What do your surfaces say about you?

The Kitchen

(lettuce seeds, black bananas, an empty film canister, dried dates, past-their-best plums, remains of a pack of salted peanuts, bar of chocolate)

(burnt toast, empty bowl of apple flapjack, tubes of mediteranean soup, glass of butternut squash seeds, recipe book holder containing everything except recipe books)

 

(3-day-old egg white from a recipe that required egg yolk, plate of bread crusts, unwashed cup, bottle of pepsi, empty bottle containing dried popcorn, a tuning fork, a burnt-down home-made candle in the shape of a dog, a piece of paper with bookshelf dimensions)

(ladle, carnations in a measuring cylinder, egg from our hens, marmalade jar with paintbrushes, plastic tub of unknown seeds)

The Conservatory

(black shoe polish, modelling foam, jam jar lid, roller, kids' paintings, on top of bank stuff that's been waiting a year to be filed)

(home-made camera obscura, aquarium bridge, jam jar with chrysalis, build-a-volcano box, modelled scenery, wire trees in a tupperware tub)

The Lounge

(globe, edible money, indian takeway pickle tub containing cardboard parts to a make-it-yourself siege tower, an Egyptian Mummy wordsearch, two camers and a video camera plus leads to connect to tv, a biscuit tin lid with magnetic calendar, a mug of squash that someone has forgotten)

(a smaller globe, an origami snapping crocodile, a jewelled egg bought at a carboot sale, a sewing machine foot that's not for our sewing machine, a fold-up clothes brush that doesn't work)

(two home-made felt penguins, a plasticine dragon, a wax sticks sculpture of a three-legged dog, pieces of a Christmas cracker jigsaw puzzle and a half-finished felt butterfly)

(Sherbert dip, a model of a heart and intestines, a painting on a mini-canvas, a Game gift card)

(potatoes, a plastic test-tube rack with iron filings)

(a home-made cardboard pyramid)

(stones and a stained-glass knight picture)

(Art mannekin and box of assorted 'stuff')

The Hallway

(Deodorising foot spray, tennis ball, door stop in the shape of a cow, a calendar notepad, tubs of pens, a light bulb, a carefully balanced filing system of 'probably important' stuff in a slightly-overwhelmed letter rack)


I think our surfaces say 'we've been busy' and 'there are more important things in life than housework'.

What do your surfaces say about you?

Educating the kids is the easy bit

When I tell people I home educate, often the response is 'Wow, you're brave' or 'That must be hard work' or 'I could never do that'. And what I want to say in reply (but rarely do) is that educating my kids (or facilitating their learning, which is more our style), is actually the easy bit. It's all the other stuff that is hard.

This term I have been doing three courses. On Thursday evenings I'm doing a 2-year part-time diploma course, on alternate Monday evenings I'm doing an online course and on Friday mornings I'm doing another course. This equates to five 'homeworks' every fortnight, and one 2-3000 word assignment every term, plus working towards a larger portfolio and an exam. That's without actually making uninterrupted space for thinking time. I belong to a writing group, which meet every fortnight. It's my turn to lead the session tomorrow.

Two evenings a week during term-time I work from 7-10pm. The money isn't just handy, it's pretty much essential.

I try to home cook. I try to home bake. (Though at the moment the kids are living on Cream Crackers and Pot Noodle). I grow our own veg and I ignore our almost-abandoned allotment plot and feel guilty about it and continue to ignore it. I sell stuff on Ebay and Amazon to pay my late-payment credit card fines.

I do housework. I clean. I wash. I mend. I tidy. I cook. I shop. I cut grass and hedges. I scoop poop. I nag. I do it all over again. And still this place looks like something out of the series 'How Clean is Your House.'

Agreed, there are no dead mice in the wardrobe or cat pee stains on the carpet (there is no room in the wardrobe even for mice and we don't have a carpet). But it is a good demonstration of why hoarding stuff is A BAD THING and why pretty much everyone I know, except me, has a cleaner or an obliging mother who lives nearby and who cleans and babysits their kids every week, and why there are moments when I hate stay-at-home women whose kids are in school all day and who moan that they can't fit everything in. What I actually want to say is 'What the **** have you been doing all day? Writing a bestseller using alphabetti spaghetti?!' But of course I don't.

So, where does this leave us? Well, the crockery cupboards are full of dog hair and crud, the fridge has something growing in it, and the leaning tower of art and craft materials is now topped by a leaning tower of tablemats and books and clothes to mend and clothes beyond mending and weird things that the kids want to keep that I can no longer be bothered to resist, and one day it will topple down and bury us all and no-one will find us until the council break down the door to investigate the bad smell.

So when I start thinking about the home ed side of things, that is actually the easy bit. Or it would be if I had nothing else to do. One evening a week the boys have home ed fencing club, and middle child has cub scouts. This has to be juggled between work and courses. And then there is the kids' daytime activities - weekly fencing, monthly home ed group, monthly geography group, weekly/fortnightly Explorers Group for the younger ones. (We keep the activities to a tolerable level, but when you top up with play-dates and inpromptu meet-ups it all adds up.) And there's the time we spend on projects, research, library visits, outings, workshops.

But really, if someone - anyone - would step in and do the rest of the c**p, the boring, menial, essential stuff that is truly hard work, the home educating would be a doddle.

I have found my vocation

Recently I paid off a £30 - well closer to £40 fine - for overdue books at the library. I can't afford a £40 fine. It is absolutely and definitely not in my budget. The library has introduced a policy that if you are more than £10 owing on any one library card then you cant take any more books out. So there you have it. I had to pay up.

I'm not sure quite how it happened. Well actually it might have had something to do with 70 books and 3 DVDs and 2 audiobooks being at least a week overdue. And the fact that every time I go into the library I have this mistaken illusion that if I get books out I will actually have the time to read them (or that if I get lovely educational books out for the kids that they wont just use them for ramps for lego racers).

I'm usually very disciplined at keeping track of these things. But deadlines seem to be slipping lately. And I've developed a resistance to listening to that niggle in the back of my head, you know the one that say 'er actually you need to deal with this - now.' So I only have myself to blame. And the library. Because I don't think they should charge hopelessly disorganised home educating mothers. It should be against the law.

When I told a friend about the fine she chuckled and said 'that's why I love you.' So perhaps my purpose in life is to reasure others that they are slightly less crap at housekeeping and financial management than I am. I may, at last, have found my vocation.

Hoarder? Or just frugal? The survival instinct kicks in...

There's been a terrible smell in the house for the past few days. I think I've tracked it down to the fridge, but despite throwing everything out that looked like it had a life of its own (there were quite a few contenders), the smell still lingers.

I even wiped it out with our really stinky cheap washing up liquid. Didn't make any difference, except that the fridge now smells of yuk AND a lavender/toilet cleaner-sort of smell. Bicarb solution might be the next step. But in the meantime I'm just hoping the smell will somehow go away...[yeah, head in sand as usual]

Well the snow finally stopped on Saturday and once a bit of ice had melted we were able to get the car out safely. Like others that I know, the survival instinct immediately set in and I drove out to get SUPPLIES.

It's only been a few days since we've been able to get out the house, but the shopping centre was like pre-christmas madness! People were buying up anything and everything! I'm not sure if this is something specifically British, but we seem to be so scared of going without. We are a nation of hoarders:we hoard and hoard, and then barricade ourselves in, just on the offchance of starvation, or drought, or flood, or Tesco closing for a day, or any sort of shortage.

Maybe it's a leftover effect of World War II, where shortages were commonplace and our grandparents learnt to live with rationing for many years? I've had the 'make do and mend' mentality driven into me from a young age and in times of stress - or shortage - it kicks into overdrive. How can I throw anything out when it may, at some time in the future, be so very useful??!

Of course this hoarding is useful when it comes to home educating. We have every resource we could possibly need - except that we have so many things it's quite difficult to find what we need when we need it. Or maybe home educating is just an excuse to hoard even more stuff? No! I'm frugal! I recycle! I'm good for the environment! (at least that's my story and I'm sticking to it).