Things…

Could easily do a TMI post here about the state of my stomach, cramping and the soundtrack to my day being the flushing of the toilet, but I’ll spare you! 😉

Last night I got an email from the woman who joined me in running WAG for the end of last year. You may recall that while I liked her a lot our views on Education and pretty much life in general were fairly oppposed. We remained amicable but it was clear that once WAG ended we had not enough in common to remain in contact really. So I got this emall from her – as part of a circular email to various local HE folk – to say that she is about to launch a new local Home Ed’ centre’. Totally not what my potential new group will be, totally not someting I would be interested in attending and actually not something which will in any way compete with or clash with my new group. But bad timing just the same. I have sent a reply wishing her all the best with her new venture, explaining that I am in the throes of lauching one of my own and offering to advertise her’s both at my group and in my standard reply email to new HE contacts via EO. Whilst I am unlikely to attend her group and I would imagine she would have little interest in mine it is not beyond the realms of possibility that other people would be interested in both and of course the more choices and options for local HEers there are, the better.

I’ve been reading some more of Home Education Journal today, pondering a thread on a forum I am on and I am still inwardly digesting the post of a week or so ago on Green House By The Sea about curriculums and the standard. Along with another politically ‘hot’ topic I have been thinking about recently and an amount of frustration with myself for not doing *something* with some of my skills I am feeling a little itchy of foot currently. Not sure where it will lead really and it might just be a changing of the seasons thing but I feel a certain sense of inevitability about life being on the cusp of change. Hopefully it will be a caterpillar to butterfly style one eh!

The children have done lots of art and craft type stuff today. They played with their Floam, plasticine and then Davies asked for me to make some playdough which I did. He made some very good characters from W&G. He directed the colours I made and in what volume and then he put loads of thought into them and came up with figures which were really rather excellent. I did take some pictures but they were too blurry. I only had virgin olive oil instead of the vegetable oil the playdough recipe calls for so whether that was the cause or some other unknown the playdough has dried out and cracked so I’ve had to chuck them out, but in a spending frenzy way back last year or even the year before I bought some buckets of air drying clay from ELC which have never been opened so I’ve promised he can have some of that tomorrow to make some real characters to keep. I’ll mix up some more playdough for Tarly to play with while he does that though, otherwise we will end up with a vast collection of air dryed ‘wormies’ from her! Then they tidied up and did some drawings together before finally tidying that up and getting the geomags out for the afternoon. Davies also did some Zoombini-ing with Tarly as a captive audience for a while today too.

I’ve been fairly redundant parenting wise so between toilet visits I’ve put away all the clean washing, filled the line up with 7 – count ’em 7! – loads of washing, most of which is also now dried, cooked some chocolate chip rock cakes and got a slow cooker dinner on before lunchtime. I’ve cleared my inbox of emails again, booked the venue for a 3 week trial starting after Easter for the new group, designed a logo for the group (I’m calling it WOW – Worthing On Wednesdays), booked in an Activeo event for April with the newsletter team, photograped a load of outgrown Tarly clothes ready to list on ebay and been generally otherwise efficient.

At 4pm Dad arrived so I chatted with him until it was time for me and Davies to go to Badgers. They had a community Police officer there tonight, called Mandy. She was great actually, let them all try on her hat, hold her stab vest, look through all the various things stashed in her pockets on her belt, have a flip with her pocket notebook and finally they all filed out to the carpark and had a sit in the squad car. 🙂 Davies loved it and joined in loads with the talking. I was really proud of him actually, despite not quite getting the hang of putting his hand up (;-)) when he did speak it was relevant to what was being discussed, he had a proper point to make or question to ask and then he was quiet and listened again – more than could be said for all of the children! The leader woman asked me all about HE and complimented me on Davies lots before asking if I’d consider the Assistant Leader’s role. I declined, for now, as part of the reason for taking Davies is to eventually get him happy to be left there and to let him develop himself with other coping mechanisms than me in the room whenever he gets out of his depth. So I don’t think making myself a permanent and involved fixture would be such a great idea. Shame though, as having to be with loads of children aside it would be something that would interest me! I said I might reconsider it in a term or two if he was settled.

He came home full of it clutching his giveaway items of stickers, a pencil, a policeman glove puppet, a road safety activity book and some colouring sheets of police cars, helicopters and motorbikes. Next week it is the end of term party and presentation of badges – he won’t get one obviously as he’s only been twice but the leader – Lisa said she’d think of something to keep him included in it, which I thought was great. They are also inviting siblings and parents to next week’s as there is to be a party after the presentation so providing Ady is home in time we’ll all go and bring Tarly too which I think Davies would like as he’d get to ‘show off’ the place to Ady and Scarlett. 🙂