One word? When seven would do…

Had a very nice day today. 🙂

Lovely lie in til nearly 9am which is always pleasant, Ady did loads of ‘stuff’ (excuse me for having no inkling of what it was but it all involved garden tools and machinery :oops:) and the children pottered in the garden getting their clothes muddy, sandy and wet but enjoying it thoroughly.

I spent ages on the computer on various pursuits, got a bolognaise sauce cooking in the slow cooker for dinner and then they all came in for lunch. I gave the papier mache Wallace his first coat of paint ‘assisted’ by the children and then we headed over to Chris and Julie’s for a couple of hours this afternoon.

We had a really nice time there actually. They had all their garden toys out and it was a lovely afternoon weather-wise so the children had a great time, Ady and Chris took pictures and me and Julie chatted and gossiped. I also set her computer up with email, signed her up with a yahoo account and an ebay account. I tried to tell her about IM chatting but she looked scared and blank and said she’d start slow and work up to such joys at a later date! 🙂

We came home via Burger King as Davies had seen a TV advert saying their kids meal toys were Ice Age 2 ones and we pulled into the adjoining petrol station for Ady to fill up his car only to realise he had a puncture. So the children sat in the car as it was jacked up and down and ate their BK while me and Ady both got greasy streaks on our hands and jeans changing the wheel.

We came home and Ady bathed the children while I dashed up to Sainsburys to get next week’s food shopping, bumping into my Mum whilst there so arranging to see them tomorrow some time. I did another coat of paint on Wallace and the children took forever to go to sleep so we taped Dr Who and have just watched it whilst eating dinner. Am now watching the repeat of last night’s Green Wing which I missed in favour of Second Coming.

Hope the weather is as lovely as this for next weekend too. 🙂

is the place where I sit
there isn’t any other place quite like it
It’s not at the bottom
and it’s not at the top
but this is the place where I always stop.

By Kermit’s nephew Robin. A ditty for all occassions that one really, a bit like supercalifragalisticexpialidocious – a word to say when you don’t know what to say (and yes I imagine I have spelt that incorrectly 😉 )

But anyway…

Today started with logic games – we got this peg game thingy from the Wizard store yesterday, which is basically a simplified version of the mastermind game which I certainly had a version of as a child although I don’t think I ever bothered working out how to play it. So yesterday the children just played at making patterns with the pegs but this morning I sat and taught Davies how to play it properly. We chatted about what the techinique of applying logic was all about, played it ‘open’ a couple of times (e.g. with nothing hidden and every move discussed) – then he played at being ‘Code Defender’ (as the instructions insist on dramatically calling it) and I was ‘Code Attacker’ – then we swapped roles. We played in the same style as we play battleships with me explaining every move and walking him through it, but the idea is sinking in and he is learning all sorts of new words 🙂 I quite enjoyed it too and it is certainly good mental practise for some of the logic puzzles I have been messing with this afternoon ;-).

I spent some time IMing and phone chatting with various people and the children played with sticklebricks – Davies recreated all of the weird and wonderful pictures on the front of the sticklebricks boxes and I did several loads of washing, several loads of putting away clean and dry laundry and drank lots of tea.

Ali and Freya arrived for a very pleasant afternoon. I got some much needed reassurance about various things (thanks mate 🙂 ) and eventually the children did take themselves off to play. I introduced Ali to the delights of Holy Clothing and we drank more tea 🙂 And ate chocolate 🙂 The children did put on a show at one point although I confess to struggling to follow the plot there did seem to be one somewhere and it was complete with music using a saxoflute, which later got threatened with confiscation! They ended up watching Madagascar – always a winner!

Davies sat up a bit past bedtime as we happened upon Brainiac whilst channel flicking so he got to sit and watch that with us, sparking all sorts of science questions, ideas for experiments and so on – excellent educational viewing 🙂 When I went to kiss him goodnight he was in bed having drawn a replacement for the temporary tattoo of Alex the lion from Madagascar which he’d been sporting for three baths and had finally worn off (it came free with a box of microwave popcorn) with biro and then drawn a recreation of a can crushed by air pressure experiment on his other arm – erm, art and science anyone? 😉

Children asleep and rather good curry (with the end of the bombay potatoes made for Alison, Layla and Si last week and frozen) plenty of wine and we’ve just watched The Second Coming on video which arrived via ebay this morning. We watched this when it was on TV a few years back and it was the first time I’d come across Christopher Eccleston and Russell T Davies, so I was thrilled when they were both involved in similar capacities in the last series of Doctor Who (and am still mourning the passing of Christopher). We were living in Manchester, where it is set, at the time which made it all the more real as we knew all of the places refered to very well and it has been one of those things you see or read which just stays with you. (Similar to Last Train for me). I’ve sat glued to it and found it even better than I remembered. 🙂

And now my head is all spinny from wine, wearing my glasses today which always makes my vision go all trippy and altogether too much spiritual questionning and logic puzzles of all sorts!

Not at all sure I did much which isn’t already documented here today really 🙂

Ros was planning to come over but couldn’t make it due to delayed piano delivery, which was a shame as I was looking forward to adult company and the children were in dire need of other small people to run about with. We’ve got Ali and Freya coming over tomorrow though so I am sure they will provide an end of week high point 🙂

First thing we popped out to collect a freecycle ‘win’ of a single burner camping stove thingy. Very compact but I imagine useful (I say imagine as I am still of course mightily struggling with the concept of cooking anything over a small blue or orange cannister powered ‘stove’ but I’m seeing it as an adventure and viewing it with the mindset of a fondue evening with retro charm and tasty morsels eating in bite sized chunks with minimal washing up – but categorically NO wife swapping!). We came home via the Wizard store where I had gone with papier mache inspiration in mind. Was not struck with any but picked up some more plasticine, a plastic peg logic competition game which has already been put to massive use although without notice of the instructions ( 🙂 ), some thread for when I eventually get round to sewing Totty for Scarlett, some very cute nail jewel stickers for Nic’s Nail Salon at Kessingland (I know, I know, but they were only a quid!) and some acrylic paint for the painting of the papier mache Wallace. I know, retail therapy but all very affordable – all for about half the price of a CV! 🙂

Home for lunch and I continued with my emailing, blogging, phoning and so on while the children played with the logic peg game and then went on to trash both their bedrooms. Serious lecture time from me about that – I accept lots of mess and toys being strewn about when there are loads of children in the house but not when it is just the two of them and the sole aim of their game seems to be to make as much mess as possible. 🙄

I did some reading with them of a few books, Davies did some colouring of some dinosaur posters – he rarely does colouring in of other pictures prefering instead to draw his own, but I noticed a different in tidyness of colouring and staying within the lines from the last time he did any. He also seemed to be really thinking and planning the finished picture rather than randomly colouring too which was good. I showed them something I used to do loads as a child the other day when we had the paint pens out – scribble pictures. Don’t know if anyone else used to do them but basically you scribble all over a sheet of paper making lots and lots of abstract shapes on the page and then you colour them all in different colours. You could get quite dramatic with effects blurring the edges and mixing colours venn diagram stylee or experimenting with effects and patterns within the main pattern, but it did give me lots of practise of colouring in anyway.

I spent some time moving a small plastic drawer unit from Tarly’s room which used to house nappies and was currently mainly used for hair slides and bobbles into the playroom to take up the overspill of craft stuff alongside the plastic drawer unit which had once held nappies in Davies’ room many years ago. So now we have two drawer units full of glitter, glue, pens, crayons, assorted papers etc. Have identifyed a need for a few odds and ends of craft stuff which I may have to satisfy with a BakerRoss order if CVs come through next week though, although the scrapstore is proving a good investment for £8 already having provided all the materials for the W&G sewn toys including the couple still in planning, and the sheets of huge paper. I’m about to get together a consortium for the even more local scrapstore too so we can start to make weekly trips there if necessary and start some more ambitious projects which I think Davies would enjoy.

And that’s kind of it for today really… glad it’s Friday tomorrow, I’m ready for a weekend!

and cos I’m distracting myself from children – I rang up for costs for the other hostels.

Great Yarmouth is cheaper – rooms would work out as follows:
1 x 2 bed – £44.50
2 x 4 beds – £89
2 x 6 beds – £135
1 x 8 beds – £185
1 x 10 beds – £235

Margate is also cheaper and slightly nicer in that it is an ex – hotel so some rooms are en suite. But let’s face it, it is Margate 😉
2 x 2 beds – £54
1 x 3 beds – £81
3 x 4 beds – £108
1 x 5 beds – £135
2 x 6 beds – £162

I think we can probably forget Truleigh Hill given it is more expensive and I definitely – and Ros and Ali would probably agree- wouldn’t be up for paying a couple of hundred quid to stay somewhere practically walking distance from home for a week! 🙂

For the second week Great Yarmouth, Helmsley and Margate all the same prices obviously, Minehead is more expensive. Kirkby Stephen, Lynton and Kings Lynn all slightly cheaper, but not much, and second week would mean no Sarah 🙁

ETA – I’ve created a yahoo group to continue discussions off my blog. Everyone who’s mentioned being interested has been invited – let me know if you don’t get the invite cos I must have got your email address wrong. 🙂

On the basis of numbers, preferences and so on I have provisionally booked Helmsley for 23-37 October.

I need to return the booking form with a 25% deposit within 14 days to secure the booking… so, it’s firm committment time I suppose.

There are seven rooms at Helmsley.

1 x 3 bed
2 x 4 bed
4 x 6 bed

If I divide the cost of the hostel (which is £1090) by the per person when at full capacity of 35 people and then times it by bed available per room that seems to be the fairest way of working it out. Then if anyone shares a room they can work out how to split the cost of the room between them perhaps? On that basis the costs are:

the 3 bed room – £96 with a deposit of £24 due now.
the 4 bed rooms – £128 with a deposit of £32 due now.
the 6 bed rooms – £192 with a deposit of £48 due now.

Which leaves an excess of £30 to be the starting kitty for bread and milk and stuff.

It’s not the cheapest hostel option, certainly pricier than Melrose and I think we might need to do a fair bit of room juggling as there are already 8 families interested with space for another 6 people left over – which would of course adjust the cost slightly for individual families. If that becomes the case then I am more than happy to readjust the maths to make it fairer so that for example the non sharing families (such as myself) are paying slightly more for such luxury ;-).

So what do you all reckon? Too expensive? Not happy with that hostel choice? Too soon to make a committment (in which case I think we need to be realistic about possibly not getting a booking if we leave it much later, certainly for that half term week). As you all know I have £zero so would not be in a position to book anything unless all the 25% deposit has arrived with me – and I guess it would have to be a non returnable deposit too unless you could ‘sell it on’ to another interested party.

Well???

when I noticed it come up in the random flickr shots.

Taken two years ago in April 2004 here is a picture of Scarlett aged 15 months old. Naked, she’d climbed up on top of a unit far taller than herself to get to her dummy (which she was only allowed at night) and my phone (which she was not allowed to touch as she’d broken the previous one by sucking the end of it until water got in and it went mildew).

Only today I had to rescue her having climbed onto the worktops in the kitchen in search of forbidden snickerdoodles.

I find myself resigned to rescuing her every April for at least the next 16 years as she clambers into scrapes she is unable to get herself out of…

having 5 tabs open to try and sort out links for youth hostels we’ve had a bit of an arts and crafts (for girls) fest here today.

After a long and oft-interupted IM chat with Ali this morning during which I got the children dressed, made cups of tea, brushed Tarly’s hair – and yes that is worthy of mention when it becomes a fortnightly event, got loads of nail varnish and other odd things out of it, so that was good! – and even put a wash on although I neglected to hang it out :oops:. Then we nipped into Lancing, took a couple of books back to the library that I’d forgotten last night, got a couple more out for the children, wandered round the charity shops and generally mosied about. We picked up a few bits in the charity shops actually – Davies spotted a cuddly Gromit toy – which brings his total up to 4 of them, but having spent lots of time looking at W&G stuff on ebay I know I could sell it for at least double the £1.50 it cost so I don’t mind. I found a little chinese style dress for Tarly which I have long thought she’d look lovely in, red, which is a great colour for her and for just £1.5o. If you can look past the odd posed grin and the fact she refused to wear it done up at the neck:

I’d been thinking about paper mache in the morning for some reason, having seen something somewhere about papier mache boxes and meant to google for some ideas and found a papier mache book in the ‘4 for 99p’ basket in one of the shops. So I got that along with a M&S version of The Velveteen Rabbit and two Usborne First Nature books – one on trees and one on creepy crawlies. Also picked up a big box of art straws for a quid to go in the craft drawers when we get them sorted out. We also saw the leap pad book of Madagascar which Ady has promised he will buy for Davies when he next makes a leap forward in his reading, so hopefully that will inspire him to get the leap pad out and do some more with it as that really helped bring him on last time far more than sitting with me seems to. Need to bring it out of his bedroom and try and encourage him to use it a bit tomorrow I think.

Came home and the children did some plasticine modelling with Davies following the instructions from a W&G modelling kit and using pieces of wire Ady had picked up at Hobbycraft yesterday to give more stability. I got a bit involved in that but I try to stay fairly hands off when he does this otherwise he gets disheartened that his efforts don’t look ‘as good’ as mine and ends up just wanting me to do everything. I explain that the only way I learnt to do stuff was by lots of practise but he seems to expect to be able to do everything perfectly at the very first try – and comparing his efforts to mine removes some of his pleasure. 🙁 But he did some great work anyway and when I’d stopped sitting with him he made a really good representation of Morph – who was pictured in the back of his book, so that was good. 🙂

I started looking at my papier mache book and decided to have a bash at something not too ambitious, so I cut out a Wallace shaped bit of cardboard and covered that in papier mache with lots of ‘help’ from Scarlett. It’s already hardening off as I didn’t make it too thick and providing it dries lighter and the head is not so top heavy it snaps I think it will look really good painted up. Scarlett wants a jewellry box next and we have lots of those big fake gemstones which would look really cool imbedded in a chunky box with lots of bright colours so I might have a bash at working out how to construct a box for a base (or pop along to the Wizard store and see what suitable cheapo boxes they might have to just cover instead. Actually I can think of all sorts of craft ideas which would look good with papier mache using stuff from the scrap store but as I don’t want to clutter my own house up with handcrafted tat I might need to save them as present ideas for people instead 😉 Do shout if you have a birthday coming up and fancy a bathroom mirror with 3D mermaids and an intergral shelf on it! 😀

We’d just about cleared all that up and they’d had tea by which time I was getting shouty and fed up with such full on parenting so happily Scarlett fell asleep almost instantly in my arms and Ady is taking care of Davies. Apprentice tonight served with pizza and wine! 🙂

I need to know (in the comments box please):

Name, how many of you coming and whether you will share a room or not.

Any of the choices which would be a ‘No’ for you.

So e.g. I’ll be:
Nic, 4 people, won’t share, all OK

To reiterate everyone who reads this blog is invited to join in, the idea of it is a Halloween themed 4 night youth hostel ‘camp’ with a Halloween party towards the end of the week.

I’ll do some sort of poll to try and work out which would be best for the majority of people although I suspect whatever choice is made will sadly rule somebody out. I’ve checked availability of hostels for two weeks – Monday 23th to Friday 27th October and Monday 30th October to Friday 3rd November. The second week has lots more available options, probably because the first week is half term and lots of the hostels only become available on the Escape To.. scheme from November anyway.

So the list of availables is as follows:

23rd
Great Yarmouth, sleeps 40, 7 bedrooms
Helmsley, sleeps 35, 7 bedrooms
Margate, sleeps 36, weird bedroom set up with lots of single bed rooms (which is not without appeal 😉 )
Truleigh Hill, sleeps 56, 13 bedrooms although lots are 2 bedders

30th
Great Yarmouth, sleeps 40
Helmsley, sleeps 35
Kings Lynn, sleeps 35, 6 bedrooms
Kirkby Stephen, sleeps 40, 8 bedrooms
Littlehampton, sleeps 32, 8 bedrooms
Lynton, sleeps 36, room number appears to be a secret but I can find out!
Margate, sleeps 36
Minehead, sleeps 35, 8 bedrooms.
Truleigh Hill, sleeps 56

Will come back and play with that a bit more later but wanted to get the links in first…

But had to blog again 😉

Just got back from Reading Group and wanted to enthuse again about how much I’m enjoying it really. Ironically given how many of my old pleasures I have recently given up and forgone I am very happy right now. I had my low period a couple of weeks ago but have reevaluated and am feeling very positive and in love with my life again.

The children seem to have shifted slightly again – and as I touched on in a post yesterday much though I would never wish their lives away and each phase and stage has brought with it great joys and new experiences when I pictured myself as a mother when I was a child it was never with baby at breast or small helpless crawling individuals, it was always with a ‘family’ of older children. I like people, I am fascinated by getting to know others, finding out about them, their history, what makes them tick, what their thoughts and motivations are. I think that is why Home Ed and specifically autonomous Home Ed suit me so well actually. Much though it is a joke subject the A level I found most enjoyable was Sociology – and I was bloody good at it too. And being at home with two ‘people’ rather than feeling like a child carer suits me way better than the pureeing carrots and clapping whilst three building block towers were made. I am finally feeling like I might be coming into my own with this whole thing rather than feeling like an amateur who is ‘coping well’.

I am also really enjoying the CV work I’m getting. Obviously the money is very welcome, as is the pyschology of feeling I am financially contributing something to the home again (as opposed to my track record of spending it! 😉 ) and the feeling of usefulness and ability over and above being Mummy that it brings, but it also appears to be something I am really rather good at too. And not surprisingly given my past working life and my love of marketing, interest in people and ability to spin doctor / talk bullshit / write copious amounts about really very little! Match made in heaven really!

And for the first time ever I have an interest and life not just outside of my relationship with Ady but also outside of the rest of the family. I love my friendships with HE mates – local and national, I love my friendships with people like Julie and Lucy but I am really enjoying going along to Reading Group once a month and sitting with people who know nothing about me other than what they see in that couple of hours. They know I am married with children but they are just peripheral cast members who are not seen, they do not know I Home Educate, I write CVs, I am hugely in debt etc etc. They are judging me purely on what I say and do in regard to the books we have been reading and with every month that passes I grow more confident and articulate in what I bring to the group. It has achieved exactly what I wanted it to in terms of broadening my reading horizons – both in the books I have read for group and in the books I have chosen independantly, it has changed the way I read things too and brought back one of the things I recall enjoying in English lessons at school which was reading something and then debating it, finding out how others interpreted the words, what conclusions and pictures they drew from it and so on.

So tonight it was only 5 of us there – Mike, who normally comes with his wife Rose (the English Teacher) but she was ill today, Sandy the cool Canadian, The blonde accountant who squashed reading group inbetween the gym and parents evening for one of her children, the retired lady who normally reads Chick-lit, and me. We discussed Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling in a lively and debating manner and came away with the book for next month which is by a local author who is coming along to Reading Group in a couple of months time – Simon Brett – so it seemed only right that we’d at least read one of his books before he arrived.

Anyway, that sort of ran out of steam as my dinner was ready and I reiterated it all to Ady and got real life nods and hurrahs in the right places, but what the hell, I’ll press publish anyway! 🙂

By 9am I had already gotten dressed and had a beef stew cooking in the slow cooker.

By 10am I had already got a load of washing on the line, the children were dressed, a picnic lunch was packed.

By 11am we were standing in the car park at Highdown Gardens awaiting the two families coming to join us on our Activeo event of a Spring Walk.

I did think about taking some pictures and making it a photo blog day but decided against it as a) it is far from typical and b) I realised that I’d dressed Scarlett in an identical outfit to the one she wore last year for photoblog day and Davies was wearing the same trousers as last year too…hmm, spooky coincidence!

We had a nice walk round Highdown gardens although the woman and her daughter who’d come along too seemed to enjoy it the little girl (I think she was 8 ) clung to her mother and didn’t talk to us. She was really interested in new group though so that’s promising. She was a nice lady, full of questions and story-swapping about HE and actually it’s been a while since I met anyone new so it was quite nice to be doing that again. She has a 10 yo boy who does one day a week in school but would come along to HE group so that will be nice too.

She left after picnic lunch to go swimming with her daughter leaving me and Julie and the children. The children were fully engaged with some complicated game involving stripping a big stick of all it’s bark and chasing butterflies and bees. They got a range of looks from the large amounts of elderly people out enjoying the gardens from indulgent smiles to frowns at their noise and boisterousness but Julie and I enjoyed sitting on a picnic rug and chatting. 🙂 We left around 2pm when Scarlett decided she needed carrying.

Since arriving home the children have disappeared off into the newly spacious playroom and are playing with the megablocks and the cars on the car playmat, I’ve done a couple of emails, taken a scary money phonecall and made some snickerdoodles as we were lacking anything sweet in the house that isn’t chocolate and egg shaped 😉

I’ve started Catch 22 but failed to get into it although I’ll give it a full 3 chapters before deciding against it and I also looked at the first bit of To Kill a Mockingbird before deciding that having seen the film at least once during school days perhaps I’ll leave that one for now. I was reading stuff on the website for the Pay It Forward movement last night and feel quite inspired to re-read that again actually. I read it and loved it, watched the film and thought it was a good film but not actually that representative of the way I’d interpreted the book and I think I’d like to read it again – actually I think I might suggest it for reading group too.

Right, another cup of tea beckons, maybe with a snickerdoodle on the side…

Happy Birthday Hannah!!

Hope you’re having a lovely day, lots of love from Nic, Ady, Davies & Scarlett xxx

I got most of what I needed to get done done today but none of it was particularly spectacular so I am without any great sense of achievement really. 🙁 I hate bank holidays. When I was a child my parents always seemed to spent the extra time off work as an opportunity to row more and from the age of 14 I worked in Mum’s restaurant so bank holidays were an extra working day, leaving there to go to retail meant bank holidays were worked in the early days to get the time and a half and day off in lieu deal, latterly when time and a half didn’t exist any more in retail management they became a miserable chance to beg and plead with my staff (who had lives outside of work) to work them. In all the time Ady and I have been together he has worked pretty much every single bank holiday and I have only ever had two years worth of different office jobs where I got bank holidays off. Since having the children they feel even worse as everywhere you look is full of families doing family stuff together so you either risk feeling like a single parent and join in with the family activities or stay home and mope!

So today Ady was off and gone before I even woke up, I faffed around reading blogs and waiting for a load of washing to go through the machine before hanging it out and going food shopping. The children got out loads of different paper (tissue, corregated, construction, textured and printed) and made a beach for their toys to play on with it. We went to Sainsburys where they were both very well behaved and did lots of counting, spotting different groceries and so on. Davies spotted some collect tokens and send away offer for a Wallace and Gromit modelling kit on ‘tip top’ cream products so we worked out the cheapest way of collecting the required amount and bought them (tokens duly removed from packaging and me and Davies walked to the post box to get it sent off when Ady got home from work).

Home again for lunch and more hanging out of washing. I went through the big pile of paperwork of creditors stuff and sorted that out including sending a couple of emails to CCCS to update them.

The children played with various things although nothing for very long. I sat and did some drawing and colouring with them for a while of Madagascar characters, Davies did some writing but he is very tired and hasn’t got any great attention span at the moment, he so needs an early night or a late morning and can’t seem to manage either. 🙄 We got out the marble run and I built them a huge run which amused them for all of about ten minutes before it got knocked over. Scarlett then spent some time playing with that by herself. Davies got out his k’nex but then put them away again, got out some magnetic word tiles and stuck some on the fireguard to spell out obscure and nonsensical sentences before putting them away too.

They were amused for a while by the colouring in online again from yesterday but even that didn’t last more than about half an hour. I offered to read to Davies, watch a film with him, sit with him while he read to me, do some more writing, do a jigsaw but none of it appealed. I refused to ‘play’ at making Wallace and Gromit with geomags or get the plasticine out as either of those activities would have had me more bored than him. I also offered various websites or pc games all of which were refused. But I kept my patience and temper at least. Scarlett painted my toenails and her own fingernails and eventually they did disappear off to their bedrooms for a self created game for the last hour or so of the day and I started Catch 22.

I’m popping out shortly to give my Dad a tow – again 🙄 as his van has packed up again and is booked in at the garage tomorrow but needs to be gotten there and hopefully evening bank holiday traffic will be quieter that early Tuesday morning traffic. Then tonight we have my favourite dinner of stir fry followed by chocolate! Tomorrow I’ve organised at Activeo event at Highdown Gardens but the only taker so far is Julie so I expect it will just be us with our picnics. And in the evening I have reading group.

I’ve had this post bubbling in me for a couple of weeks. I’ve chatted to some of you in real life about a conversation with a woman who insisted she had the definition of ‘autonomy’ (except she called it autonomative, which really annoyed me! 😉 ) and was not up for debating it. My definition of autonomy is very different.

I looked on dictionary.com for some definitions too and found these:

Main Entry: au·ton·o·my
Pronunciation: -mE
Function: noun
Inflected Form: plural -mies
1 : the quality or state of being independent, free, and self-directing
2 : independence from the organism as a whole in the capacity of a part for growth, reactivity, or responsiveness

(pleasingly there was no listing for the word autonomative – but I guess that means she gets to write her own definition if she made the word up!! 🙂 )

Now this lady was very inspiring in many ways, she is passionate, had achieved great success in giving her quite severely disabled child not just an excellent quality of life but an independance and education far far beyond what would have been expected by the medical profession at her birth. She is someone a journalise would describe as ‘a powerhouse, unstoppable and unshaken in her belief in what she is doing’. I admire her and what she has done so far and indeed what she intends achieving in the future, her approach and dreams are not all that dissimilar to what mine might have been in a different reality. She is after setting up a very small school type set up for Home Educated children to get lessons from tutors in subjects that she feels she cannot offer such as science, PE, art and language. She explained how the ‘lessons’ are to be set up with the children experiencing physics rather than being taught, nothing is written down and so on. It did sound a very interesting approach and I imagine I am not doing it justice in my re-telling anyway but I think if I knew more about approaches like Steiner and Montessori I would probably be able to equate it better to those. I am cheerfully ignorant of educational readings like these as in the same way that Gina Ford and the What To Expect books pissed me off no end when I had tiny babies in presuming to know what my baby wanted and should be doing at 7pm or 8 months old I refuse to accept that it is possible to ‘raise’ children according to someone else’s teachings or findings or studies or ideas, I don’t even want to spend time reading about educational approaches as the most I could take from them are a few ideas which already fit with stuff we’re already doing. In which case I don’t need to bother really. But this lady is, IMO, utterly surrended to her children, she lives for them, through them and I suspect that there is very little of ‘her’ left. Whatever my personal feelings on that sort of life it is something I would be incapable of doing even if I’d wanted to try.

I’d love to live my life according to the sort of proverbs on teatowels and fridge magents which explain why you shouldn’t shout at a child, why one should have endless patience blah, blah, blah. But I can’t. I’m an individual, each of my children are individuals and our family is unique so what works perfectly for us would fail horribly for others, what is perfect for one family would be our idea of hell, even methods of parenting which are splendid for one of my children are rubbish for the other and whilst Ady and I share our ideals on how we want to do things sometimes our approaches of achieving them are even different. Which is why I don’t think school works. Anyway, as usual I have veered far from my original point. So I went to write this post on autonomy and then realised from reading a few bits of my blog that I already wrote it, about 8 months ago!

I realised in reading that that it had been the starting point for where we are now and that in the main I am very happy with the way things are going. Davies is two terms into what would have been his reception year and so far I would consider Home Education a huge success for us. The hands off approach to areas such as reading, writing, maths had been proven to work for him really well, he’s learning letters and numbers and playing with the oral and written concepts of both when he needs to and because he wants to and I have total confidence that as his needs for greater understanding and ability in both grow he will meet these needs accordingly.

The one area I still feel the need to tweak and adjust slightly is my own ability to listen and react to his needs. He is sometimes resentful of my failing to get down and play with him more – this is something he will probably have to live with as I am simply not a sitting on the floor playing with children sort of person and I don’t think he is being in any way harmed by me not doing so, but I do think I sometimes miss opportunities to impart knowledge, show him a new skill, demonstrate a point in the very best way or simply follow up a question or an answer at a later point with research, books or activities. This is a combination of selfishness, busyness, abent mindedness or on occassion apathy on my part and I think better organisation of my own time and maybe conscious dedication of periods of time would ease this slightly. The more I am having real demands on my time outside of the children with my CV work etc the less justifiable it feels not to have times when I focus solely on the children. I remain pretty sure that as they pass being dependant and needy small people and become more self sufficient bigger children my overwhelming feeling will be relief that that period is over and we can get on with the far more interesting business of getting to know each other more as people and engaging in things together which we share common interests in rather than me faking passion in megabloks or 6 piece jigsaw puzzles. So, I’ve re-evaluated, like what’s happening and have a plan for continuing in a very similar vein. All good. 🙂

with apologies to everyone who now has that ringing in their ears!

We’ve had a blissfully people free day today, having had my parents around for the last two days and for dinner both nights we have really appreciated not having to be remotely sociable today. 🙂

The children were awake early, Ady got up with them and as I’d had a dreadful nights’ sleep with cold sweats, tossing and turning and weird dreams I followed not too long afterwards at abolut 7.30am. We’d hidden small chocolate eggs around the lounge which they collected in their papier mache eggs and they had one small egg each – Scarlett’s came with a Dora cup, bowl and spoon and Davies’ came with a little box of K’nex. A friend had given Ady a tenner to get them Easter eggs from him but we spent the money instead of buying them Madagascar on dvd which has been watched twice and all of the extras much explored, including the learn to draw the characters bit which Davies sat for ages doing. 🙂 I got a Green & Black’s egg and I was extravagant and bought Ady one of these, which no, we probably couldn’t really afford but he’d been drooling over the adverts on TV and the look of utter delight on his face when I gave it to him was worth it. 🙂

The children have only gotten out of their pjs today long enough to have a bath after dinner and get back into clean sets and have spent time playing, eating chocolate and singing about ‘move it move it’. I also spent an hour or so getting my old laptop and Ady’s work laptop set up on the new wireless thingy I got yesterday so they spent some time sitting at their little table and chairs with a laptop each infront of them playing online Madagascar colouring in from the Dreamworks website. 🙂

Aside from doing that I have also almost finished my reading group book – Brian Keenan, An Evil Cradling which I’ve found hard work but got quite into towards the final third of the book so at least I’ll be able to speak about that at reading group this week. I also spent some time in the playroom sorting through the cupboards but it was slightly half hearted as I was not in the right frame of mind for it really.

Ady has had a hugely productive day and removed the defunct pc from the playroom, taken down the table it was sat on, removed the computer chair and various pc related stuff and reshuffled the playroom so it looks like a real playroom. We’ve set up a car mat on the floor and have plans to bring an unused set of drawers from Tarly’s room to set up as a second set of craft drawers as the first set is constantly overflowing and I’d rather the children had access to pens, paper etc whenever they wanted it as it seems to occupy so much of their days. He’s also taken down and put back up all the various photos and posters in there including a load of ‘educational’ ones such as times table and number squares which once adorned walls at Joyce’s 🙂 It looks great in there now actually, don’t know whether the children will soak up any great mathematical skills but Ady is delighting on testing me on my times tables! 😉 Our final plan is to set up a clothes rail to hang the dressing up stuff on rather than it staying screwed up in the chest as it is at the moment.

Tomorrow Ady’s back at work again and I am as yet undecided as to my plans. We need food shopping which is slightly tiresome on a Bank Holiday and poor planning on my part really but hopefully if I get there early it won’t be too busy. Other than that I imagine the children will be watching Madagascar lots more and I intend starting on Catch 22 now I’ve done with my duty read.

The weather forecast for today was lovely. It wasn’t lovely of course, it was windy all day with heavy showers happening from about 2.30pm onwards but it is a bank holiday after all.

So we’d had this plan to go to Devils Dyke for a wander about and my parents had said they’d come too. We headed over there (it’s only about a ten minute drive on a good traffic day) and I was overcome with the nostalgia of visiting the place for my second only time – the first being when I had my first kiss on UK soil with my first real love – Ady was overcome with the beauty and photo opportunities, the children were overcome with the wide open spaces and my Dad was overcome with a fit of mardyness and flatly refused to walk anywhere in ‘this bloody wind’ so buggered off back to his car to wait for us! 😀

We trekked almost to the bottom, then turned around and walked about halfway back up. We drifted up from the trodden path slightly to let some people pass and decided that actually we could probably continue to clamber up the steep bits and rejoin the path at the top. We indeed could, which was just as well cos if we thought climbing up was hard work then trying to scramble down would have been murder! Davies plowed on at the front for most of the journey, closely followed by Mum, followed by Ady in the middle with the camera with me and Tarly at the back – Tarly collecting a variety of small insects and creatures all of which she exclaimed over, carried for a short while, demanded that everyone wait whilst she caught them up and admired and then let go again. We had ladybirds and caterpillars among other things. At one point she asked for a piggyback which I agreed to and then promptly slipped in the mud and fell forward onto my knees, bringing her speedily to a landing on her feet, which she found hilarious 😀 Ady was just sad he’d missed the moment with the camera! We collected Dad from his car and went into the pub at the top for chips and wine (oh we do live well!) and then came home.

Ady and Dad watched and listened to football on the radio / TV, the children by the looks of things ran amok and me and Mum went back out to PC world for me to get a wireless modem router thingy doobrey wotsit (which with only fairly minimal swearing I have gotten working, hurrah!) and to collect a few bits of food shopping for tonight’s dinner.

Home again and I swore at the wireless thing, Ady and Davies did some pyrography using a kit I’d had years ago (Davies wrote ‘Davies’ on a leather key fob for me really nicely with it) and then they all played a game with an audio cassette of various noises to tick off on bingo style photo cards.

Kids went to bed (although have only just gone to sleep), we watched Doctor Who (not bad but no Christopher Eccleston is he 🙁 ) and traditional Easter Eve wine drinking in preparation for drunken mini egg hiding commenced. Which will explain any typos here 😉

Some photos on flickr but here are a couple of my faves:

Some traditional self timers and arms length shots

A particularly lovely one of Davies

Bit of scene setting Chez Goddard this morning for a tale which for once needs no embellishment or creative licence from me 🙂

Scarlett and I had just had a bath together so she was naked with dripping wet hair and I believe wearing lipgloss, Davies and Ady had been tidying up the playroom and Ady had just turned the mad guitar intro to Michael Jackson’s Black or White up really really loud so Davies could listen to it. A bath was running for Ady and Davies which Davies had got loads of bath bubbles from to create a foam beard and was playing air guitar. I was upstairs getting dressed. Ady had had a busy morning, he’d had his toenails painted by Scarlett and was sporting one foot with bright pink and the other with bright purple, his old and rather snug tracksuit bottoms and an inside out T shirt. We’re expecting my parents over this morning so to amuse and entertain my Dad Ady had cut out a picture of the Queen’s head from some 80th birthday celebratory pull out picture bit of the local freebie paper, so her disembodied head was sellotaped to our front door.

The doorbell rang while we were upstairs so Scarlett answered it, naked and dripping. Davies brought up the rear sporting his foam beard and Ady leisurely followed to ensure it was indeed my parents to find two ladies trying to give Scarlett a copy of Watchtower and Scarlett trying to give them money for it (a 2p coin) which they were shouting over Michael Jackson’s song that they didn’t want, they just wanted to leave the magazine with our 3 year old. She lost interest and just chucked it at them, Davies went back to his air guitar playing and Ady smiled apologetically at them and agree that yes, it might be better to call at a more convenient time just as he followed the line of both women’s eyes down looking at his cheerily painted toenails….

Yep Jehovah came a-knocking but we were not home!

Really tired today, it feels like Friday’s been a long time coming and I feel drained and knackered but in a happy and positive way. Bring on the weekend! 🙂

We didn’t get to Blockbusters as Ady drew my attention to the fact there were already loads of films on TV being Good Friday we could watch instead. Davies appeared upstairs with me as I went to put away some clean laundry and get dressed and sat rubbing moisturiser into my back and chatting to me. Funnily enough I remember I used to go and sit on the side of the bath and wash my Mum’s back for her when I wanted to chat to her about something – I distinctly recall blurting out a load of saved up questions about periods one evening while doing it and writing her secret messages by tracing my finger on her back with the words…where did that closeness go I wonder?

So Davies came and sat chatting to me about The Easter Bunny coming. He wandered round the houses a bit and then asked ‘so who *really* hides the eggs then?’ so I asked him who he thought did it. He went all bashful and said ‘you?’ so I agreed and said yes it was and asked him how that made him feel. He said it was a nice feeling, like a good secret and it was nice to pretend. We seemed on a bit of a roll so I asked him if he thought there were any other things a bit like that where we all pretended something fun and he said without really thinking about it too much ‘Father Christmas?’ so I agreed again and he went on to say ‘and I think that when we leave a carrot out for the reindeer you cut triangles in it with a knife to pretend it’s teeth marks really’ so it’s clearly something he’d thought about, deduced and was fine with all by himself. I kind of guessed he might have done prior to last Christmas as he is normally a child who needs full details on every little aspect of everything and although he has an active imagination he is also very clear about it being imagination and has a very good understanding of what is real and what is pretend (which should probably make me all the more worried about him believing in God really 😉 ). I asked him about the tooth fairy too (in for a penny eh!?) and he said he thought that really I got a penny from my purse and took the teeth away. So I guess that’s that then really! 🙂

I know this is something there was discussion about at Okehampton and I was in a conversation with several people about it at Melrose too and I can see various takes on the when to tell the truth opinions and of course one must do what is the right choice for one’s family, indidvidual child and the impact on siblings but personally I’ve always felt slightly uncomfortable with the concept of keeping up pretence for very long on such things. Quite specifically because we HE and as yet Davies has only really had me or Ady to pass him his knowledge or at the very least confirm or deny or answer his questions I feel we need to maintain a very clear channel of truth and trust between us. It is fun to pretend and I am not after taking away childhood magic or anything but I would never have been able to vehemenantly defend the existance of Father Christmas et al if faced with a volley of Davies style questions and interogations so I’m glad we had the understanding about it that I thought we had. Scarlett was not around for this conversation although I’m sure Davies will feed it back to her at some point anyway but I imagine she is confident enough in the ability of Ady and I to provide money for teeth, chocolate for Easter and presents for Christmas that it is unlikely to devastate her either really 😉

That done and clearly sensing truth and potential weakness in toeing the parent line on all politically correct hot topics he pressed me to choose a favourite offspring and got fairly pissed off with me when I couldn’t. I did explain that I have different relationships with each of them, there are things in them both that I adore and which irritate me and that although I love them both equally there are times when I would choose one of them over the other to spend time with or do certain things. Not what he was looking for but the best he’s gonna get out of me on that one! 😉

We went back downstairs and they had popcorn for breakfast 😉 and watched some Cbeebies for a bit of a retro kick. They quite like The Upside Down Show and we were also enjoying Tikkabilla (even though it had the dreadful Sarah-Jane in it) while I read some more of my reading group book when Dad arrived unannounced. He stayed for coffee and then went home to collect Mum, promising to be back in a couple of hours.

I have some pondering on my parenting and educational approach to do but I am pushed for time just now so it will have to wait but as part of my master plan I did indeed put my book down and do some drawing with them for a while. Davies had done an Easter card for David (thank you neighbour) and written ‘Happy Easter’ on it with me just telling him which letter to write next and then written ‘Davies’ inside and was doing various other pictures quite happily too. He wanted to make a book and for me to do the writing and him to do the drawing so I suggested we read a book together and then did some drawings to go with it and he wanted Very Hungry Caterpillar. So we dug out one of our copies and made a book each by folding large sheets of paper. We both copied the first page ‘In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf’ and drew a picture to illustrate it. I did the next page writing but Davies had had enough of writing so we changed our minds about the project and I got out a large roll of plain paper to make one long story illustration instead. I wrote out the title and the writing from the first three pages, told him what it all said and then popped out to hang some washing out. He had made a very good start but came out to me in the garden in tears because Scarlett (in a sort of jealous rage apparently) had scribbled all over it with black pen. Not altogether sure what had really happened as she was quite upset about it all too and seemed fairly contrite so we packed the drawing stuff away and got some hama beads out instead. That was all going very smoothly and cooperatively when Mum and Dad arrived so it got abandoned in favour of chocolate eggs and Easter gifts arriving slightly early.

Davies got a Spiderman egg, an egg with a red toy mini car and a magicians set complete with hat, wand and a few tricks. Scarlett got a Bang on the door egg, an egg with a pink mini car and a Barbie peel and stick dressing up scene thingy with a case to play with it in the car and a Tinkerbell dressing up outfit. So they were all opened, some consumed and enjoyed and the rest played with while we had lunch.

They are also very tired and were not really on top form or that willing to be fawned over by Granny or teased by Grandad so keeping them occupied has been challenging by necessary. We ended up getting out a couple of enormous sheets of paper each (from the scrapstore) and the paint pens and they did a couple of massive pictures each. Davies drew himself eating his tea complete with his name totally in mirror writing from right to left – which I’ve noticed a couple of times lately but I’m sure I’ve heard people mention enough to write off as normal and fine – and a road scene for his mini with houses, churches, factories, a river complete with all the underground pipes for plumbing water back to the houses and a fire engine putting out a house fire – very detailed! 🙂 Scarlett did a rainbow on one sheet and a piece of toast with various toppings on the other. Actually I have taken some photos of Davies’ most recent pictures which I will upload soon as they are very good. He is now colouring in the whole sheet of paper with background colours and so on, using black to outline everything and then adding colour and paying attention to detail and things like perspective. I’ve introduced him to Illustration Friday, last week it was Speed and he did a good racing car picture and we chatted lots about my interpretation of it with a drawing of the race of the hare and the tortoise. So I’ve told him about this weeks theme being ‘spotted’ and we’ll see what we get from him for that. He really doesn’t get on with watercolours or paint in general really but I think he’d enjoy getting to grips with other materials as he loves his playdough and plasticine, he likes pens and crayons and chalks (not in the house of course 😉 ) and when he’s not making brown I think he’d like to learn more about texture and colour mixing. Any suggestions for other arty ideas or links gratefully recieved – actually computer aided drawing or design might interest him, will have to look into that…

Ady’s now home, my parents are staying for the dinner I really should be downstairs cooking and my wine awaits.

Probably the week after next (I’m semi planning for Tuesday 25th) I’m taking Davies up to London to go to the Pixar exhibition at the Science Museum. Anyone fancy joining us or meeting up for lunch / play in the basement / wander round afterwards?

Also planning a Legoland trip, probably sometime in May. Does anyone want to be included in that – we get excellent discounted rates as HEors if we pre-book. It’s closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays in May and we do our badger thing on a Monday so it would be a Thursday or Friday trip but I’m open to suggested dates if people are up for coming along.

I’m also aware I’ve not mentioned the October Halloween thing for a while so I’ll chase that up next week and get some idea of where would be available and ask for numbers again.

When you’ve had a houseful of up to 9 children, a drip feed of junk food and snickerdoodles, various adults bribing you with things to go and play and films, games, inside and outside play all with minimal supervision for three days to go back to normal and spent time with your cousins instead. And of course for me too 😉

But we tried. I had 6 CVs come through which must have come on foot from Brighton as they were postmarked 9th April but didn’t arrive til yesterday with a note asking for them back Wednesday/Thursday so I managed two last night before my eyes started to get too blurry to see my laptop screen. I got another one done this morning and the last three this afternoon so I still managed to get them in on deadline though. 🙂 So a CV, packing a picnic and getting slow cooker chilli on before leaving by 10am was pretty good going considering none of us were up at 8am. 🙂

We were meeting Julie, Jack and Maisie in Bognor at a park which years and years ago used to be a zoo. I remember going there on a school trip and being upset about a black panther pacing up and down in a really tiny cage and having something like 3 tokens to spend on ‘attractions’ such as the mini train. All of that has gone now and it is just a big park with a fairly cool playground bit in it. So I spent the journey there reminsicing about how I used to do that journey every single day (I used to work in Bognor managing a well known card and gift retail shop) and the rest of the time reminiscing about school trips.

Davies and Scarlett were tired, fractious, generally not at their best with Tarly wanting constant attention and to be carried round the place (WTF!) and Davies has just been used to slightly more freedom this week than it’s feasible to give him when he’s with three three year olds so he was getting reined back in again every few minutes which we were both finding wearing. The plan was to have a play, have a wander round, find somewhere to eat lunch and then go to the local library. We did all of the first bits but when we went back to the cars for Julie to collect some books to take back I decided – and the children both agreed – to come home instead.

I set them up with some readymix paint, newspapered the lounge floor and gave them their papier mache eggs which have sat with small amounts of Floam pressed onto them but otherwise unfinished for weeks. I hung some washing out (it’s been intermittently cloudy and sunny here but with a strong blasting wind all day perfect for drying clothes) and then settled down with a cup of tea and the rest of my CVs.

Now I believe it might have been documented before that I have contol freak issues in some areas. Laundry, packing food shopping into bags, putting the lids back on felt tip pens, the indoor or outdoor classification of toys being adhered to, jigsaw puzzles being put back in their boxes and the lids not being trodden on and finally the mixing of colours of items which can have their colours mixed. We’re talking playdoh, plasticine and paint. Oh and the nibs of things like felt tips or paint pens on top of each other. I’m all for autonomy, learning through experience and so on and of course the educational and cause and effect style benefits of colour mixing. I know that the very best way for children to grasp primary and secondary colours and shades is to create them for themselves. So for a time I rather enjoyed listening to them say ‘oh, look, red and yellow make orange’ and ‘Look, look, I’ve made pink with red and white!’ and ‘if I add more white to this pink it gets lighter’. Which would all of course have been fab if they’d used their newly created colours to embellish and decorate their eggs as planned. Instead there was further mixing until we reached that most logical of all conclusions when small children and colour mixing combine. Yep, brown. Brown, brown, brown. Slightly different shades of brown in every pot granted, and a translucent sort of brown in the water pot but brown nonetheless. And whilst I don’t mind the cause and effect of create brown and you can’t uncreate it when it’s being learnt using cheapo plasticine or home made playdoh (well actually I even mind that a wee bit but I can let it go 😉 ) and even the paint being ‘wasted’ was a lesson in the ‘well its a finite resource so if you want to use all these lovely bright colours to make one big old goddam (;-)) stash of brown then feel free but know this, you will not have green, yellow, white, pink, red, blue or black to use next time you want to paint anything. Nope, your painting scope will be limited to brown dogs eating chocolate standing beside a tree trunk on a woodland floor covered in conkers singing don’t it make my brown eyes brown. But splashing it all over their eggs seemed a bit of a shame. 🙁

So they got a lecture, which went over Tarly’s head and Davies headed off into the kitchen bringing me a peace offering of a plate with a chunk of cheese on it and a glass of water 🙄 and we chatted about why it wasn’t really what we had in mind when we set out and I helped them finish them in shades of brown having decided we could further decorate them on a brownish base with glitter or something tomorrow.

I finished my CVs, Ady came home and sorted out their tea and bathed them while we all watched Ice Age and they continued their pattern of the week of late to bed. 🙂 Which is at least making for later to rise than normal too.

Tomorrow Ady is working, at least for the morning and I think we need a quiet end to a busy week so we’re planning to head off to Blockbusters in the morning and rent out a few films, come home for Hot Cross Buns for lunch followed by some of the microwave popcorn I’d bought and forgotten about for earlier in the week and watch films for the day. Looking forward to cuddles on the sofa. 🙂