Tim headed out to old house yesterday to do things like finding the lawn again, and left me and the kids to our own devices. The children’s own devices seem to be entirely focussed around the tv atm, although they did watch one or two vaguely educational shows during the course of the day. There was an excellent one about Ostriches, and yet more Horrible History.
Small was cross with me on and off about the whole not playing with his new toys thing, but he coped, and it did mean we had several more conversations about the violence thing. Other than that I couldn’t even persuade them to go outside as given the weather difference from the beginning of the week they decided it was really cold, and tbh, I couldn’t find the energy to disagree.
I did the blog equivalent of picking at scabs and read through a year or more of my own archives from the last time I wasn’t working, right the way up to the start of my last IT job. Tim and I have been having the “what do you want to be when you grow up” conversation and the one thing I’m pretty much sure about is that I don’t want to go out to work again. Not yet anyway. And who would want to give an 18 week pregnant woman a job anyway? Once baby is here, I want to give it at least a year of full time me, and by the time that’s over, I guess I’ll be pretty much unemployable in and IT sense, which is a shame in some ways, as I do like playing with code.
So that left me pondering other alternatives. I had a look round some pro-blogging sites, and while I wouldn’t want to monetize (brilliant word) this blog any further than it is with the amazon links (which really don’t bring in enough for more than the occasional amazon splurge, and it’s very occasional at that) I’ve got a couple of other sites under development that I’ll be happy to go a little further on.
And I even sent an email in after a problogging job – I figure that I spend so much time sat at this keyboard anyway achieving nothing that I might as well try to change that a little.
And then the other thing that reading through my archives reminded me of was this whole educational thing. Have to say that the children did squeeze one or two other educational activities out of their day, as when they went off to play with playdough and spent some time making money and selling things to each other (love that arithmetic going on in the background) but overall I need to be offering more activities that will amuse and help them to develop interests.
I did finally get the Power House
out of its box the other day and then realised that the instructions weren’t quite as comprehensive as they could have been so put it back on the shelves until I could look at it more closely. If we did some of that once or twice a week and explored issues around it we’d be covering science I think.
We bought materials to make montessori bead material and they are just sitting around, so I need to get on with that, while they were primarily aimed at Small, they won’t do Big any harm either. And I want to put together a box of stuff for each of them so that when I get the “what can I do?” wail, I can answer it by pointing at the box. (At the moment I run through a litany – you have books, you have craft items, there are other books on the shelves in your room, how about your maths etc etc – the standard answer is but I don’t want to do any of those 🙁 )
I have maybe 5 months before our lives change all over again. I need to pull myself out of this low grade funk and make some progress or I’m never going to catch up with myself. While still being kind to myself of course 🙂
Leave a Reply