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. ]

Straw into gold (or sheep into thread)

"To-day do I bake, to-morrow I brew,
The day after that the queen's child comes in;
And oh! I am glad that nobody knew
That the name I am called is Rumpelstiltskin!"

Today we had a go at spinning.

We got together at a friend's house where a very capable friend of hers showed us how to use a spinning wheel.

The hardest part for me was the multitasking, i.e. concentrating on keeping the wheel spinning, while dealing with feeding the fleece in at the other end. You wouldn't think with years of home educating experience that multitasking would be a problem...welllll...One foot is supposed to be peddling while the hands tease out the fleece, feed it into the spool, and make sure that the twist doesn't work its way back into the bundle of fleece and tangle it all up! Easy, eh?

Ds2 had a go and was a right little Rumpelstiltskin, even managing to join in the fleece again when the thread broke. My attempts were, well, let's just say that I need the practice.

Rumpelstiltskin in action

I also had a go on our drop spindles which have been kicking around the house for some time now. One was borrowed from preschool when ds2 was there (about 4 years ago); I've never got quite got around to returning it (oops!). We were given a sack full of fleece at the same time which has been residing in the garage ever since because it smells - quite naturally - of sheep. [mental note to self: must do something with that fleece]. Anyway, the resulting thread from today's drop-spindling is what we generally refer to in our house as 'rustic' or 'full of character'.

Yesterday we exercised the kids at a local nature reserve, taking a picnic and a few bags for anything they happened to collect en route (they always come back with something, don't they?). We found some complete shell fossils that had come loose from the sides of the quarry, and a dried up (slightly crunchy) beetle, which I think is a female stag beetle. There were loads of butterflies, some photos below. (For some reason my camera is having trouble focusing close up at the moment, well focusing on anything other than faces, so apologies if they look a bit fuzzy).

Poking in the water. I'm not sure what for, but there were some pretty big fish jumping around.

Posing under the 'lightning tree'

We're such fungis to be with (groan)

Crispy stag beetle (yum)

Layers of fossilized shells

Painted Lady butterfly

Peacock Butterfly on a scabious flower

Some sort of moth I think. Not big enough to be a tiger moth, so I'll need to look it up.

And what does the canine member of our family think about all our recent goings on..?

I could have been a movie star...this is just so degrading.