a little bit of time-travelling in between 😉 A good way to spend a Thursday.
Kids started the day with putering, but soon drifted towards their maths books, aided by Tim and me taking them out to the garage to find the scales so that Small could do all the weighing experiments that he couldn’t do the night before. Big is extremely jealous of the hands on aspects of his book, and the games that she gets to play are not measuring up to his activities atm. Oh well, have ordered her some ten sided dice so at least she can do those bits. (Will have surplus btw, as they come in a pack of ten, so if anyone else has need, let me know.)
They spent an hour or so weighing things against each other which seemed to go down extremely well, and then somehow it all went to pot over lunch time and there were tantrums galore and generally horrid behaviour. I’ll gloss over that – I ended up blackmailing Small into accompanying us to Fram for the Knight Academy segment of time travellers and we set off about an hour later than I’d wanted.
As it was, we’d turned up just in time for the re-enactment of Agincourt – if anyone is near to one of the properties where they are doing this over the next few weeks, I highly recommend it. It was really carefully worked out – the largest children with weapons were taken off to be general footsoldiers, the large band of medium sized children were the archers, and the very smallest were kept out of the fray and given inflatable swords so that they could be the knights who eventually slayed the french army. The french army was made up of parents. Or grandparents. Whoever could be dragged into the ring really. And the rest of us were the sound effects department.
Don’t know how much the children took in, but they seemed to enjoy it – the whole thing took about 40 minutes, and I now know a lot more about the tactics of battles during that time period. And the three guys who were doing it were absolutely excellent. They are in Cornwall next week, and they said they were at Bolsover the week after, but I can’t find that on the English Heritage site.
After we’d done the Agincourt thing, we had a wander around the shop for a little while, and both the children spent some money. Small bought himself a jester finger puppet and an English flag, while Big splashed out £1.50 on a timeline book of stickers. We had both thought that it would contain a timeline that you needed to put the stickers on, but it doesn’t. The timeline is the little picture on the back cover, there are 20 stickers, a wordsearch and a crossword puzzle. Not quite what we thought she was getting, but she’s still fairly happy with it.
Then they reopened the armour tent, and brought out the inflatable swords again. Had a good conversation with the swordmaster – said I spend most of my time trying to stop Small fighting rather than encouraging him to do it. Sword guy said yes, but there are times when you have to fight, and he worries about bullying at school. I said that’s not a problem for us given we’re home educating and he was absolutely thrilled. Turns out that he learnt to sword fight from his German grandfather when he was 8 and now makes his living that way – he later stood in the middle of a ring of battling children and declared I have the best job in the world 🙂
Big and Small had a go with the sword until Small got carried away and hit her in the eye – even with an inflatable sword that’s going to hurt 🙁 They were both declared dead at that point, and we retired to the armour tent so that they could try on a variety of helmets, chain mail coifs, gauntlets and so on. All good.
And eventually home, out of the baking sunshine (28 degrees according to the car thermometer) where I set to making tea from the veg box again. Roast vegetables and the rest of the family had chicken, with the left over new potatoes from the night before. Roast courgettes not too successful, I liked the beetroot, which Tim declared tasted like mud and Small declined to taste at all. Onions are onions really.
Finished off the day with yet more Kaspar, while the children did maths as they listened. They are waiting to do the same tonight, so I’d better clear off and read to them, then come back and blog today!
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