You know it's time to clean the bedrooms...

...when the kids start drawing in the wall mould :

 

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.

'Best Before End' Trumps...(or how housewives manage to avoid hitting the bottle before noon)

Thursday morning. Ds1 is throwing up. I settle him on the sofa with a king sized tub trug and resign myself to a day at home.

A day at home.

So what do I do? Oh the choices are endless. I could feed the washing machine monster. I could find a way of fitting all the kids clothes in their drawers. I could burn chocolate cookies. I could poke out the gunge-slime from the rubber seals in the dishwasher with a take-away chopstick. Or I could solve the problem of life the universe and everything.

Well even though the latter sounds mighty tempting it's not really compatible with emptying vomit out of a tub trug at regular intervals and so I decide, instead, on the task of clearing out the kitchen cupboards. Not just any kitchen cupboard, but Baking Cupboard Hell Hole, that desolate-thingimagig-stuffed-flour-mite-dog-hair-infested-no-mans-land.

Yes. I may be some time.

So here is an account in pictures of the contents of my baking cupboard on Thursday 29th July 2010.

Somehow it looks much tidier in a photo than it does in real life:
















But as I start to remove items, the reality shows:




















I reveal what no good vegetarian should have in their cupboard (close your eyes). I find two packs. But to be fair we used them to make 'snot' one halloween, not to eat.




















There are strange things lurking. A regular item in our diet (not). Maybe some strange healthy visitor snuck it in there when I wasn't looking. Or maybe the kids used it for dinosaur world or coke bottle rattles or amunition for assorted weapons...




















There are indicators of a guilty 'we ought to eat more healthy' moment. 3 different packs of pumpkin seeds, signifying 3 separate moments of food health guilt.
At least one, as you'll note by the use-by date, occurred before 2003:















Ahah! I'd forgotten that wonderful game. The 'best before' game of trumps.

And so I start with Dried Stoned Dates....





















...July 2006





















I trump that with Mixed Dried Fruit (looking more dried than fruit)...
























...Oct 2004





















Well that definitely beats Green's Velvety Cheesecake mix...


























which has an almost edible March 2010


















Quick intermission (doesn't everyone have tattoos in their baking cupboard?)

Then back to the game. I trump Velvety Cheesecake Mix with Ready To Serve Custard (complete with layer of authentic kitchen grease and dust), September 2009.

Which thrashes last year's Classic Christmas Pudding, still in date with a best before of September 2010:

But I'll top that with Flaked Pudding Rice...

with date of Jan 2003...

Which trumps Tescos Walnut Pieces...

that is sadly only April 2004:

But both are trumped by my positively retro selection of Gram Flour packs...

The first with the date of December 2001

And the second ...

...with the super bbe date of 7th August 2001! Yay! We have a winner!

The only problem is that at this point I get bored.

And somehow all this has to go back in that cupboard:

Never mind, maybe I'll just ignore it and go tackle the lifeforms in the fridge.

I am taking on the world, one cupboard at a time.

A post a day...

Well, pretty much every day this week. This must mean either I'm using the pc as a displacement activity or that I've completely switched off to the whole domesticity thing. Or both. Yesterday I found myself checking emails and facebook and my blog every 5 minutes, just in case someone somewhere had tried to communicate with me. If my social life wasn't so dire I would suggest that I need to get out more. The freezer aisle of Tescos doesn't count.

Well seeing as I'm here, I'd better post about something. I have two photos to share. As you can see, we've found out what those leggy cases were dangling from the reeds in our pond. This creature still had his/her's attached when the children caught it:

So, not a damselfly, but a big greeny dragonfly. It's looking a bit soggy cos today, for the first time in a while, it is raining. Proper daytime summer showery rain. All warm and smelling of damp leaves and pollen. (Aaaattiiishhhhoooo!).

The kids woke up with mosquito bites this morning. A sure sign that summer has definitely arrived.