Weekend recap

Feeling that we did more history on Friday night, seems to be the in thing atm. Sat morning wandered around packing up the car with overnight gear that included a tent (!) and we pootled off the path which was lovely. Lots of other puddlers there as well, and most of us stayed over (only Kirsty of the puddlers clearing off I think).

Weather was just about perfect, warm but with a breeze which meant we were all out in the garden for ages, and then Jan laid on a fantastic spread. Got to spend time passing J around, he is a lovely baby for it 🙂

Excellent moment when we got 7 of the 9 children into the bath together, hoping Jonathan got some decent piccies, which should be fine to show as you certainly couldn’t see very much! Then we stacked most of the children on top of Katy on the couch and she read a bedtime story or three. Or more 😉

Finally got the children down to bed, mainly by dint of Barbara running up and down the stairs a lot to the dormitory arrangement in C and M’s bedroom, and we got to gather around the table and chat til the small hours. Was great 🙂

This morning, not so good. Big was just a touch on the absolutely tired and frazzled side, so we didn’t go to church, but when everyone else had gone, we gathered our stuff and made a quiet exit. Sorry about having to do that, but I really do feel it was for the best. Both of the kids slept in the car on the way home, which means they made it through the afternoon alright, Tim and I took shifts to go for a lie down 😆

I got the shopping done as well, and I’ve managed to go and water plants, but overall, feeling a bit braindead and shattered. We did start a history folder tonight with Big though, which felt like a really good achievement. She’s fascinated by history, especially Kings and Queens and castles, thatched houses, what ppl wore, how they travelled and what they ate. So I wrote down a list of questions that she wants to answer, and she picked a queen – she knows that the current queen is Elizabeth II, so she asked about Elizabeth I. I put a sheet on the relevant century into the folder, and then we looked for some piccies and printed them out, wrote dates on them and added them in. All of which took a good hour, as well as looking through one of our history books.

I can see this could be something that we spend quite a bit of time on, and I’m really looking forward to doing it with her. I’m chuffed to bits that she’s come up with something so meaty that we can really get into and spend some time and effort on, I’m just hoping that we’re going to find the time over the next couple of (very hectic) weeks to keep the interest going. Also wondering if there is anywhere local we can go to look at historical sites, must do some more research.

This is going to do wonderful things for my own historical knowledge!