One word? When seven would do…

From my all time favourite Christmas record. Ever. Have not heard it yet this year but as soon as I do (which is likely to be any day now) I will be flooded with that festive feeling 🙂

So. Advent. Now I know some of you hate Christmas, some of you love it, some of you don’t mind it but just wish it didn’t start sometime in early September. Well I love it! I shouldn’t by rights really, we always had really crappy Christmasses as children, my birthday is so far on top of it that all my celebrations for the year are over in a fortnight and given my past career mainly in Retail Management and the long hours I have worked over Christmasses past it should be a time of dark nights and expense! But I now live with a man who simply adores everything festive and holly coated and have two small people in the house who really do believe in flying reindeer with glowing red noses, a big fat man in a red suit who has a crap scriptwriter (well HO!HO!HO! is hardly ‘I have a dream is it?), truly expect to wake up every morning in December and see snow and sing jingle bells with all the enthusiasm of someone who has no inkling how cold and uncomfortable dashing across the snow on a one horse open sleigh might be! But as I was saying, I do love Christmas, as a family we have already begun to start our own festive traditions and I love the air of excitement, anticipation and goodwill to all men. I don’t hold any religious beliefs but I do know that aside from frustrations about shopping in busy shops, worrying about the expense of the season and where you will seat Great Aunt Edna round a six seater table that already has fourteen people sat round it and never being sure quite when you should start defrosting the turkey this time of year does bring out the best in most of us. That couple of hours of the first day of a new year when everyone is walking home drunk and shouting Happy New Year to each and everyone they pass walking drunkenly in the opposite direction when you truly believe this new year will be the one that all your dreams come true and you have such high hopes for everything really is the most wonderful time of the year.

So romantic monologue aside so far the morning can be divided into two clear cut categories:

Things I love –
Christmas! Advent calendars begin today so kids both had chocolate before breakfast! Ady has put the Christmas cds (we have over 20 as a result of him bringing all the ones home from work last Christmas and work no longer being there for him to take them back this year!) on constant loop on the cd player so we are being seranaded by a children’s choir which is lovely on all the traditional carols, the rat pack are doing a good version of Mary’s Boy Child, Chestnuts roasting on an open fire and the like and a ‘fun’ version of stuff like Rudolph, when Santa got stuck in the chimney and Frosty the Snowman;
Deliveries! I have this morning had two of the four things I am waiting for – ink cartridges for my printer, which is less than exciting but does mean I can orint off some flyers for our new WAG home ed group and get them posted out, and Beads which I have opened but not looked at properly yet despite the kids pleas! Still waiting for some photo gifts (calendar and a mug) and a massive Hawkins order of stocking fillers and jokey stuff.
Getting the dinner on early – have peeled, chopped and stuck in the oven with children’s assistance a beef stew, which is already scenting the house with ‘eau de housewife’ type wafts and means there will be no squabbling about who does dinner tonight and I can maybe get some wrapping up done and have a bath!
Being organised! Have got my job list and can see stuff on it getting done! I Have already done three loads of washing and have some drying and some ready to go in the tumble drier when the last load of washing is done.

Things I am less keen on:
dressing gowns! normally I just fling on a bum skimming nightie until I get dressed which hastens the process along as I get cold. But today for some reason (up early I think) I pulled a dressing gown on too, which has been good considering the amount of deliveries I have answered the door to, but bad as it meant I didn’t get dressed til 9.30am – which would have been later still if I hadn’t got pissed off with the swishyness of my dressing gown knocking things over as I whizzed round the house!
spluttering offspring who still don’t sleep! they are both sat, pale faced and whiney in the lounge watching Nick Jnr and randomly coughing constantly! They are very tired and can only raise themselves off the sofa every so often to fall out with each other over someting petty before crawling back on the sofa again! We have done the vegetable cutting and naming this morning, listened to some carols and will be going to Rachel’s later so we can tick a few educational things off the list but I think that will be it for today.
Wasted time! I spent a useless hour this morning on the internet trying unsuccessfully to get tickets for Little Britain. They only went on sale on Sunday and I only read about it this morning and it’s not even until NEXT December but the two venues near enough to us have both already sold out 🙁 Did see some on ebay for twice the face value but I don’t think I’m that desperate! Maybe they’ll add more dates…

A bit of a nothing day today really. Infact were I not so blog addicted, not to mention keen that all the little dates on my calendar turn purple to show a post for that day, I almost wouldn’t bother blogging. So apologies in advance for the overal blahness of the below!

Woke in our own beds except for Scarlett this morning, not too bad a night and as Ady was going to the dentist he didn’t leave for work too earlyeither so I got a mini lie-in. He headed off and we all got dressed. Took the kids to Tescos to get the bits and pieces to make Scarlett’s cake, where despite Davies being a bit giddy and not watching where he was going and having to be snatched out of the path of oncoming heavily loaded trolleys about 14 times they behaved well. We also listened to the choir singing carols outside for a bit which made me think again about taking Davies to a carol concert somewhere. I have debated it for the last two years and never done it. On the one hand I feel a bit hypocritical going to a church when I have no belief and just enjoy the carols and the atmosphere of wonder and excitement – I was in the choir all through school and performed at the carol concert ever year and loved it. But I do want Davies to learn about religion and it seems as good a time as ever to be around for one of Christianitys biggest celebrations to take him to a church… will look into the local church services and see…

Home again for lunch and I stuck a Disney Countdown to Christmas dvd on for them which I had picked up in Woolies the other day (one of their you have spent over £5 would you like a dvd for a fiver special offers at the till) and they watched Toy Story too. Scarlett did some puzzles and that was about it. No real educational stuff happened, infact I seemed to be out of the room for most of the day getting various bits and pieces of my own job list done – which was nice but makes me feel as though I have been a bit neglectful now I am trying to recall what we did do today!

They are both feeling a bit better today and I think for once we have ended up with our quiet time at the beginning of the week and plans for the end of the week and it seems to be the best way. Tomorrow we are going to Rachel’s house in the afternoon, Thurday Julie and the twins are coming over and on Friday there is a walk organised with Activeo which I might go along to weather permitting and take a picnic. I am planning to put the decorations up on Saturday so we might start making some gingerbread decorations tomorrow morning ready to hang on the tree – or at least start practising by making some to eat now 🙂
To finish the day off I whizzed up to Boots (we have one of those supercentre ones near us next to Sainsburys and B&Q) and pretty much finished all my Christmas shopping. The last few extra bits and bobs for the kids – things like slipper socks and bubble baths, a pressie for Julie’s birthday, a couple of things for Ady including aftershave, a pestle & mortar, various small gifts for my mum, dad and brother. I did start wrapping stuff up but lost interest! It does need doing by the weekend though as I need to get everything we have bought Scarlett out and decide exactly what she is getting for Christmas and what is for her birthday, so if it’s all out I might as well wrap it all in the various paper! I can’t believe it’s not even December and I am this organised – I think it’s a hangover from two years ago when I was also super organised to make sure everything was done before the baby arrived…

See told you it was all blah and boring. Think I might get an early night }-)

You’re a girl power mommy! You love to be girly,
but you’re no pushover. Your kids are learning
that gender differences don’t have to mean
gender inequality. You’ve taken back pink, and
you don’t care who knows it!

What kind of a freaky mother are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

You are an OOMPA LOOMPA!
You are the most evil and foul being to walk this
earth. Get therapy! And stay away from my
family!

Monkey? Pizza? Death? Oompa Loompa?
brought to you by Quizilla

Well I don’t know how I did it – couldn’t tell you for love nor money – which is a shame as if I could just define all of the ingredients and the mix and the right temperature for cooking it then I am sure I could make my fortune for selling ‘Nic’s Good Day Tonic’ to all parents everywhere!

But there have been no tears, no raised voices, infact its been peace and harmony all the way 🙂

Another musical beds night – can’t even recall all the details but Davies did a stint in our bed but ended up back in his own, Scarlett started in her bed and ended up in ours, I did shifts in our bed, on Davies’ floor with a pillow and woke up this morning downstairs in Scarlett’s bed (which is both a room and a bed I have never slept in before 🙂 ) and Ady managed to stay in the same bed but certainly didn’t get much sleep either 🙂 Am feeling quite philosophical about it all though as they are both poorly with some sort of cold related lurgy and TBH I don’t know what we could do differently at the moment anyway, so I guess we just hope it improves soon, or list them both on Ebay’s next free listing day 🙂 Amazing how thankful you become for the smallest things though and the fact that we had an evening to ourselves and went to bed and had been asleep for a couple of hours before either of them woke up was a plus.

Anyway, today has been a really good day. I have cleared several things off my to do list and am making great headway with my online course too which is giving me a real sense of achievement 🙂 So up, breakfasted and dressed we broke out the glitter to make some Christmas cards for the MuddlePuddle list:

which actually went pretty well, many of you will be opening envelopes full of glitter and our vacuum cleaner is looking very festive with spangly bits nestling in its clear window, but they were both good at getting into being creative:

We did, of course, end up with Scarlett simply upending the glitter and sequin pots all over the carpet (not the mat I had put down obviously!) and Davies got bored and wandered off. I then spent probably as long clearing up as we had making the cards (I think we managed about 12 so far) but as it was actually quite theraputic picking up sequins and putting them back in their pot I didn’t mind. Then hoovered up most of the excess (although of course there will be glitter in the carpet til February now!) and made lunch. Neither of them ate much, prefering instead to wait until I had unpacked the Tesco shop which arrived while they were supposed to be eating and then nicking crumpets off me!

After lunch Davies did some playing on the computer – a bit of Cbeebies website and then back to his old favourite maze puzzles
which gave me some time to play puzzles with Scarlett:
which she is really good at. We then dug out all the old puzzles from Davies’ bedroom – most of which seem to be missing at least one piece – sharp intake of breath! and played with them too. Davies did a bit of wooden train set too and also joined in the puzzles.

They have been really nice to each other all day, very tactile with their hugs and kisses and just generally cute. Mel emailed me earlier to cancel lunch as they are all ill, which actually was good cos mine probably were not up to being nice to other children too 🙂 They were both asleep not long after 7 although they have both been coughing and spluttering so I don’t know for how long…

Educationally, apart from the arty crafty stuff we have also covered some alphabet stuff when Davies brought in a wooden alphabet puzzle and started talking about the letters, I taught him how to answer the phone – both as in how to do it by which button to press and how to do it ‘nicely’ by asking who is calling and so on – I rang him a couple of times from my mobile to ‘test’ him too. We then talked about 999 emergency calls and I showed him how to do it and we talked about which service he would ask for in certain circumstances, when he would ring and what sort of emergencies he could think of when you might ring 999. We talked about making sure he gave the address (which he already knows) and he did do a bit of faffing about telling the hypothetical operator that we used to live in Manchester but now we live in Sompting 🙂 So I guess that ticks off essential life skills!

I have fought with myself not to start ‘testing’ him on skeletons and just enjoy how organic the learning here is at the moment, but it does go against all my instincts!

Tonight I dressed the kids in red pyjamas and we took them up to Davies’ room to take some pics infront of the Christmas tree in the hope of getting a good shot for our family Christmas cards. Still don’t have that elusive perfect shot like we managed last year, but having decided perhaps we won’t get it we have chosen one which is quite nice so Ady will hopefully get the cards tomorrow for me to start writing.

Tomorrow I have another day of nothing much planned before we have stuff organised for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Although I might need to go on a hunt for ready to roll icing to create the Dora cake I have convinced myself I *need* to make for Tarly’s birthday next week. Maybe an educational, wrapped up warm, walk into Lancing is in order 🙂

Finally the Maths round up for the day:
Dora’s leg iron on – zero, she is still up high on a shelf with one leg from yesterday
cups of tea made and left to go cold before pouring down the sink – three
cups of tea made and actually drunk – none 🙁 (maybe my teadrinking turns me into an evil monster mummy and that’s why I’ve been so mellow today!)
times stll to hoover before glitter is lifted from the carpet – at least four

Will blog properly later but for Jax we thought it was pretty good

And Jenny, yes please that’d be fab 🙂

After we did the jungle puzzle the kids got the plastic animals out and were matching them to the animals on the puzzle. Davies suddenly asked me about a giraffe’s skeleton, we have been doing various bits on skeletons ever since the last London trip to the science museum when we bought a little bones kit. We have done stuff like naming the main bones, made the cotton bud skeletons, looked in our human body books for more details, played the game Jax mentioned and so on. It’s all been totally Davies led and I have merely answered his questions or if I can’t then we have found them together.
So I googled and found a site with various animal skeleton pictures, and printed out a giraffe one for him. It also had frogs, fish, camels, snakes, emus, turtles and a couple of others. He was excellent at working out what the animal was from its skeleton and we talked a bit about how their skeletons are different to ours. In all I suppose it was a ten minute exercise, totally based on his interest and at his request. It’s really hard not to leap on it and start some big bone based project tomorrow but as that seems to be a sure fire way of ceasing his interest in stuff I will abstain and hope his next question is not too far away.

Well last night just got better and better! After my drunken post I had a big heart to heart with my Mother where she begged forgiveness for everything she has ever done wrong – which in my magnanamous love the world mood I happily bestowed upon her 🙂

We were all fairly drunk and pretty loud and kept disturbing Scarlett. Mum and Dad got a cab home at 11.15 and Ady and I went up to bed. I was just removing clothing in a manner designed to kickstart some LI when smallest child awoke and started climbing up the stairs. (Although reading round the blogring I don’t think we were the only couple with foiled LI plans last night 🙂 ). She joined us in bed, very swiftly followed by older child and shortly after midnight all four of us were in our bed singing Christmas carols 😀 me and Ady obviously intoxicated, the kids simply in utter disbelief at the whole situation! I then got a fit of hysterical giggles and fell asleep, Davies did too and Ady and Scarlett did some sort of musical bed type game for the rest of the night. At 6.30am she appeared in our bed again and woke up Davies and I (Ady was in Davies’ bed!) so I got up with them while Ady crawled back into our bed for another couple of hours sleep.

Made some chocolate croissants with the kids for breakfast, replied to a couple of emails I had been putting off and sat with Scarlett while she completed the jungle puzzle pretty much all by herself (v impressed with her as its a 3yr+ one and she is really looking at the pieces, saying which bit of an animal she can see and then looking to find the rest of it on another piece). Davies came over to assist and we all looked at the various animals for a bit. Ady then appeared so I went off to get dressed, got the kids dressed and we headed off to Chris and Julie’s.

Arrived and had a cup of tea and a bit of a group chat before Julie and I headed off to do a bit of Christmas shopping leaving the men with the kids. We had a very pleasant few hours wandering round the shops. Julie got everything she was after (amazingly organised that woman – she has browsed all the various gift catalogues all the retailers have produced and had a list of everything she wanted which she promptly ticked off as we got them – a far cry from my wander round the shops, credit card in hand randomly purchasing things as I go!). I picked up a couple of other bits from ELC for the kids (some scales, some more magic maize, a reward chart thingy) and the wrapping paper for the kids’ Christmas pressies and Tarly’s birthday – wrapping begins tomorrow evening! We had lunch out (only a sandwich and a hot chocolate but as before, so nice to have it un’aided’ by small people!) before returning back to their house for the kids tea.

Scarlett was very very tired (surprising that!) so we borrowed a pair of Maisie’s pyjamas and she fell asleep on the way home in the car – Davies was also asleep by 7.30pm so although I don’t for one moment expect them to stay that way I have plans to get into our bed while it is still an adult only zone pretty soon 🙂 Except Ady’s just turned on BBC3 for Little Britain which I may not be able to turn off (we have just been talking about a fantasy I’m a celeb cast and dreaming up Little Britain characters in there and the different situations – it’s great fun living here!)

Tomorrow Mel is coming over for lunch with L and L and I really, really, really do intend to make some Christmas cards with the kids!

and in between challenging members of my own family to what song are these lyrics from I thought I’d drop on by to tell you all that I really, really love you xxxxx

ps the lyrics are: words are very unneccesary they can only do harm….

Has been a pretty good one today actually. Up exceedingly early with the children (well about 6.30 actually, which would not be so early if Scarlett has not woken up just as I was about to go to bed at midnight last night, come up to our bed with me and persisted in trying to get into Davies’ room to wake him up to play with her until she finally fell asleep at about 3.30am!), and we got out the various Christmas crafty books I got from the Book People and made the igloo, swiss chalet and advent calendar pull outs from inside them in our pyjamas – very festive feeling 🙂
I then went off to have my haircut which I always enjoy having done, and I got my fix of what ‘the youth of today’ is up to from the teenager who does it, which made me feel about a hundred! Appparantly they still drive up and down in their cars of an evening on the same little convoy circuit that I used to participate in 13 years ago, and she gets ‘really, really drunk’ on half a bottle of cheap white wine and some archers – I probably should be worrying about the fact this will be Scarlett in about 12 years time, but for now it gave me a little glowing feeling of nostalgia 🙂

Back home again and my parents (who are *always* late) were already waiting for me so we loaded everyone up in the people carrier and set off to Bluebell Railway. Mum sat in the very back with Davies, Dad sat in the middle with Tarly and me and Ady were the grown ups in the front! It was very expensive to do the full return trip in first class on the steam engine (£63) but luckily my Dad is made of money (well he always asked if I thought he was and frankly I still think he might be!) and paid for it. I have a selection of fairly poor photos as for some reason neither of us seemed capable of getting a good one today!

And one okay one!

Ady’s arty steam shot:

A typical Tarly picture – check out the mucky face, the dirty knees and the windblown hair!

Finally these two which although are poor photos being over exposed really show how alike their features are (although not as alike as some Puddle and Portico children I could mention!)

Still with me? Good!

The kids quite enjoyed the train actually, at the end of the line we stopped for a cup of tea and a run around, then back on again to the main station for some lunch. The carriage we were in was a real old fashioned, murder on the train type one, it had cute little lamps which came on when we went through a tunnel and as Ady had the window open the whole time we were all covered in little spots of smog when we got off from the steam billowing in. Dad told us all about how he and his mother used to travel from North Wales to London on the train twice a year to visit his aunt on trains just like that one, very romantic to listen to, but I imagine really quite an epic to have done!

Lunch was okay – overpriced and not the most delicious meal ever but hey-ho. We then stood about for a while watching trains chug in and out and get loaded up with coal and water, which held the kids attention for a bit, then home. We all sang along to big band songs all the way home to keep Tarly awake – great fun having a car loaded up with six people all singing Mac the Knife 🙂

Davies has fallen asleep while I am typing (result! it’s only 7.30!) and Scarlett is also in bed so a nice evening ahead with Mum and Dad staying for curry. I also had a chat with Dad about finances and stuff and I am going to try and remortgage the house after Christmas to sort out our dire finances again, hopefully I am about to start bringing a small amount of money back into the house again soon as well and Dad has said that if the bank won’t help then he will, which at least means we don’t have any worst case scenarios to worry about too much. So in all a good day – won’t be able to watch X Factor or I’m a celeb as Dad hates both, but never mind eh? I only get all ranty about them both anyway!

More cos I like the word ‘yacht’ (which I found really hard to type!) than anything else, it’s one of those words which unless you are in yachting circles you probably only use when trying to come up with an example for the letter Y! And one I have no idea how to explain when we get to sounding out letters to make words with either 🙂

Current Dora leg back on ironing for the day – 17!

Failed miserably to get the house anywhere near ready for Julie, Jack and Maisie to arrive and the lounge was amass with pretend food and crockery, the playroom was full of crayons which Davies and Scarlett were fighting over while colouring in some Thomas pictures and I was midway through tidying up my pit of a desk (which is now super organised and ready to do work at!) I finished sorting the desk out while Julie supervised all the kids colouring before we went into the lounge and set up a game of some sort of cafe with all the food on one table and the crockery on the other. Davies and Scarlett were excellent at getting food we asked for (Davies did stuff like select breakfast foods, all vegetables and so on, Scarlett was finding specific food like ‘a lemon’, ‘a sausage’ or certain coloured foods.) Jack and Maisie mainly just pretended to eat it (or in Maisie’s case actually tried to!), then we made some real lunch which they ate picnic style on a messy mat on the floor.
After lunch we had the usual getting out every toy in the house and scattering it around the place including more abuse of books 🙁 but this time Julie helped tidy up with me behind them all and a fair bit of education went on. Davies played with the dinosaurs and was telling Jack which one’s ate meat and which ones ate plants and what they were all called, Scarlett did a puzzle with me, while Maisie played with the beauty case and pretend dried her hair and put make up on. So although there was mess it was all at least being played with and I was not left to tidy it all up at the end:-) I also trimmed Maisie’s fingernails as she won’t normally have them done but as I did Scarlett’s and she had been playing beauty salons she thought it was great fun:-) We decided it was too wet to venture out to the park this week so they headed off at about 2.30pm. After that we had a bleak half hour with screaming children aplenty! Can’t even recall what about but I know they were both just really horrid and very loud, and it definitely had to do with Davies refusing to tidy up something before I let him have something else out 🙁 So I called time out and we all did some magic painting for half an hour for some calming theraputic quiet time. It did sort of work and by the time Ady got home at 4.30 the house was a slightly nicer place to be. Scarlett was asleep by about 6pm again and Davies is currently fighting it having been in bed since 6.30pm too in the vain hope that he might actually be asleep by 8.30 if we put him there that early 🙁 He has done this before and usually makes himself ill by huge lack of sleep until he ends up totally exhausted and falls asleep for about 14 hours and then gets himself back to his usual routine again – judging by the amount of toddlerlike behaviour these last two days I reckon he is almost at his breaking point so hopefully by next week he’ll be back to normal. I have decided that Scarlett just doesn’t need 12 hours sleep 🙁 She also seems to have some odd inbuilt body clock thing going on whereby she sleeps in two big chunks of 5 hours or so but has a couple of hours inbetween – so she will be asleep by 6.30ish, awake at 1am, back for about 4am and sleep till 9am. TBH if I didn’t have Davies I could almost go with that myself and be up with her in the night doing stuff but as I can’t sleep in with her it is not practical. I think we need to get her to fall asleep later in the evening, so she sleeps later into the night but I am not sure how to accomplish that – will worry about it after Christmas I think.

Have just arranged with my parents to go to Bluebell Railway with them tomorrow, which should be nice. I am having my hair cut first thing (so naturally I have a big spot on my forehead to sit and look in the mirror at for an hour!) so we should get there around lunchtime (which hopefully Dad will treat us to!), so a nice day with plenty of educational stuff to chat about.

But of the sensible variety. Following on from the Blogring post I have decided to ‘do a Sarah’ and create a load of categories under ‘edyoocatin’ to tick boxes so if I do ever need to look back and show what we have done, I can do something with my blog that way, but otherwise normal service will resume.
And just for old times sake – Hanging Gardens of Babylon!
*was very disappointed that my blog didn’t come up on the google search when I put HGOB in it actually!

I had forgotten my all time top frustration with hama beads (putting aside my crossness with the mini beads that fly off the peg board if you breathe too heavily or your cat runs across the room and swishes her tail near them!) which is that if the kids decide the finished creation is a ‘toy’ you are constantly re-ironing them to fix them together again – producing a squashed, square flat fat bead effect instead of the nice round firm chunky one. *This should by no means put anybody off the beads, they are a fab resource and can provide hours of educational creative fun, infact I am off to replenish our black, red and white supplies and perhaps try midi to see if my issues with Maxi and mini can be resolved 🙂 *

So there I am, ironing Dora’s leg back on for the 8th time this morning when I hear Scarlett utter the imortal words guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has met her or heard about her:

Messy! Mummy, uh-oh!

In her room I dash to find she has climbed on the roof of her dolls house to reach the baby talc and liberally sprinkled it round the dolls house, the Father Christmas animatronic figure which seems to have ended up in her room, her oil filled radiator and the foot of her Christmas tree. Festive image of snow in her bedroom aside, she had made something of a mess, yes! Luckily talc incidents are amoung the easiest to manage – even Davies, model child in comparison, covered his bedroom with talc one night when we thought he’d gone to sleep – so a quick hoover dealt with that one -and I like the smell of new babies and cleanliness it creates too 🙂

Talking of which – last week when I held baby A (Rachel’s) in the evening I felt like I was full of milk, I forgot about it til I held her again yesterday and as I cuddled her I swear I felt the old let down reflex kick in. Clearly there is no milk there, but how odd! I was in the middle of saying to Rachel that if we had had a third child then she would have been planned to be the exact age A is – a two year age gap after Scarlett, and also she is the only baby other than my own I have ever held. So although I don’t necessarily *feel* anything for her, I guess my body reckons if it is holding a baby then it should be feeding it. Very odd…

Have done some more hama this morning. Davies copied my snowman from yesterday and with only a small amount of help seemed to grasp the concept of following it as a pattern. Scarlett wants me to make a Boots and a Backpack to go with Dora – Backpack is managable – we have loads of purple beads and I even had a quick go last night while they ate tea but it was more of a rectangle with eyes and a mouth than anything amazing so I didn’t iron it – Boots has too much detail to fit in maxi beads so she might have to wait for the midis.

Right, I have half an hour to sort the house out ready for Julie and the twins to arrive, decide what to make everyone for lunch and oh yes, get Scarlett dressed 🙂

Well clearly she didn’t get enough answers then the loony bloody bint! I really didn’t want to watch I’m a celebrity this year, and tbh aside from Ant & Dec it probably isn’t worth it. But Natalie ‘I’m gonna be sick, I’m over it, hello I love you everyone I’ve ever met’ Appleton is really pissing me off. Me and Ady have been shouting at the TV and wanting to dump her head first in the most disgusting box ever.

It’s not like there have not been about four series before and they don’t know EXACTLY what they are letting themselves in for…

The other Santa pic in which I am sure you will agree he is looking a little less serious – maybe they are before (with all the hard nights work still ahead) and after (down the pub with the reindeers to celebrate a job well done!)

Cos you can buy my favourite cheap and nasty chocolate liqueurs anywhere and everywhere for abotu a quid a box! Normally I would plump for your classier chocolate (green and blacks over cadburys every time!) but I do love a nice dark chocolate filled with a nip of alcohol, and best of all Ady doesn’t like them so they are mine, all mine (ha ha ha ha!). But I digress….

Educational stuff has happened today here in vast amounts. I am model of how home education works for the under fives in a child led kinda way so I am! So lets get all the educational stuff out of the way first. Today we have:
done Hama beads, which has involved design and art skills, colour matching, fine motor skills, patience, science (understanding of the application of heat to the beads and how it changes them), pride in one’s work oh, and identifying a well known character from a fairly dodgey bead interpretation:
.Someone could anyway!
We did some Christmas designs and Davies actually finished his first ever design of a car without getting bored and giving up halfway through:
I can hardly believe it myself considering how long I have had the beads and thought they would never be used for anything other than scattering round the house and then being tidied up again. Such was the success of the activity I am off to Bead Merrily later to stock up a bit and maybe try some midi beads.

We also spent the afteroon with Rachel, E and baby A which involved socialising, negotiation of who was going to sit where and next to whom in the people carrier, some educational distraction games such as ‘count the red vans’, ‘count the dustcarts’ on the way there and a rousing singing session of Old McDonald had a Swiper (with an Ohhh Mannnn here, an Ohhhh Mannn there etc), Twinkle twinkle little star, the alphabet song (which I then told them was the same tune as Twinkle twinkle and we proved by Rachel and I singing abc while the boys sang Twinkle twinkle), the Dora theme tune and ‘I’m the map’ in a bid to keep Scarlett awake on the way back. We covered all sorts of educational stuff walking round the dinosaur place and the gardens and playing in the amusement area, we did loads of physical ed / running off of energy running round the outside area and tonight we have done a bit of literature with our bedtime stories of Aesops Fables, which also taught some morals and some maths (I will read you three stories, how many will be left to read after one? How many after two?).

So there you go. Actually it’s quite boring doing it like that isn’t it. Well we did tick lots of boxes anyway (maybe I could just stick some more categories in and be done with it). So we had a nice time doing hama this morning, both children really enjoyed it – definitely one to do again and more regularly. Rachel and co arrived just before midday and we shot over to Paradise Park for lunch (which none of the children really ate but never mind!), a walk round the dinosaur display, a play in the indoor amusements, a walk round the outside dinosaur display, more playing inside while Rachel fed A, a look round the shop where both of mine behaved dreadfully – Davies had a total meltdown about not being bought a really expensive dinosaur book which I had drawn his attention to as it was interesting but was not suggesting I buy for him. He never normally does this which made it even worse, then Scarlett started running about everywhere, chased by E which made her run more, we ended up, in some of surreal way in the middle of a group of about seven nuns who were having some sort of day out with me trying really hard to fight the urge to yell ‘for Christ’s sake will you two behave’ before turning to them and asking for them to pray for my children! Just about managed to herd them away from the nuns when a further meltdown happened when I said ‘Yes’ to E’s request for all the kids to have a lolly before realising he meant ice lollies. I then had to backtrack as although E is very tidy with ice lollies both of mine need a bowl to catch the drips and there was no way I was taking three children in my car with ice lollies. I finally got them out, with much grabbing of arms and collars, shouting, talking in a low and menacing tone and threatening all sorts of things and by the time we had them all installed in the car again we were fine. The funniest moment was Scarlett having a total fit about being picked up, struggling and bashing me until I snapped and said ‘what exactly do you want Scarlett?’ and she replied ‘a cuddle’ and sunk back against me – strange child!
Everyone came back in for a quick play and a cup of tea and a lovely day was had by all really. Oh also forgot to mention yesterday that I bought the JP video when I was in ELC last week and Davies watched it twice yesterday. Although I don’t think it has all sunk in as such, he has started to talk about words rhyming (which he was already familiar with as a concept but didn’t grasp why exactly before) and about sounds of letters joining together. I am not going to go mad and buy anymore of the stuff as we already have more than enough Letterland stuff around the place and I am sure I can pick up where the video leaves off with all the other resources we have in the house, but it does seem to have been the catalyst for him getting the idea which is fab 🙂

I love the blogring. I love the feeling of community (its a bit like being in Coronation street!) and the support and virtual hugs and stuff. I also really enjoy reading others accounts of their day and the educational stuff too…. Buuuuuutttt,

I have been wondering of late whether I should be on it with this blog really. For several reasons:
1. Not a great deal of HE happens on my blog. Part of this is the fact that the children are preschool age anyway, part of it is that the route we are currently looking to follow is pretty childled and often hard to quantify what has been learnt / taught / educated.
2. I don’t think I am ‘giving anything back’ to the HE community at large with it. I can’t think that anyone would be reading my blog and thinking ‘well it really really works for them, maybe I could do that’, I don’t think I am offering any sort of inspirational ideas or plans to help others with HE. The only thing I could appreciate I am doing is helping others feel better when they have a crap day and worry about whether they are doing the right thing and be able to perhaps compare themselves to me and feel better about what they are doing – none of which I am really comfortable with.
3. Finally I worry that we don’t really know who reads this. I am not concerned that what I have blogged will ever be used against me in some sort of courtroom drama scenario for a school attendance order or having my children taken away or anything that dramatic, but I also think that in terms of HE I don’t always show my true passion, committment and belief in it here and I worry that I do it more harm than good. The blogring can be accessed by so many people and stumbled across and while I don’t worry too much about who is reading it, or even if they are sympathetic or supportive to HE I do wonder what image I am putting across under the blatant banner of ‘HE WEBLOG’

Does any of this make sense? Many of the blogs are so much better at being good advertisements for HE, offering links, ideas, lesson plans, hints and tips on what works and what doesn’t etc. I am not fishing for compliments here as I know plenty of people read – and comment – and seem to enjoy what I do blog, and I would continue to blog in the exact same way and be accessible to all those who currently read it – I am just pondering whether I should be part of the blog ring.

What do others think?

Days. As in it’s been one of those….

Kids are pretty ghastly right now (doing their high volume chasing each other about and being very very irritating) but have been in the main pretty good today. Both are running on virtually no sleep and both are in the throes of a cold snot lurgy so I am prepared to make allowances, although I wish they were old enough to have at least some sense of where and when to run shrieking! (Handy hint, that would be not at my parents house and not when I am trying to conduct a potential business phonecall okay kids!).

So this morning, I did my rant, wrote my letter, which I then lost before I could post it (it has just turned up again in my handbag – obviously!), checked our bank account online which neccesitated a trip to the bank to move some money around, which meant the kids didn’t have time for faffing about with their lunch so I made it, loaded them into the car and fed them on the go. Sorted the bank then went to Jenny’s house to talk about our new HE group (WAG). Considering we had five out of six children around us demanding sweets, juice, to be played with, to have their shoes on, to have their shoes off, to have their poncho on, to have their poncho off, to watch TV, to go home, to stay a bit longer I think we did actually cover quite a bit! Jenny’s older two very sensibly took themselves upstairs for a while, whilst Davies, Scarlett and Fergus posted bits of Happy Street track through the cat flap into the back garden – which was nice 🙂

So I am feeling very excited about the new group, we have already had several people interested just from posting to a couple of yahoo groups about it – next stage is to start emailing contacts from my EO and HEAS contact lists and hopefully by launch date in January we will be on the way to having something like we read about in Sheffield and Reading:-) I also feel like I have met my first real HE friend ‘in the flesh’ too – it’s so nice to find someone who seems to think along the same lines as you – she says hoping Jenny is not reading and shaking her head wildly! 😉 So that’s good too.

Home via my dad’s where I needed to pick up two of the seats which go in our people carrier but we don’t usually have in the car cos we bought it for space not seats. He only had one of them so hopefully Ady knows whereabouts in our garage the other one is otherwise the planned trip tomorrow to Paradise Park may end up being convoy instead of two families neatly packaged into one vehicle (Rachel, E and A are coming with us). The kids went wild as soon as we got there and started tearing around all the precious ornaments and hazardous hearths and sharp corners. Its a huge house but very non-child-friendly, Dad was very nice about it but also seemed quite relieved when I cut the visit short due to me not actually being able to hold a conversation with him for shouting at the kids, dealing with Davies whinging or Scarlett doing death jumps off the sofa!

Home again I had to return a phonecall from when I was at Jenny’s from Miranda about some possible storywriting work she wants me to do. As I expected she has asked me to price some stuff for her and I don’t really know where to start – it’s a tricky one as she is paying me more for ideas than actual time and I just don’t know what price to put on my own head… We know each other too well for me to try and sting her for too much and we also both want to be fair to each other with me not ending up doing loads without getting paid enough – just don’t know what ‘enough’ is really. The kids were awful throughout the phonecall – I hid with the phone in Scarlett’s room for a bit but when they found me they both just follow me from room to room shouting and being really noisy – they do it every time I pick the phone up and it really pisses me off but I am yet to find the way to stop them from doing it 🙁 Anyway I got the gist of what she was saying and she is emailing me over some stuff to look through as a starting point. She is also emailing me some stuff we worked on previously about curriculums, child developement areas from 0-5 (the stuff Playhouse Disney use when commissioning programe ideas to check that it fulfils their criteria as educational and otherwise helpful in preschool age child developement) which may be helpful for some other stuff I am working on.

They have both eaten all their tea and are now covered in spaghetti sauce and I think I smell eau de nappy too so I’m off to bath them and get them asleep as soon as possible so I can catch up some more on my ever growing job list!

Not a song lyric, just a need to vent some anger! Without going into huge details or heaven forbid naming the offending company I am soooo pissed off with a large organisation who used to supply our electricity. I have just had yet another letter from them proving that there is no communication between departments, and picked the phone up in my anger and let myself down by being very aggressive with the woman on the other end of their customer services.
I always try really hard not to do that, not least because I have worked in enough jobs where you end up on the wrong side of someone’s anger, which is not even directed at you personally but at the company you work for, and I have had my share of putting the phone down or asking people to speak to me with some respect or calm down so I can help them. I normally don’t ring about stuff like this cos I know I end up being the most evil cow and it doesn’t do me any good or the poor person on the other end of the phone who’s day I have also probably just wrecked… wish I knew how to meditate 🙂
So with nothing really resolved I have written a very cross letter, which is probably also fairly inarticulate as I am too incandescent with rage to put together something coherant and non-rambling. But I am going to stick it in an envelope and post it anyway and hope that between letter and phonecall I finally get a resolution of this sorry saga and can go forward without ever having to deal with this incompetant organisation ever again. The End!

Heard this song for the first time ever (no, I don’t know where I’ve been either!) when me and Ady were on our way to Lakeside on Friday and it had me in tears. This picture sums it up for me – two years ago I was waiting for this child to be born, now she is a walking, talking person with a mind of her own. Yesterday she astonished me by counting to ten all by herself – so much for the neglected second child eh? 🙂

I’m not even going to blog about sleep and children going to bed – don’t know quite what’s going on in this house and I am prepared to put it down to colds, being scared of ghosts and general time of the year type stuff. Come January we will endeavour to sort their sleeping out if it has not dealt with itself – and we can find something to sort it out with (wine anybody?!) So after milk and breakfast we went upstairs to get dressed and Davies chose all his own clothes today – he decided he wanted to look ‘really smart, so that when people see me they will wish they had a smart shirt like mine’. Scarlett, predictably chose a pink dress, which she has not worn before and looks super cute in:

We nipped into Lancing for a few bits and pieces, where I tried to be clever by not taking a handbag and just shoving 20quid and my credit card in my jeans pocket, until I parked and realised I needed change for the machine 🙁 A quick scuffle in the car turned up tenpence, so I had to approach a kindly looking old lady and ask if she by any chance had change for a £20 note – she very kindly gave me 50p (I must have looked either menacing or like I was a nice lady who would not go and blow it on drugs!) Davies put 50p in the Help the Aged charity shop box when we got some change so I felt like I gave it back 🙂

One of the tasks on my job list yesterday was to organise a few small pressies for various people, my Mum being one and I know she needs a new glasses case (the one I bought her last Christmas has had it!) so that was on our list of stuff to look out for, as was a new manicure set for my handbag (as Tarly has raided my current one and it only contains a metal emery board and one of those oval shaped things I don’t know what you use for!). Didn’t get either of those things, but we did get a Shirley Hughes book (thanks Sarah – since reading Dogger I have remembered all sorts of her books I loved as a child!) for 39p, a 2005 diary for my filofax, Christmas cards for the kids, birthday cards for Scarlett, a few crafty bits like paper split pins, treasury tags and a craft knife I want for various Christmas craft projects and some cakes for lunch.

Back home and Davies refused to let Scarlett play with him so I got the duplo blocks out for her – which he then of course wanted to play with too. But she did wander into the playroom where I was ver proud to have created something all by herself, which she tells me is a ‘rarfe’ (giraffe) and is actually pretty good:

Davies then spent about an hour playing on his play and learn computer game doing mazes, puzzles, shape sorting and so on – he is getting really good at it and it keeps him quiet for ages, must let him on there more as it gives me time to spend with Scarlett and is very educational for him too 🙂

They are currently having a mad half hour involving throwing balls *up* the stairs, shrieking and running around like loons – for once I am ignoring it and letting them get on with it. I have done the first three assessments for my online learning course – which are boringly easy but time consuming with all the processes, screen prints and explaining how you did stuff but I feel I have achieved something and am ahead of the personal learning schedule the tutor sent me too:-)

And finally, as I am doing photos here are the pics of the kids’ Christmas trees for their bedrooms (I am particularly proud of myself for doing ‘stuff’ to the camera to make the lights come out on the trees) and Davies being Santa: