It was the monthly Home Ed meet up at PB today and we’d have liked to have gone but with the MOT already run out on my car I decided not to risk driving it. Instead we had a morning at home. Scarlett has really gotten into drawing and making little paper things involving lots of cutting out and colouring in and sticking together. This rather puts Davies at a loose end and he sometimes combats this by baiting and annoying Scarlett. He and I had a chat about not wasting his freedom of childhood and lack of anyone dictating how he should spend his time. I said that all the time I could see autonomy working for him with him being occupied, self driven and interested then it was great but if I could see he was getting bored, restless or unstimulated then I was quite happy to take the decision making power back again and decide for him how he should spent his time.I suspect this is a conversation we will return to but hopefully more in a gentle shove in the right direction than full on timetables ;). He did go off and come back later having made a robot from various bits of recycled junk and tried to read my very stylised writing on some Christmas cards.
Scarlett did a drawing with mountains in the background and a cat chasing a bird, chasing a spider, chasing a flea, chasing a dog which she then glued edge to edge to create a 3d round of perpetual chasing. Liked that lots 🙂 and all her own ideas and work.
We had lunch and then headed off to to drop my car off for it’s MOT. Every year I anticipate being the one that the car finally starts costing us loads of money – an MOT due the week before Christmas is always a bad idea anyway. We dropped it off, were told to come back an hour later and he’d ring me if there were any problems and so we walked into Lancing.
We looked in the bookshop (where I covertly bought them each something they’d been cooing over when they weren’t looking), various charity shops and the post office where I posted all the foreign Christmas cards and bought stamps for all the UK ones. We walked back to the garage and were delighted to learn the car had passed :). He recommended new tyres for the front wheels which I’ll get sorted after Christmas.
While we were out we’d discussed gymnastics as it was the last one tonight but they have missed the previous three sessions. I have been really careful not to impose my view that it is very expensive, highly unlikely to reap the actual goal of backflips any time soon and really not what they are used to in terms of the strict discipline and the way the children are spoken to, whilst still allowing plenty of scope for both children to confide they are not sure about it anymore. Today neither of them wanted to go and when I pressed them as to whether they wanted to go again after Christmas Scarlett straight away said no. Davies was prepared to go again but when I said I’d been looking into acrobatics and tumbling and circus skills instead he agreed that was far more what he was wanting to learn rather than competition level gymnastics. We agreed I would contact the Gymnastics owner and say they wouldn’t be coming back. I am pleased. Pleased we gave them the chance to do something they wanted to do, pleased they gave it a genuine crack and pleased they knew when to call an end to it having decided it wasn’t going to provide what they wanted after all.
Back home again they wanted to play in the bath as Scarlett had bought them both some toys in one of the charity shops so they ran their own bath and got in while I made a start on my roundup of 2009 post. I made their tea and made a couple of phonecalls / sent some emails I’d been meaning to do. Davies and I had another chat and he showed me some video clips on his phone taken while at camp and earlier in the summer with Chloe.
I think they are both on the cusp of another spurt of changing and development which is always a bit unsettling for everyone for a week or more until life gets back on an even keel again. We started talking about things we want to do next year though and both of them were very enthused by that idea so I am hopeful that willl give us some guidance to fall back on.
Ady came home and I read the last couple of chapters of the Littlenose book we’re on. Bedtime was rather protracted and we had an amusing interlude when I was in the bath, Ady was in the kitchen and the children were in their respective bedrooms (Davies upstairs, Scarlett downstairs) and I think Scarlett started singing ‘deck the halls’ until we all joined in from various rooms :).
Can you pretty please youtube those clips?