Stuck for a title

The hour thing is messing with my head, as it always does for at least a week every spring and autumn.

This morning was all bright and sunny and lovely so we headed out earlier than planned for a quick charity shop perusal before our meet up at the park. Scarlett’s winter coat is too small from last year and Davies’ appear to have been stashed very effectively over the summer. That is plural as he had the one I hated (grey with luminous stripes on the sleeves) and then a couple donated by Liza. I’m sure they will turn up but as snow is forecast this week and we have a couple of out after dark events lined up in the next week or so they both really needed to have coats that both fitted and were on the coat hooks rather than in some mystery location somewhere in the house!

The charity shops turned up nothing, still rather bizarrely stocking mostly summery clothes – maybe they’ve not yet had donations of outgrown autumn and winter clothing? We’d visited a small parade of shops which seem to all change fairly regularly and had parked opposite a new sweet shop (mentioned in the comments of this article) selling sweets in jars by the 100g (shame about the loss of quarters eh!) such as sherbet pips, toffee crumble, teacakes, fizz bombs, sherbet lemons and loads more. The children both wanted gobstoppers (although Tarly insists they are called ‘gum suckers’) so we all had a bag of something from there.

We then headed to the park, it’s one we used to spend lots of time in a couple of summers ago with Julie and Lucy but haven’t been too much this year. We went there on the Snowy Sunday earlier in the year and again when I did my running up and down while the children played in the park. D and S had insisted they wanted to take their scooters as Toby would be bringing his bike althoug predictably they don’t scoot so well over grass so they didn’t really want them after all.

They all played together in the playpark, then went over to the clearing in some trees where there are mud slopes and dips from back when BMXing was all the thing (I remember that being done, previously it was a mass of trees where we used to make ‘camps’ when my brother and I were kids). Tasha and I followed them from playpark to slopes and then Toby wanted to go back to the playpark while Davies and Scarlett wanted to stay at the slopes, mostly because they’d found a tree that was ideal for climbing. They told me I didn’t need to stay and reminded me they’d been in the tree area on their own way back last summer and the summer before so they’d be fine and I went back to Tasha in the playground. They joined us after about 10 minutes and then everyone decided they were hungry and although it had been warm enough to sit without coats we started to get cooler so headed back to Tasha’s for lunch.

I think she’s hit a bit of a wall and half a term into Home Ed is wondering whether Toby will indeed return to the interested little boy she once sent off to school. He is clearly de-schooling and has times when he really struggles with not having all his time directed and they are both having trouble adjusting to his periods of boredom and aimlessness but with reluctance to do anything. He is very firm about not wanting to ‘learn anything’ and if he does express an interest and she jumps on it too obviously he is turned off it again. It makes me realise how different Davies and Scarlett could have been if we’d gone down the school route. Davies has very occasional times of being like that but they rarely last more than about 10 minutes before he has found something to entertain himself again – I think I might struggle if it was a frequent thing. I’m very cautious of just prescribing what we do as the way to Home Educate and I know how many other families do things so very differently but completely successfully for them. Tasha says she doesn’t want to fill her days up with spending lots of time around other people and doesn’t feel either Toby or her would get much from Home Ed groups but I have said I’ll send her some more links to local groups so she could maybe hook up with more families doing it – and indeed some more online places to hear about how other people Home Educate to see if she can find what is going to work for her and Toby – and in time Vinnie too.

Davies, Scarlett and Toby all got on well again today, taking time out when they needed to and then going back to the game. By about 2pm I thought we were going to need to head off as Toby seemed all Davies&Scarlett-ed out (I’ve heard that can happen ;)) but he got a second wind as they started playing in the front room with Vinnie and some of his toys and Toby came back and joined in again. We finally left around 3pm ish.

The rest of our week is looking pretty busy so we took advantage of the couple of hours before the shops shut and headed off to Portslade which is another parade of shops, this time off in the other direction. This time we had luck and managed to get a coat each, some long sleeved tops for Tarly and some socks for her as she has suddenly taken to wearing them with her boots. She doesn’t put them on until she puts her boots on and then she takes them off again as soon as her boots come off but it does mean the two token pairs of socks she had in her drawer are not sufficient!

We detoured into Southwick to visit a party supplies shop which someone had told me was selling cake decorating stuff and I got some food colouring I wanted and then finally we got home. It was about 20 past 5 and nearly dark so my heart was in my mouth when I walked up to the front door to find it standing wide open. A quick FBI Style scout of the place, poker in hand showed it to be empty and everything was present and correct. I think Tarly was last out of the house and must have just not pulled the front door shut behind her. Phew! I really must check rather than taking it forgranted that the last child to leave will remember to shut the door behind them.

Chickens away, tea sorted for children who are both eating huge amounts of food at the moment (could they really grow? ;)) and then some Olga Da Polga for them before bed. Ady and I are watching series 2 of Torchwood on dvd at the moment so we had an episode of that with our dinner.