Happy@Home

Here are a few photos of things we are growing on our allotment. I’ve waited about 6 weeks for a really cheap delivery of 100m x 1m of weed control fabric from here … they’ve just changed their courier … so it came in 1 day once they put it with the new courier. When we get a bit of family time we are planning to finally make the allotment path layout and tackle the polytunnel bindweed issue!

We’ve spent a fair amount of time at the allotment when the weather has been good. Next year Miyuki will be much more able to be involved. We plan to have a serious shed, with work space for Lani, Freya and Miyuki so that they can carry on with things other than digging and weeding if they want to bring stuff with them. I envisage Dad coming home and bringing the bar-be-que stuff so we can hang out and stroll home for bed. What I’d really like is to live in a house with wild space … enough for roaming and collecting crickets and having an veg patch near the back door for night time slug sweeps!

• Identikit session at the Buxton museum. Making photofit faces out of magazine cuttings … build a face then cut into sections and mix and match with a friend. There are quite a few events at the museum that seem to be related to police and policing.  Bumped into our HE friends with their dad and aunt (don’t know the latter two too well, but said hello).
• Art exhibition of Sue Platt’s Theatre of the Unique.  My favourite piece was an old cabinet that contained rows of uniform sample bottles, test tubes, etc.  The middle row of sample bottles had worry dolls in them.  It was like juxtaposing the empirical measurement and testing of things with the more spiritual, intuitive … far from empirical … world of worry dolls/the psyche.
  

  Click on me to see a gallery of her work and The Apothecary in more detail.

We got the chance to educate a Community Support Officer about home education … it’s legality, the position of the law and the ins and outs of it as far as we do it. She offered us stranger danger courses (!) and cycling proficiency.  We also had a long chat with one of the organisers who also works in our local library so knew there were lots of home educators in town because they have HE library cards (the one’s I negotiated some years back!)  There must be quite a few even that I don’t know of.  Our local HE list is very quiet.  People join but don’t really make any contact, maybe because we don’t have regular meetings.  I’m still debating setting up a more solid group, but insurance and other issues concern me (where would we get a room, etc, as we tried before and it was quite difficult with issues with folks who joined and demanded we put on activities for their children so that they didn’t have to!  Argh.  A minefield.  Do I want to do it again?)

• Lunch at the pavilion garden’s cafe.
• Swimming.
• Playing with Ada and Ollie and eating home made ice lollies.
• Watching David Attenborough: The Open Ocean parts 1 and 3.
• Big play dough session.
• 1 hour of CBBC including the Googlies, which Lani is very inspired by right now.
• 
• L, F & Uki Reading with Dad: Sedna and the King Gull from The Barefoot Book of Animal Tales from around the World.

Lani:

• Swimming: is very confident and asking to start swimming club or lessons again.
• Drawing Kate from Robin Hood TV series (medieval costume).
• Fascinated by the display of art work at the museum: “Theatre of the Unique” by Sue Platt.  Objects made from found things that seemed to have quite a macabre theme.  Lots of models of babies and strange, old scientific objects.

Freya:

• is very afraid of drowning but is quite agile and confident in the water with her feet down or holding onto floats with her armbands on.  She is also going down the slide without getting caught.

Uki:

• swimming quite happily under water but only for a few seconds (has done so from tiny but we have not been swimming often until this week).  She will happily drop into the water if she knows you are there to help her up.  I’m quite sure if we went swimming daily for a week she’d be swimming under the water for quite long stretches.  She is very near to confidence.
• Drawing.
• play dough
• lots of sticky glue, cutting out and drawing at museum.
• looking at display of funny art objects.

Fair weather campers … didn’t go to Peak Camp 2 today because it is raining.  Didn’t manage to get kids out swimming, as promised, as they were reluctant to leave their work in time.  There is always tomorrow.

Sally: working on jungles project.  Continued with drawing map of continents.

Offered special CBBC TV 5-7pm.  We’ve been on TV detox for a week and it’s definitely better for it.

Beethoven's 'Fur Elise'.

Lani

• Listening to Beethoven and trying to play ‘Fur Elise’ on the piano.  We downloaded the sheet music for Fur Elise.  Lani would love to learn to play it all and fully.  We also listened to it on CD (as well as some works by Mozart and Bach.)
• Baking mince pies, largely unassisted.  Weighing and chopping, mixing in the kenwood and rolling out between cling film sheets, chilling and then greasing baking tray, cutting out, filling and glazing.  Setting oven temps etc  (Wheat Free flour pastry).
• Calculating proportions of her toasted cheese roll to divide two between three of us and then to recoup a correct proportion when Freya didn’t want any and the division was between 2!
• Writing about Planet Spag Bog and drawing her hieroglyphic alphabet.
• 1 hour 21 mins on Wii Fit: boxing, yoga, hula hoop, step aerobics, balance games.
• Listening to My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards on CD.
• Horrible Histories episodes on computer x 2.
• Whilst waiting for pastry to chill ….. salt dough Egyptian cat goddess.
• Calculating proportions: I challenged her:  The pastry proportions were 1/2 fat to flour and an equal number of table spoons of water as there were ounces of fat (8:4:4).  I asked her if we used 16 oz flour, how much fat and water would we use.  I hadn’t pointed out the similarity between number of tablespoons of water and number of ounces of butter.  She LOVES doing these sorts of math problems and proclaims regularly, with joy, that she is really good at maths!  She also managed to joyously and effortlessly calculate the proportions for a half batch of the one she made.
• The TV watching resulted in Lani spending a lot of time talking about animating peeled boiled eggs with goggly eyes glued on, flying up ramps in cars and off cliffs, falling into egg slicing gadgets!  She was very detailed in her ideas on how to go about animating this … with nylon strings and seeking out animation software that she can use to splice her films so that she can reposition the egg when it falls into the slicer!  I always thought she had a good bit of Aardman about her … she is excellent at modeling with fimo and other such stuff, and has always had wacky ideas for animations.  Must try to get some software for Mac OS X for her to use.
• She spent a fair amount of the evening trying different ways to attach goggly eyes to small potatoes (the ones I just dug up from the garden!)  She thought about doing the filming and drawing the eyes on afterward (since she thinks this is sometimes what they do in the programme she saw on CBBC that sparked all of this.

My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards (Illustrated by Shirley Hughes … of course!!!)

Freya

• Listening to Beethoven’s 5th symphony and we also listened to some works by Mozart and Bach.
• Working with Miyuki on the computer: DK Toddler School.
• Baking mince pies with Lani.  Rolling pastry out between cling film sheets, chilling and then cutting.  (Wheat Free flour pastry).
• Salt dough flower whilst waiting for pastry to chill.
• Writing in her wipe clean book: letter formation and writing letters to complete words.
• Watching Lani doing Wii Fit.
• Listening to My Naughty Little Sister by Dorothy Edwards on CD.
• Horrible Histories (CBBC) x 2.

Uki:

• Salt dough and play dough rolling.  Made a “cake”.
• Watching Lani and Freya baking whilst playing with dough.
• Toddler School with Mum (using the mouse, clicking to open door or pop balloons, recognising and naming the objects behind the door/behind the balloon).
• Drawing ‘umbrella’ and ‘picture for Granddad’.
• 6 readings of Hairy Maclary Scattercat by Lynley Dodd.  She said “Read it badly!” meaning she needed me to read it to her urgently.
• Listening to classical music.
• Copying Lani during Wii Fit.  She stands on a book (her Wii balance board) and does the moves for hula hoop.

Jon read “The Enchanter’s Daughter” to Lani and Freya at bedtime.

The illustrations are fantastic.  The illustrator is Errol Le Cain.

Here’s another of the illustrations from the book.  We found it in a charity shop some time ago.  You can click the picture to link to a whole list of books he has illustrated.

I’ve just bought Alfi and the Dark by Sally Miles, illustrated by Errol Le Cain … so watch this space for a review when it arrives.

Nat's

Sunday roast at our favourite restaurant:

It is Sunday, so Mum’s quiet time day:

• sleeping,
• yoga,
• Erin O’Brien post natal workout.

Littles went to park with Dad and played on the fair ground rides.

Lani

• Lots of exercise on wii fit: yoga (tree, king of dance, etc), hula hoop, boxing punchbag with footwork, etc.
• Making peg dollies (brought to the restaurant).
• Handwriting … working on heights of letters (auto-ed of course).
• Writing in her notebook about Planet Spag Bog.  Invented an alphabet for Planet Spag Bog.
• Snail observation: excretion!

Freya

• 

  Hairy McClary by Lynley Dodd

  Read the word d-o-t and then ‘Christmas dot-to-dot’

  .  This is the first time she has sounded out a word.  She is quite cautious.  She was very pleased about it.

• Dot to dot in Christmas dot-to-dot book. Freya was very pleased by how fast she could do them.
• Reading lots of Hairy McLary books with Mum and then Dad.
• Snail observation: excretion!

Uki

• Drawing round her hands with Mum.
  

  Uki drawing with Freya (pinching her pen … alla Montessori puzzle work!)

• Playing with Freya.

My guys actually seem really happy without TV suddenly, after a few days of extreme moaning and some shouting! Freya said she ‘didn’t even listen to something this morning’, she read a book with Dad that she really wanted read: Bored Bill by Liz Pichon. She was really pleased.

I’m really glad they didn’t just turn to the computer for consolation.
They’ve been talking to each other more, and reconnecting with their parents. TV and computers really do disconnect us indoors. I always wanted to do some painting or something with my DH, but he really is a TV bod once the kids are in bed, or he is working. I used to want to throw the TV through the window. I thought about it once when we lived in Massachusetts, but then I realised there was a screen on the window, so the TV stayed. My mum used to cut the plug off at quite regular intervals because one of my brothers couldn’t be contacted when watching TV!

I’m hoping they’ll forgive the coercion and be glad to be freed.