REME Museum of Technology

REME stands for The Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.

And so we went, to look at army thingimagigs. And I tried to look interested. I did. Honest.

There were uniform thingies. And gun thingies. And vehicle thingies. See, I was paying attention. And ds1 was so intrigued and distracted by machines of death-thingies that I even got him on camera. The lesser hooded pre-teen finch. Need to mark that down in my spotter's guide.

Photos of thingies:










I feel that the photo below should have a funny caption attached to it. But I'm not witty enough to think of anything.








Then we had lunch and we ate hula hoops and cheese and onion rolls for lunch and I drunk coca cola and I really liked the Penguin finger biscuits we took with us and we had fun and it was good and then we went home. The End.

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.)

Golf and the world of home education

I think the world would be a better place if everyone played golf like this. Those tedious golf championships on tv would take a fraction of the time and we could have some good ole sleepy Sunday films on instead.

[By the way, in the world of Home Education this is not called 'cheating'. No, it is called 'using your initiative', or 'thinking outside of the box'...or 'doing it quick so you can get to the ice cream van'. ]

I've been thinking recently about the concepts people have of home education. So many seem to think that home education equates with 'school at home'. Of course there are a number of home edders who do home educate like this, particularly in the US where it seems there are two sorts of home edders: the structured home schoolers, and the autonomous unschoolers.

But in the UK there are many, if not more so, of home edders who do not do 'school at home'. And there are many who have a sort of eclectic mix of home education methods, constantly in flux, somewhere between 'school at home' and a totally child-led education.

For the record, we do not do school at home. We tried. We failed. We didn't conquer. (We chose another path).

But, what you might ask, do we do?

Well, there are days when I do not know what we do.

There are weeks when all I remember is the mounds of washing in and out and in and out, and the muddy footprints, piles of sand and dog hair down my hallway. There are weeks when I can't see beyond the boot rack and I despair over flat fruit cake and cry over lumpy mash.


There are weeks when my children whizz through the kitchen on a mission to something or somewhere, grabbing food on the hoof, hardly stopping for breath (and certainly not to grunt anything as civilised as 'hi') before they disappear off to something 'important'.

There are weeks when learning just happens, in its own wonky unpredictable way, without me teaching, interferring, guiding, enthusing or doing any of those things that are supposedly 'essential' for children's education:

And there are weeks when I am needed, on hand, that very minute, every minute of the day. 'Now Mummy!' they yell alternately from the bottom of our twenty million metre long garden and the highest point of our roof

'Come here!'

'Watch me!'

' Help me with this!'

' Look at this!'

and I'm pulled back and forth like a tired overstretched bit of knicker elastic.

And there are weeks when we play around with experiments from http://www.thehappyscientist.com/ and make sparks out of plain old aluminium foil:

And there are weeks when we go pond dipping

(It was this big, honest)

(no it wasn't, he's a liar)

(who cares, I have a great hat)

And there are weeks when we have fun at museums:

or listen to stories, or play with friends

There are days (not often weeks) when we (I) get the maths books out, encourage the kids to copy out poems to improve their handwriting, use 'Sequential spelling' in some desperate attempt to instil some sort of spelling sense into them.

What will happen to you little children if you can't spell? I wail.

How will you survive in the world without knowing your nine times tables? I wail.

We'll use spellchecker and a calculator, they wail in return.

And I say, fair point, and decide we should instead go out and do important things.

Like flying kites:

and playing golf (our own way):

and seeing the world with fresh eyes:

Workbooks, water and Romans (said with a Jonathan Ross voice otherwise the alliteration doesn't work)

Despite my feelings towards workbooks, they have seen on the conservatory table these past few weeks. Miquon maths, CGP maths and Sequential Spelling. They don't have a huge fan base among junior members, but they tick a fragile little box in my head and once that's ticked, it means that the kids can get on with learning the important stuff.

Dd in the meantime has started a very small 'paint by numbers' picture, which we picked up at the roman villa (see later). Of course it's a completely useless set, with hardly any paint in the teensy paint pots they supplied. What paint there was dried up on contact with air, so she ended up using our own paints that were similar colours. It is still a 'work in progress'.

In between workbooks and more useful learning, we've been carrying on with a Roman theme. Ds2 seems to enjoy it, but ds1 has made it clear that he is far above all of this stuff. It doesn't stop him joining in though{g}.

I've been reading the book 'Across the Roman Wall', which is ok, but feels a bit as if it was written to fit in with the National Curriculum. It probably was. Having listened to book 1 on CD we've also been listening to a few more Roman Mysteries on audio CD ('Vesuvius' and 'Collossus of Rhodes'). Both v.good, though I do wish the author would find some more varied vocabulary. I swear EVERY CHAPTER starts with the phrase 'Presently, he...' or 'Presently, she...'

Last week we finally made it to the Roman Villa that we visited the week before (on the one day it was closed!). The little carry-around commentaries were popular and kept my 3, plus 2 other children that I took with me, interested for a while at least.

Ds1, forgetting for a moment to put on his I'm-miserable-why-did-you-drag-me-to-this-place face:

Ok, I spoke too soon:

He's in training for a life in the public eye (no comment):

Ds2 naturally fleeced me at the gift shop:

So what else? Well the garden/veg plot/allotment is a shameful disaster,so no photos. But here's a photo of what we found coming out of our pond, a dragonfly (I think) nymph, ready to transform:

Dh took the boys on a work trip to Stratford (which apparently didn't just involve eating food and drinking in the pub)

Ds1 tested out his home-made (from plastic fizzy bottles) raft at sailing club. He discovered that although it floated, it floated about a foot under water when he sat on it. Hmm...back to the drawing board then.

The boys show that you're never too old to play in a sandpit:

Dd tests my patience by doing some sewing. Omitting swear words I calmly untangle, mend, untangle, prod, untangle and nurture the sewing machine into action, with small person at the helm. I don't intend to make it a regular occurence. (Perhaps I should hide the sewing machine on the top shelf, like I did with those apalling Letterland books that my children insisted I read to them)

Dd shows how photogenic she is in her new hat that was free from the local swap shop:

A session on World War II at our home ed group.

Even my children participated (a bit). It will go down in history.

Ds2 finds out all about hot air balloons at cubs:

A sign of a fun day - straight to the bath with you missus!