One word? When seven would do…

cos our season ticket runs out on 2nd June and at £38 per person per year it won’t make it onto our priority list of investments of our meagre spare cash fund 🙁

This morning despite being up for three full hours before we had to go I still ended up dashing about at the last minute being all irrational and shouty. The children can both get themselves dressed now, which is excellent – I chuck clothes at them (they are of course capable of doing that themselves too but I am still to controlling / altogether too aware of the ‘standard’ of sartorial taste they would pull off to let them 😉 ) and they chuck their pjs back at me. Sometimes this takes a fair bit of nagging / coercion / threats of not going out or leaving the house in pjs / yelling and tears, other times it is straightforward and stress free! Today it was stress free. But then I remembered I needed to post an ebay parcel I hadn’t packaged up yet, and I still hadn’t made a picnic and Scarlett’s hair went beyond it’s normal worst acceptable level of tangled-ness on Tuesday so I did that and we left about 15 minutes after I’d planned to – which wasn’t too bad really and probably a tribute to the fact we can actually get out of the house and maybe even hope for the future 🙂 I did get four baskets of clean washing all put away too! Wish I could learn to choose my battles as quickly as I’ve learnt to enjoy housewifeliness 🙄

As it happened Lucy pulled up after we did anyway and we were less than 10 minutes late. We listened to some classics for children music on the way over which we’ve not done for a while so that was nice.

The children had a great time all round really, looked at the animals, played on all the various interactive bits, made full use of everything in the playground and generally made the very most of the day. The weather held all day and ended up very warm and sunny so that was good. Only paid for a cup of tea too so that was frugal 🙂 I would have taken pictures but I think we just have so many of them in various positions around Drusillas it seemed fairly pointless somehow!

We left around 3pm and I did some more shouting on the way home as they suddenly decided having played beautifully all day together to wind each other up and whinge. Sorted ourselves out by the time we got home and played I spy on the way, called into the post office to post my parcel and to the train station to find out about network rail cards.

When we got home I took to my car with a bin liner and cleared out all the various child related rubbish, removed all the winter coats and outgrown spare clothes and then replaced them with clean and season appropriate spare clothes, found the waterproof trousers and coats for the children, put their wellies in there and found fleeces for all of us to go in there too. One less job to do pre Kessingland too 🙂 That led onto sorting out the coat rack in the hall, bagging up all of the winter coats that won’t fit the children next year ready for ebaying, putting all of our winter coats in the back of our wardrobe and going through the shoes and putting all the wintery ones in the bottom shoe chest and all the summery ones in the top – there guaranteed rain for another fortnight 🙄

The children had grazed on food all afternoon with the sandwiches and crisps I’d taken for their lunch, some cheese strings things (refuse to spell any of those words with Zs like on the packaging!) Lucy’d brought to share. They they had apples, bananas and carrots when we got home, rice cakes in the car and two mini milk ice lollies each so they were understandably not fussed about dinner. So we played memory match the pairs with three sets of Ice Age 2 cards they’d got at the cinema as a free gift with their popcorn. We read Cat in the hat comes back and then the children sat with some of Tarly’s Dora books with Davies ‘reading’ them to her. I also wrote out ‘banana’ ‘green’ and ‘cat’ and Davies read them. He’s so utterly convinved he simply can’t read that when he realises how easy it actually is to read a word like banana he is amazed 🙂 Very funny to watch and of course quite amazing too…

They found a diary which was a McDonalds HappyMeal giveaway at some past point today so they have both been drawing and writing stuff in that today too. They brought it, along with some pens with us in the car and were illustrating stories to tell each other in it during the journey. I think spending time with some of the older girls in our circle who all seem to have notebooks they draw and write in has been noted by them more than I realised. They’ve already filled that one up so I might get them a cheapo notebook each – seems like a good little habit to encourage.

And that was about it for today really. Tomorrow we’re off to Ali’s so naturally Davies is planning ash-art :lol:.

We’ve started a team blog with food stuff on it 😆

If you want to contribute let me know and I’ll send you a username and password!

Happy Birthday Steve 🙂

Cinema again today. We saw The Wild. Very well animated, very weak storyline, too many similarities to Madagascar to carry it off really. No catchy soundtrack, not much charm, no catchphrases and generally rather forgetable. Davies watched it all but Tarly struggled with it about an hour in and then bumped her chin (ouch) on the arm of the chair where she was wriggling and cried, loudly 🙁 I managed to pacify her and she cheered up again for the ending but really it was a fifteen minute story with unecessarily complicated bits that she struggled to follow. Eddie Izzard’s koala was the redeeming feature for me really 😉 Like Eddie 🙂 Both children agreed they much prefered Curious George out of the two films anyway, but enjoyed the two cinema trips in a week experience lots! Thanks film education 🙂

We just had time to drop a couple of library books in and grab a plastic bag full of toy dinosaurs on the way to home ed group. The only attendees this week were us, Julie and Lucy. As last week was due to be our last week at the venue anyway we totted up the money and realised we’d used up all our funds so have cancelled it for next week and will start meeting at a local park each week instead. Come September if we have sufficient numbers to hire a venue again we will do so, if not we’ll move our get togethers indoors somewhere (soft play?). I like the idea of having *something* we do weekly to refer new people to but can’t be doing with the responsibility of being the one to fix themes and hire venues every week. I’m glad we did it for the four weeks as I’ve met at least four new contacts but as Julie and I (and often Lucy) meet weekly anyway it makes sense to just publicise that locally and refer any new HE folk to that get together as ‘local events for Worthing’. The theme was dinosaurs so they all played with the plastic dinos for a bit and then just ran around really. They found a ball and a hoop which they invented various games for and then Lucy brought in her cd played and a Spanish holiday song cd (birdie song, agadoo etc) so all the children danced to that for a while. Rebecca and Maisie danced together for ages – they are very similar in nature and make cute little friends actually, far more alike than either of them is to Tarly so we ahhhed at them holding hands and quietly dancing together. 🙂

Lucy, Rebecca and Richard came back for coffee afterwards but Rebecca didn’t really want to leave Lucy to play, despite Davies’ constant offers, Richard ignored all the various baby friendly toys we offered and wanted to climb the stairs with a view to falling back down them or play with the coal dust covered companion set on the hearth so Lucy I struggled but just about managed to chat about camping. She’s coming along to Kessingland which will be great and her husband, Colin, has done exactly what I would have done if finances would have allowed and dashed out and spent a fortune on everything with the word ‘camping’ infront of it 😆 Seeing them again tomorrow as we’re going to Drusillas (will be there from 11 Ros if you’re around?).

I did the children’s tea while they played ‘Curious George’ and then tidied up with very thorough micro-management from me 🙄

Looking forward to getting outside tomorrow, we’ve been indoors all week, so rain or not we’ll be out there tomorrow for at least a part of the day.

I fear my muffinicity is over taking me – I need to spend more time focussing on my hard drinking, hell-bitch side quick before I start coveting a sewing machine and looking at getting a pinny!

I’m almost ashamed to note my housewifely doings today but I did five loads of washing and got it all dry (hurrah!), changed our bed, got slow cooker chicken cooking by 9am (it’ll be our third time of eating it Joyce, I reckon you’re good to go with it!), made some almond macaroon things with the leftover egg whites from yesterday’s quiche, ate way too many of them and felt queasy all afternoon, drank about seven cups of tea (resulting in many, many trips to the loo!), constructed a version of a potato gratin thingy and almost finished the library book due back tomorrow. At which point I actually got quite bored and really felt like doing something with the children but they were so absorbed in their games that it would have been cruel to interfere really!

They started off playing with the toy animals this morning and had a long game involving dinosaurs – was impressed with not only how much detail over and above just names of each one Davies had remembered but also how much Tarly knew and that she was asking him to fill in any gaps. That moved onto playing holidays which moved on to teddy bear races down the stairs – they have a bear the same although Tarly’s is evidently two years less loved and were putting them into head over heels position and letting them go at the top to see which won to the bottom – noisy and potentially dangerous I guess but they enjoyed it. 🙂

Then they came and gathered food from the kitchen to take upstairs for a picnic. They’d laid out a blanket, set places for various soft toys and used books as place mats. After about half an hour they came and invited me to join them so I went and read them a couple of books while they ate. They carried that on a while longer and then Davies came and showed me some magic tricks.

Before tea they asked if I’d do some drawing with them. I said I would but I didn’t know what to draw. Davies (no idea where he gets these things from I’m sure!) said I should just ‘get a pen and draw whatever you feel. Not trees or cars or real things like that, just draw like your feelings or your imagination and see what happens…’ I know, deep! 🙂

So we did. We did ‘mindless art’. I started one picture with scribbles which Davies took off me and interpreted into something which led to him drawing an underwater picture. Then I started one with colour schemes and did lots of pinks and purples. That got taken over by Tarly who finished it off beautifully and I finally got to complete one of my own in all shades of yellow and green. Very theraputic and actually quite creative and interesting to look at. Must do similar exercise on decent paper and maybe on a bigger scale. It also reminded me slightly of some monster drawings we did recently. We folded paper into three and each drew a head on the top third, folded it down and passed it to the next person who drew a body, folded it down and passed it on again to draw feet. I like communal works of art. 🙂

And that was probably about it for today really. They carried on drawing while I got their tea and Davies made me an Easter book using loads of Easter stickers combined with drawings. I read Tarly her favourite Dragons book and they both went to bed awake and laid in their beds playing for a while before going to sleep. Oh how they’re growing up…

Tomorrow we’re off to a Film Education showing of The Wild and then back for Home Ed group, themed dinosaurs so that’s dead easy 😉

would really appreciate your answers to the following, email or comments would be fine. Mostly for my own curiosity…

What did you want to ‘be’ when you grew up? (very simplistic phrasing so please don’t pick me up on that, you know what I mean 🙂 )

What single thing are you most proud of yourself for?

Who do you most admire (dead / alive, famous or not, known to you or not) and why?

Happy 8th Birthday Fran Puddle!

Love from Ady, Nic, Davies & Scarlett xxx

Out the house by nine this morning, with minutes to spare 🙂 Couldn’t be doing with all that malarkey every morning though!

We arrived at the Marina with a good half an hour to spare so had a quick look round Asda and used the loo – nice to browse with no money and not see anything I would have bought anyway 🙂

We arrived back at the cinema at the same time as one small school party of 6 children and 2 adults with another two larger school parties milling around nearby. I was quite surprised at how ‘wild’ all the children seemed to be although I actually remember acting similar when on school trips myself looking back. Considering I only had one less child under my control – and they’re mine so theoretically less likely to listen to me somehow (well that’s how it worked with other adults in my day!) I was very proud of how well D&S conducted themselves. 🙂

We bought popcorn and coke – justifiable when the cinema was free I thought 😉 and settled down in the front row. We had about a 20 minute wait before the film started during which time we just chatted and looked around. It was Tarly’s first time in the cinema so she was enthralled with the chairs, the drink holders, the posh curtains (Davies said ‘I bet the Queen has posh drapes like that’ when he pointed out some swags as being very nice. No idea he even knew who the Queen was let alone that she would be bound to have posh stuff – the only time I’ve ever mentioned her to him was when we saw corgis in the street!) and the huge screen. Davies talked about how ‘Adam’s got a big screen in his house but there’s only enough seats for four or five people in the room’ in response to my explanation that it needed to be so big cos there were so many people going to be watching it! (Ros, you might want to get that sorted out 😉 ). Then I attempted to be educational and explain about projectors to Davies but he told me instead :-).

The film was quite good I thought. Nowhere near as clever and catering to adult audiences as well as Shrek, Toy Story etc aside from the fact it seemed to be animated in the style of cartoons from years gone by – not quite so technicolour as today’s usual cartoons and with drawings in the same sort of style as Top Cat, Flintstones and other HB stuff from the 70s, so a bit of a nostalgic feel to it somehow. No slapstick, lots of gentle humour to make the five year olds giggle and some nice moral stuff tucked away in there too. So simple, unsophisicated, quite charming and probably one of the most appropriate films I could think of for a first time for Tarly.

She spent pretty much the whole of the first hour utterly mesmerised – not sure if that was the story, the size of the screen or the hypnotic rhythm of posting popcorn into her own mouth 😉 Davies watched it and whispered to me lots – he likes film watching to be an interactive and sociable experience (Chris, you’d hate sitting next to him 😉 ).

We came home and they did some drawing and then got the sticklebricks out and started playing with them. I made a rhubarb, apple and ginger crumble ready to go in the oven and the pastry cases for quiche for dinner tonight and my Dad came over ready to look after Tarly while I took Davies to Badgers as Ady was working up in London today and wouldn’t be home til late.

Badgers was good, as usual. I gave a brief kiss goodbye and left him to it to wait in the car, I could see him through the window and he appeared to be just fine. Right at the end while they were tidying up he came to the window and waved and blew kisses for a bit but is more than happy with me being out there instead of in the next room. I’ve decided that is fine for now, mainly because I really enjoy the hour sitting in silence in the car reading a book 🙂 They covered where Germany is in relation to England and talked about the currency there. Davies also brought home some sort of abstract piece of collage work with German flag colours and drawings on it. Not sure what they were supposed to be doing (I imagine it was something slightly more structured) but loving his individuality anyway 🙂 I was really pleased to notice as we left that loads of the children were talking to him, calling his name and yelling goodbye. I really like the huge age range there as far from giving space for the ages to seperate it appears to be the great leveller with the older ones enjoying ‘looking after’ the younger ones and them all being taken as individuals.

Dad and Tarly read some books while we were gone and Ady pulled up at the same time as we got home. Ady tidied up while I made the quiches and we’re about to eat and watch BB.

Some of you may have noticed that I recently reappeared on the Early Years Blogring. I left the blog ring with this here blog you are reading quite some while ago for various reasons – I was concerned about too much personal information about me and the children contained in the blog and not enough educational content for it to be sitting under a ‘Home Education’ banner. I very rarely read round the blogring (it’s just sooo big!) but when I did a month or so ago I realised that whilst there are many different approaches out there there is probably noone ‘doing it’ quite like us. I’d already set up a blog (you’re shocked aren’t you :oops:) for the children’s specifically ‘educational achievements’ as this has long since become far more a personal diary and far less a HE record, albeit the personal diary of a family who HE. So it’s there and it documents the things that the children and I cover on a weekly basis in the hopes that it will demonstrate to people who don’t know about this approach as an option and should we ever need to have information regarding what we do in the course of our day to day lives in order to tick someone somewhere’s boxes then it will there, ready and waiting, illustrated, dated and categorised for me to point them at.

A year or so ago every time someone else speculated about whether they were doing enough with their children, whether they should consider school, indeed decided school was the way forward or agonised about education generally it sent me into my own personal whirlpool of doing the same. Equally someone waxing lyrical on the great joys and successes of HE would also have me feeling somehow inferior and challenging and questioning how we were doing. I had my mental list of how old all of everyone else’s children were on a sort of mental timeline with my own two and would – in spite of myself – be comparing and contrasting and weighing up a reading a Bob book there with a writing a name here and raising you one act of self sufficiency for your demonstration of independance there.

All of my worries about the children would be equated with their HE status – can’t wipe his own bum? He’d have to if he was at school, can’t persuade her to have her hair brushed? Well it would be in plaits daily at school, still hasn’t been left alone and is still not at all prepared or ready for that to happen? Ha! Pre school would have taken care of that 2 years ago!

There are still things which raise my concerns and will continue to do so over the years but HE vs School seems a bit of a no brainer for us right now. Similarly the approach we are taking with no structure also seems really rather obvious too.

Over the years I have had concerns about various things which have all proved unfounded and in the main I have learnt to let things happen in their own sweet time wrt the children. Davies was right at the outside edge of ‘normal’ with his walking – at 17 and a half months he still wasn’t and I was fretting like mad. Bet none of you have looked at him and ever thought his walking is any way deficient now. I remember when one of his little friends was saying ‘Dada’ way before him how I fretted – now his vocabulary is one of the widest for a child his age I know. So mobility and communication sorted themselves out.

At this point I am very aware that Davies specifically would be well into the tick boxes and standards of measurement if he were at school and it would be all too easy to still do that within the HE community we move in. So Davies can’t read yet – he’s got the mechanics inasmuch as he knows all the letters and the sounds they make, he knows that you blend them together to make words which means that if he is in the right frame of mind then words like cat, sat, mat and so on are well within his capability. But give him the, you, or are and chances are he’d be a bit stumped. Does this have any impact on his day? None whatsoever. Do I think if it did he’d crack those words in about half an hour? You betcha! Am I suprememly confident that as and when he needs to read – and I’m guessing given how much he loves books and he loves information and learning new things it will probably be sooner rather than later – he will do so? I certainly am. Davies says ‘I can’t read yet’ and if he is considering it something he will be able to do but hasn’t done yet then that’s I consider it to be too. When the time is right I have no doubt he will master it with exactly the same zest and enthusiasm and craving to get it done and get it right that he approaches his other passions.

Today we went to the cinema. Films are totally Davies’ thing – watching them, certainly but far, far more that that. He wants to know about the whole process, the actors, the animators, the scriptwriters, the filming process, the sets and he is recently learning about the marketing and advertising too. I started to explain to him about the projector and the screen while we sat there and he shushed me and explained it to me with a better understanding of it that I possessed myself. He tells me he learnt it from watching the extras bits on a couple of his dvds. When I asked him if he thought he’d probably do something to do with cinemas and films when he grew up he looked at me like I was slightly deranged and said ‘of course’. Which could be anything from the person selling the popcorn, to the star of the film, to the director or scriptwriter or the animator. The opportunity to specialise is one so few schooled children seem to be offered and I would argue that far from limiting a child allowing them the time to truly discover things and fully develop that knowledge is probably the greatest gift we can offer. Who knows what future doors I’d be shutting by dragging him away from his exploring so that he can better perfect his reading to see whether it said push or pull on the front.

Happy Birthday James 🙂

Have a right good day!

A very Sunday sort of Sunday today.

Up at 7ish although Ady had been up for a couple of hours (children had woken him and he couldn’t get back to sleep) so he’d done croissants and tea and then went back to bed.

The children were playing with plasticine and making flowers. Davies did some excellent roses, daisies and dandelions with lots of detail and then they both got caught up in some complicated game so I left them to it.

Ady got back up again and occupied himself hoovering or something while I made a sponge cake for Frazer to take over to my parents for lunch. Which is where we went, taking Fred and Albert with us.

It’s rained pretty much all day today (I’d consider getting plans drawn up for building an ark but due to the drought we’d not have the water to mix the cement 😆 😉 ) so after lunch and between downpours we all trooped outside and Davies ceremoniously released Fred and Albert into Dad’s pond. Hopefully they have already made lots of new friends with the 50 odd fish Dad has in there already and won’t be needing the fish equivalent of a cushion for the emotional trauma of being big fishes in a small bowl to being middle sized fishes in a large pond. He expressed some concern about whether they would be OK with the food Grandad feeds them – we use flakes and he uses pellets so he had a bit of a pep talk with them about that before he let them go, explaining that they needed to try new things and not be scared to swim up to the other fish and say hello – that sort of thing 😆

Then we went up to the aquarium shop and chose two new fish, smaller but in the same style as Fred and Albert, imaginatively christened Fred and Albert 🙂

Dad, Frazer and Ady watched football, I read my book and Mum played with the children and then we came home. I also had Davies come to me for a cuddle at one point and as I happened to be on my laptop we flicked about through my del.icio.us stuff and ended up looking at a load of stuff about the brain. So we talked about that and then did a quiz thing about strokes. Ady’s Dad died of a stroke so we chatted a bit about that and how the various parts of the brain control various functions with various examples.

We came home and I cut Davies’ hair (bit severe but good for the summer), the children had a bath and I read them Earth Story and Life Story by Eric Maddern as Davies has been asking various questions I thought Eric answers better than I do. A particular one being ‘how is water made?’. In Earth story the rivers, lakes and oceans come from millions of years worth of rain and storms as the steam from the big bang falls and the Earth cools down. So he liked that explanation and now wants to do some sort of experiment to see it actually happen. We did some practical stuff about weather a while back but never really carried on with it much so maybe it’s time to do so – I’m fairly sure I’d got various water cycle things planned but never did them so I need to dig back in my blog and see what I come up with, or just google 😉 We also talked about reptiles, fish, mammals, birds, insects and amphibians and I was impressed that Davies could give examples for each and characterising features for them all, following on from our chat about mammals the other night. He then wanted to know exactly how evolution theory worked in terms of us coming from apes, so I did a very brief whizz through of that explaining how each generation or two might have subtle changes until over many, many generations a different species evolves. Think he got it.

Nigella’s ham in coke for dinner whilst watching Dr Who recorded from earlier and then tomorrow me and the small people are off to see Curious George. Nice weekend 🙂

It’s been sooooo windy today!

I had a lie in this morning and after two glasses of medicinal wine last night and an early to bed night I slept well and felt loads better today.

This morning I went off and did food shopping for next week and posted another ebay parcel, Ady did gardening and defrosted the chiller (or chill-eh as we call it here – in the style of Bonn-eh from BB!) – see I’m not the only one prone to muffinicity 😉

We had lunch and then we headed off to Brighton. Ali had very kindly treated Davies and I to join her and Freya in seeing James Campbell perform as part of Brighton Festival. D & S were being the most stereotypical siblings in the world in the back of the car and Ady and I were responding by being the most stereotypical parents in the world in the front so it was a blessed relief to be dropped off with D and only have one child to one parent for a while :-). We’d arranged to meet Ali at the Lush shop and I must confess to purchasing a couple of bars of solid shampoo with the justification that they are just perfect for camping 😉 And of course the mere exhaling of the scent of Lush while breathing in the shop was instantly calming and restorative.

Then we walked down to the area where he was performing and joined the queue. Freya and Davies were on good form together although it felt slightly odd to be there with Tarly really as I’ve only previously seen them as a trio – the show would have been beyond her though and as I had Davies sitting on my lap throughout she’d have been something of a liability too. I thought the routine was very good – he has quite a bit of Eddie Izard about him who I am rather a fan of anyway and I love the risk of stand up so to perform to a room of children quadrupled that gamble and I thought he pulled it off well. Davies and Freya certainly seemed to enjoy it, me and Ali did plenty of laughing out loud. Davies even joined in with some shouting out the answers at one point. We signed up for the mailing list for future Brighton events including a possible stand up workshop for children (and what is wrong with living vicariously through one’s children exactly 😉 ) and then Ali headed off in one direction while we headed off to meet Ady and Tarly in the other. Thanks very much Ali, we really enjoyed it 🙂

We’d arranged to meet them at the mad roundabout infront of the pier. If you know Brighton at all this will imediately make sense to you, if you don’t then infront of Palace Pier there is a roundabout with about 5 exits which is a constant state of utter chaos with the soundtrack of tooting horns and people leaning out of their cars yelling and waving fists at each other. The rule of giving to the right is utterly irrelevant when there are five exits and the whole thing is against a backdrop of all Brighton’s finest hanging out infront of the pier and with the faintest threatening of sunshine there will be hundreds of motorbikes added to the mix too. Love it! 🙂

We watched the sea, which was very very choppy for a bit and the pigeons and seagulls digging in the stones then we started to walk along the prom away from the pier. There was some sort of stage set up with some very funky live band which I would have happily stayed and watched but Davies was running ahead crazily laughing into the wind and hiding behind every object possible to jump out and shout ‘boo!’ at me. There was also some sort of Ferrari gathering with added Lambourginis, must have been about 100 of them all parked or revving up, so we enjoyed walking past them too. Then we met with Ady and Tarly.

They’d had a lovely couple of hours walking round the Marina. They’d been in all the designer clothes and handbag shops trying on silly hats, walked round some market stalls and generally enjoyed each others’ company so that was nice too.

We then went over to my parents to give Frazer his cards and presents – however depsite being there til nearly 7pm he was still in bed recovering from a very heavy night out last night (I guess if you are single and childless you get to celebrate 30 very heavily like that!). The children had tea there and we’re going over there again for lunch tomorrow too.

Tonight we have watched the Prince’s Trust thing, sporting our 3D glasses which Davies of course was very interested in, had a lovely curry and are about to head off to bed. My turn to get up in the morning 🙁

Albert lives!

And the real Albert, not a hastily purchased from Petsmart replacement either! 🙂