taking a moment

to recap in a bit more detail on the weekend.

My excuse for this is that we’ve had an extremely quiet day today, although I did ban children’s channels on tv between 9 and 5, which led to Big watching a documentary on monkeys, and another on experimental archeaology, both of which she was telling dp about at bedtime. Go figure. I also read to them over tea, which seemed to work quite well as well…

Anyway. As I said below, Alison and Chris and offspring came to visit this weekend. Saturday was forecast to be the better day, weather wise, so we loaded up a picnic and set out to the Yorkshire Sculpture park. Before we’d done that though, the children found our optics set and much fun was had with that. The Sculpture park was great, and it was lovely to see Jan and Jonathan and their kids and Barbara and hers again. I know that we adults spend a fair amount of time communing online, but it does sometimes surprise me that children who don’t see each other very often get on so well – I don’t think there were any major fallouts in the entire day (not counting B’s physical fall out of a window to land on his head – ouch!) So we covered culture and physical education – for the adults at any rate. I have to admit that sculpture is not something I know much about, and usually it seems rather silly – some elaborate and enormous statue, stood in a white walled room. At the park you’ve got all sorts of stuff dotted in fields with sheep and amongst trees and undergrowth, and it seems much easier to enjoy somehow. And as for the physical education – well next time, we’re parking in the car park half way down the hill – having to walk from the bottom of the park to the top at the end of the day while carrying a sleeping Small (although aren’t Ergos wonderful?) was no joke at all I can tell you.

Home for tea, and much pasta and sauce later, we had a production line bathing attempt going on. And how black was the water?! Proves that they’d been out in the fresh air, that’s for sure… 😉 Once we’d started getting children to bed we ordered ourselves takeout and found a rather good bottle of wine -I heartily recommend wine clubs, completely revolutionised my feelings towards red wine, I can tell you. We talked loads, about all kinds of things, and I found it a really easy evening. We haven’t spent much RL time with the portico before, but it didn’t seem to show, and given that several of us have laid claim to being uncomfortable in company, well, it didn’t show.

Sunday the weather was not nearly as accommodating. It was grey and rather threatening, so we started off with plans for a quiet day. So we did the Sound and Music kit, and the colour and light kit, painted, drew, played with the dolls house, read many books, dressed up and finally did make it outside to run around and be athletic. And much talking in between children as well. There is this odd concept that I’ve come across whereby ppl think it is mean to home educate because the children won’t get any time off, you are always schooling them, well it didn’t seem to be doing these children any harm! And I fail to see how you could stop them learning – it was fabulous to watch. Big seemed to really come out of her shell as well, she was right in there doing rainbow science with P, painting, drawing, you name it. So I’m hoping that I’ve learned a lesson or two as well. I think I’ve been doing too much and too little – trying to hard to provide educational activities and not doing enough to provide an environment conducive to learning.

I do feel that I should offer one last apology to Alison as well – I feel like I spent the entire weekend picking her brain, and probably didn’t let her rest at all – sorry! But the conversations about children and education were just so interesting, I couldn’t let it alone! I promise that I’ll try to be a bit less enquiring next time we meet… 🙂