Making it up

On Friday we made it to Framlingham for a Time Travellers event. Last year we started our passports at Festival of History and completed them at Framlingham, and the kids got English Heritage bags that lasted a few weeks and then fell apart This year although we were given the passports neither of them wanted to do the kids’ events that would have given them stickers at Festival of History – it isn’t desperately well organised in that you end up doing quite a lot of standing around waiting for your turn, and that’s something neither of mine enjoy. Then when I looked on the website it appeared that most of the events were repeats of last years, so we didn’t bother to plan any in.

Fortunately, a not very local set of friends decided they did fancy an event and we arranged to meet up there. Fortunately, because otherwise we’d have missed Heuristics, and that would have been a shame.

They’ve been at Festival of History each time I think, and we’ve spent a differing amount of time around them, but enough for me to know that we were in for a treat. Sadly we arrived at the end of the inventions talk, which Small would have enjoyed, but we were in time to build a castle, add crenellations and then queue up to knock it down with something that wasn’t a trebuchet but is like it. (Hm. Guess my brain just isn’t up to retaining that level of information.)

After the castle destroying I took Big, Small and smallest up on the walls (baby on my back) along with an extra who belongs to our friends. Part way round my thigh muscle went into spasm, which made for an interesting experience. I’m just not used to steps – we live in a bungalow now, and there are no slopes around here either. Leg muscles only do flat!

And after the wall walk there was a talk on medicine. Which was funny, seriously funny. I thought Small was going to cry laughing, he had a fab time of it, and heckled very well throughout, which was encouraged If you get the chance to see Heuristics at any point, I really recommend it, and not just for the education for the kids!

All the kids were having a lovely time together, and Katy and I were enjoying time to chat so once the show was over we wandered around the moat walk for a while. The weather was surprisingly kind, given the constantly threatening grey clouds and although it was a long day, it was very worthwhile. So thanks to Katy for providing the motivation to make it out, really really enjoyed it.

And I’ll come back with photos tomorrow, for some reason the network is saying they are going to take 16 minutes to reach this machine, and I want to go to bed!

the rest of teh interwebs has gone to bed, hasn’t it? I’m all alone, just me and the washing up and the toys all around the floor. and quiet.

The quiet is nice. The toy strewn devastation of a living room, not so good. And I daren’t even think about the kitchen. Which needs to be dealt with before I go to bed as Tim has a breakfast meeting and so won’t be able to deal with it in the morning.

Humph.

I could do with today being over. I know it is, in terms of elapsed hours, but as I’m still awake it still counts as Thursday in my head.

It hasn’t been a good Thursday. It should have started well, in that I dragged myself out of the house for my run, but my run itself didn’t go well. I kept moving faster than a walk on the circuit (0.438 miles, thanks for asking) but barely faster. In fact it was the slowest circuit in almost three weeks. Not good.

And maybe that was what set my mood. That and the rain. What’s with the rain? Honestly, there are ppl out there looking for trees to build arks. It’s just been relentless. And we’ve friends arriving for the weekend tomorrow who are planning on camping in the garden. Although given that we *still* haven’t managed a dry window to get the Montana down, they could use that instead.

Except the cat has been using that. I don’t know how he got the door open (didn’t think cats could do zips) and he’s been sleeping inside. Given that he is infested with fleas this is not good. Actually no, it’s not fleas that are his problem, it’s harvest mites. And maybe they don’t eat ppl, so maybe the tent will be alright.

The cat isn’t. He’s been looking a bit threadworn for a few days, so I arranged a vet appt, and went to catch him. It’s ages since I’ve cuddled him – he tends not to come near me now that soa is mobile and pulls his tail – and I didn’t realise what a state he’s in. According to the vet he has a systemic allergic reaction, probably to the harvest mites as she didn’t find any flea dirt. Poor thing. Hopefully the steroids and antibiotics will sort him out, and I must keep up the frontline from now on.

So I felt rather bad about that.

And then, having grumped my way through most of the day, we had major mummy patience fail at bedtime. I was trying to do the dishes while the baby was still happy in her chair and the other two were dismantling the den they’d made in the bedroom (they had to dismantle it to go to bed, they’d used all their bedding making it!) and it turned out that it was only Big dismantling while Small refused to get involved and you can imagine how that went. And I shouted at them and that made the baby cry and oh, I felt like such a bad mummy

This was not a good day to stick to the no chocolate in the house rule. Particularly as it seems likely that my 9 month holiday from periods is wearing off (quite surprised it’s lasted this long tbh, expected them to return when soa started solids) and I’ve felt bloated, achy and hormonal for the last couple of days.

Ah well. Tomorrow is another day and all that. Here’s hoping for a better one.

A year ago I did a round up of posts about home education and why ppl chose it. I didn’t call it a carnival, don’t know why. One year on, and we aren’t fighting against Badman any more, we have a new government who are broadly supportive of parental choice and therefore home education and it doesn’t feel like we are quite so set about as we have been.

So this year, the notbacktoschool picnics may be more of a celebration than a rallying call, which is how I’d like them to be

I’m hoping that we’ll have another picnic maybe at the beach and blow bubbles, but in the meantime, I’d like to invite any and all to join in a notbacktoschool carnival. Tell us why, tell us how, show us your bubble pics, give us laughter, make us cry, whatever, but let’s celebrate home education.

Deadline for submission 6th September and I’ll publish on 8th September, which is round about the start of term around here.

Either leave links in the comments here, or send them to me through the contact form Look forward to seeing what you’ve all got to say.

Hm. Difficult actually, as usually I am slightly displeased with my pics.

Though I like this one, and it’s late and I want to go to bed, so it’ll have to do.

with apologies to Max Ehrmann.

Go placidly amid the blogs and the tweets, and remember what peace there may be in going offline.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Write your posts honestly and clearly, and read others, even the dull and the ignorant, they too need to blog. But don’t feed the trolls.

If you compare your stats with others, you may become big headed or depressed, for there will always be those with more page views and visitors or less than you. Enjoy your archives and your drafts, and love your blog, backing it up regularly, even if you are the only reader. It’s your blog after all.

Exercise caution in paid and review postings for these are transient and commercial. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many bloggers strive for high ideals, and everywhere words can change the world.

Be yourself. Especially do not linkbait. Neither be cynical about friendship and love, for even on the internet with all the spammers and trolls, it is as perennial as the grass.

Listen to those who have been kicking around for years, and give up the ways of the newbie. Be strong when there are comment spats and blogwars and stop looking at ranking lists. Many fears are born of too much comparison online.

Beyond a wholesome discipline to post, be gentle with yourself and your blog. You are a child of the internet, no less than google and facebook; your site has a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the internet is linking as it should.

Therefore be at peace with teh internets, whatever you perceive that to be. And whatever your efforts and inspirations, in the noisy confusion of twitter, keep peace in your soul.

With all its spam, drudgery, and broken links, it is still a beautiful worldwideweb.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Swimming lessons today. Yet another run through of what school would be like as we struggled to get out of the house on time. Small is horrendous in the morning, makes me wonder how we did do almost 2 years of commuting. (It was simple, I dressed him and put him in the car, he ate breakfast while I drove and had come round nicely by the time we got there an hour later. And then he slept on the way home.)

Anyway, we were only 5 minutes late for his lesson, and he seemed to recover reasonably well to take part, although getting dressed again afterwards took a very long time and rather more shouting than I like to indulge in in public.

Big, by contrast, just gets on with it these days. Which is good, but not the proud mummy moment of the title.

It was badge day. When they get the certificates and badges that they’ve been working towards for the last 10 weeks. Small got his 10m badge (which made him very cross on several levels, one because it was pink, and he isn’t too fond of pink and secondly because pink isn’t in the rainbow and it’s supposed to be rainbow awards). I think 10m is pretty impressive for him and I’m very proud.

But I’m even prouder of my Big. She got her 800m badge. That’s 32 lengths of a 25m pool in 30 minutes. And this is a girl who just over a year ago couldn’t swim a length. She’s now more powerful and skilled in the water than either of her parents, and what’s more important, she adores it. Definitely a proud mummy moment all round

So, that was a good moment. Didn’t quite wipe out the irritation level from only taking one nappy into the bathroom and then having the baby wee all over my hand, but it was close.

Was even harder to keep up the good spirits when we walked out of the leisure centre to find out it was raining. Not heavy rain. This was Suffolk rain, the kind of lazy rain that hangs around in the air and waits for you to walk through it to get wet. So we did.

It didn’t get us really wet. soa seemed to think the whole thing was quite funny, even though Small complained for the first 5 minutes. The part where he went on about it hailing was particularly annoying. (It wasn’t hailing. You couldn’t even say the rain was definitely falling. Honestly, he can be such a wuss at times.)

And that was about as active as I got all day. Didn’t take tent down, didn’t process any more washing, didn’t even cook this evening, just processed left overs into food (cold sausages, yesterday’s left over new potatoes into potato salad by adding mayonnaise and herbs from the garden, and boiled eggs. Oh, and carrots. Pretty good meal for no cooking and left overs tbh. (I don’t count boiling eggs as cooking.)) at tea time and slept most of the afternoon.

And as I can’t do that tomorrow as we’re AFK at HE group, I’d better go to bed now.

a good week.

Too much rain, but what do you expect when you’re camping in England in August? Turns out the Montana 6 awning is a really good extra room, though I haven’t quite got my head around how to use it yet.

We went on Sunday to Rendlesham Forest for a week’s camping with friends, with a trip to Theatre in the Forest to see Midsummer Night’s Dream in the middle. We also fitted in a trip to an art installation at Snape Maltings (slightly sad as I had a baby strapped to my front, so couldn’t look through the viewer to see what everyone else was enjoying, but one of these days I’ll actually see a Pixelh8 production in progress), fish and chips on the beach at Aldeburgh in the rain, (you probably had to be there to understand why 9 of us were crammed in a 7 seater car with an umbrella up in the backseat, listening to African music praying for rain and laughing hysterically as we scared the passersby), and some percy wotsits.

Small enjoyed the ufo park adventure trail and reading Charmed Life, which I gave him for Christmas He also devoured a Mr Gum book that Em had in her car, which I think might have been What’s for Dinner, Mr Gum? but I could be wrong.

Big enjoyed riding bikes. Which was only slightly awkward in that I hadn’t realised bike riding would be such a feature of the week, so I hadn’t organised for her bike to be there. The other kids were great though and she got lots of time in the field riding their bikes, so it was only the trips off out on the bike trails that she couldn’t join in with. Will make myself a note for next year that bike is a necessity.

soa enjoyed the ground. She enjoyed cracking crawling, eating dirt, smiling, spending time with friends and just life in general. I think she enjoyed Shakespeare, the other two certainly did, particularly with the workshop before it. I’d managed to get confused with the night so we ended up watching the play on a different night to everyone else, but in some ways that worked quite well as Tim had a dinner the other night and the kids needed a quieter evening. Although it was a little unfortunate that they were so cold and tired that we were all already in bed when the main perseid shower took place.

(Although given that someone had put a sign up in the loos that said meteorite shower and I had to spend some time reassuring Small that they aren’t meteorites they’re meteors, it was probably just as well. He might have lost it totally if he’d actually seen it all in action.

Hm. He seemed to be having a few anxiety issues actually. During the rather spendiferous thunderstorm he got really worried about what would happen if lightning hit the tent. Not something he’s ever been concerned about before. And yes, we’ve camped in some stonking storms before now!)

I enjoyed being outside and being active. When I’m at home I find it far too easy to just sit in a chair and fail to move from behind a twitter screen. It does me good to get away and have thinking space. Even if I’d had an all singing all dancing phone it would have been no good as there’s very little mobile coverage there, so I’d still have had to detox from internet to some extent. I was really impressed with myself when I got home and did washing and showering and lunching and putting up tent to dry and watching the carnival procession *before* I turned my netbook on to check twitter/bk/email (and I *still* haven’t checked facebook!)

(Although I probably should confess that Tim downloaded my email for me during the week and brought the netbook out to the field so I could just draft a couple of replies… )

Right. It’s way late and I’m already breaking new resolutions to keep on with the going to bed at sensible times, so I’ll abandon this rambling waffle mid flow and finish up with a few pictures.

eta wordpress is fighting back, obviously feeling hurt and abandoned after a week with no attention. Pictures after I’ve slept.

edited again. I’ve slept. Wordpress is still refusing to give me a gallery. Have some pictures anyway. More below the fold.

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It’s been ages since I’ve actually put something in here about our lives, and when it comes right down to it, those are the posts I read back to see. So apologies to those reading for the more interesting stuff, here’s a bit of a braindump of what we’ve been up to since FoH.

Small has got into programming in a big way. He’s spending a lot of time on Scratch and has taken a massive leap forward with it. While I am a programmer by trade as it were, he appears to be one by instinct, and while I work hard at being creative, he hasn’t worked out how not to be. Visually he’s been drawing stuff to put together games, and working out how to make them to what he wants. He seems to be doing pretty well with it, and is certainly fixated on spending time on it. Having said that, over the last few days, they’ve both been playing outside again – the Hogwarts game having made a re-entry.

Big is re-reading the Harry Potters. She was thrilled to receive a copy of the Deathly Hallows from the Hogwarts librarian to replace the one sadly destroyed by the Puking pastels attack . So she read that one, and now she’s reading the one before. No, I don’t know why she’s reading them backwards as it were. But she’s devouring them, and it’s restarted the Hogwarts games. No bad thing.

She’s still plodding her way through mathletics as well – progress is steady and I’m pleased with how she’s doing. I do wish she didn’t always decide to do it when I’m in the middle of doing something else mind, it’s quite hard work keeping a baby happy and cooking tea for a family of five while also giving a maths lesson on mental times. Which is my excuse for getting it horribly wrong so that she didn’t get her gold bar :blush:

Soa is becoming a handful, in the nicest possible way. She’s cracked the whole crawling thing, well, sort of. She crawls a little bit, then flumps to her stomach and does this commando thing which is twice as fast. And she can get past things, or through things, and in the last couple of days she’s figured out how to sit herself up again when she gets where she wants to be, so now she can pull things down from tables and chairs. And if you hold her up she’ll take steps too.

Today she started to play in a purposeful way rather than just accidentally. She was sitting with her Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Learning Puppy (a gift from the Fisher Price ppl at Cybermummy – thank you!) and appeared to realise that it was reacting to her touch. So instead of just bouncing on it and interrupting it and causing it to flip from song to song she’d bounce until it started and then wait for it to finish before bouncing again. On some levels this is progress Wish I’d aimed the camera at her when she was trying to dig her way out of the french window with a spoon as well

Family wise, we had a fab weekend at the Beans party, seeing lots of friends. Kids had a fab time, I assume, as we barely saw them! Big made it through the weekend with only one wobble, and Small only struggled with having to sleep without her in the room with him. And soa didn’t wobble at all, except for when other adults tried to cuddle with her

Usual swimming lessons are going on – Small had a trial up to the green hats. We haven’t had a call yet, but on past experience this could happen as late as Monday afternoon to rearrange for Tues. We shall see.

And that’s about all I can think of for now. So I’ll finish with some photos of children in typical poses.

I wrote my first guest post. It’s in part a review of items I was sent (there’s that disclosure ) but I hope it’s also a fun post with added pictures

You can find it over at Active Kids, I’d really appreciate if you’d consider leaving a comment there – maybe tell me what’s in your bag for a quick trip to the beach?

I love the Gallery posts but so rarely get around to compiling one and entering it (um, once so far I think?) but this week has the additional draw of there being chocolatey goodness on offer in the form of prizes so I couldn’t resist

Having said that, it took me all day to actually publish this post, and I would have given up on it, except @tara_cain was lovely and encouraging on twitter!

The theme is nature.

I’m quite fond of nature. Where we live, although residential, it’s very quiet and as such we get a fair bit of wildlife in our garden right outside the french window. Soa likes to sit and watch the birds through it and we feed them right outside to keep drawing them in. (This also means I spend some time chasing the cat off or rescuing slightly chewed birds but you can’t have everything!)

As we’re within a mile of the sea, we get quite a few seagulls around. I’ve set myself a challenge to take photos of them – which is proving very much more difficult than expected. For such big birds, they are incredibly nervous, and they don’t hang around. And it takes a flock of them seconds to clear a garden full of scrap food (not much makes it to our bin nowadays, it goes out for the birds or into the compost!)

So far I’ve got lots of pictures of an empty garden:

and occasional pics of (slightly blurred) seagulls in motion.

Thankfully, the bluetits in our relatives garden were more cooperative

For this shot, I was sitting out in the garden, with soa, while everyone else was inside watching England play football very badly. I think I had the more enjoyable afternoon!