T-Bird Anni Rides Again

Whilst looking for the cover things for the trampoline springs, we notices taht some places sell tents that are designed to go on them but for lots, and lots of money obviously!  But then, we have a pop up tent which is a perfect size…. so we have popped that up and had SonLight in the bouncy tent for the last 2 days!  Funny how she will listen to hours of stuff if she can fidgit and wiggle but can’t listen to 2 minutes if she is sat "normally".  Just another reason why home ed works

Other good things in the past few days include being told by my boss that I’m "too good" and thus am getting a pay rise, no idea how much but every little helps and actually, being told I’m good is worth quite a bit to a daft sod like me! In a similar vein, I’ve been nominated for an award with the Red Cross, which I won’t be there to collect at the annual mutual back slapping event as I’ll be at the Christmas NicCamp (phew, being told I’m good is nice, having to stand up in front of lots of people is embarrassing…) And we have traced why our bank account was £700 worse off that it should have been - that would be Duke forgetting to put in time sheets for his casual work for the last 4 months then   So we are going to be in a much better position come pay day and may even be able to afford Christmas after all

Aprilia has asked for more practical science.  I am being sadly negligent in this area at the moment (in fact, you may ahve noticed a general air of negligence in many areas recently…..) but as I am now expecting her to do "work" for me, I need to return the favour and provide fun stuff for her.

So here are some science links I want to follow up with her, recorded here because my browser’s bookmarks are in such a state just now that I’ll never find them again if I put them in there!!!

Fizz foam and flubber - thanks Michelle for the link to this one

Steve Spangler Science - an on-line shop (take the credit card off me NOW!!) but with loads of experiments to try that you don’t need special stuff for

Planet Science - as a "newsletter" for under 11s with a simple weekly experiment and lots of bright and flashy stuff that will keep my shiny girl happy for hours!

I’m sure there must be more but really, there’s enough to keep me on my toes here for a while!

random stuff, really.

Got the new smoothie maker - went for same one as last time in the end for various reasons.  Still like the look of the really cheap one (and yes, Jo, I did consider buying 2 of them!) but on looking around the internet, the Hinari seems to be the most robust, adn it needs to be robust!

Signed up to Graze to see if healthy snacks could become a habit.  Will post up my "tell a buddy code" when I rediscover where I put it safe.  It gets you £1 off a box, adn the same for me too.  We liked our first box (came today) and, although they aren’t cheap, they aren’t bad value all things considered.  I may consider getting stacks of small tubs and doing similar once we have tasted our way round all the various delicious mixes but actually, it would be an awful waste of money to buy packets of all the different bits and bobs to find we don’t like some - this way we get nice little tastes of different stuff.  She has rather got a liking for yogurt covered peanuts it seems.  Not to mention a fondness for "picasso nuts" (once she realised you don’t eat the shells!!!!!) but she wasn’t keen on Japanese crackers - and I can take them or leave them to be fair - so we’ve crossed them off our list.

I’ve written pages of notes that I need to convert to mind maps as part of my revision process.  I’m never sure if it’s the making the maps or the looking at them taht does the trick.  Either way, they work.  Still think it’s not quite right taht I needed to pull out a text book from a previous course to make sense of one big chunk of this course though.  And it’s not like the other one is one that you need to have done before being allowed on this one.

Aprilia has done learning stuff of various kinds.  She offered to read me a bedtime story about 2 hours ago but I was in a revision chat (whilst chatting to Duke on FB) so I had to decline.  Will be glad to get my evenings back.  ONly 1 week to go.

Had the pleasure of a visit from Uncle Curly yesterday.  Very unexpected.  Very pleasant to see him and chat in comfort  rather than  it being at the side of a race track!  Aprilia cuddled him damned near into insensibility, she really does do good cuddles!

Have had to admit defeat and put heating on, house just too damned cold when it’s damp - the downside of tiled floors throughout downstairs laid straight onto concrete.  Who stole my summer?

We started the day with doll clothes making.  We have an almost done "kimono" style night shirt to show for it which just needs lace sewing round the edges and eitehr poppers or velcro attaching and it’s done.  There was very little hand holding on this one and I’m looking forward to posting a pic of the results as I think it will look pretty damned good for her first flying solo project (at a good few years younger than I was the first time I was let loose on a machine!)  She also cut out, very neatly, a care bear pre-printed thing that you sew round the edge of to make something loosely resembling a teddy.  It was free of freecycle, I suspect it cost someone an awful lot more money than it can possibly be worth.  There are a lot of curves on it but she has managed one with a bit of hand holding before so she can have a go with less hand holding from me tomorrow all being well.

Then we ambled off to get the final book case I want for the bedroom.  So that’s 3 trips to Ikea to get a total of 1 desk, 2 bookcases and a CD tower.  I could ahve had the lot delivered next week for £35, I suspect that, on balance, it would have been good value, not least since I now have a sore back from mauling the damned thing into the car today.  My car’s loadbed is not long enough, not by a long way, so there was much mauling to do to get it at the right angle over the back of one seat so it was secure, I could close the back door and no one got brained by it.  We may have managed to pick up a few other odds and ends too.  Hmmm, yup, delivery would have been much cheaper.

This afternoon there was random TV for her whilst cutting out paper people for a Brownie badge (World Traveller or World Culture, they all seem to blend together at the moment….) whilst I tried again to make some sense of revision.

This evening she has Moshi Monster-ed whilst I had a "chat tutorial" on the very useful OU student forum thing the result being that she ended up doing lots of puzzling and brain work whilst I got a handle on one poem.  One.  Well, I suppose it’s a start. And it is ‘To Autumn‘ which I do really love.  So that’s okay then.

Was in work this morning and got home to find Aprilia developing a deep and meaningful relationship with Zoombinis and Spelling Blaster and Duke playing with his mid life crisis bike.  Lunch was a gourmet delight of chicken dippers with garlic bread (blush) and whilst Duke and Aprilia continued as before, I did a bit of a brainstorm on one of the plays from the course and pleasantly surprised myself with how much of it I actually remembered without looking.  Feeling slightly more hopeful that I can do the plays question in the exam now, just need to brush up on a couple of novels (give me a bit of choice in case I don’t like one question) and get a grip on a bit of poetry.  15 days to go before the exam.  Just 15 more days then it’s all over, one way or the other. 

Back in the mists of time I used to blog multiple times a week, sometimes even multiple times a day!  Now all I can claim is a few times a month.  Life. It gets in the way you know!

So, this last week then….

Work is ticking along, it’s rather nice actually to have that hour or so doing something fairly brainless, uninterrupted by family and away from the house. 

The Outwell is still up in the back garden, but I think I’ve worked out how to make the kids pod work… I’m going to cut the groundsheeting off it and use it like curtains within a normal pod (will have to sew loops inside the pod but that should be an easy job)  Am still truely hacked off that I was so badly mis-sold with the damned thing but life goes on and in the grand scheme of things a dodgy kids pod is piffling really.

Rainbows is on hold.  I have too many balls in the air, Rainbows is one I can put down for a month with little or no pangs of concience.  We will start after my exam and have a 7 week term.  Final straw was that "a number of parents" phoned the county commissioner to complain that they had expected Rainbows to start and it hadn’t.  No, they didn’t phone me first to find out why.  So stuff them.  They can damned well wait until I’m good and ready to start back  am not flogging myself or risking stuffing up the exam on their behalf.

Educating is going in fits and starts.  We did loads of schooly stuff yesterday, finishing off the waifs and strays of old workbooks and revisiting the first NVR papers book - I’d scanned the whole lot last year which she ground her way through at agonisingly slow pace so we started again, in the book this time, which she doesn’t know is the same one, and she rattled through an entire paper in 10 mins.  She likes NVR now!  Monday she spent the whole day self-educating on the PC with a mix of Zoombinis, Spelling Blaster, Moshi Monsters, Magic Schoolbus and Cbbc website games.

Revision is also going in fits and starts.  I’m happy with the plays part (I know which play to revise, I know it will be an extract to do text analysis on, that’s easy)  I have 2 novels I’m blissfully happy with, which should give me a few options on the prose question.  But then we get to poetry.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I actually rather like poetry.  But the selection we have is pants for the most part.  A few corkers in there but for the most part it’s pretentious or feminist (and don’t get me started on being force fed feminist issues on this damned course….)  Sigh.  I think my trouble is that the first course I did was so well produced that everything afterwards seems like utter dross.

It’s that time of year when we re-qualify on First Aid too.  Irritatingly all the really busy stuff at Wombwell can’t be counted towards the re-qual (you are supposed to be able to count stuff you have actually done so long as all the criteria are met) because I didn’t have my paperwork with me (it wasn’t issued out til the next day) when all hell was breaking loose so no one could stand there and tick bloody boxs.  Calm blue ocean be damned, I want blood…..   or maybe even

By the way, I keep being accused by people at Kung Fu of being too nice.  Was even accused of being a lady on Saturday.  See?  I can still fool some people at least some of the time  

This morning started off Far Too Early (as indeed will every morning this week) as she has swimming lessons at 8:30 every morning this week.  She seemed to be enjoying it and I’m pretty impressed at the quality of front and back crawl that she seemed able to demonstrate by the end of half an hour.  Aparently though she doesn’t like their floats, they aren’t as nice as hers, so I’ve said she can take hers and ask the lady NICELY (and yes, I fear I did speak in capitals at that point!) if she is allowed to use her own - it’s bigger, multicoloured and has hand holes it it…..  Meanwhile I swam.  On my own.  For a whole half an hour.  In a "medium" speed lane, after having been evicted from the "slow" lane by a flotilla of blue rinses and lightly perms.  It was lovely.

After that it was a trip to the library to get her second set of stickers for the reading challenge, pick up 2 reserved books, and get cajoled into renting 2 DVDs on the promise of her watching those whilst I study.  The rest of the morning was spent with her getting sqare eyes and me producing a full third of my next TMA which doesn’t need to be in until next Thursday…. there is a very real danger that this one may get in before the deadline if I’m not careful!

The afternoon was the first of 2 "Godly Play-ish" sessions at a local church.  I’m quite a fan of Godly Play, it’s sort of Sunday School meets Montessori, so I was looking forward to it probably as much as Aprilia was.  The basic idea is that stories are told with the benefit of "props" - 2d pictures for parables and 3d models for events - that are slowly set out onto the table as the story progresses then left for the children to look at and "respond to" in their own way (they are allowed to re-tell the story with teh props, provided with art and craft supplies to draw the story for themselves etc or allowed to simply sit and think about it).  This slipped slightly wide of the mark and was a little too directed (colouring pages and puzzle sheets etc) but was non the less a very pleasant way to spend an afternoon.  I was, naturally, abandoned by my offspring, but she was feeling just tired enough that she "needed" me to stay around, so I did.

I was chatting with one of the other adults (E) there who is a big fan of home ed (or is it a big fan of Aprilia, never can quite tell)  She was saying that one of the kids at last week’s summer club was very confused about how Aprilia is home edded and how *everyone* has to go to school etc which aparently Aprilia explained away in that very matter of fact tone she takes about things that are so patently obvious to her that she can’t beleive you don’t get it that she does "do school" but she does it At Home Okay?   Small child then asked how Aprilia could possibly have friends if she just stayed at home all the time (erm, she was at a holiday club….. hardly counts as staying home!!) which E found really very ironic as Aprilia probably has more friends that this child who goes to a small country school with only 15 kids in her class and who doesn’t do Rainbows or anything (she left, she’s one of the few children I can honestly say I could have wept for joy when she decided she didn’t like it….)  compared to Aprilia who has so many friends up and down the country that we can fill a whole youth hostel between us, is adored by the Rainbows, goes to Brownies, goes to Kung Fu….. poor lonely child hey? 

I think we have "discovered" a new favourite writer for Aprilia!  I’ve just read I believe in Unicorns to her and she has informed me that it is not going back to the library any time soon….. think I may just have to buy that one then!  I’ll admit I could happily read it to her again (and again) and I’m hoping that that is the style of most of the M Murpurgo books as if so I think we may have hit the jackpot in books that are less air-headed than the ******* Fairy books but more within her reading ability than the Harry books!

In other news, we have been swimming twice already this week and have bought goggles which seem to hvae made quite a difference to her.  She’s booked in for a week’s "crash course" in a couple of weeks, I didn’t realise until after I’d paid what time the lessons were but hey, normal people seem to manage getting up to be places by 8:30 so I’m sure we’ll manage.  She’s continued to read to me with increasing confidence and stamina and is even venturing into "writing" by sending me random e-mails (ROFL, yes, we are turning into one of those families who e-mail each other from different rooms in the house….. she’ll be IM-ing me soon if i’m not careful!)

it would appear that I have a reader in my house!  She ambled in to me at 10pm last night to read the first 2 pages of Bad Beginnings (Lemony Snicket) to me, then proceeded to read a fist full of Benny and Watch stories (short stories with lots of pictures based on the characters in the Boxcar Children books).  But more importantly she now thinks that all the hard work was worth it because reading is really very good after all.

I have suspected something has been going on for a while as I keep finding easy reader type books in amongst the bed clothes but have just smirked and tidied them away knowing full well that this Little Madam does not let on she can do ANYTHING until she can really do it.  I do love the way children do stuff in their own time!

I do get bored of this one you know…. not least because it’s always the same check out operator at Asda that asks us, and then proceeds to ask us exactly the same follow up questions as before (who regulates you, where do you get your curriculum from, are you a teacher then, do you have to do exams, all the usual crap)  Ho Hum.

We had a slow morning yesterday, by which I mean, she woke up, decided she was still tired and went back to sleep until 10!  Meanwhile I sneaked out into the garden hammock with my CD player and a good audio book.  Bliss.

Shopping seemed to be a bit random and we ended up with a lot of clothing, stuff for camping and so on but I’m not sure about food…. really should learn to take a list.

Aprilia decided it was too hot to be outside so she Moshi Monstered and did various other edutainment activities and watched some TV.  Meanwhile I also edutained myself as a diversion from trying to sort out the car ready for the weekend   I think, if I can excavate it, we will take the Hobbit Hole even though I would really really like to use the Outwell at some point and justify the money we spent on it.  Trouble is, the Outwell is really just a weekender tent, it was bought on Duke’s specifications of "something smaller but I still want to be able to stand up in it" so it’s got limited living space and no space for the loo.  It’s a lot of money for something that will get very little use what with Duke rarely being with us on short trips and the little Sigma being perfectly acceptable for just A and me for weekending if catering is being sorted communally (wouldn’t fancy cooking in the Sigma….. I know I’m adventurous but I’m not actually qutie taht daft!)

It was Kung Fu in the evening which was a pleasant end to the day - a bit warm perhaps, but pleasant.  I’m enjoying the Thursday nights, it’s an almost decadent thing, doing something just for me, without a single child in sight….