. 🙂

Home for a bath and bed for him, a bath and dinner for me. I’d foolishly frozen chilli and bolognaise without labelling which was which so I’d defrosted it and hoped it was bolognaise. It wasn’t, although it was perfectly edible with pasta instead of rice.

I’ve had a very odd few weeks, feeling quite fragile and got at, for a variety of reasons – not least of which was probably Davies’ party and the huge time and effort I put into it. Davies brought his party up tonight and I was thrilled to realise just how much he had appreciated it, enjoyed it and known what had gone into it. Along with having a bit of a breakthrough with a rocky patch of parenting and resuming control of a couple of other things I’m feeling lots more positive again today. Which is just as well as I seem to be going down with a cold and it is mooncup time – all of which might have tipped me over the edge otherwise! Tomorrow is X Box day, with trips to the post office and the library both necessary at some point.

I’ve had loads of paperwork and phonecalls to make today, trying to switch all my direct debits over to a new bank account – so I have listened to the widest variety of hold music, automated dialling systems, been told how important my calls is and spoken to a wide array of call centres in far flung lands where heavily accented people try to convince you their name is Brian (when they are a woman!) or Mary (when they are a man) – clearly those are names for a quiche or a lasagne anyway! 😆 Finally done the last one, while agreeing to all of the childrens’ most imaginative and ridiculous requests in order to make them go away again so I can hear what the person on the phone is saying to me or concentrate to give my sort code. ‘Mummy, can I cut all the cat’s fur off with your nail scissors?’ ‘Is it OK if I eat a whole bag of lollipops?’ ‘Davies is annoying me – can I hit him with the poker and little shovel from the companion set?’ would all have been met with a nod and a dismissive wave of the hand. 😆

Inbetween such joys we have been to Magical Mondays – as previously mentioned at Green House by the Sea. Excellent time of day – 11am – 2pm which means we are not likely to get there too late as it allows us to adhere to our never getting out of the house before 10.30am limitation and means we are home again around 2.30pm, which is perfect for having a quiet couple of hours to organise early tea before Badgers on a Monday at 5pm. It means Davies gets a nice socialisation sandwich on a Monday too, gives a nice structure to the week with our other regular stuff and prevents that post weekend slump we sometimes have on a Monday.

Very easy to get to as well – although it’s about 15 miles away it’s only about 20 minutes drive, which is the same time I had to allow for travelling to the group I ran myself the other side of my own town – infact the only downside seems to be that I’d really have to change my name to some shortened version of Alison to fit in with all the other Ali/Allie titled folk there 😉

They have a really good space there with a large room for being noisy, kicking balls and shooting hoops in, an open plan room with a kitchen and plenty of seating and a variety of toys etc. Today there was air drying clay (always going to be a hit with Davies that one, can anyone guess what the first thing he made was? 😆 He also made a snowman and then when someone broke out a bag of pipecleaners he made a person with pipe cleaner arms and legs which was really cool. I then suggested a spider using four pipe cleaners pushed through a piece of clay to make eight legs so he did that too. All left there to dry ready for painting next week 🙂 . Tarly made a worm.), pens and paper – which Tarly mostly drew on her hands with :roll:, science experiments with apples and baking of spelt flour and raisin cakes which they both enjoyed the making – and eating – of. Oh and a load of other children, by far the most exciting and used resource! Freya and Ali were there, which was great as I got to chat to Ali a bit and the children got to form a little trio which instantly gave them confidence to join in running with the pack. There was Ali and Leo, with whom we’ve more crossed paths with than spent time with previously, a couple of people who I knew from groups of the past, a few familiar but not placeable faces and some new people too. I managed a couple of brief chats with various people and the children had a great time. There was one incident at the end of a very crazy time which all the adults predicted would ‘end in tears’ when Tarly was a casualty of overexcitedness and games getting slightly out of hand, but I was really impressed with the speedy, effective and non-dramatic way it was dealt with – always a mark of how a group works is how easily a wrongdoing is put right. So that was reassuring. 🙂

We left and both children instantly declared it ‘really good’ and are keen to go again next week. So that’s a good start. In the car we listened to some more of the Horrible Histories cds – Vicious Vikings and Rotten Romans this time. They only really like to listen to the songs – clearly I need to set a whole curriculum to music or verse, which funnily enough was how I used to revise or remember long lists of information when I was at school.

This afternoon we’ve watched a film, they’ve played with geomags and toy animals, while I’ve finished my phonecalls and done some online stuff.

And now, Davies and I are off to Badgers. Back later. 🙂

Heather 🙂 Have a good day xxx

We went over to Chris and Julie’s today for Jack and Maisie’s birthday party. They were 4 yesterday. We arrived to find slight bedlam with two lots of cakes cooked and burnt so Julie’s mum sent off to buy one cake with the third and final attempt still in the oven, Chris and Julie barely speaking and chaos abounding. Ady helped Chris get the barbecue under control (for more cooking of bits of Pete) while I helped Julie restore order in the kitchen. By the time the first guests arrived all was calm once more. 🙂

The children had a great time playing with the various other children who came along, which included a boy and a girl the same age as Tarly, so it was very interesting watching her in a group of 2 boys and 2 girls all within a couple of months age of each other to observe how she acted. There was a 37 weeks pregnant woman there who I chatted to for a while, the now infamous woman with her two children from last years willy flashing birthday party incident, Julie’s mum and her boyfriend and a couple of other people I didn’t get to talk to. Ady and I actually sat and talked to each other for a while making up lives for the other guests which is always a fun exercise ;-).

We left after the cake was served as Ady’s mother was due to arrive within the hour and we were not running any risk of an encounter, so we headed over to my parents and spent a very nice couple of hours with them. Last year they almost decided to go on a holiday to South America but the specific one they had chosen was booked up by the time they got themselves organsied so last week I was nagging Dad to get it sorted for next year NOW. He got the brochure and had talked to Mum about it last night so we looked it up on the internet and found the dates they want (January 2007) were already booked up online. They rang and have booked it getting a cancellation which wasn’t showing up online but they are waiting for confirmation tomorrow as to whether they can upgrade to business class for the flights or not. If not they will plan another trip instead and get this one booked up for next Autumn / Winter. It does look really exciting, taking in Brazil, Argentina and Chile over nearly 3 weeks. My parents had never really been on any holidays until we went to Vegas 7 years ago and they came with us. They went off to Australia for a month just 3 months after that, repeating it the following Winter and last year they went to Thailand, China, Hong Kong etc. South America was next on Dad’s list of places to see, followed next by various places in the US. It’s so funny to think that my Dad who is so staid and never did anything crazy at all when we were children (he was 35 when they had me and despite having a slightly wild past in his youth had got it all out of his system really by the time we came along) is now riding elephants and keen to ride cable cars on Sugar Loaf Mountain in his retirement. It gives me hope for years to come and also makes me want to do even more crazy things now rather than wait! The world has gotten a much smaller place even in my lifetime but since my Dad was a small boy of Davies’ age, some 60 odd years ago in a tiny North Wales village with no electricity, TV or telephones let alone computers, internet shopping and dvd rental services he remembers looking at maps on his classroom walls of far and distant lands. When the climate was the extreme opposite to the 20 foot deep snow drifts he’d avoid on the miles long walk to school every morning in his short trousers and the sun shone all year round, where people with different coloured skin to he and all his classmates pasty white welsh colouring spoke different languages, ate different food and wore different clothes. My Dad will readily confess that he is still utterly bemused at the technology behind the telephone – and that’s the one he can see plugged into the wall at home with telephone wires connected to the big pole outside his window, let alone mobile phones which work anywhere by some sort of black magic! So to be able to go to those places and have the pages of his boyhood atlas leap out at him in full colour is something that brings that little boy right back to the surface again. His excitement is a joy to watch. 🙂

We left there and came home for a lovely roast dinner (beef, we called her Shirley!) and we’ve been watching the ‘Steve Irwin, he changed our world’ show on Animal Planet showing the memorial service from last week, which has had me in floods of tears throughout with special sobbing when his little girl came on with her amazing speech.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the weekend!

You Are Bold And Brave

But daring? Not usually? You tend to like to make calculated risks. So while you may not be base jumping any time soon… You are up for whatever’s new and (a little) exciting!

If You Were Born in 2893…

Your Name Would Be: Vuis Umori And You Would Be: An Evil Space Warlord

All the music has had me wandering down memory lane lots today, well I say wandering, mostly I was skipping and dancin’ in that ‘hey I might be overweight, the wrong side of 30 and look more than faintly ridiculous but I still got it’ way that embarassing aunts and mothers dance to Hi Ho Silver Lining at wedding receptions up and down the country every Saturday night during the summer in hired scout huts, town halls and reception rooms in pubs after one too many Babychams. But I shan’t share those memories here, they are far too special to be sniggered at by my more lofty readership 😉

I got all my ebay stuff listed, then started walking round the house casting an appraising eye over every surface looking for things to sell. A couple of cds made it on there and if husbands, children and cats stay still for more than a few moments I am there, ready to whip out the camera and think up a punchy item title for them. 😆 I then nipped out to get barbecue guest supplies, choosing to go to the nearest supermarket which necessitates crossing the railway line. The gates were down there and back which meant the other supermarket would have been loads quicker and probably cheaper but never mind.

Coming home I saw the Thank You Neighbours (who Kirsty and James were very priviledged to actually meet – Lucy has met David too) full of stories and anecdotes about their trip this week to the Isle of Wight and the gifts they selected for Davies and Scarlett’s Christmas presents while they were there :rolls:. Then we set off for Lucy’s. We’d planned to walk, been behind schedule and Ady decided he’d drive after all and ended up being early.

Children had a great time despite D & S taking the baton and S having a whingy few minutes when we first arrived and D having some crazy behaviour which really, really, really annoyed me. Colin cooked loads of lovely food and it was a lovely few hours. Came home and watched X Factor then packed the children off to bed who were both asleep almost instantly – I am even prepared to concede behaviour was due to tiredness much though I loathe that excuse.

No tea for us as we’re still stuffed from bbq food (I called my burger Cheryl and my chicken drumstick Ian) so we’re watching more Simply Red on the Biography channel live in Cuba, which reminds me of the time…

It’s really not.

Apparently it’s me as Totty, dancing to KLF! 😆

Except I’ve moved on to Nina Simone now and am counting megabloks ready to list on ebay.

Ady is doing something to do with ring tones and MP3 downloads on his laptop, the children are playing with lego and toy animals, I’m sitting on the floor in the playroom surround by outgrown childrens’ clothes listing them all on ebay listening to a variety of music very loud on the cd player including Elton John, Billy Joel, Beautiful South and other singalong stuff I loved years ago, singing along at the top of my voice and occassionally getting up to dance too if the song demands it.

Earlier I told Davies I wished he was old enough to go and make me a cup of tea – he came back a few moments later with Tarly in tow and requested that I show them both how so as soon as they are ‘older’ they will be able to do it. So I did – he did the putting the kettle on, stirring the tea bag around and pouring the milk, we looked and smelt various of my hippy tea teabags and I snipped open a cheapo normal tea bag to show them the tea leaves and told them about tea plants and making tea with loose leaves.

The sun is shining in through the windows and this afternoon we’re off to Colin and Lucy’s for a barbeCue.

If I could only find my Carpenters cd to listen to next it would all be pretty much perfect. 🙂

Oh and Pete was lovely 🙂

Ady worked from home today which initially caused additional stress as the children were constantly trying to leap on him, get him to run around after them and shouting across us whenever we tried to talk. And we fell out over me ‘helping’ him with what he was working on 😳 But we eventually settled into it.

I forgot to mention earlier in the week that Tarly is suddenly into sticker / puzzle books. I have about half a shelf of 3+ ‘workbooks’ largely unused that I bought when we first thought about HE. Davies has never been a workbooky sort of child and I had pretty much reached the conclusion that I was not a workbooky sort of mother really but Tarly is loving them. She’s done some match and sort style mathsy ones although they are very much of the spot the difference, link the pairs, odd one out style rather than anything involving maths as I consider it. Seeing Tarly head bent over a book, getting a bit of attention and support while doing it has sparked a bit of interest in Davies so he has been looking at books like Dinosaur atlas sticker books which have loads of stickers all numbered which you have to put on the right part of the world to show which dinosaurs lived where.

Today Tarly grabbed a first 100 words book so we sat matching stickers to that for a while and I showed her how to match the word printed on the sticker to the word printed on the book and how that word was what the picture was etc. Then we looked at the picture and spotted things in it and did some counting up of stuff too. All very early years education really and something I am so not in the habit of doing I found it nice but odd all at the same time.

Davies came over and started ‘helping’ with the words until I asked him to read ‘hen’ off one of the stickers and he threw a complete looney at me. I would have maybe let it pass but Ady was sitting across the room and waded in with the ‘if you can’t read at home then maybe we need to send you to school’ type chat. Which I am more than guilty of pulling out of the hat myself at times despite having very little intention of seeing it through, or indeed being particularly concerned about his reading. I just hate the attitude he displays sometimes about things which I know he is utterly capable of and get really pissed off when he would rather make a huge drama about it, cry, sulk and stamp his feet while riles me up instead of just doing it, getting the praise and feeling good about himself. Kids eh? I sent him to his room as he was being really arsey and then after a few minutes I followed him up there and we had a chat. I then asked him to choose a book for us to look at together – with the aim of restoring some of his confidence by showing him he *can* do it and feeling good about reading rather than leaving it as a sore point. He chose some of the Usborne Ted in Bed, Big Pig type books and we looked at Big Pig. He did really well actually although I helped him with the sort of where, when, there, shows type words which we’ve never covered before. We did about five pages before we both got bored and stopped but he redeemed himself in Ady’s eyes and was all positive about what he can do again so that was mission accomplished. 🙂

They then got the Happymais out and Davies was playing quite happily with that but being interupted and annoyed by Tarly so I took her off to do some baking with me instead. We made chocolate brownies and rice crispy cakes together and chatted lots about what we were doing as we went. Tarly broke up the chocolate, did some stirring of the hot pan, greased the brownie tray, tipped the nuts, sugar and flour in, did some more mixing and put it in the oven. Then she assembled paper cake cases for the rice cripsy cakes, tipped the marshmallows into the pan and then wandered off again.

I returned to the lounge to find Davies making all sorts of stuff with Happymais, Tarly looking at the Big Pig etc books and ‘reading’ to herself making it up as she went along looking at the pictures – she sat and happily did that with all six books. I do sometimes wonder what would happen if you applied the ‘raised by wolves’ approach to a child like Tarly and didn’t help AT ALL. Would she learn to read eventually just be working out what individual words meant by spotting them against various illustrations in various books? She constantly surprises me with her wide vocabulary and expressions and it is actually very rare she asks what a word means like Davies still does sometimes, she just seems to note it’s use and context once or twice and then starts to use it herself.

Ady had awarded himself a break and found a website of ring tones with loads of old children’s TV shows and 70s / 80s adverts, so we happily played ‘name that kids show of your childhood’ for a while which was cool. 🙂

And then, imagine my surprise (said in best Viz voice) when I spotted Ali and Freya walking damply past the house. So the children let them in and then kept them coralled in a very small area in the hall while they brought them various things, returned borrowed items and bombarded them with X box questions as they tried to remove shoes, outerwear and change soggy hemmed trousers. When we eventually allowed them inside the rest of the house there was a brief period of craziness which was solved by packing Davies off upstairs to eat his lunch in the company of Ady who had scarpered upstairs when they arrived due to not being fully clothed, needing to go and put his boots on to be in Ali’s company and knowing full well I would deputise him to look after and entertain all the children so Ali and I could chat! 😆 Wise man!

Which meant that Tarly and Freya played really nicely together with occassional interjections from Davies when he re-joined us. They did stuff with make up, Polly Pockets and liberated toys from Davies’ bedroom. And then Davies realised that actually it would be far better to hang with the laydeez in the lounge than try and infiltrate the beauty parlour in Tarly’s room. So he sat firing quick fire questions at Ali about W&G X box games and talking us through every stage of his Happymais X box related constructions. He really made me laugh when Ali was out of the room by confiding in me that he’d ‘accidentally said bugger’. 😆 I repeated it to Ali when she came in but stopped short of what he’d said and turned to him to say ‘what did you say Davies?’ He thought for a moment and then said ‘I can’t tell you, but it’s a friend of ‘Oh My God!” 😆

Inbetween chatting with Ali I did manage to suggest and support Davies with creating tartan slippers for a Happymais Wallace, persuade Tarly to paint nails over newspaper and threaten shouting as a punishment for repeated offences in turning lights on in Tarly’s room. Then I escaped for an hour by taking Ali and Freya home.

I came home and Ady had fed the children (easily my least favourite task of the day), we watched the quarter final of celebrity Masterchef with Davies making all sorts of hilariously adult and astute comment on it before trying to get children to sleep. Tarly had mislaid both her remaining (very old) dummies and seemed fairly ‘unbovvered’ about it so I was prepared for this to be ‘it’ and was sitting in her room with her while she kept getting out of bed to look at books, brush my hair, lie upside down on her bed picking at her woodchip wallpaper telling me convoluted and complicated stories until she fell asleep when Ady arrived with a dummy he’d found in a holiday holdall. So she took it and was asleep very speedily afterwards.

Now we are drinking alcohol, watching music channels on TV and playing ‘guess the song title, artist and year first’ while Ady has cooked possibly our latest ever dinner of home made burgers and chips. The mince and potatoes were both supplied by Chris and Julie – the potatoes from their garden and the meat from a friend of Chris’ who had an Aberdeen Angus slaughtered for their wedding reception (pre the event I believe rather than as part of the evening entertainment!) and supplied Chris with various cuts of meat for his freezer from the remnants. The cow was called Pete and we have enjoyed him very much 🙂

Lots of socialising planned for this weekend so I might not be back til after the break. 🙂

Up, organised and out by 9.30am today, complete with two loads of washing out on the line. Days like these I can realise how people manage school 😉 Of course I did forget at least two things and needed to pop home unplanned in the middle of the day, but it was a good start.

We headed off to Brighton to see Hoodwinked as part of Film Educations screenings. I had not told the children we were going but billed it as ‘a surprise’. We arrived at Brighton Marina and Davies said straight away ‘is the surprise that we’re going to the cinema?’ in a really hopeful voice, so it was fab to be able to say yes. 🙂 We headed into Asda first to buy chocolate, popcorn and fizzy drinks at approximately a quarter of the price we would pay in the cinema – I do like to rot my childrens’ teeth and feed them additives in a frugal manner 😆

We were not first in the cinema but Davies and Scarlett still like to sit in the very front row, which most other cinema goers are not so keen on so we still got their favoured seats. I was impressed that Davies pointed out we had gone to a different screen last time. We settled down with our food and drink and a cinema employee came to introduce the film – he talked about evacuation procedures and film performances. When he’d finished Tarly leant over to me and said ‘he used a lot of long words!’ 😆

The film was excellent – I really enjoyed it and it would have been good to have another adult there to watch it with. I thought it was well written with a fast paced script and original and funny takes on the well known characters of the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. I’d have been very proud to have written it. The animation was good too – Red reminded me of Betty Boop – I quite like the return to old fashioned very obvious cartoony style characters. Davies sat glued to it and Tarly just got a tiny bit restless about an hour in, but was easily quietened again and whispered lots of intellegent questions to me. They were far better behaved than the group of about 10 eight year olds who sat in the row behind flanked by a teacher at each end of the row.

We left there, blinking in the sunshine and headed to Lucy’s via a post office on the way to send a couple more books I’ve sold on Amazon Marketplace – my un-read parenting manuals are selling a storm ;-). We loaded Richard, Rebecca and Lucy into our car and we popped back to my house so I could collect luncheon vouchers, take sausages out to defrost for dinner, get changed to suit the beautiful weather which had come out while we were in the cinema and collect Lucy’s sunglasses she left with us yesterday. Then over to Chris and Julie’s.

Julie had arranged an Activeo event to celebrate Jack and Maisie’s fourth birthday this weekend but actually there was only one other HE family there in the end. A really interesting woman I’ve met twice before with two daughters, aged 3 and 1. The 8 children had a ball playing in the garden with virtually no intervention while the adults, including Julie’s Mum who arrived this morning and her boyfriend enjoyed plenty of chatting on all sorts of diverse subjects including parenting and education of course.

We left there around 4.30pm and ended the day via McDonalds. I had pinecone research LV to spend so had planned to end the frugal treat for my two with a final junk food top up. They ate in the car and clearly the way forward for peaceful journeys with uninterupted chatting for Lucy and I is to feed them McDonalds in the car 😆 We went in with them for a final cup of tea for me, a further play in the garden for the children and to finalise arrangements for getting together with Ady and Colin too this weekend.

Ady was already home when we arrived and the children were both easily asleep by 8pm having been worn out by two days of being children all day long. Lovely dinner and I’m planning an early night myself.

This week started with a couple of really crappy days but has been turned round with a lovely couple of days. Having listened to myself talking about TCS, reward and punishment and general parenting today I am feeling slightly ashamed at how little I followed any of what I believe in and hold true at the beginning of this week. Less time spent trapped home all day with no fresh air or exercise for any of us does not make for a happy HE home, so I’ll learn from this week and try and work on not repeating some of those errors again for a while.

Had a really good day today with loads of stuff falling in our laps to talk about. Lucy was due to arrive at 10am – and Luce, really, promptness has gone from being a trait I admire in a friend to one which I could happily live without, so don’t ever rush 😉 – and I was actally well on schedule. The children were dressed, I was dressed, I’d put away three baskets of washing, hung two loads out to dry, persuaded the children to play with the non-messy option of plastic dinosaurs, had a plan to make some snickerdoodles to take on our picnic and had finally tracked the camera down so I could film the children singing Happy Birthday to Lulah. One of our fallings out yesterday was about making and writing in a card which I was going to post on the way to reading group so it would be with her this morning, but Davies wrote an ‘e’ instead of an ‘a’, Tarly got pen on the carpet when she was drawing a pink space rocket and I lost my temper with them over it. So they sang Happy Birthday and I taped it on the camera ready to upload to youtube and blog.

Then Ady came home again. His car was in for a service and as he is due a new company car in the next couple of months he had borrowed a Touran as a courtesy car and brought it home to show us. I don’t like his Golf anyway, I far prefer big cars (like my Sharan, or a BMW for exampled 🙂 ) but it is so not practical for the out of work hours stuff we use it for like camping. So he was going to ask for an estate but decided instead to go for a people carrier – perfect for using to ferry friends or relatives about in for days out and with loads of space for putting seats down to load it up with tents and portapotties – which was sort of why we bought the Sharan 5 years ago. Love the Touran anyway and he’s had it OK’d this afternoon as his next car. Hurrah! 🙂

All of which opening glove boxes, pushing all the buttons on the dash and trying to fold seats down threw me totally off schedule. So I bunged the snickerdoodles in the oven and was battling with my computer having realised that it hadn’t managed to use flickr uploadr or ebay turbolister the last couple of days either so clearly had some sort of uploading issues.

Lucy arrived just as the snickerdoodles came out of the oven, further reinforcing my muffin status in her eyes, I made a quick picnic and off we set.

We went to Tilgate Park, which we had planned to go to at least once before and been rained off of doing. Today was a perfect day weatherwise if slightly windy for our picnic and Tilgate is fab. With only minor detours due to us chatting and not looking out for our right turning properly and only minor yellings at children on the way we arrived. We headed straight for the animals bit and had a fab hour or so wandering round looking at them. There is a Discovery Centre bit there which has loads of small animal and bird skeletons, talks about reptiles, amphibians, mammals, fish etc and has odd small live exhibits too like tree frogs and lizards. Davies was really into it and we walked round the whole thing lifting every flap, answering all the questions and talking about everything there. He impressed me by remembering all sorts of snippets such as dolphins are mammals, alligators are reptiles, nocturnal means you are awake at night etc. We looked at the skull and teeth of carnivores (dogs), herbivores (sheep) and omnivores (humans) and talked about the differences, we looked at barn owl and pigeon skeletons and learnt (me too!) about the different types of feather – flight, contour and down. We looked at a time line of the population explosion of people and the decline and often extinction of other creatures. Tarly veered between interested and insightful and downright annoying because she wasn’t getting full attention all the time. She came out of it quickly enough when we entered the yard with various animals including pigs, cows, sheep, goats, deer, wallabys and a wide variety of birds. Davies and Scarlett happily ran ahead and were having a great time observing all the animals and chatting about them to each other and swapping knowledge. It was like a working model of how autonomy can work. 🙂

We stopped for lunch, Lucy very kindly bought me a cup of tea and despite claiming to be starving it wasn’t long before the children had abandoned their food in favour of running around and exploring some more. We did the maze, with Davies fondly remembering the one at Longleat from this time last year and walked through more themed gardens before heading off towards the water. There is an enormous and very picturesque lake with lots of water wildlife which we walked alongside before heading to the playrgound.

There Lucy and I managed to sit and chat for a while, despite R and another small girl taking it upon themselves to cart R up and down the climbing frame and slide – he loved it, Lucy and I were less keen! D & S went running off and got caught up in one of their own world games – about Wallace and Gromit I believe. Other children came and went and joined in a bit (Davies told me he had made a new friend when we left). They all appeared to be loving it so much they’d have stayed for hours longer but we managed to shepherd them out without a fight and the drive back home was lovely and quick too. A definite ‘we’ll come again’ vote there, infact I might try and arrange a HE gathering there with an educational talk for anyone near enough to be interested – will post to early years about it though.

Once home, Lucy, R & R came in for coffee and further playing. The shapes and sticks set was popular (can’t find a link) and as Davies made something he claimed could ‘tell you where north is’ I ended up doing a quick diagram of a compass and explaining south east and south west etc and even north north east too. Ah so much education :lol:.

Ady got home and Lucy, R and R headed off for home. I was getting increasingly cross with the computer so Ady sent me upstairs with it to swear in peace and I eventually got it sorted out and working again.

Tomorrow we have film education seats booked to see Hoodwinked, which I think looks pretty good. The children don’t know we’re going and I’m planning to take them to the Asda next door to the cinema first to buy drinks and popcorn there at about a quarter of the price of the cinema, so I wonder how quickly they’ll guess what’s going on?