Sunday

It’s been bitterly cold here today, with it feeling like it might even snow but it ended up being really nasty wind and just rain instead. Really feels like winter now, we were so lucky with our NicCamps weather, just 10 days ago. 🙂

Ady set his laptop up in the playroom on the table yesterday so the children have made much use of that playing on Barbie and Doctor Who games respectively. There’s also been further full use of various other things now easily accessible and on display in the playroom which is good and thanks to a buy it now negotiation on some dressing up clothes money is already starting to roll in from the copious ebaying I did with unwanted stuff from the clearout – I listed another 27 things today and now have about 70 items ending over the next week which all adds nicely to the Christmas fund :). A continued barrage of questions including various requests to send things to Spain and France and a lot of measuring clothing dimensions with the only suitable tape measure I could find being one of the freebie IKEA paper ones have meant I’ve earnt my money well though.

This morning Tarly spend some time on a Supercook kit Ady had found in the cupboard. It was chocolate, white and milk, to melt and pour into a bouquet of flowers mould and then decorate with writing icing. She did almost all of it herself and sat for ages painstakingly icing round the flowers before getting Ady to help her put them in the presentation bags and tie them with ribbon before breaking the milk chocolate one open again to share with the rest of us and scoff. I think it was a Mothers Day kit I picked up reduced to clear in Asda after Mothers Day had passed because the box was a bit battered.

I rang my parents, conscious of not seeing them again for a couple of weeks and arranged for us to go over there for lunch. I’d offered to do some baking with Davies as he’d asked to make cupcakes but somehow he got distracted with the pc and we never got round to it. He did come and sit with me and read me a story book though – a very simple board book style one about Gromit which he has had read to him enough times to know the gist of anyway but he is clearly well on the way all of a sudden with his reading and while he doesn’t seem inclined to do it for too long at a time it all does seem to have clicked for him and he really can ‘do it’ rather than ‘fluke it’ which is what I think was happening previously. Hurrah and woohoo and I hope the spate continues to a good amount of progress before it wanes off again.

We headed off to Mum and Dad’s via Sainsburys where they were giving away free bags for life, hurrah for Sainsburys! 🙂 We had a nice lunch despite some niggling from Dad about reading and arithmatic and home education. Never will he get what we’re doing or why we’re doing it and the further away from mainstream or school at home we stray the less he seems to understand it. I tried to explain about personal happiness and fulfillment but as they still fully expect Ady and I to divorce fairly imminently over our debts and can’t quite factor in why I don’t want to pack the children off to school, get back out to work and earn money so we can go on holidays and out for dinner again I don’t think anything less than material gain will ever impress then as output from Home Ed eventually. Ah well.

It was bloody freezing round there though. They live in an old, cold, big house that is dark and a bit drafty and never actually gets particularly warm even in the height of summer so a bitter cold day today was always going to be a wrap up warm day round there, but to make things worse the new boiler they had installed earlier this year appears to be on the blink and they have to keep turning the heating on and off to get the thermostat to kick in so it was positively arctic. Davies was quite happily playing round there but Scarlett really wanted to come home, she’d been upset by me telling her off for constantly interupting me while we were talking over lunch (she gets really upset about being told off infront of others, which is something I recall being a very big deal for me as a child, I must try harder not to do that to her but she does make it difficult with attention seeking behaviour although I notice they both seem to play up when I’m defending Home Ed or anything to do with them, as though they think there is a danger of me being swayed by someone else’s viewpoint perhaps?), so she was cold and wanted to come home. So we left at 3pm as we needed to get dinner on but Davies wanted to stay behind for a couple more hours, so we left his car seat (Mum: does he really need it, wouldn’t he be fine in the seatbelt in my car? :roll:) and left him behind. He apparently had a great time, Frazer came and watched The Simpsons with him and he got to drink coke and stuff, while Scarlett came home and was a bit loose endy without him but played on the laptop in the end.

Ady brought home four pheasants on Friday night:

which he plucked this morning with Scarlett as a very interested audience and cooked for dinner. The children had two breasts each for their tea, with chips :lol:, Scarlett adored it but Davies wasn’t so keen and we had the rest as a proper roast dinner later with red wine, brandy and onion sauce, roast potatoes and parsnips – delicious. And of course very cheap ;). This is from Ady’s workmate who bought us the bantams and is also supplying us with a massive amount of free logs for our fire. His father is very wealthy and has a business idea which he wants Ady and I to come in on with him so we have a meeting set up sometime in the next couple of weeks to discuss it further, which is potentially exciting and maybe even lucrative. Those new doors do keep on opening at us…

When Mum dropped Davies back her and I found a great present for my parents and brother to give Scarlett for her birthday and she has offered to put £40 each child towards the purchase of DS and games for their Christmas presents too, which means with my backdated payrise lump and Ady’s potential Christmas bonus we have everything covered, which is good. 🙂