One word? When seven would do…

A fairly educational day here today although I really should be following a few things up with Davies as I promised instead of sitting here 😉

First thing the children played with playdough while watching Class TV. There was a really good programme on about an apple tree which told the story of the seasons changing and had all sorts of ancillary facts such as a puppy and a kitten playing together in the spring and then being grown animals by the following spring, a bee landing and the man talking about the role of bees in apple trees and also honey production. Very good 🙂 So we chatted a bit about the things raised by that as they happened and then I wandered off to do other stuff while they carried on playing and watching. There was some show about storms including some footage of the 1987 storm and a weathergirl stood infront of a weather map talking about weather forecasts. Then Davies started watching a thing about Shakespeare which he showed a fair bit of interest in too, particularly when I told him that Stratford, where we have been several times is where Shakespeare was born – need to dig out the Shakespeare children’s version books from Book People (Merry, if you remember can you bring the Ant & Cleo one to Okehamton? 🙂 ). I also had a bit of a browse on the BBC website and we played a couple of the maths games, Scarlett really surprised me with her mouse pad and button clicking skills and also recognising numbers when Davies called them out. I also googled for my answer to the largest number – I think I can explain it a bit better now next time that one comes up. 🙂

We headed off to Julie’s then and on the way Davies told me it was supposed to be windy and rainy today (it was) and he’d seen it on the TV saying it was going to happen before it did. How did they know that before it happened? Explained my sum total of knowledge about meterology and promised to catch up on that with him again too – which would obviously tie in well with the temperature stuff then wouldn’t it really 🙂

Nice couple of hours at Julie’s – the children have all reached that age where they disappear into their playroom together to play so me and Julie get to drink tea and chat, which is always a bonus. 🙂 Talked about money, lifestyles and alternative lives – interesting stuff.

Left there slightly earlier that I’d planned to as Tarly suddenly got all whingey and just wanted to come home so it seemed pointless to string it out for another half an hour. I managed to keep her awake all the way home by me and Davies singing songs to her but she has just curled up and fallen asleep on the sofa next to me – ah well, sleep routines likely to be shot to pieces at the weekend anyway 😉

Right, going to see if I can interest Davies in a book about the weather.

Just been reading the Dr Seuss Book of Sleep (or some other such story) as a bedtime story to Davies. It touched somewhere on the concept of minus two and he roused from his near-asleep state to ask what that meant. Erm!

Very easy when you know but one of those situations where I am left stuttering like a too advanced thesaurus when he asks the meaning of a new word and all I can offer as explanation is a series of other words he also is unfamiliar with. I need an example… I tried asking him what he would have if he had two and then took away three but he was having none of that. He told me that if he had two and then had two more he would have four. He told me that if he took two away from four he would have two and then if he took two away from two he would have nothing. And of course you can’t take anything away from nothing can you Mummy?!

Clearly not a bedtime friendly concept to start explaining anyway but would appreciate anyone’s tried and tested examples for minus numbers.

The book then (and at the back it says ‘This book is to be read in bed!’ clearly it is lying!!) goes on about numbers like millions, billions, trillions and zillions so I had to explain about them being ‘really big numbers’ to which he pounced back on his unsatisfactorily answered question from the train journey the other week about what the ‘last number’ is. I repeated that there isn’t one, to which he said ‘of course there is one Mummy, it’s just that no-one knows what it is yet!’

Just as well we’re off to Reading this weekend then, Lije can take over some of the HE for me 😉

Is what we have mainly be doing today 🙂

The children, Davies in particular love it, so we’ve watched it, played the game on the nickjr website and then made some playdough and made all the characters from it. Well I say we, aside from entering the competition via the website and making the playdough up I have not really had any part in it. I’ve been mainly writing a draft post for Scarlett’s birthday. It’s not for a couple of weeks yet but I was uploading pics to flickr and sorting through which ones I wanted to use and got all nostaglic and melty about her so I thought I’d write it while I was in the right frame of mind. And it duly made me cry!

Tumbles Tots and Gym Bobs day today as well. Scarlett was a complete minx in her session – again! either way I’m sort of glad she’ll be moving up a class in a couple of weeks – she’s either playing up because she’s ready for more of a challenge or playing up generally, in which case I’ll be glad to hand her over for an hour! Davies was also lurking instead of entertaining himself which he usually manages well. Sigh. Need to decide what Davies and I will do with that hour when Tarly goes in on her own, I think we’ll probably just select a couple of books to read together each week or something else quiet and cuddly 🙂

Scarlett and I sat and read books together while Davies did his Gym Bobs – and played with some Dora picture cards too. There are two little girls, only slightly older than her (who are in the class before Davies’ and then wait for older siblings who are in Davies’ class – I imagine their’s is the one Tarly will go into soon) who are clearly great friends and sometimes they come over to see what Tarly and I are doing and even try to join in (if we’re doing puzzles or something) and then other times when Tarly clearly is desperate to play with them they are really horrid and excluding to her. It’s really hard to watch and I’m pretty staggered that the whole ‘we’re not playing with you’ thing starts so early, I don’t recall it being an issue when I was a child until I was much older. For the most part Tarly is oblivious, but today they were being really mean to her when she clambered under some chairs where they were to try and join in and I could see from the expressions on their faces they were saying nasty things to her. She came back all hurt and said they’d told her they didn’t like her and she couldn’t play with them 🙁 I asked her how that made her feel and what she thought of them. She said they were smelly slugs and they were silly and it made me laugh so much I told her to go and tell them, and she did! I know, probably really crap parenting but it restored her faith in herself to know that just because someone didn’t like her it didn’t mean she was not worth liking and made her see that actually if that’s the sort of children they are then she probably wouldn’t want to play with them anyway! Slate me in the comment box if you like but I’ll just come and do the same back in yours 😉

I think that’s about it for today, Davies has produced some very good playdough figures which are now a bit squashed, Tarly’s done some creative stuff with a big lump of colours all marbled together with bits of car sticking out (we’ve got a vehicle playdough set with plastic bumpers, exhausts and wing mirrors etc) and I’ve taught them how to be childish 🙂

Happy 10th Birthday to Chelsea 🙂 Double figures, wow!

Happy 9th Birthday Miss Poppy Price 🙂

Hope you have a lovely day tomorrow, a fab birthday treat on Thursday and we’re looking forward to seeing you at the weekend 🙂

Lots of love from Ady, Nic, Davies and Scarlett xxx

I’ve been pondering education, autonomy, our approach, where it might all end up and so on recently. I’ve been involved in several conversations with people who have asked questions which I have had to really think about to answer and then ended up thinking about lots more afterwards. I’ve read odd remarks here and there on other blogs, listened to others in their educational ponderings and reasonings and realised that in some areas we are very similar to others, in other ways we are worlds apart and far from either of us being right or wrong we are both totally right somehow, which is something I would not have accepted a year or so ago.

I think the last two years of ‘Being Home Educators’ has been the biggest journey of my life so far. I have learnt so, so much. About me, about Ady, about our children and our family. I’ve learnt so much about people both as people and as individuals, I’ve listened to others agonise and I’ve agonised myself. I don’t think I have it sussed forever but I do feel like I’ve got it sussed for now, for us. It feels right, we are happy, the children are learning, I don’t feel surrended or guilty and with the odd tweak here or there still to work on I think this is working for all of us as individuals and as a family unit. The best thing for all of us at the moment is that we feel free. We are not bound by anything we do not want to be bound by, we have no resentment and no feeling of having to do something depsite not actually wanting to do it (probably best described as the homework feeling!).

I think we are probably closest to the autonomous approach educationally. The children spent the vast majority of their time playing. They play with each other or alone, they spend lots of time playing with friends making up games and stories and role playing. They play endlessly with all of the many toys and resources in our house making cities and world, recreating history, playing out stories, books and films in their own way, pretending to be people off the TV. They do, what in my very small experience of being around children seems to be what children do naturally when left alone to get on with it.

I was talking to someone at a soft play centre recently – I try not to get into discussions with strangers about HE. You end up answering the same questions with the same answers which sounds tired to your own ears, you graze the surface of it rather than say anything profound and at best just hope that they will leave the conversation a) not about to take down your car registration number and ring Childline / the LEA / Social Services and b) maybe even think a little about what you’ve said. I don’t feel I have any responsibility whatsoever to convert anyone to HE either as an idea or as something they should do themselves, although if as a result of a conversation I may one day have someone who didn’t know about it as an option and it was something that knowing about helps them or their children then that would be good. 🙂 But the woman raised two very interesting questions while chatting to me about it and although I answered them at the time with practised, polished confidence I did come away and wonder a bit more about them myself.

The first was about curriculums and how you would cover everything without one. The second was what would I do if they reached teenagerdom and got the ‘can’t be arsed to do anything’ type attitude that characterising teens and spent all day in bed doing nothing at all.

The currciculums one first then. When we started this whole Home Ed thing I was fairly convinced I would be following some sort of curriculum. I looked at Sonlight but decided it was too religion based for us and came to the conclusion that I would work out my own sort of curriculum using workbooks and the NC. I downloaded all the NC stuff, looked at early years goals and stuff and bought shelves full of workbooks, got Studydog and plastered the walls of the playroom with alphabet posters and pictures of 1 button, 2 frogs, 3 balls, 4 flowers and so on. Oh I had big plans for timetables, coloured in charts, graphs, stickers and certificates of achievement! Several false starts later with occassions behind me I’d probably rather forget of me standing over a weeping child holding his pen in the wrong sort of grip desperately trying to remember the order of a, b, c and d and write them down again and threatening school each and every time we tried to tackle one of the 100 lessons all of which we found really rather hard work instead of the advertised ‘easy’ I decided that school at home was never going to work for us. I think I secretly harboured hothousing tendancies. I believed I had bright children who would stream far ahead of where their schooled peers were, effortlessly impressing everyone who met them with their ability to recite the 7 times table whilst playing the violin and colouring in maps of the world in pastel shades never going over the lines into the seas! But I’ve had to realise that I am not your classic hothousing mama. Aside from our day to day lives not fitting very well with routine and sitting at desks for an hour a day, we don’t have the desks and we’d all really rather be somewhere else instead!

So we stopped. We moved away from everything even remotely educational in the usual sense of the word. I listened to the words I was to say to that woman in the soft play centre about a year before I even said them and I realised that my children didn’t learn to walk and talk as a result of me drawing up a timetable and us working on the M sounds before they said Mummy. We didn’t have a movement a week to put together at the end to create ‘the crawl’. They got where they are on these basic skills in their own time, in their own way, in their own style. Sure I helped and facilitated but it was just in a low level way of talking to them lots, naming stuff all the time and using all available resources to help them learn to talk. We read books together, we chatted to everyone we met, we got out and about so they learnt words in their own contexts (shopping centre, cashpoint, trolley! 😉 ) to make the link that much easier. They watched me and everyone other grown up around them walking, having watched the older babies around them crawling. Their natural curiosity spurred them on to learn how to ask questions and learn how to do stuff for themselves rather than squawk and wait for someone else to do it for them. And do you know what? Turns out they were both natural walkers, just like they were born to do it! And as for talking? Well I reckon I have two of the most articulate children I know, they both have a huge vocabulary, know all about changing pitch and volume to great effect and just which words will create the outcome they are after!

I’m not saying they would learn everything they need to know simply by existing, or actually maybe I am, I’m not sure. But that isn’t quite what I’m planning to do anyway, however it is the basis of it. If they need to know they will learn it and by fostering that love of learning, that inate curiosity and that passion for knowing stuff and quest for knowledge I imagine they will never ever stop learning. So my role is to not push them into it, or dictate what it is they need to know and learn, but to help them learn it once they know themselves. I can provide the tools and the resources, answer the questions they ask or help them find out the one’s I can’t, cheer them on and celebrate their successes, gently nudge or push them that bit futher when they are tired and help with the skills and foundations to smooth the road ahead. What I can’t do – and this is the radical bit I don’t believe anyone else can either – is prescribe what it is they need to learn and when they should be learning it. I see my role as the person in the gown and face mask who hands the surgeon the tools he asks for – a lesser role than the surgeon perhaps but one which the surgeon couldn’t be so brilliant without. In the same way as I might be the one who buys them their toys but I cannot dictate what games they play with them or how their imagination brings them to life I don’t think I can presume to tell them what they need to learn. There are of course bare minimums – a level of literacy and numeracy are mine – but I think that to impose any greater enforcement would quite possibly stunt rather than give wings.

I should say at this point that I am not against curriculums for others, I do not think that everyone else is stunting their children by sending them to school or doing school at home. I have no idea what is best for other families, but this is what I think is working for ours – I can see the results already in my children and I hope to continue seeing them grow and grow.

The second question was about motivation really – the example being the ‘don’t care’ teen who sees no purpose in trying and if they can get away with not bothering then they will. For my children who have been given responsibility for their own education I very much hope the motivation they currently possess will remain and grow. I hope that by taking their own future in their own hands they will realise that the winner of pushing themselves to be the best they can is themselves and similarly if they take the piss by spending all their time lying in bed sleeping their lives away then it is their life and no one elses. That is not of course to say I wouldn’t care but one of my biggest life philosophies is that we are each responsible for our own happiness – if I can pass that on with the idea following on that by deciding what they want out of life and then going out there to get it there is nothing to be gained by wasting a single day.

Whilst I have been typing this I have been sitting on the floor of Davies’ bedroom while he is supposed to be falling asleep. He laid there telling me (with no prompting, actually he was distracting me from this – lol) the starting letter and sounds for box, Buzz Lightyear, Woody, Mummy, crocodile, aligator, apple, leap pad, cat, cupboard, drawer, snake, bed and so on – basically everything he could spot in his bedroom. He was right on each and every one 🙂 He also ‘drew’ each letter in the air as he said it, again with a 100% success rate. So he’s five and he can’t read or write yet but he probably has more of the mechanics in place than a child who can!

Home Education is experimental. There is no denying that we are pioneers of something different and something which there is no guarantee or proven evidence of success for. I am very aware that by making this decision for my children it will be something which stays with them for life. It will be one of the first pieces of personal information they impart about themselves in any new relationship or acquaintance. I will spend many more years justifying and explaining it and then pass the baton on to them to do the same. It is a gamble and the way I am choosing to do it is perhaps even more of one. But I believe it’s an ‘everything to play for’ type of gamble, one which could just net massive rewards. For now my reward is happy children who spend lots of time being children, who have a fantastic relationship with me and each other, who have no stresses or unrealistic expectations on them and who are allowed to be whoever they want to be (even when sometimes that is Buzz Lightyear or a Fairy Princess for the best part of a week), who are learning all the time in everything they do and who are loving pretty much every minute of their lives. Who never have to put their hands up to ask a question and who get the answer from riding a magic carpet holding the hand of someone who loves them, they are surrounded by friends and for once would probably prove the saying that these are the best days of their lives.

Every time I have an ebay frenzy I always get the postage wrong. I have previously wildly over priced postage and then felt awful at the post office when it is clear from the sticker that I have made a fortune from overcharging. The next time I ebay I am mindful of this and go all coy about charging at all and underestimate and end up out of pocket. Last time I gave a discount to someone for buying 3 items off me and she sent me a cheque cos she’d looked at what I’d paid to send it and realised it was about two quid less than she’d paid me and felt bad herself!

So this time I thought I’d got it about right charging 2 quid a go for sending pairs of jeans. But no! I sent five parcels this morning which would have netted me a tenner in p&p charges and it cost me £13 to send them 🙁

I know I should weigh stuff first and then look on the royal mail website to find out how much it will cost then factor in a bit extra for packaging materials but thats a right faff! I think I have it sussed this time though, I’ve looked at what others are charging for similar items to the ones I’m listing and gone with that.

Sigh!

Would probably best describe the day really. The man came to look at my laptop so that’s in hand but I failed rather miserably to make any of the phonecalls I had planned.

Davies and I were on TV – which was the first time I’ve seen myself on TV aside from home videos which are a slightly different kettle of fish – I didn’t need to hide behind the sofa at least! Davies was fairly twitchy and typical small child on telly really, but piped in when he needed to. We have it on dvd so will bring it along to various get togethers for any people who had a wish to see what we look like sitting on a daytime TV sofa 😉

I did some flickring of very old photos – really enjoyed ahhing over my babies when they really were babies but also felt a sense of true relief that the period of having babies is well behind me now and I quite possibly may never again in my whole life change another nappy 🙂

I went food shopping, calling in to see Dad on the way for a chat and weekend catch up, then popped into Boots which is opposite Sainsburys (one of those out of town retail superstore Boots places) and using the large amount of points I had saved up on my card I redeemed about £30 for some pressies for Tarly for birthday / Christmas which made me feel better for having done a bit of pretend shopping and also evened up the pile of stuff ontop of the wardrobe as about equal amounts for each child. Also I do love buying girlie stuff and that was what she had earmarked as potential pressie last time we wandered round Boots together. So she’s got some Barbie perfume and glitterbabes lip gloss and stuff which I know she will simply adore 🙂 That’s my girl!

Did my food shopping this week in Sainsburys and was very pleased to come in under budget as I really would rather shop there than Tescos. I’m quite enjoying the novelty of being frugal just now although I’m sure it will wear off eventually!

Cooking a roast lamb dinner as we’ve missed Sunday roasts for a couple of weeks and in our house they are something of an institution. We also allowed ourselves alcohol to make up for not really having any last night so tonight is a sort of honourary Sunday.

Not even sure what I’m supposed to be doing tomorrow – will check my diary in a minute and find out. I’ve also made about 30 quid on ebay selling off the clothes which I liberated from the bottom of the wardrobe in last week’s declutter – so that’s good 🙂 Keep eyeing up all sorts of things around the house and wondering what their ebay value could be…

that me and Davies will be on TV later today. The show we went to London to film a couple of weeks ago will be on The Baby Channel (Sky 285) from 2.45pm. Feeling quite wobbly about how I’ll come over (and how I’ll look – oh shallow Nic!) as I’ve never been on TV before, so do me a favour and focus on Davies rather than me if you watch it 😉

As Tarly would say!

Stayed up til nearly 2am this morning chatting online, which had so not been my plan but was nice anyway 🙂

Need to rouse myself to unpack from the weekend, sort out some washing as it’s a nice bright day and might even dry outside, get myself and the children dressed, do a shopping list for later, make a couple of phonecalls and do something with the children – not sure whether we’ll go for baking, snuggling with books, watching a film, drawing and crafts or general playing yet – depends on my level of enthusiasm I suppose!

Don’t think I have the energy to do a blow by blow account of the weekend really – we arrived home having taken at least an hour longer than expected due to some traffic jam (which we never found the source of) meaning we did the first 40 miles in 2 hours 🙁 Tarly had fallen asleep but then woke up and has literally just gone back to sleep (it’s gone midnight!) so a planned evening of wine, some sort of meat product and I’m A Celebrity.. was somewhat scuppered!

But we had a lovely weekend anyway 🙂

Chris and Helen have a beautiful house, meat free zone aside we enjoyed lovely food (mulled wine and chestnuts last night being a particular favourite part of the weekend), the children all bundled straight in and had a whale of a time. Tarly was slightly off colour for a bit yesterday and faded fast again late afternoon today before we left but Davies and Elinor thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company and played pretty much solidly without any real adult intervention required. I was actually very proud of both my two this weekend, particularly Davies as he was a perfect little houseguest. He did his pleases and thankyous, he thanked our hosts for having us, he was very gentlemanly with Elinor and dealt with compromises and negotiation on a very high scale. Elinor was charming as ever and a perfect little hostess too.

Lovely also to see Merry and 3/4 of her girls – it would appear that a Tarly / Ammi corner of the Tarly / Ammi / Lulah triangle started to form which bodes well for Okehampton 🙂 Nice to see Merry when she’s not at a camp too without the backdrop of canvas!

It was lovely to be part of Alys’ first birthday celebrations too – thanks for that Chris and Helen.

There are some photos on flickr – Ady got all arty in the frosty light, bright winter sunshine and the beauty of the house so finally decided to use his own flickr account and uploaded some there too (after I’d stuck most of them on my own flickr, but never mind!) He’ll be using his photoblog soon at this rate!

Had lots of long educational chats too – which was nice and made me feel like I was facilitating something I’d thought through and could justify although I think we all know I am far more muddling along and making it up as I go than that really. Nice to clarify some of my own thoughts though. Also told Helen some of my alternative life ponderings too, which was good to air, so thanks for that Helen.

And I think that’s probably as far as this post is going really – I need to go to bed!

Tomorrow is a quiet day at home, PC world are coming to investigate my laptop which hopefully will not mean I am without it but there is that risk. Other than that its a fairly quiet start to the week with yet more wild partying (well a bit of visiting anyway!) planned for next weekend! Just as well we have the week to recover eh!

Happy 1st Birthday Alys!

Lovely to be with you on your birthday 🙂

Arrived last night to a rapturous welcome from Elinor, wine and beer from Chris and a guided tour from Helen. The house is simply gorgeous – a real dream home and the peeps out of the windows this morning look it to be a lovely little village too.

The children ran around until at least 10.30 last night with Scarlett initially being shy and wanting cuddles and pjs but soon joining in with Davies and Elinor – who took one look at each other and ran off into the depths of the house somewhere! There was a mad frenzy of playing, dressing up and drawing before they were finally persuaded into bed.

Chatted, ate curry and drank wine until a fairly respectable (for me) 1.30am ish before heading off to bed.

Today the weather is lovely again, the children refuse to get out of pjs and having eaten many croissants from the bakery across the road I think the inclination is to laze about for most of the day 🙂

As threatened here I am again 🙂

Finished my cvs and emailed them across, so that’s my internet supply paid for the month in an hours work 🙂 (tip from one of the frugal sites is to work out how many hours work it takes to pay for stuff and then decide if it’s worth it – sadly although there is potential to earn a high hourly rate there is not the work available to earn it with). My two remaining tasks are printing off directions and a route finder and packing – off to do them shortly as well as packing some food for the children for the journey.

Granny came over and quite shockingly and impressively for a woman in her late 70s totally grasped the idea of autonomy and child led education. She even said she could see exactly how it would work as she spent some of her school years in a mass class of 8-14 year olds, mixed gender being taught by the headmaster of the nearby boys school drafted in to run the school where lots of London children were evacuated to during the war. She has mentioned this teacher before as inspirational and able to draw the best out of each and every child depsite the mix of ages, abilities, backgrounds and everything else going on around them. She sat looking at the pictures of the Halloween party remarking on how happy all the children looked and how well they all appeared to be mixing. D & S sat talking to her about various recent adventures such as Legoland, The Eden Project, trips to Reading and Sheffield and all their various friends around the country which obviously helped!

We then had an hour or so of autonomy in action while we sat chatting. The children got out the geomags and built all sorts of weird and wonderful things, chattering as they went about magnets and shapes and how many sides and corners they had, Scarlett counted up to 7 for Granny (which is actually not the top of her range but Granny was impressed, she then decided to build a square and a triangle, told us she was going to and then did it. Then she got totally absorbed in a pattern of two rods, two balls, a panel (threaded onto a rod) and repeated in a big long line – which as I said to Granny would have easily been a pattern you would be asked questions on in a maths GCSE test. Davies meanwhile was building people, robots and fireworks with some more rods.

Then we heard a sound outside so Davies went to investigate by standing up at the window watching. It was a mini roadwork repair which two men stood either end of with STOP GO signs so the traffic could go past, so Davies stood and gave a running comentary and read the STOP and the GO (ok he was probably guessing based on colour and the fact that it was a road sign but he did it without hesitation!) signs as they were revolved. I also realised that Davies is able to ‘read’ the difference between Annie and Clarabell on his Thomas carriages – I’m sure he couldn’t read the words out of context but he knows which is which between the two when looking at the words on them.

So that was all good 🙂 I love it when people ‘get’ what it’s all about and don’t leave the conversation blatantly disagreeing with you but not having the balls to say so. Granny left quite evangelical about the idea herself. Go Granny 😉

Right, Ady has just arrived home super early so I really do need to go and pack now so we can set off while it’s still daylight – see you in a few hours Beans 🙂

It’s a beautiful winters morning here again today. It’s been a really cold and frosty night so everything is twinkling in the sunshine as it melts, the sky is deep blue, the remaining leaves on the trees and bushes are beautiful burgandy, burnt orange and red hues, glossy red berries have sprung up on the holly (and other plants I don’t know the names of!), the grass is bright green and there is that air of excitement and anticipation that this time of year puts in the pit of my stomach. I once read somewhere that you tend to favour the season you were born in – which sort of makes sense as when you were a child I guess looking forward to your birthday made you like that season most. For me, born in January all of my Christmasses and Birthdays, New Years Eves and so on came together in the space of a fortnight so it *was* the most wonderful time of the year (ironically I have associations in December and Januray for both children now as Tarly was born in Decemeber and I found out I was pregnant with Davies in early January). There is always that new year, new start mentality anyway and for us at the moment there are all sorts of possibilities and outcomes as to how our life might pan out next year. Some of them might be painful but all of them will involve growth, change and ultimately positivity.

I’ve just been gazing out of the window daydreaming about living different lives and then Ady rang to chat while he was driving to a meeting so we talked about wild and wacky things to do. Sometimes the scariest thing is when there is nothing to stop you going and grabbing a dream… Might blog about this more, or somewhere else or might just keep it to bring out and play with myself for a bit 🙂

So far this morning we’ve watched some TV together (Big Cook Little Cook, which I cannot watch without getting giggly now thanks to Richard Herring, Backyardigans (which I confess to not actually watching and checking my emails instead!) and Dora. Ady finally found the lead for the portable dvd player so Davies has been selecting a pile of DVDs for the journey to The Beans later today. We’ve done some puzzles – Davies did a market stall one by himself and Tarly did a house one with some matching colours and textures pairs despite protesting that she couldn’t do it by herself – she did!

Davies then did a world map one (100 piece ELC) with what felt like a lot of assistance but probably wasn’t really – he finally seemed to click on some sort of process of tackling it, which is one of Davies’ biggest things to overcome – once he finds a system he can tackle anything but finding that system often seems to elude him for far longer than it should. I think reading is the same for him actually. He is like a detective, he needs to crack the code of doing something and then it seems to unlock something in his brain, all the pieces fit together and he is capable of flashes of genuis. Maybe I’ve just described the way we all do stuff but somehow it seems so much more *obvious* when observing him that that is how he does everything. He is very reluctant to invest time or energy in something unless he is confident of the outcome i advance. I’m guessing he won’t make much of a gambler 😉 Safe, steady and slow – he would probably pack a flask and some sandwiches with a first aid kit to walk to the local shops if I allowed him to – so his father’s son! Also reminded that I meant to blog about Davies’ mood yesterday. He tends to have times every so often (usually before or after he’s been ill or when he is very tired) when nothing seems to go his way, he gets really stroppy at the slightest little thing and I would probably best describe as moody. He huffs and puffs, sighs and stamps his feet and sulks for ages. My Mum is like this and so is my brother; both of whom have been treated for depression. I recall my Mum spending ages cajoling Frazer out of his sulks with all sorts of bribes, treats and silly behaviours and he is still like it now at nearly 30. Aside from not being one for having much time for other people’s fragile egos I really want Davies to be able to be responsible for his own happiness and able to pull himself together without me fawning all over him. I offer cuddles and keep Tarly away from him to give him his space to work his way out of his stroppiness himself. While he’s feeling like it what he wants and expects is the world to revolve around him and me to pander to his every whim – when he comes out of the other side (he was fine by the end of yesterday and perfectly happy, sunny and back to himself again to day) he will tell you himself that he’s been stroppy or was ‘having a moment’. I was talking to Julie about it yesterday as she commented on him being a bit miserable so explained and she said that as someone married to a man who is still like that and still expects everyone else to try and make his day better when its going wrong she wishes his mother had done the same with him (although of course Chris’ mother who is also Ady’s mother stuck them in a children’s home instead while she had her own mental breakdowns so I guess she couldn’t be accused of molly coddling him!). Anyway, it feels slightly heartless but I think I’m dealing with it in the right way for now.

Back to processes, Tarly on the other hand is much more into her leaps of faith, haphazzard doing stuff without thinking it through and working out what she’s going to do next as she goes along. I’ll let you complete the rest of this paragraph for yourselves! 😉 She has also been doing some fuzzy felt pictures and when I came down from getting dressed she’d made a really good tap a shape person picture complete with legs in two pieces so they could bend at the knee.

They are now eating their fourth bowl of cereal each while looking at the world map puzzle and talking about the North Pole and the compass which is pictured on the bottom of it.

My Granny is due to visit this morning, I’ve got my CVs to do, I need to pack for the weekend and the floor is covered in fuzzy felt. Also have more daydreaming planning to be done…

Did some productive financial stuff this morning, feeling quite smug about my ability to live far more frugally than I’d ever imagine possible with no real feelings of hardship so far. Which could of course serve to make me feel shamed by living otherwise previously, but hey, we enjoyed it while we had it! 😉

I’ve been spending time signing up to all sorts of lunatic frugal living newsletters and browsing websites. There are some fairly hysterical ideas, hints and tips out there if you dig around. My favourite so far is using vinegar as a deodrant – aparantly it doesn’t stop the perspiring but it does stop it from smelling, presumably because you smell like a pickling jar! Had a bash at making newspaper logs last night which was also faintly surreal – and hopeless – I just ended up with very inky fingers, fifteen minutes of my life I will never get back to live again gone and a brickette which caught fire and turned to ashes quicker than you could say ‘think of the money it’s saved in coal!’. Tim, I feel another website idea coming on 😉

Anyway, while I was doing all this Davies was playing Cat in the Hat and erm, Cat in the Hat on the playroom pc. I think he zoombinied too 🙂 Scarlett sat for ages with a pair of scissors and a piece of paper snipping it into confetti sized bits – so fine motor skills and hand/eye co-ordination ticked off there, oh and probably arts and crafts too 😉

Then we headed off to the local soft play to meet up with Julie, Jack and Maisie. They were nearly an hour late and as for once we were actually on time I sat and blissfully read one of the magazines donated by Ros while the children went off and socialised making friends with random strange children (they are actually really good at this and take great delight in coming back to report that they have made a new friend, sometimes dragging the new friend with them as hard evidence!) and Davies stage managed various very noisy games (but if he can’t yell and be bossy there where can he?!). I passed the magazine onto Julie afterwards so cost cutting and recycling lives on in another home 🙂

The children started to flag after a couple of hours so we took them into the cafe area and fed them processed, deep fried food (well I did mine, obviously Julie’s children had nutrionally balanced, healthy food instead!) which gave them the energy to go back in again for another hour afterwards! Tarly was so funny when we finally dragged them away and said ‘Oh Mummy, I just want to have a little bit more fun!’ holding her hand up to demonstrate what a little bit looked like (can’t imagine where she got such habits from!!).

Julie and the twins headed for home we walked across the road taking advantage of free parking at the soft play to go to the main library. I’ve not been there since college when I used to spend hours cosily tucked up there reading teen fiction and political reference books so we wandered round the children’s area and gathered a few books including a couple of enormous classroom style versions of stories for reading aloud to groups – you could have one per ticket. We got the Giraffes Can’t Dance one as previously mentioned by Heather once which I’m looking forward to reading with them tomorrow. Thanks to Joyce I am seriously into Jodi Picoult but so it seems is everyone else in Sussex and there were none of hers there to be found 🙁

Came home to find a couple of CVs which need to be back for Sunday – which means they need to be back tomorrow as we’re away for the weekend had arrived in the post, a phonecall from Dad for cat feeding rota sorting in our absense and I finally sewed up Davies’ cuddly Peter Pan toy which I made him a couple of years ago and a combination of being much beloved and not that well sewn in the first place meant he was losing stuffing from several places. Did a couple of other sewing mends while I was at it while Tarly played with all the cotton reels sorting them into colours and sizes and stuff. Then they had sandwiches while watching Backyardigans (which they adore!) and I chucked some red wine, garlic, onions and oxo cubes in the oven with some stewing steak for dinner – which of course means there is the other half a bottle of wine which really needs using up tonight as we’re away, so having thoroughly enjoyed the mid week ban lift by drinking a whole bottle of white myself last night I am now enjoying a nice glass of red too 🙂 It’s OK this teetotalling lark!

Right, bath, dinner and the new series of Little Britain. Not sure how much I’ll be around this weekend although I am home most of the day tomorrow as Ali has cancelled due to ill health our visit over there tomorrow so I may well be blogging as we go!

In summary a rather good day although it was not without it’s moments.

First thing was TT for Tarly who was in some sort of minx mania mood and refused to sit when she was supposed to, take turns or go where she should be. When she did as she was told she was excellent as always and tbh I think it is probably more that she is simply ready to move up to the next class now. She is the oldest in the group, some of them are literally just 2 and she is only a few weeks shy of her third birthday – and the year between 2 and 3 seems to be a long one! She gets bored waiting for the slower ones to execute stuff infront of her and given my children will not have to get used to being as slow as the slowest in the class I have to admit to struggling to watch her being ‘held back’ too. She dashes round doing her climbing, balancing and jumping at top speed and with real agility but then gets stuck behind a toddling toddler who takes forever to climb across something so she loses interest, buggers off and bounces on the trampoline instead. I’m sure there is something to be gained in learning patience and turn taking but frankly she gets her turn taking practise at home and in other situations, patience is not one of the virtues I possess in large amounts and I think it can be highly over rated anyway (although I would of course now fall firmly in the camp of waiting til one can afford something and not being impatient about spending any more 😉 ) and whena child shows a wanting to be the best and do stuff in a competitive manner I am disinclined to prevent them from doing so really. Of course if it were my child being the slow one I might feel differently 😉 ! Anyway, she moves up in the new year so she only has about 5 more classes in this group and I think she will really enjoy the challenges of the next class up.

Davies also kept appearing in the room which was a distraction for me and he does this thing of just hanging around and talking in a real baby voice, which given his obvious tallness in the room of 2-3 year old marking him out as of school age really pisses me off. I just have no patience with him babying himself really, particularly with an audience who I am aware all know he is Home Educated and probably look at us curiously.

So by the time I was trying to get Tarly’s tights on with Davies messing about I was heard to hold my hand up to Tarly with a very small gap between finger and thumb and warn her ‘I’ve got THIS much patience today Scarlett. Use it wisely’. Which her and Davies took as the open invitation to open the door and run down the corridor towards an open door to the street where vans drive up and down like lunatics while I was putting my boots on. Dashed after them, yelling as I went. Caught up with them in the foyer (I don’t actually think for one moment they would have gone out of the door, but…) and lectured them before getting them into the car and explaining, at high volume why that was not acceptable behaviour. Unfortunately I did this with the car doors open and I had an audience of mothers arriving for the next TT class which is for 6-12 month olds. So there was I, yelling in a very attractive way at my two small people, for all to see and hear while these mothers with their little baby bundles all looked at me in horror. I was barely a breath away from turning to my audience and finishing off the rant properly but ran out of steam in the end. The children apologised and we came home.

And along came Ros, bringing with her children to entertain my own, soup and proper branded bread for them to eat, cakes and a new way to cook supernoodles for me and best of all a stack of the trashy celebrity magazines which I have been getting withdrawal symptoms from ever since we started economising. (I know, I’m shallow, but I can’t help caring if Jordan is blonde or brunette, whether stars from Big Brother have lost so much weight you could play a tune on their rib cage and who has been spotted where wearing what!) Lovely couple of hours gossiping and catching up on each others news in person – thanks 🙂

Mad dash to get everyone out again for Davies’ Gym Bobs session. He did really well today. Last week I talked to one of the women helpers as they do this warm up type game at the beginning where they have to run around the room in a certain style (like a bird, or a tiger, or a giant or something) and then when they blow a whistle they have to stand really still until they call the next style out to run around in. Davies never participates, he just stands at the side of the room while all the other kids do it. I asked her why and she said he just doesn’t seem to understand why they do it so he doens’t see the need to do it. Which to me makes perfect sense actually! And infact is one of the things that makes Davies so Davie-y really! So today I explained to him why they do it, to warm up muscles so that you can climb and stretch and jump and so on without hurting yourself and so on. And so off he went to join in with it quite happily! The woman actually said to me she thought it must be to do with him not going to school as they have a couple of other HE kids at different groups and apparantly neither of them like doing that bit either!!! So because the lemming reflex has not been installed in him to mindlessly do as he’s told without a logical explanation and a reason he is already starting to be a bit different. He’d already be used to not asking questions and just accepting everything if he’d been ‘in the system’ for a year or so but he still requires a purpose for doing things before he goes ahead and does them.

While he was doing his class Tarly and I sat together and did some drawing and colouring. She is getting very good at drawing very recognisable things – she did an excellent picture of Ady without any guidance at all which is not far off of the one Davies did earlier this year. I don’t know if maybe she’s bypassed a developmental drawing stage perhaps but I think his drawings are pretty good and hers are not far behind them. Which is a bit scary actually as I have no idea how to guide them on anything artistic other than cartoons and caricatures. Davies also made a very very good Peter Pan model with some plasticine today too which Tarly came and picked up and said ‘oh look Peter Pan’ about when she came in the room afterwards. Ah well, makes up for the maths I guess! 😉

Got home to find Ady already here so he sorted their tea while I whizzed round and tidied up, they are now both asleep, Ady’s cooking dinner, Lost is on tonight and we have our midweek alcohol allowance too 🙂

Nice day today with plenty of child led learning happening hither and thither. Due to a communication issue (i.e text messages which stacked up and then all came through at once despite being sent about 2 hours apart – why we didn’t just ring each other I don’t know!) we spent most of the morning at home. We were supposed to be meeting Lucy at the park but it was raining and horrid so she text me to say should she come here or we go there. Curious to see her new house and ready to get out of the house even if it was just to go to someone else’s I text back to say we’d come to her and what was her address? Having not heard from her for about an hour an a half during which time Davies Zoombini’d some more and Tarly did some geomagging and general flouncing I text again to say it had cleared up a bit did she want to meet at the park after lunch. Four text messages came back from her all at once with her address, directions on where to park, asking if we were lost and saying OK to the park but we were very welcome there still!

Gathered up the small people and shot over there. Thoroughly embarrassed myself with my dreadful parking skills by attempting two different (but in fairness quite tight) spaces on the same street and failing to reverse park into either. The attempts were seperated by going round the block, but as I drove away from the second space the laughter which I heard even inside the car from two blokes standing chatting in the street led me to believe the whole thing had been witnessed by them! Parked in the next road in a nice easy drive in – able space and kept my head down whilst wearing an impromptu disguise of a drawn on moustache with an eye liner pencil I found in the glove compartment so they didn’t recognise me when I walked past them on the way to Lucy’s. 🙂

Had an interesting couple of hours there, Rebecca took a while to warm up to playing with Davies and Scarlett who were embarrassingly both squabbling over Baby Richard’s toys (sigh!) but they got there in the end. Lucy and I had some interesting chats about HE. The party was very reassuring for her on several levels – that all the children just got on with it and played so well together, that the older ones had such care for the younger ones and were so quick to ensure that pass the parcel had everyone winning a prize and so on. Her main observation however was that it was a party for ‘everyone’ – she was amazed at how many of the adults had dressed up and then participated fully in the whole day. She’d been expecting me to be the one running around organising all the games when I’d said that there would be lots going on. She said that it was apparant that a lot of us knew each other but she had mainly expected parents to be sat round the edge of the room with glazed expressions rather than actively joining in and making it ‘our’ party too. Something which tbh had never really occured to me but is actually very true, certainly in our circle of Home Educators – both myself and my children have our best friends in the same families and we do our socialising as families rather than independantly – something to cherish I thought 🙂

She’s a bit of a thinker is Luce, so she had stored up lots of observations, questions and posers for me about HE and parenting in general so we had some interesting chats about all sorts of things, leading with both of us deciding that we wouldn’t start going down the route of speculating on mass brainwashing, social conditioning and conspiracy theories! Deep stuff 😉 Lucy and I tend to chat very little about day to day stuff and much more about bigger picture stuff, she’s not really a gossiper (and of course she doesn’t know anyone I might know gossip about anyway!) so it was quite refreshing not to be rehashing various topics and talking about positive and life affirming stuff 🙂

Her husband came home and as his day starts at about 5am (he rides out horses) we cleared off to give him some ‘peas and light’ and went for a walk along the beach, which is at the end of her street. It was still slightly drizzly, but mild and the tide was just going out. Davies, Scarlett and Rebecca went straight down to the sea and played, collected various ‘treasures’ (which my pockets are now filled with and I must remember to empty out before putting my jeans in the washing machine!) and then my two played for about 20 minutes with some sort of rusty old iron pulley thing (it was obviously used to pull boats or other such heavy stuff and although it has long since gone it would have had a chain round it which a series of four cogs turned by a handle would have wound and unwound). Davies has a current fascination for cogs anyway due to a fridge magnet at Ali’s house so I showed him how they all turned each other as a result of the handle turning and explained a couple of possible uses. Him and Tarly then set about combing the area for other ‘stuff’ driftwood, large stones, a bit of crate which said ‘castrol’ and so on and in the style of Wallace and Gromit created some sort of machine. Wish I’d had the camera really – Home Education in motion!

We finally persuaded them away from there and took a walk along the pier. There is a sort of ramp type stage area leading off the pier pavillion which they climbed up onto and put on a show for us on with singing and dancing! Davies was thrilled to see the posters there for Shakin Stevens so we had his rendition of Green Door with Tarly as a backing singer, much to the amusement of a couple of pensioners!

Came home where Tarly went into meltdown mode due to been awake since about 4,30am (Ady had got up with her at ten to five, having looked at the heating timer which never got changed when the clocks went back and thought it was ten to six!). She stropped about everything finally ending with tears because I cooked her pasta with cheese which she last had when Lulah was here and they’d shared the bowl and she wanted Lulah to come and eat it with her. Tried to explain why this was unlikely to happen and then Davies started sighing about wanting Lije to be here too! Nearly phoned them so they could have a little love in chat between the four of them but then Ady arrived home and distracted them. They did eat the pasta and then were both asleep by 7pm.

Did at least two things off my job list!

Sort out life insurance to get cheaper price;
Get wet washing in off the line and drape around the house;
Find TT T shirt for Tarly for tomorrow (is it clean, is it dry, is it still screwed up in the bottom of the TT bag like it was last week necessitating a quick squirt of febreeze and a hasty stretch back into shape!?);
Put away clean washing languishing in each child’s bedroom;
Find out when my phone is due an upgrade;
Chase up some CV writing work.

Davies is playing Zoombinis (again) and has already commented on how nice I am being today when he comes to fetch me to help him through tricky bits (yesterday I just snarled at him every time he asked for help!) and Tarly is strutting round the house in high heeled dressing up shoes, having played with the geomags for a bit and then stood watching Davies in awe as he played Zoombinis!

Right off to get everyone warmly dressed for our trip to the park in the drizzle!

Alls well that ends well then really.

After my decluttering frenzy this morning I managed to go and finish what I had started after lunch, threw all the broken shoe boxes that were doing a very sorry job of containing my many pairs of shoes away in the recycling, put a bin liner full of rubbish in the bin, (finally) got the children dressed and headed out to the clothes bank to drop off all unebayable clothing, drop the keys and payment off for the Halloween hall hire (I know, two whole weeks late!), post the letters and then came back and photographed and listed all the ebayable stuff on ebay. 🙂

Children played apart and together, ate their tea (although Davies refused his own brand tomato soup saying ‘it doesn’t taste like normal’ well no it won’t darling, it’s not expensive Heinz I could have, but didn’t retort – child has expensive tastes and I don’t know where he gets ’em from! 😉 ) and then ate loads of fruit too (Tarly: Mummy, Mummy, I need more seaweed! (kiwi!)) while I did all this industriousness.

Davies has tonight asked me if I love him more than my computer. Of course Darling, so why do you spend more time on your computer than you do playing with me? Erm… this from the child who spent 2 hours on Zoombinis today, he clearly has the ‘if you can’t beat ’em…’ mentality sussed already!

Tarly shut the bathroom door yesterday and when Ady opened it again (she gets trapped in there as she can’t reach to turn the doorknob properly) she stomped up to him and said ‘leave it shut. I need my peas and light!!!’ which we eventually translated as peace and quiet! 🙂

Tomorrow we are out and about early to meet up with Lucy at the park (she was at the Halloween party, dressed in red with the cute devil baby for those who came and are able to get points of reference from my non blogging friends now!) for a bit, weather permitting, and then I suppose I might bring myself to do some playing with the children (who seem quick to forget that whenever I end up playing with them they quickly lose interest in me and bugger off to play by themselves again anyway!).