KNEX Robot Challenge day

Er, yeah, me again.

Feel like I can hardly keep up with our weeks now. I have so many photos to post, but haven't loaded them up yet, so a quick whistlestop tour right now and then I'll get around to doing the photos soon. Promise. No more boring posts, after this one. Go on, sue me.

We had a day out on Saturday with friends at a little theme park to celebrate dd's 7th birthday (half-price voucher for tickets, always a bonus). Then she had her birthday with home-made hedgehog cake, a wolf suit (which was kinda purple when it arrived rather than grey, but she was dutiful enough to try it on) and a visit from her auntie. Then on Monday it was cinema in the morning (Schools Film week - free films) and her 'animal-themed' party in the afternoon. All surprisingly chilled. Today, cinema again, this time to see Ponyo, one of the Japanese animations by Studio Gibli that we love.

Previous weeks the kids have been creating knex crossbows at HE group, doing poetry (well, doing 'Mutant Wordsworth' more about this when I post up the photos), ice skating, and er lots of stuff. I find now if I don't keep a note of it all it's soon forgotten. Ds2 has done a long hike and overnight camp with cubs, ds1 has been film-making with a friend.

Part of me feels I should be booking some group workshops at museums, or doing some outings with the kids, but another part of me knows that I can't really take anything else on at the mo. If you read my other blog (http://www.the-idle-pen.blogspot.com/) then you'll know that I have other things to fret about, like Jane Austen and her literary chums.

Sigh.

In order for me to have time to tackle JA and Co, I've been trying to keep some structure to our weeks and a while back I came up with a plan to tick a few boxes. So, we do one week 'writing' (and anything associated with) and one week 'maths (and anything associated with). Writing has included poetry (Mutant Wordsworth), filling in a museum trail sheet, writing a letter to penfriends (it took a whole week for that) etc. Up to an hour a day max. Maths is less exciting and flexible...just workbooks until I can come up with the energy to do something else. Of course I could do cooking or some other sort of measuring, but cooking with kids is even more stressful than stapling them to the table to do a page of a maths workbook.

Saying this, I DO have plans to cook with the kids, using the River Cottage Family Cookbook which looks fab (have it on loan from library at the mo). Still at the planning stage though. Or maybe it will just make a nice coffee table book, or doorstop.

The kids started fencing lessons this week. Kindly offered at bargain price by another home ed family, my bunch joined others to have their first lesson on Tuesday. The best thing is that the teacher is a boy who was home educated himself, AND his mother was the first ever HE contact I ever made, about 8 years ago. Lovely stuff. Amazingly dd did not bark, or miaow or growl or make bear noises or crawl around the floor on all fours or hug the tutor's legs until he fell over. No she participated and cooperated and enjoyed. Miracles do happen.

Christmas is approaching. Am very aware of low funds, bulging credit card, and children's expensive tastes (and, more importantly, very few relatives left alive to meet these tastes, or even any to buy them some cheap tat so they have something to unwrap on Christmas day.). Oh and the small matter of nearly 2 grand's worth of course fees, still to pay this year. I'm going to blame it all on Jane Austen.

p.s. check out this wonderful explanation of the defence cuts:
http://archers-at-the-larches.blogspot.com/2010/10/defence-cuts-explained-simply.html

Catch up - halloween, fireworks, capoeira, and other stuff!

Ok, ok, so I haven't blogged for AGES (smacked hand, naughty naughty).

Which means

ta ta ta da da da daa daaaaah...

I'm due one of those mammoth catch up posts. I posted the photos a few days ago, but didn't get around to writing the blurb. So, here goes:

HALLOWEEN

(Me, looking gorgeous):

FIREWORKS

(Cub fireworks night)

Too noisy!

CAPOEIRA BATIZADO

An annual event when ds1 and ds2 play Capoeira with Brazilian masters to earn their next belt.

THINGS WE MADE

Dd sewing felt teddy bears:

Dd helping me make candles with our freebie candle-making set from the Swap Shop:

(Guess what eveyone's getting for Christmas this year?)

Ds2 finally finished his James Watt steam engine. If you look closely you'll see that it's held together with double sided tape and pins and a few (non-religious) prayers.

Now we just have the Viking settlement and medieval town to start (remind me not to buy any more of these cut out cardboard kits in future...arghhh!)

Dd1 has been making loads of films on his camera and creating all sorts of interesting items for his warhammer scenery (most of which are part assembled on my conservatory table...). He doesn't really play warhammer, but likes making the scenery.

And ds2 showing off his natural ability with technology again, while his mother disappears down the other end of the hall and feigns complete ignorance...well actually I didn't need to feign it :)

The stupidness of chickens who doe-cee-doe with dogs and don't know when to get their heads out of the way of large garden forks

Today the kids and dh went to our local science centre. I can't say much about it, seeing as I wasn't there and I'm not telepathic and the kids weren't that forthcoming about what they'd been up to, but here's a photo. Apparently they were making a Knex fairground thing with a motor. Poor children, they look resigned to having their photo taken. With all this blogging you'd think they'd get used to it.


So what else has been going on? Well ds2 was sticking foam letters on the bathroom wall the other day and spelled out the cryptic clue 'Im hot I boil water'. He was most miffed when we read it (rather tricky not to as some of us old folk have to go to the loo at least once a day and I'm far too old to use the hedge in the front garden), but I love the way his brain works.

Apart from that? Well my shoulders are aching and my knees hurt from playing on Wii tennis and Wii dance mat respectively. And ds1 nearly trashed the lounge while playing against me (ok, overexaggeration, but quite a few Christmas cards flew across the lounge as he lunged for the ball). I actually worked up quite a sweat on the Wii dance mat (probably more info that you wanted), so maybe this will help with my new year's keep fit resolution. I have the same fitness resolution every year, but of course...

****THIS YEAR WILL BE DIFFERENT****

or maybe a bit different

or maybe just a teensy weensy bit different.

(Though it may all fail dismally if I break a leg flaying around the lounge with a controller and a nunchuck while trying to do funky moves)

Talking about the 7th Wonder of the Chickenshed Household, I wonder how many brainstorming sessions they had to have at Nintendo to come up with the name 'Wii'...or nunchuck.

I mean, do you call those names? [speaking from my grumpy old woman persona]

I, personally, would have suggested 'white addictive thing with very expensive extras that you feel the need to buy even if you don't want to' and 'zappy thing that doesn't do what you want it to, but at least you can blame it when you're rubbish at whatever game you are playing'.

But no doubt they get paid an awful lot more than me, so I'm hardly in a position to be critical.

Anything else going on? Well, I've also been poking the raised beds in the garden with a fork, which was tricky today as the ground was rather frozen. I kind of churned up the soil a bit, made a feeble attempt to take some weeds out and then decided it was far too cold to be doing anything like weeding. Then I emptied the contents of the compost bins on the raised beds and covered them up as best I could with cardboard. Recently I've been letting the chickens out to rummage the garden and their idea of rummaging is more like rampaging - scraping out the contents of my raised beds:( : hence the need to cover them

One of the chickens was so enthusiastic about the contents of the compost bin that it nearly ended up with a large fork in it's head. No I'm not deliberately cruel to chickens, but they can be exceedingly stupid animals when it comes to avoiding garden implements. Though, to be fair, this one was distracted by the big fat juicy compost bin worms and wasn't taking much notice of the huge silver prongs heading its way and about to propel it into chicken heaven.

[Amazing observation: I've discovered that chickens don't respond much to being shouted at. 'Get your head out of the way, I'm trying to stick a fork in the compost heap!' got absolutely no response. I wonder why?]

I'm thinking of writing a book ' How to train a chicken'. Should be a bestseller.

Ok...scrap that idea. I just put 'chicken' and 'train' into Amazon's search engine (you can tell I have nothing better to do) and came up with this book : '100 Ways for a Chicken to train it's owner' by Diane Parker.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/100-Ways-Chicken-Train-Human/dp/0340910208/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230668289&sr=8-5

That sounds like a much better idea. So there's no need for me to go to the trouble to find an agent then.

I'm quite tempted to buy a copy...

Anyway, back to stuff. Jack has been pleasantly surprised to find the chickens loose in the garden these past few days and gave them a quick lesson in how to avoid the stupid furry barking thing. Stupid animal chasing even more stupid animals? Well that's my week's viewing sorted.

Jack almost gave up when faced with one chicken who was obviously too stupid to run and had decided to face him square on. They did a kind of doe cee doe (er don't know how it's written, but it's one of those country dancing* sorts of things that we used to do at school when I was 6 and I always got it wrong and got told off): Jack would move forwards and jump back just in time to avoid the beak attack; then the chicken would move forwards and then back as Jack would bark at it.

Thinking about it, I should have quickly got my camera out and filmed it. I could have sent it in and got loadsa money off 'You've been Framed'.

Oh yes, trust me, I would stoop that low. I have no shame*. If people want to watch trash them I'm perfectly happy to provide them with some material (for a fee of course).

[*'Shame', along with 'guilt' and 'embarrassment' are such 'thirties' things. Now I'm nearly 40 I'm sure I can come up with some better replacements...like intolerance...pig headedness...and downright middleaged grumpiness...]

Hmm...I've suddenly realised that I have no idea when term starts and so have no idea when the kids start back at music lessons. Or, probably more importantly, when I go back to work. This could either mean I'm so chilled that it doesn't matter, or that I'm in denial. [The Jury is out at the moment, but I think it's probably 20:80 chilled:denial]

Anyway, got to go. I have a just-bathed dog trying to sit on my lap. Yuk.

[*I think they call these things Ceileihs or something like that (you can see I can't spell it) except that it's pronounced Kayleigh, a bit like that song that was in the charts for ages by that balding guy who fronts a heavy rock band who's name I can't remember, but it was a ballad, so not really a rock song at all and it got a bit tedious cos it was always on the radio and if you're not as old as me you probably wouldn't have heard of it anyway, but it was one of those songs that would probably have been played at lots of 6th form Christmas discos and all the cool girls would smoochy dance with the cool boys and the rest of us would slunk away looking as if we didn't care cos we had better things to think about like scented erasers and scratch and sniff pencils and stuff like that... [big breath] Anyway, I think Ceileighghgheighs (or Kayleighs) are the trendy version of that skipping around stuff we used to do at school to the BBC radio's school country dancing programmes. And yes, I was rubbish at it, always going the wrong way, or not skipping the right direction, or just not paying any attention whatsoever, and it's probably scared me for life. Or did I mean scarred? Well, one or the other, or maybe both. ]

Lordy, tell that girl to stay off the sherry...

boys, boys, boys (and weapons...)

Some mornings just don't go to plan.

Yesterday, I overslept, woke up at 8.55am realising that I was meant to be helping out at dd1's preschool at 9.15am! I hadn't bought any snacks for the break time (parent helper responsibility) so needed to get to Tescos on route, and the kids were just sat downstairs in their pjs watching tv! So at 9.10am I was chopping up carrots into fingers and trying to work out whether the humous was past it's best (it was). So, after rushing around like mad things, we stopped off at Tescos to stock up on humous, breadsticks etc, and finally arrived about 9.45am.

Preschool was chaotic - lots of small boys with heaps of noisy testosterone, far too many adults around, but none of them seeming to be in charge, and my 3 causing even more chaos. And one child was apparently very allergic to humous (typical!) I ended up talking to another parent and giving a very poor case for home ed (my brain wasn't really in gear), who then told me she was a GP and was looking at me as if she was about to report me to the local authority and have me sectioned {g}. At that point I went and hid in the preschool kitchen for the rest of the morning doing the washing up! I suppose it's just as well we don't have to do the school run every day, there would be this sad, motley, disorganised bunch arriving late every day!

Anyway, by the afternoon we were all worn out. dd1 had a friend back for lunch and play and I disappeared while they were quiet to do some web surfing. I found some interesting projects on the http://www.instructibles.com/ website - ds2 was looking over my shoulder and once I printed a few things out he disappeared upstairs and started making knex crossbows. We found several on the website, some were quite complicated, some had unintelligible instructions, but after we'd sorted through them we found some that looked 'do-able'. The basic mini crossbow was quick to make, didn't take many pieces and worked quite well, firing an arrow down the hall fairly speedy. The new improved crossbow took a lot longer and quite a few pieces to make. It seemed unecessarily complicated to make, but was stronger and when it worked it was certainly effective, making a hole in a paper target that we blue-tacked to the front door. Anyway, it was fun and for the first time I got to make something out of knex that actually worked - lego is more my 'thing', never did get the hang of knex. Ds1 had a go at designing his own version today, quite a simple design but it worked.

The Basic Mini Crossbow design made from the webpage:

http://www.instructables.com/id/Mini-Powerful-Knex-Bow/

Testing the mini-bow

There were loads of other ideas for projects on the website, just putting 'airplane' in the search box led to pages and pages of ideas. I like the idea of trying to 'make an ipod speaker out of a hallmark card'. Unfortunately they've had to remove the pattern for knitting a tardis due to complaints from the BBC on copyright issues. Shame, cos I fancied having a bash at that...