I was working all day today and Davies and Scarlett went off with Ady. I managed to get up and ready and leave in time to nip to the post office before work so sent some ebay parcels off. We were short staffed today so morning teabreak and my lunchbreak were spent alone in the staffroom, which if I’m honest I actually prefer as I really like sitting with a cup of tea and one of the glossy magazines that are always in the staffroom :). As we were so short staffed I had a really nice easy rota with most of my day spent on the Enquiry Desk and therefore sitting down :). I helped a woman who wanted to place some online adverts to sell her oven but had zero computer skills and was very demanding. In the end I had to point out that for £1.25 for half an hours internet use she really couldn’t expect me to sit there with her for the whole time too as I had other customers to attend to. We ground to a halt when the ad wasn’t accepted without an email address anyway so I gave her her money back. I helped at least 3 people with the photocopier which I hate and think is nowhere near worth the 5p a copy we charge for all the staff time spent assisting. I joined a few new borrowers, spent some time helping one of the regular borrowers finding information about Abraham’s journey to help her grandson with his half term homework and then spent ages catching up a bit on the ECDL course I am doing. It was quite tedious as it was MS Word first which I sort of know well enough to get it to do everything I ever want it to do and was struggling to learn alternative ways. Plus I’d never used mail merge so clicked through it quickly and didn’t really take it in. The result of this was a fail on the test at the end of the module – I got 64%. It’s fine as I can do it again and I was distracted by various things and interupted lots but actually I’m quite pleased it will actually be challenging and therefore interesting after all. I was thinking it would be something to plough through, most of which I already knew but worth doing for getting a qualification at the end of it that I can add to my CV to demonstrate my computer literacy. It turns out it will be that aswell as something I will actually learn from and feel a sense of achievement at the same time :).
Ady was off to a work colleagues leaving do so needed to be heading over to Chichester by about 5pm and had planned to drop Davies and Scarlett off with my Dad but the library was so quiet and there were only two of us on duty for the last hour so I rang him in my afternoon break to suggest he drop them off with me instead. When I hung up the colleague I was at break with said how amazing it is that they can come to the library for an hour and behave and not cause a problem for me working. She said she had thought that before when we did Chatterbooks; how very well behaved they were and that her children could never have been trusted to do that at Davies and Scarlett’s age. She also said she’d been thinking about how they could never have gone and done something like we’re planning next year when her kids were that age as they would have argued in such close living quarters, spending so much time together and being trusted to stay with so many other people. I said how sibling closeness is often one of the great positives of Home Ed and in pretty much all cases of the HE families I knew the kids get on really well with siblings. It is interesting watching the increasingly obvious differences between schooled kids and HE kids as the group we know well all get older.
Ady dropped Davies and Scarlett off at about 515pm and they were indeed well behaved, looking at books, working out where they would find certain things by author name or dewey decimal reference and getting me to check the catalogue for things for them. Very amusing was when Scarlett was asking me about books to help you draw dragons and I checked to find the Lancing copy was out on loan and Davies appeared to say ‘yes, it’s at home in my bedroom!’ and sure enough it’s on loan to us 😆
We got home and the kids put the chickens away while I chopped some firewood, Davies lit the fire and Scarlett closed all the curtains around the house while I cooked them some tea and then read to them while they were eating. They chose a Roddy Doyle which we read about a year ago but they’d asked to borrow again and I ended up reading the whole book to them as they finished their tea, cleared away and crept over to sit on my lap during the course of the book.
I then stuck some bacon in the oven for my dinner and went for a bath as they went to bed. I finished cooking my dinner (tagliatelle carbonara, one of my favourite dinners but as Ady doesn’t like it I only ever have it when home alone) and ate it watching River Cottage followed by a progamme following up Genuis Children. I’d not seen the original programme but it was still really interesting.
Ady arrived home just before 11 and was still buzzed up from an evening out so had a beer or two (as he’d been driving) but I was pretty tired so for once abandoned blogging and headed off to bed first.