One word? When seven would do…

You Are a Margarita

You aren’t just the life of the party, you are the party! You mix a good drink, bust out some great music, and know how to get down.

You Are a Hunter Soul

You are driven and ambitious – totally self motiviated to succeed Actively working to acheive what you want, you are skillful in many areas. You are a natural predator with strong instincts … and more than a little demanding. You are creative, energetic, and an extremely powerful force. An outdoors person, you like animals and relate to them better than people. You tend to have an explosive personality, but also a good sense of humor. People sometimes see you as arrogant or a know it all. You tend to be a bit of a loner, though you hate to be alone. Souls you are most compatible with: Seeker Soul and Peacemaker Soul

Gah!!!!! 😈

Today. A day of frustrations, a day of wanting to smack my palm against my forehead, a day of wanting to have a remote control to aim at people to ‘mute’ them!

Anyway… I finally went to bed around midnight, waking Ady up to go and sit with the mad piriton’d up dancing crazy girl in the lounge as I’d crashed and burned singing ‘Love is in the air’ with her having been inspired by Joyce’s blog post of the same title! I seem to recall some sort of musical beds thingy went on, apparently we’d woken Davies up with our singing 😳 and shortly after Ady went downstairs he came into bed with me, the next thing I knew he was downstairs crying cos Ady told him to go back to bed (it was about 1am)! The next thing I knew after that is was 8am! Ady recuperated further for an hour or so and then when he got up and the coughing from all corners was driving me insane I snuck my book upstairs under the guise of going to get dressed and closed the bedroom door, laid on the bed and read in peace. Bliss. For all of about 10 minutes….

Ady was first up bringing the camera with some photos he wanted me to ok him deleting, swiftly followed by Tarly with her cuddly toy tiger who apparently *needed* me to stroke him. Hot on Tarly & Tiger’s tails was Davies who wanted me to listen to his newly made up song… 🙄 I sent them all away again but really my peace was shattered and shortly afterwards Ady started clearing out the cupboard under the stairs (always a sensible task to begin doing when you are due at the in-laws for lunch in half an hour) which meant he was calling up the stairs to me every couple of minutes about whether I still wanted x,y or z?

So we were late getting out of the house (surprise! :roll:) and Dad and Ady headed off to get some logs, Davies and Scarlett were entertained by Mum for a bit so I got my book out of my bag and tried a read over there but Mum kept talking to me so that didn’t work. Dad and Ady came home then so we started to eat lunch. Now Davies does this admittedly *very* annoying thing sometimes when he’s eating of sort of humming and yumming as he eats. I’m always telling him off for it and it really irritates my Dad. So he starts doing it while eating a chunk of cheese, Dad tells him to stop, he sort of eyes Dad up and then carries on so Dad really yells at him. Davies dissolves in a sobbing heap and has to be placed on my lap. Not content with having managed that Dad continues to rant at him and then starts on me about discipline, pandering to my children and if I won’t teach them how to behave then he will!! I imagine anyone who knows me already knows I can be fairly harsh on my kids myself so I certainly didn’t agree with any of that. I started to answer back and it very quickly degenerated into a shouting match 🙁 . I got the kids and Ady getting their coats and shoes on and demanded that unless he apologised for reducing a small child to tears because he was utterly out of order for doing so then we were leaving. Cue a stand off between me and Dad, Mum butting in, me in tears and Ady shepherding children out of the whole scene. Dad finally did agree that he hadn’t meant to make him cry, that indeed it was not his place to discipline my children anyway and that he shouldn’t have shouted so I got Davies to apologise for ignoring Dad’s first telling off and Dad to apologise to Davies for shouting and making him cry. So we stayed.

I felt slightly hypocritical (and indeed was accused of being so) as I have shrieked and shouted at my kids so much these last few weeks myself but that is just a tiny percentage of the time I spent with them that although it may be unpleasant it certainly does not characterise my relationship with them. When they only see my parents once or twice a week for a few hours shouting at D until he cries is something that will have an impact on his relationship with my Dad. What he did was basically bully D by using his size, authority and volume to scare him to tears – that is not acceptable and on the occassions when I know I have been guilty of behaving wrongly to the children I always apologise. Anyway it appears to have been forgotten now so rant over.

We ended up having a fairly pleasant afternoon after that little episode and Dad agreed he would pay for a course for me to learn a new skill which could help with some freelance work – not being deliberately secretive about it but I still have some thinking to do on it and maybe some chatting to a few of you next week so I’ll save it for then.

We came home to meet Frazer who popped round after work to try and work out what exactly is the matter with my pc that died after Xmas, so Ady dealt with the children’s bedtime and got dinner cooking while me and Frazer dismantled, hoovered and finally gave up on it having decided it was likely a virus of some sort. He’s taken the tower away and is going to put windows XP on it using one of my laptop discs so all the computers will be on the same system and hopefully it will get shot of the virus too – or something! I don’t really understand what he said actually but he seemed confident 😉

Of course all that took *hours* so Davies ended up starting to watch ET which predictably he loved and Ady is recording the later repeat for him to watch tomorrow, dinner was really late getting on and Davies has only just fallen asleep. Off to have a bath, drink some wine and eat a very late roast 🙂

Her dancing is too funky 🙂

Me and Tarly are still up together and watching music channels on Sky. She’s a wee bit high on piriton, I’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and we’re doin’ dancin’.

Currently on is Mambo No 5, which we had played loads and loads at our wedding reception and I distinctly recall playing pretend trombone with one of our normally quite sensible and sober friends who was utterly drunken and giddy. Happy days!

Young Miss Goddard has a rash. When she was just over a year old she had a rash once before. It started on her torso and gradually spread out to her arms and legs, then her face and eventually her fingers and toes before it left. I took her to the doctors three times with it when it happened and there was nothing they could do. It was some sort of allergic reaction, it was not really bothering her so they said to just leave it alone and if it ever came back to investigate it then.

She actually had it over my 30th birthday. She was fine in herself and we ended up carrying out our plans for the day anyway which were to go into Manchester on the tram, go round the shops, get me some pressies from Lush and have lunch in the very posh M&S coffee shop and generally enjoy being in the hustle and bustle of a very busy city centre. It was probably my first and only taste of a sick child and the reaction of The General Public towards it. Mothers steered their little people’s pushchairs away from us with our very obviously ‘infectious’ child (which of course she wasn’t!).

I always thought it had probably been a reaction to some Matey Bubbles bubble bath I had given her for Christmas and she’d had in her bath the night before the first rash appeared. Prior to that she’d only had baby bath bubbles and I couldn’t think of any new food or other allergen causing things she might have had contact with. Anyway it never came back again.

Today her and Davies leapt in Ady’s bath after him and were in it for ages. It had some sort of radox stress relief stuff in it and as I got her out I noticed a patch of red on her arm but it went away so I thought no more of it. She’s not had anything to eat or drink today that she’s not had many times before and we’ve not left the house since Wednesday.

So she’s woken up tonight, having gone to sleep really early and she is sitting here with rash patched identical to those ones 2 years ago on the tops of her legs, round her ankles and on one of her arms. Hopefully she will be rash free in the morning. We’ve done the glass test (just cos you do really, don’t you?) and given her piriton so we’ll have to see what the morning brings. It seems slightly irritated and she is itching at it but then she is a picker and a scratcher anyway so that doesn’t really mean anything.

in order to a) push the RSS breaking heart down so it don’t cause no trouble no more and b) for fun!

None of the people who live here with me knew which child this was in the picture today. Do you?

Hands up who knows the dance routine? 😉

Ady in still in the grip of ManCold and even took to his bed this afternoon in what I thought was a somewhat unnecessarily dramatic fashion!

I overslept this morning after staying up far too late last night drinking wine and reading an old diary. I did wonder about transcribing it to a blog but decided I probably already have enough of those and despite sharing most of my thoughts with the world at large via one or other my blogs now I’m not sure I’m ready to break 15-19 year old Nic out of her doodled on diaries just yet and share that early broken heart and determination to marry at least 13 different people when I grew up with the world just yet. 😳

There was stereo coughing from around the house anyway and I decided I needed to be virtually unconscious already before I went to bed otherwise I wouldn’t be able to sleep for all the COUGHING and would simply lie there plotting evil ways to do away with them all in cough related murders. So that’s my excuse!

Anyway, I overslept and was woken by Ady at 9am coming to ask what time my 8.30am hairdressing appointment was. Doh! Rang and explained but there were no other appointments available for today so I rang the hairdressers round the corner to see if they had any appointments. I used to go there but all the women who work there are scary skinny black clad women with lots of jangling bracelets, chunky streaks of blonde in their perfectly cut hair, fake nails and perfect make up. Also they don’t really talk to you they all look in the mirrors and talk to each other, mainly about other people and in a less than flattering manner. I always feel about 12 when I go there, but needs must and I was looking like a mad witch woman with wild and crazy bed head hair that I’ve worn up for the last 3 weeks so there was a need.

I managed to get an 11.30am appointment and actually it was fine. The woman was very nice and did talk to me and actually looked quite rough herself 😉 more due to a big night out last night than simply having two children and a husband determined to wreck my peace with their incessant coughing of course, but rough just the same ;-). Isn’t it funny how you just know that the conversation will end up being about HE. I briefly considered lying when she asked me if I had children as it seemed so inevitable but I owned up and sure enough about the third question was ‘which school does he go to?’ about Davies. Again I debated lying and naming one of the local ones but that could have had far reaching (although possibly quite hilarious in the re-telling) consequences if her sister had been a teacher there or her husband was the caretaker or something and she asked further questions, so I semi-lied and said I ‘taught them at home’ and made up all sorts of crap about following the NC online and using workbooks. Will I get struck down by the Lord Of Autonomy do you think? I’m banking on Him being a Lazy Bugger and hoping he won’t be arsed 😉

So I swung out of there looking as though I’d just stepped out of a salon and tossing my hair about looking at my reflection in all the shop windows and came home. Davies and I read today’s Bob book – again it was not easy as such but it was not torturous either and he really *can* read as in he can string sounds together and he does know all the sounds so at least the mechanics are finally there. He also is seeming to get some sense of achievement from it which is probably the biggest plus really. So hurrah! 😎

I nipped to Sainsburys for an odd assortment of requested treats as everyone’s been feeling rough this week. Davies wanted chocolate chip brioche which he adores and we used to have for breakfast regularly post frugality (must see how easy they are to make myself), Ady wanted some custard things he’d seen advertised on TV and Tarly wanted strawberries. Ady let the children watch trashy cartoons, had a bath and then went off to bed for the afternoon. I made the children watch Nick jr again and then they spent nearly an hour playing in the bath too. They have also played with geomags loads today which must have some sort of maths value – I heard Davies reasoning about triangles being stronger than squares or something similar and Scarlett was making repeating patterns with the colour sequences of the rods.

Me and the children have just watched Stars in their Eyes Kids and Davies has fallen in love with the Scissor Sisters as a result. Scarlett fell asleep naked on my lap so I managed to get a nightie over her head and deposit her in bed and Ady has roused himself from his bed and is now sitting on the sofa moaning softly :roll:. Oh, and coughing. If anyone’s around on trillian tonight I have a feeling I might be casting around for people to chat to!

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Happy 5th Birthday Becca 🙂

Hope you have a good one and look forward to seeing you at Melrose very soon! xxx

So we had all the autonomous learnin’ and stuff going on here today which was nice. 🙂 After my last post I went and did some muffinicity and baked bread and rolls for lunch. The rolls were made with brown flour which I have not used before and it’s a very different animal to the white. I added pumpkin seeds to the brown rolls and they were really nice.

My Mum arrived at lunchtime complete with supplies to add to the rolls of posh pate, posh crisps and cream cakes 🙂 We ate lunch with Earl Grey tea and for a short time I regained Princess Status 😉

She also brought a massive bag crammed with materials for Davies to use for his puppet making and it imediately got used fro dressing up. I probably should have taken photos really but we had mermaids using the shimmery irridescent material, Little Red Riding Hood using the red velvet and my basket, Pirates/ Highwaymen using the green velvet, the Captain Hook boots and sword from the dressing up box and Uniqua from the Backyardigans using some pink netting! Scarlett was also the grateful recipient of a gorgeous Moonsoon jumper with princesses and swans appliqued onto it 🙂 Materialistic, moi?! 😉

Mum and I chatted while the children frankly ran amok – they have not done well being ill this week and then spending two days stuck indoors but I can explain and justify their ‘wildness’ so I shall not dwell on it. Ady arrived home around 3pm but had work to do on his laptop so he was with us without really being with us. Then an advert for Floam came on Nick jr. Now Floam is something Davies and I have been coveting ever since we first saw the advert, Davies had asked for some for Christmas but I’d explained we couldn’t afford it and the deal was that if we ever saw any to buy in a shop then we’d buy some. Mum was equally taken with the advert and when Davies explained how much he wanted it and had done for ages she whipped her credit card out and told me to phone and order some! So I did 🙂

Scarlett had by then utterly had enough, both children had been sent to their rooms earlier in the afternoon and she’d never really recovered from it so she was begging to go to bed and in the end we relented. Mum left shortly after Tarly went to sleep and it was very probably the nicest time I’ve spent with her in a long while – and I am truly not just saying that cos of all the cash she lavished on us! Davies took slightly longer to go to sleep and when I got downstairs from getting sitting with him Ady was asleep on the sofa so a wild and crazy Friday night has not really been had by one and all here, but I am on my third glass of wine, thanks to inspiration from Ali I have a possible career plan in place (although it will involve tapping my Dad up for cash for training to get a qualification) and tomorrow I managed to get a cancellation hair cut appointment for first thing in the morning so I will be feeling all lovely and groomed aswell as getting an hour of pampering away from the voices of small children and my not too frequent but enjoyable on an ad hoc basis fix of life for the single gal from my early 20s still living at home hairdresser.

I’ve created a !

As I’ve said before, and indeed as Merry has said very recently the instant you start to fret about education along they come and show it everything is right on track. Sometimes however the reverse happens. So this week I’ve been banging on to people generally about how wonderful autonomous education is, how it really does work, how you have to take that leap of faith and trust the process, how ‘reading ages’ are a load of bollocks and in the same way as you now could not tell by looking at my two children which of them was walking at nearly 18 months and which was walking around their first birthday as they are both as good at walking as each other it doesn’t matter what age a child learns to read aslong as they do learn.

So could someone, anyone tell me why when my 5 year old clambered up on my lap with a book and asked me to read it to him I went into one? I started to say we could read it together and asked him what the first word was (It), he couldn’t tell me so I asked him what the first letter was. He also couldn’t tell me and did that squirming, coughing, tugging at his pjs, blinking, nodding his head thing that little children do while raising his (already quite high pitched) another octave and saying ‘I can’t do it. I’ve forgotten what the letters are. I don’t know.’ So I lost it 🙁 I explained that now he really is old enough that he should be in school and if he was in school ‘I can’t do it’ wouldn’t be good enough. I explained that it was OK for him to not go to school aslong as we could show that we were doing everything he would do in school and he was not being held back educationally by staying at home. I told him that we could get visited by someone to check that I am doing it right and if he couldn’t read they would decide that I wasn’t and they might make him go to school. Urgh! None of which I particularly believe or agree with or is very likely to happen but I just can’t bear him simply not even having a go at something just because it involves more effort than he is prepared to put in. So failings all round in both of us there really!

Anyway, this is a positive post as I’ve decided that it is allowed to kick start autonomy and then go back to being a lazy bugger again afterwards ;-). So I went and got the Bob books (the same Bob books I told someone – Ali?) that I thought were not that good actually earlier this week. And we sat, and we cuddled up and he read the first four! There was a fair bit of relying on the pictures and I don’t for one moment think if he was given the words out of context he’d be able to instantly ‘read’ them again. But he actually really enjoyed it 🙂 He ‘got’ the idea of the letters joining together, he ‘got’ the idea of different starting letters meaning the same sound (e.g. mat and sat) or a rhyming word he didn’t need to start from scratch with spelling out, he simply needed to change the starting sound and he actually agreed that reading was fun and it would be pretty cool to be able to do it all by himself (a first!).

We stopped at four when Scarlett started to get too distracting and he was beginning to get bored and I wanted to stop while we were ahead. So we’ve agreed to read one per day and see how we get on. Anyway, I headed off to get Scarlett dressed and far from running as far as possible away from the concept he decided AUTONOMOUSLY 😉 to try his hand at spelling! Writing is something he has long since mastered but of course you need to be able to spell or sort of read before you can actually write words, so I think that will be the pull for him to read – he actively wants to write. He got out a pen and paper and wrote the above and then called me in to tell me he’d written ‘monster’ Muh ssss duh argh. I wrote ‘monster’ out for him and talked him through why is is spelt the way it is and he then had a bash at writing ‘bananas’ which is the name of his favourite cuddly toy – a small red frog. He got bored after the ‘ba’ bit and ended up turning the ‘a’ into a picture of the toy instead – but that’s fine 🙂

Anyway it amused me greatly that his first self spelt word is Monster – which unbeknown to him is how he was known online for a year or so and indeed is his blogoname – I don’t think Tarly’s first spell is likely to be Teeny though, infact ‘Tarly’ and ‘spell’ conjour up visions of witches and cauldrons rather than home education ;-).

So if there is one single thing guaranteed to get me googling for divorce lawyers and adoption agencies it is spouse or offspring with coughs. And guess what? I’m bloody surrounded by them!

Anyway, dark and evil thoughts of ways to stop them from coughing aside it’s been an OK day today. Davies is tired from two late nights, early mornings and waking ups in the middle, Scarlett is tired from two nights with small hour wanderings round the house, Ady is tired from dealing with the early mornings and he’s in the throes of the poorliness and I’m generally tired and although over feeling crap I still feel entitled to the recuperation period which I’m clearly not going to get! 😉 So none of us were at our best today. Added to the mix was me alternately fretting about the phonecall, feeling guilty for not having any enthusiasm or inclination to ‘make puppets’ with Davies and knowing there were at least 400 tasks I could be getting on with and feeling productive about but prefering to spend ages researching a potential career choice on the internet instead.

We did have plenty of arts and crafts though, by way of Davies making his own stick puppets, me sitting with them drawing and colouring for a good half an hour, I read a huge pile of library books aloud to one, other or both of them, I sorted out the coats, I did a load of washing and got it dry, I cooked a dinner, Davies played on the Nick Jr site and also had a little look at BBC jam although I think my assistance is required for a proper first look round, I brushed Scarlett’s hair and plaited it and she’s spent a goodly portion of the day cuddled up on the sofa next to me being very cute and loving and of course I did indeed gather together all the relevant paperwork for said scary phonecall and carry it out.

So in many ways I guess it’s been productive in it’s own little way 🙂 I’ve been doing loads of background pondering about autonomy the last couple of weeks and had a couple of interesting chats with people about it (Julie and Ali in particular) – which I will try and get round to clarifying enough to blog at some future point, including a more honed Ed Phil – which given Davies is now Officially Home Educated is probably something I should have sort of prepared, just in case and all. I think I’ll probably keep if for after Melrose though as that’s sure to sway me in one way or another once again.

well will update on buymelove actually, but wanted to let those waiting know, everything is OK, very reassuring phonecall 🙂 No quick fix cure obviously but no dire and dismal news either.

The trouble with being upbeat generally is that rather than doing a constant Eyeore you end up being positive until the very last possible moment and then have all your doubts crash upon you at once! Only an hour and a half to go before scary phonecall…

This morning Davies wanted to make puppets using the library books for ideas and inspiration but we really have very little in the way of puppet making materials. So he made some stick puppets using paper, scissors and glue (suddenly his cutting out skills are really very good, not sure how that happened and not entirely sure I’m so thrilled about all the small bits of paper scattered around the carpet as a result but hey!). I rang my Mum – who manages a charity shop and asked her to bring over some scraps of materials next time we see her (probably tomorrow) cut from the stuff which goes into their rags as being unsaleable. Hopefully that will get him started anyway.

He’s now playing Nick jr, which for some reason it has only just occurred to me to make the home page on the computer in the playroom so he just has to open up firefox and off he goes without me needing to help at all. He’s a bit groggy today so I think a couple of days indoors is just what he needs.

I have sorted out the coats in our hall and hung some wrong season ones up, Scarlett decided that actually she rather likes Davies’ outgrown winter coat so that’s been put aside for her as have a couple of pairs of Davies’ old wellies, everything else I have photographed ready for ebaying but realised we’ll be heading off to northern parts a week tomorrow so ebaying today would be a bad idea, will save it for when we get back.

And now I’m going to have a quick tidy up and read to Scarlett for a while to take my mind off it all. Back later…

I forgot to mention that I have these odd ulcer type spot things on my tongue. They’ve been there for 3 days now and are not very hurty (although hot food and drinks sting a bit) but aside from worrying about them being a sign of some horrific disease and not very attractive they have also effectively closed all sorts of career options to me; professional kisser, tongue model, stamp licker and sticker…..

Last night we were the house of the amazing non sleeping children which is always wearing 🙁 Davies had clearly decided that Scarlett had had too much attention during the day so he stayed awake til nearly 10pm wanting one of us to sit with him because he was scared – not even scared of anything specific, just generally scared! So we managed to have baths and cook a dinner with one of us sitting with him and then he stayed in his room while we ate it and then I sat with him until he went to sleep. Bleurgh!

Tarly then woke in the night and Ady just deposited her in bed with me – she sleeps on top of me but I can just about handle it aslong as I am not fully awake and can get straight back to sleep – and buggered off to her bed. Both children were up at 6am though 🙁 Seemingly fully recovered from yesterdays maladies so our planned trip to the newly refurbished soft play could indeed go ahead.

Dad turned up for an hour before we set off and retrospectively probably had a reason for his visit although he is in the habit of appearing at least once a week during the day, normally around lunchtime 😉 which I think could be due to our threatened possible move away at some future point, which he is very vocally opposed to. So we had some general chats before he headed off home again and we headed off to soft play. We’d arranged to meet Lucy there and Julie as well and Lucy had also invited a friend of hers so we pretty much took over the place. Lucy had her two and her nephew with her, her friend had an 18 month old boy and a 3 yo girl and then Julie and I had our 4. So there were 4 three year old girls which was a nice little pink posse running around together. Davies found a little gang to be the leader of and spent time happily ordering the helper teenage worker around and getting her joining in with their games on the slide.

I had a chat about HE with Lucy’s friend who thought it was a cool idea but her 3yo is very happy in nursery so it is not for her… Lucy and her left around lunchtime and then Julie and I gave the children lunch before heading back in for a final play. Scarlett had had enough by then so spent some time on my lap while Julie and I talked about Education, Autonomy and Trusting The Process. We’ve never really talked about educational approach much so it was nice to have a chat about such things and I gave her my views on reading and writing etc so at least she has another persons viewpoint to help with starting to make decisions about appoaches from here. We also talked about nursery generally and specifically for our children and I explained how our approach works with a few examples of being a bit cunning about shoving education into day to day life without actually having a curriculum.

Then we headed over to the main Worthing library. Julie wanted to return some books and it is literally across the road from soft play so we joined her in our quest for books on film making and puppets. There was a computer set up with some alphabet games and some version of paintshop or similar which Davies commandeered and then had a little audience of Jack, Maisie and Scarlett gathered round him while I gathered up a large amount of books including a couple of Dr Seuss we’ve not read yet, the required books for Davies, an Eric Maddern we’d borrowed before but not read and chatted about as much as I’d planned to at the time, Brittania which leapt off the shelves at me having read others raving about it so I thought I’d better grab, a book about ‘where babies come from’ as we’ve been getting dangerously close to that question with both children so this might be a good way to ‘do it’ once and for all with a nice introduction rather than waiting til we’re in the queue at Sainsburys or somewhere else with a large audience. 😉 Also gathered up a couple more story books and in my continuing but truly accidental trend for reading upsetting books I picked up Richard Peltzer’s book (brother of a boy called it) and a book about the girl who was kidnapped by a paedophile (name escapes me, will come back and edit later when downstairs). I also said Davies could choose a film and then when all of them just seemed too Disney princesses or too Tweenies we sort of jointly agreed on Five Children and It which he’s already sat through once and I plan to watch with him in the morning as it looked pretty good. He’s really into his films atm and much though I am not after him sitting watching the TV all the time he really does seem to be getting a lot out of them so I am happy to encourage it, I might have to think about taking him to Blockbusters or somewhere though rather than the library’s limited selections.

We came home where the film went straight on, Scarlett played some odd game involving laying loads of dolls and soft toys around the room and then covering them with paper as sheets to put them all to bed – dormitory stylee, no idea where she gets such ideas from! Ady arrived home from work feeling rough and the children had a very long bath with every bath toy in the room in there with them.

Tomorrow I am getting a Very Important Phonecall at 3pm and my Dad isn’t able to be here as previously planned so the children have said they’ll be quiet in exchange for playdoh ;-). I’m planning some baking and some reading of all these library books in the morning and the phonecall in the afternoon.

Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday to you,
Happy Birthday dear Joyce,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU! 🙂

see you soon xxxx

From Savage Garden who we listened to in the car on the way to Ali’s. We also listened to a bit of James Blunt, some Huey Lewis, a bit of Joshua Kadison, some ABC and a touch of Rod Stewart. The children were impressed and less than impressed in varying amounts!

Tarly did indeed have a dreadful night’s sleep ending up in bed with me around 3am while Ady snuck off to her bed and she’s veered between almost OK and utterly not well at all today. We cancelled Liam and Lily coming over (right decision) and after checking with Ali that she was prepared to face contamination we headed over there anyway (also right decision – I hope!) where she did pull off some playing, some jellytots eating and some general interacting alongside some sitting on my lap, some wailing and demanding and some dozing. She’s now on the sofa, under a blanket about to be calpol’d, pj’d and bedded.

Davies and Freya did some very impressive big drawings of Wallace and Gromit inspired by Freya’s earlier version of Gromit. Davies also did a Shaun the sheep, worthy of note if for no other reason that it’s five legs – perfectly acceptable and intentional according to Davies as ‘I am five’ and of course a joy if only breedable by farmers due to the 120% sales potential for leg of lamb! They are now gracing the wall going up the stairs. Davies also spent ages playing with a magnet, did some very cute attentive big brother stuff for Tarly, made us melt and laugh by coming into the kitchen to say ‘I wish someone would come and help me eat all these crisps – they are so salty my lips are getting sore!’, enjoyed playing with a marble run and a sort of pinball marble rally type game, disappeared upstairs with Freya for some sort of game and spent a while playing with Freya’s Leapster (v. impressed with that, will have to peek at ebay!). He also pulled off a fine line in attention seeking annoyance when he suddenly realised that in curling up on my lap and falling asleep Scarlett had left the vacancy of irritating offspring open for him to take the baton and run with it! 😉

Scarlett got her 3rd time lucky birthday gift of two fab books from Ali – a colour your own The Very Hungry Caterpillar which is ace and Long Live Princess Smartypants which also looks good.

I did manage, as always, a really good chat with Ali too. Thanks for that mate 🙂 x We covered life in general, money, work, HE, autonomy, parenting, rants and tantrums (of the adult variety) and probably loads more. The sun shone and it has been one of those days it’s good to be alive, good to be a parent, good to be a Home Educator and excellent to have friends to make you tea with vile milk, pesto pasta and lend an ear to bend!

Right off to get poorly girl to bed but I might be back later, I have some ponderings I might snatch out of my head and commit to blog post a bit later.

Well I did indeed coerce Tarly into her bedroom for a mammoth trying on session. And blimey, the girl has grown! She did have a very large mix of clothes sizes in her wardrobe and I don’t think I’d previously realised just how much different stores sizes vary even in clothes for small children. Davies has always been on the small size (aside from a period as a toddler when as a late walker he was a little chubby) so still happily wears his 4-5 clothes aside from underwear but at least all the clothes seem to be the same size.

Tarly has clothes from Boots of 18-24 months which still fit (a couple of skirts and she is by no means skinny round the waist) although I have now put them in the ebay pile as I’m bored of seeing her in them nearly two years later 😉 She has Sainsburys clothes which are way too snug aged 2-3 and she has Laura Ashley outfits aged 4 and even 5 years which if she doesn’t wear now she never will. I’ve also realised today that the wedding we are going to the day after Melrose will require suitable winter wedding attire which I don’t think any of us have so I need to try and assemble outfits for that instead of leaving it until the Saturday morning and then panicking! So I think she is pretty much sorted for the next few months now, I have a pile of stuff for ebaying although it will all have to have the disclaimer of being ‘suitable for playing’ as it’s clearly worn, Scarlett is the classic ‘tough on her clothes’ child from washing powder adverts. 😉 I need to gather up stuff already bought for her for the summer and decide on what, if anything needs to be bought to see her through that as of course if you don’t buy summer clothes now in January there won’t be any left by March!

While we were doing this mini fashion show she crashed and burned and ended up going to bed without any tea as she came down with the cold and had simply had enough – charming and happy to fast asleep via stroppy and wailing in under an hour – impressive! Davies has been gradually going down with it all day too so I imagine we’ll all be just delightful tomorrow…

Just looking around flickr and found this. I think it’s really cool 🙂