The big fat chrysallis, a broken cooker and The Vikings

Well, it seems a while since I've had a chance to post on the blog, so I guess we must have been busy.

We spent last weekend away on the south coast visiting relatives. It was rather windy for spending alot of time on the beach, but we did some kite flying and the kids managed to collect half the beach in some plastic bags (cos we need more shells, don't we?). On the Sunday we went to a village fair with vintage vehicles and stalls.

Can't resist a bargain! A huge tray of geraniums for £1. Haven't got a clue where I'm going to put them, but hey, still a bargain lol. Nice armoured personel carrier too.

The boys look interested at things with wheels - even better, a thing with wheels AND weapons.

Chocolate muffins!!

I catch ds1 reading!! It feels like the whole of my home ed journey has been waiting for this moment...

So, he's taken a liking to a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon book and over the weekend finished it off.Now I just have to resist the urge to log on to Amazon and buy every single Calvin and Hobbes book ever published.

We came back home on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning I lashed myself into a frenzy of baking, trying out a new bread recipe and making some apple scone too. Went to light the oven only to find it wasn't working! Grrr... But...then I realised this was a fantastic opportunity, the opportunity to buy a nice new big shiny cooker! Having never had a new cooker (all have been secondhand), and having previously patched up/repaired/made do with the various quirky cookers over the years, I think perhaps it's time to invest in a new one.

So, I spent Wednesday afternoon and a couple of hours on Thursday dragging the kids around the main stores and looking at cookers. And yes, they were thrilled...Spent the rest of Thursday hunting on the internet for yet more cookers, while trying to deal with kids' interruptions every few minutes. Still, the thrill of the chase is all part of the shopping experience...

By the way, it turns out that the Hawkmoth caterpillar (see previous post) that we adopted hasn't died. Instead, it's turned into a huge brown chrysallis! If it wasn't so huge it might actually be quite pretty. I'm relieved that we didn't actually kill it off and that it may eventually hatch out into large moth. I just need to check every day to see how it's doing.

I started doing some stuff about the Vikings with the kids today, after ds1 had asked to do some more structured things. We'd had a discussion about what he might like to do and I suggested the Vikings might be interesting. I had lots of hands-on/interactive sheets for the kids and some books already so we were ready to start up, but it was all met with some resistance by ds2, and ds1 was so easily distracted it was difficult to get going (not helped by dd1's constant interruptions). Ds1 ended up lighting magnifying glass fires while I was trying to get him enthusiastic about colouring pictures of Vikings! Reminds me of previous attempts at any sort of structured or 'table' work..lol..which is why we ended up choosing a mostly autonomous path. I don't know how other families manage to do structured work with more than one child. Perhaps they spend their whole day chasing them around and then when they catch up with them they staple them to the table lol! I guess we'll see how it goes.