T-Bird Anni Rides Again

a nasty case of inertia has gripped the household recently resulting in no "reward chart" nonsense, and not a lot else either.  There has been….

the pop up tent in my bedroom (too cold outside!) in which we did fabric crafts.

facebook, yes, I know, just don’t go there…. but I do think there may be some educational value in all those darned games…. and it means she has unlimited oportunities to ply Uno (which I really don’t get so thus refuse to buy for her as then I’d have to play it with her…. mean?  Me?  you bet)… and she’s getting all sorts of things out of the various "ville" games, the planning and stratagies she’s developing is pretty impressive (although I do have to apologise to Jo for her stealing all your crops on the island thingie!)

brief flickers of interest in various Brownie badges, resulting in me spending hours finding stuff that really should not be that hard to find, and wittering about how useless the links on the Brownie badge website are.

and, erm, not a lot else really.

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

We did "halloween crafts" at Nelly’s house today and I took a suggestion from this site to do "skulls" which both me and Aprilia had a go at and Nelly and Bart did their own take on.  Then, Aprilia being just that little bit on the perfectionist side, she decided that her skull wasn’t good enough so went a bit mad and chalked the whole thing over creating something very like the face in The Scream.  This prompted discussion about the original work so I had to google it when we got home and printed her a copy of it and then Enchanted Learning (gotta love that site) have a colour it in yourself version so I printed her that off as well.  She was much impressed.

As to the proposed awards system, she’s much impressed with that too.  She has decided on stickers rather than tokens and wants to negociate what she gets for a certain number of stickers over a set time period.  So that’s what we will do for now.  We are still doing different colours for different topics though and she accepts that she does have to have variety and was remarkably excited to find art and music on the list!  So, it’s now down to me isn’t it to facilitate…..

Step one of facilitation was removing the ****** jigsaw of the kitchen table.  Who the **** gives an 8 year old a 1000 piece jigsaw of the livery companies of London?????  but anyway, we finished it (apart from the 3 lost bits) took photos for posterity and shoved it back in it’s box.  So now the table is clear for crafting/art etc adn I can fold it away to get to the sewing machine.  this gives her lots of options.

Having been unable to put up the trampoline yesterday (rain stopped play) I was dead set on doing it today… and I did!  Actually it was pretty easy once you got the knack of doing the springs (although I will point out that, being second hand, the springs may well not have been as, well, springy!)  It ddin’t come with the cover bit for the springs but I found somewhere selling them fairly cheaply and ordered a few new springs at the same time (there are 2 that are overstretched and I assume that more will give up at some point so it seemed sensible to get some on stock)  In the mean time she is on strict orders to bounce carefully….  I think she bounced for the entire afternoon

I’m giving serious consideration at the moment to some sort of token system to make sure stuff gets done.  I’m working on probably using tiddly winks or similar so there are different colours for different tasks then I can say that she can have her PC/watch TV once she has done so many things, including 2 or 3 different colours.  I’m not autonomous so I have no qualms from that POV but I am a bit sad that I have had to resort to her "earning" these sorts of things but really, she could quite happily watch endless trash (I mean, she will watch Cebeebies for goodness sake!) and play endless trashy games (am seriously considering a very draconian Net Nanny!!!) and really, I think she needs to learn that good stuff doesn’t come "free".  I don’t want a lot - the ability to walk across her bedroom without protective footwear would be nice, half an hour or so of "normals" three or four times a week would be as much as I’d expect, a bit of crafting or artwork a couple of times, a bit of music once a week, something physical most days and a voluntarily consumed piece of fruit most days…..  If it works I may instigate it for Duke too…… actually, it does look a lot when I list it but really, you know, she does have all day every day!!!!

It seeped into my conciousness rather too late that this lunchtime we were at a christening and that a gift would probably be required!  So, with no time or inspiration for bought gifts, it was random delving into the yarn stash time!  I came out with a lovely powder blue and a cream and then did a second random delve, this time into the pattern stash.  The results are on Duke’s camera so you will have to settle for vague descriptions!  I made a blue and cream striped jacket from this pattern (but without buttons - didn’t have any, so I went for ties instead!)  I had a couple of false starts with this one but once I actually read the pattern properly it went okay!  Mind you, I did deviate a little in as much as I like less baggy sleeves so fiddled round a bit with only working 3 sides of teh hexagon for a couple of rows to allow for enough depth and width without adding huge amounts of bagginess to the sleeves.  It worked up really fast.  Then, because I still had yarn left I did a "body warmer" that crosses over at the front.  It was sleeveless because there wasn’t enough yarn for sleeves…..

So, then I had a clear concience to go and coo over young Oliver who was remarkably well behaved for a small boy in a dress  

And in an atempt to get used to this idea of planning a whole year in advance….. this week our targets are…..

a bit of maths, English and reasoning. 
A lot of stories. 
A serious attempt at finding the floor in her bedroom. 
Some cooking. 
Some swimming

I tend to forget that Aprilia *needs* quite a bit of sensory input to function happily but today I think I may have got it right!  she spent the vast majority of the day up to the eyeballs in paint and then, in a moment of shere devilment whilst we were painting paper balls I suggested she dispensed with the brush (which wasn’t working particularly well) and just dip them in the paint pot and smear it about…. suddenly she came alive!  Two hours later she was completely blissed out

Then she sat in a warm bath and used about half a bottle of shampoo on her hair in order for there to be enough foam to squidge about round her head.  

She’s also recently been enjoying a weighted lap blanket which she puts over her legs at night and on her lap sometimes in the day.  She is asking for a full sized weighted blanket to spread the sensation further round so I need to deal with that.  Gonna take a lot of rice….. 

 She’s also sleeping in her pop up tent just now.  Bit of a nuicance really as it takes up all her floor but she likes being enclosed.

I think she is being tripped out by quite a few things at the moment and she’s needing all the sensory input she can get.  Duke being away for a week wasn’t good.  Me being on the wind up to an exam really didn’t help, and I am aware that I did not deal with that at all well and really, really need to get a grip on that before next time (which is a whole seperate post)  The whole Home Ed review thing is not worrying her for her own sake (not being autonomous it’s going to affect us less than others…. doesn’t make it any more acceptable but it shouldn’t impact us to quite such a high degree) but she is worried for her friends (how typically Aprilia!) and this is really not helping.  And, naturally, it’s at this point that I forget that what she needs or worse deny it because gloopy paint and rice/sand/mud etc are not things I want all over my house when it’s already a tip (you wouldn’t beleive that actually I get stressed by untidiness would you???)

Weird really how a child who pales and shrinks from noise stimulus in the form of noisy places can crave other sense input so much right up to not being able to sleep without her precious story CDs.

times like this make me so much more sure that home is the best place for her.  I really do not want to think how she would be if she had to deal with the stresses of school.

This weekend has seen me doing over nights for the final round of the British Super Bikes.  Teh timing isn’t what you would call ideal really, what with the exam looming large but hey, the money is very welcome.  There has been the normal over exhuberance - you know, loud singing at sill o’clock, fires that were a little too close to tents and a little too large (note, they were nothing like as large as teh one at the Sustainablility centre however, that was in a proper fire pit and the tents were all far enough away from it not to spontaneously combust) and falling down drunks.  But it was within acceptable limits on the first two nights.  Last night was the "end of year party".  Three sepearte "discos" going in different parts of the paddock.  Three lots of people who had attained the exuberantly drunk stage, and continued right on past that to the belligerently drunk stage.  They finally all collapsed into the comatose drunk stage at just past 4am at which point those of us who needed to stay awake to keep an eye on their safety could finally relax.

What a glorious recommendation for Britain’s well socialised youth.

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.