Oh yay! Oh yay! October round-up is here!

Ok, what can I say bloggy audience? I must kneel at your feet and beg forgiveness.

Forgive me for I have sinned: I've been a bad bad blogger.

You see this is how it happens:
I think of something I need to post. I have the photos; I have the words. But then somehow I don't get them to the pc.
Then a day or two later, something else happens that I want to blog. This time I get to the pc, but I don't have the photos to upload. So I think, 'well I'll wait till I have the photos'.

And well, you can guess the rest.

So here I am to rectify the situation. I have forgotten all the words I was going to say, all those pearls of wisdom/angst/humour. So instead we'll stick to annotated piccies.


Dd's 7th birthday. The hedgehog cake. Entirely home-made (well the role of nice mummy didn't extent to hand-crafting the chocolate buttons, but you know what I mean).


The best party game ever: tie mini chocolate donuts to strings off the washing line and yell 'Shark Attack!' and realise how difficult it is to take a nice photo of your child at a party without everyone else's kids in it. Especially difficult when said child is wearing a bear hat.

The best bit of birthdays of course



Mother has a fit of worksheetitis and sends children on a trail around museum. 'Just read the question again.' I say cheerily through gritted teeth 'The answer's got to be here somewhere.'

Detour to the toy shop to goggle at over-priced house-junk (the reward for not filling in the museum trail). We are all mildly impressed by the lego R2D2.

'No you can't have one for Christmas!'

Making beady bugs. Guess what everyone's getting for Christmas instead of a lego R2D2..?

Dying fluorescent orange cotton a (hopefully) less fluorescent orange colour.

Only another 20 or so balls to go...

Hoping these will make stripey socks because I'm too tight to buy the proper wool.

So, if you're not getting a beady spider for Christmas,

it could be fluorescent orange (and brown) socks.

Halloween bonfire party in motion

A picture just made for quirky captions. Suggestions anyone?

How about 'The devil is in the detail' ?

Or perhaps 'It was a hell of a halloween'?

Is it one of my kids in the photo?

No, obviously someone more willing to wear silly headgear than my bunch.

I think someone has been drinking too much Tango.

And the most exciting part of the halloween bonfire party?

When the fire engine arrived, of course!

Nothing us mothers like more than when the firemen stripograms arrive

I think everyone should set fire to their carpark

and invite a few firefighters along to the party.

On our trip somewhere between worksheetitis and toy shop we do something far more educational: watch a stuntsman do a stunt for the next series of 'Lewis'. To quote a famous band: 'That aint working that's the way you do it,

get your money for nothing and your chicks for free.'

(Though it must cost a fortune in chiropracter fees.)

One day to go (or further adventures of the obsessive knitter)

At some point in the afternoon I abandoned the packing.

It was too early to start on the wine and there were no choc chips left in the baking cupboard so the only alternative was wool therapy. I drove to a wool shop to buy another ball of sock wool that I'd run out of after knitting 3 socks. You knitters know what it's like, if I don't finish that 2nd pair of socks asap that poor lonely little sock will reside in the drawer of unfinished projects forever.

So wool shop it was. £20 later I came out with the ball of sock wool...and another ball of different sock wool...and 3 balls of wool that looked like the kind of thing I might make something out of one day when I finally finish knitting socks. If not then they'll make great loft insulation.

Wool shops warp your mind.

[Btw, for those of you who don't normally read my blog I do actually write about home education sometimes. Really. ]

Apple White and The Emperor's New Clothes

Ok, I'm still fiddling around with the blog colours.

It occurred to me that brown and blue don't really go, so I changed and went all-blue. Well, it shows up as blue on my p.c. However, on my laptop it just looks like shades of white. I don't want shades of white! White reminds me of when I was a teenager and the 'in thing' was to paint your walls with Dulux 'apple white''. It was all a con of course, an Emperor's New Clothes thing, cos to anyone walking into the room it just looked like you'd painted your walls with a tin of cheap white emulsion. Dulux must have made a packet ['Let's tell them it's white with a hint of green and charge them a rip-off price. Nobody will notice.']. Mind you, most people were desperate just to paint anything over the brown and orange flowery wallpaper left over from the 70s.

Anyway, I don't want my blog to be white. So is it just me? Does it look blue or white to you?

Today we were at the sailing club. The kids went swimming as the water is getting warmer at last. Last week I christened my new super fluorescent pink 'n' swirly swimming costume in the lake, but was feeling a little more self-conscious this week. I do like it. But it's not designed for people who want to slip their lardy wobbly bits into the water with minimal audience. I mean, this thing glows in the dark.

Ds1 and ds2 have been working on various animations and games. At the moment I can't upload them onto this blog cos they're made using Scratch which (I think) can only be uploaded to the Scratch website and I can't convert them into a different format. Will keep trying. I've booked the boys into the annual Summerscreen animation/green screen workshops this year, so maybe they'll pick up some more tips.

Knitting. Sigh. I have numerous projects on the go as usual. One arm and some borders to go to complete a cardigan. It's the first thing I've knitted for myself (apart from socks) for years. I am feeling rather wary about completion. Usually I would lose interest halfway through, or get bored, or just decide I don't like it anymore and unpick the lot. But I've only one arm and some borders to go. It is worryingly near the endpoint...

A friend is heavily pregnant at the moment. I don't envy her in this heat. In fact I don't envy her at all. I never did like the baby stage (or the pregnancy stage, or the toddler stage, or the preschool stage). Now my children are at the perfect age, the 7-10 age (well ok, I'm stretching it a bit: one is 6 and one is 11, but it's the best I'm gonna get). I just need to cryogenically preserve this moment. Fast-freeze my children straight from the field like baby peas. I wonder what I'll be doing when my eldest is 16 and my youngest is 11. What will life be like? Will I be celebrating my freedom, or mourning my loss? I guess only blog will tell.

Pah! We can do the National Curriculum too, you know...

...the 'Sorting and classification' bit of the NC, where kids have to spend endless hours deciding whether a spoon is alive or dead
[to which ds1 answers 'Well if I wire it up to this socket here, it'll definitely be live.']

But of course our ventures into the National Curriculum are entirely accidental - or should that be incidental - or unintentional - either way, when we do accidentally do accidentally do it, we do it HOME ED style.

Yesterday ds2 suddenly decided to take an interest in stamps. Thankfully I just caught him as he was sticking them in very firmly with double sided sticky tape.

'Er...I think we'll get some stamp hinges.' Says philatilist mother.


Poor child didn't account for maternal enthusiasm...
'Oh look there's a whole box AND a shopping bag of stamps here to soak, sort, classify and stick in' (says mother with cheery grin).




Four hours later....still going...(Yoo Hoo! There's still another sackful of stamps over here)




And joined by sister, who also wants to sort and classify small things (hama beads, and shredded pepper offcuts in coke bottle lids):



And ds1 follows in the criminal footsteps of his mother...

Though it might be the knitting that is criminal...Yeah, we know the mouth is kinda, well not in the right place (you weren't planning to wear it while eating were you, child?).

Anyway, we all know mother's fabulous motto for her handknits:

'You'll grow into it, dear.'

The Incredible Sock-Making Woman and other tales...

Yes! Another pair!





I found this wool on my last wool-hunting expedition (the one that involved the unhygenic chip shop and a wind up toy rat). Only problem with this wool is that the repeat on the colour isn't very frequent, so I had to work really hard to get two socks that looked similar out of one ball of wool. They're very soft though. Shame I can't keep them - sent them to my mum as a belated Mother's Day present. Hopefully they'll fit. If not I'll have to do more knitting...


Other news?


Well dd has been seen in public sporting a very lovely hat. She even had a photo taken of her like this by a local attraction for her annual pass. Oh yes...it's those home educating nutters. You should see what they make their children wear.






Dd's fascination for millipedes and centipedes and other pedes is taking over the house. New tubs with their littlepede houses appear daily. Often with their lids left off. I am extraordinarily tolerant of this sort of thing, having kept various creatures in old Ferrero Rochet tubs under my bed, as a child. However when a dehydrated and rather crunchy centipede stuck to my sock yesterday and I padded around the house it did cross my mind that perhaps this isn't how normal families function.

Dd1 begged to do handwriting practice! (the alternative was a page of maths - God he must really hate maths). So he wrote some beautiful letters in beautiful handwriting...

And then put them to good use...

Don't you just love the eloquence of the English language?

Ds1 and ds2 designed their egg buggies for a home ed competition.

And the kids made puppet theatres out of cereal boxes. Well part-made. Dd was only mildly impressed with my efforts on hers, but she did enjoy the cutting out. Amazing the joy one can get from a pair of scissors and a glue stick.

And the boys were invited to a birthday party involving quad bikes.

Note the 'Oh God Mother put the camera away' look on my eldest's face...


And...so who invited the leopard to breakfast?

I hand made the costume about 7 years ago and NONE of my children have ever wanted to wear it. So what if it gets used to mop up Cheerios - we don't care. Go girl!

Question: When is a hen not a hen?

Answer: when it turns into a cockeral.

No, it's not a joke. It's a rather serious business actually.

Two mornings ago there was a strange noise outside in the early hours. I looked out, couldn't see anything (it was dark). The noise? Well it was just odd. Like a barking, croaking, gurgling, clucking sort of noise - but actually none of those.

And then this morning I heard it again. But this time it was a barking, croaking, gurgling, clucking sort of noise with 'a-doodle-doo' added at the end.

Now, I don't know a huge amount about hens. I feed them, I clean them out, I worm them, and I run around very quickly when they turn on me (especially when chicken food falls down the inside of my welly -a very dangerous situation indeed!). But the one thing I do know is that hens don't - as a rule - make any noise that involves 'a-doodle-doo'. Are you following my drift?

So my conclusion (being the Sherlock Holmes type) is that the cute fluffy chick that we raised last year, that looks like a hen and acts like a hen (well ok, so its legs are becoming mini tree trunks and it's got a nasty temper on it) is actually not a hen at all.

NOT A HEN.

Putting it simply: Lola is actually Charlie.

But it looks like a hen. Well except today, when it is looking less and less like a hen the more I examine it. But maybe that's because I have been influenced by the vocal suggestion that it may be something other than a hen (all the time it sounded like a hen, then it also looked like a hen).

My only thought is that it's one of those breeds that when I googled it said 'it's very difficult to sex these chickens, because the first you'll know about it is that they'll either lay an egg or they'll crow."

Bummer.

So why didn't somebody tell me that it takes 6 months before a hen - I mean a cockeral - starts to crow? So, it gets to puberty and starts strutting its funky stuff going 'hey, look at the cool dude here' or something like that? In a very loud and strange -'my voice has just broken' - noise. It's all news to me.

Well, whatever. All it means is that out goes 'egg-laying potential' and in comes 'potential to mightily pee-off the neighbours'.

Don't suppose anyone want a free lunch (with feathers)?

---------------------------------------------

Ok, on to the home ed now. Yes, I know my posts are completely random. You probably click on the blog link and think 'I wonder what it'll be this time - Some political rant about home education? Some funny comment about parenting (or lack of)? Or a dull list of home ed activities with some photos of kids we've never met and have no interest in whatsoever?'

Well today ladies and gentlefolk, I'm going for option C...

Here is the news:

Spring has arrived (at last)

and with it, comes that craziness that infects all who stand in the way.

Mad teacher woman with tambourine in museum reminds home ed children exactly how patronising adults can be:

(it goes without saying that I am always very very thankful when others organise home ed workshops at other locations - but there are times when the workshops serve to remind me why I home educate)

Shocking new discovery of 'hoody' mummy - freed from it's crypt it roams the museum withh unfilled-in worksheets:

Criminal mother finds exactly how quick it is between taking a photo of the stage and the theatre police tapping her on the shoulder and telling her off (approx 2 secs after this photo):

[We saw Charlie and Lola - well worth a visit if it comes to you. Lovely for littleuns. True to the original. And no silly adults in funny costumes singing stupid songs (always a sticking point for me).

Of course I'd give it a full review if the security thugs at the theatre had let me take a few more fuzzy pictures. Pah! Who do they think I am? There's this badly dressed frump of a mother who couldn't find the hairbrush, with my crappy little digital camera and 3 fidgetty kids? Like I'm going to film the whole show (in blurry wobbles with 4 heads in front of me and small child begging for jelly beans) and put it on Youtube..? Ok. Rant over. I suppose it's a fair cop, guv. I give you the full two-fingered salute.]

Child praises miracle of mother actually finishing a knitting project:

[Do they look different lengths? Nah! I reckon it's just that one leg is longer than the other.]

[Notice the non-slip rug stuff sewn underneath? No more hall floor slides for you, my child. You have super sticky feet. Ha!]

One of the family proves that they can actually do academic work without mother threatening to send them to school ('..I'm phoning St Christophers now..what d'you mean? You're willing to do it now..?')

Small child demostrates how best to drown very tiny seeds:

(and then leave them to die from lack of water later)

Middle child demonstrates at science festival how to soak stall-holder's feet with water pump (and not apologise):

Small child makes mother freeze her wotsits off for 2 hours at science festival so small child can ask stall holder 'How big is Space?'

(I wouldn't have minded but the stall holder is her dad. )

'And how big is space?' I hear you ask

VERY.

(apparently, though I couldn't hear because my teeth were chattering too much).

Big child makes lethal additions to catapult collection (hard things to fire and targets to pretend to hit while actually aiming for squirrels):

Small child finds jelly bean on floor of theatre. Museum assistants date it to sometime in the 3rd century judging by the amount of archaic fluff attached to it:

And here endeth the news.

The perils of buying cardboard model-making sets.

You'd think I'd have learnt from the James Watt Steam Engine that took us weeks to make, and the numerous cardboard model-making sets still unused on the bookcase. And the Trojan Horse model that I ordered from Amazon and immediately regretted. But no. I went and bought a telescope-making kit. It was cheap. In fact I thought it might have been mispriced.


Then I realised, as ds2 progressed, that the part labels were written in German. And that at least one of them was incorrectly labelled. We haven't got any further, but it's possible that more is mis-labelled.

So by the time we've interpreted what it is we're meant to do (each little stage requires gluing and drying before progressing to the next stage) it could be a couple of months before we are viewing the stars through our cardboard telescope.

And then we have a Trojan Horse to make. Sometime this year.

Still, we are plodding along at Ancient Greece. Not on Ancient Greece. Not in or with Ancient Greece. But at Ancient Greece. That proactive word 'at'.

I'm trying to make it as interesting and painless for the kids as possible. Ds1 and ds2 are making lapbooks/folders. We are covering small topics. Small painless topics. So far: Athens; The Parthenon; Sparta; City States/Government; Food; homes. For each we make a little booklet to stick into the folder, sometimes photocopying pictures, sometimes printing out words, sometimes doing a bit of colouring. So very painless. Theoretically.

Next I think it'll be Greek Gods (we've been listening to the first of two CDs of Greek myths) and perhaps something about architecture and writing.

Below you can see the kids importing clip art into the wordprocessing package (some of which they'd downloaded from the internet). I gave them the task of getting pictures of a list of foods that the ancient Greeks would have eaten.

And now to the very different subject. The subject of socks.

I've been very naughty and visited a wool shop. Frugal went out the window. In came greed. Not only did I buy self-patterning camouflage 4ply sock wool to make ds1 some socks, but I also bought a pattern and some cheap wool for chunky socks. Here's the first one finished, modelled on ds1's foot (he's been wearing it all afternoon). :

They dont look quite as wholesome and natural as the wool that was used in the pattern, but that wool was expensive and rather too girly (pinks and pastels) for the boys. This is courtelle yarn, which is basically a nice chunky and soft acrylic. It's really easy and quick to knit with, though it does have a mean habit of splitting into its individual strands if you're not careful.

I was a bit worried it might have really lumpy seams as it's knitted on 2 needles (makes it even quicker!) with the seam sewn up afterwards. However ds1 hasn't complained so far.

I don't know what they'd be like inside shoes, but they make great slipper socks (if a bit slippy).

Maybe I'll be able to use up some of the other chunky-thickness wools in the loft now I've got the hang of it.

Now I need to knit the second sock before he wears this one out.