Decorating, Gardening & A Golden Wedding Anniversary

We had five days off decorating on Friday-Tuesday as we were busy with other things in life. The bedroom is still a work in progress, but I'm really chuffed with how it's turning out. This morning Jon got up at 3am and by the time Emily and I got up he'd sealed all the gaps in the floorboards and along the skirting board - no mean feat, given the state of the floor. We've decided against sanding and have decided to paint the floorboards chocolate brown instead, and then varnish them. The chocolate colour is close to their natural colour and will go really nicely under our big red rugs. Today Jon's also painted the bedroom door and retouched the edges of the ceiling. As soon as we've moved the new wardrobes out of the bedroom, the floor can get going. Our bed isn't coming until the 14th anyway, so there's not exactly any hurry. We'll be sleeping on the floor/sofa until then regardless whether the room's finished or not, so....

Jon's also been a very busy bee out in the garden today, planting the flowers and herbs Emily and I grew from seed at Imbolc, erecting a rose arch, carrying on with the rock feature and generally tidying up. Oh, and he's taken Grandad to the dentist. I'm surprised he's still awake after all that lot! Next door's huge apple tree overhangs our garden just outside the back door and the falling blossom has been like a constant flow of confetti today - really pretty, and the kibbies love it!

This morning we waved my Mum and Dad off back to the caravan at St Bees again. It's their Golden 50th Wedding Anniversary on Saturday, so Emily has made them a stunning card incorporating a copy of this lovely photo from their wedding day. We've packaged up the card with some golden balloons and a present and will post it off to them tomorrow. When they get back, there'll be cake :-))
I love all Mum and Dad's wedding pictures, but I especially like this one; not only do they both look beautiful, but it's interesting from a social history point of view, lol - look at the little boys in short trousers running around and the lady with her headscarf at the back of the gate. The world has changed so much since; it's fascinating to reflect on what has happened since this happy, sunny spring day in London on the 10th May 1958.

Staying with a wedding theme, Emily and I had fun this morning making wedding dresses for two of her barbies. Emily went for a sophisticated gold look, based loosely on the colours of my wedding dress. I went for a rather sillier frothy pink look, lol.

We also made lovely hemp macrame bracelets and Emily started writing a letter to a friend.
Since last Thursday when I wrote here, we've also been out to friends for the day on Friday, when Emily, Mei Lin and Jasmine performed the plays they'd been busy writing for a very impressed me and Jacki. I have some lovely video of the three of them convulsed in giggles before they got over the stage fright, lol! We also went to a friend's 9th birthday party on Sunday, which was lots of fun. Monday was psychic circle night over at Jacki's again. Emily had a fab time with the two girls and with Alex. Alex's Mum is moving into the village in a couple of week's time, just two minutes walk from us, so we'll be having Alex over here for the day when they actually move. He's really taken a shine to Emily this last few months and is talking about coming over to play often in the summer. He's only a couple of months older than Emily too. I'm really pleased they get on so well, as we don't really know any other boys other than as passing acquaintances. We call Alex Emily's boyfriend ;-) as a gentle tease; she gets very cross but secretly I think she likes this young man rather a lot......

Emily also finished painting our new bedside tables, including stencilling the Chinese symbols for lucky, happy, long life and love on them. You can see that they are no longer as pink and purpley as they were when they came out of the box :-)



Financially, we're having huge fun. Not. The BBC failed to pay us at the end of April. Apparently, this is due to their finances being taken over by yet another new management company. Also apparently, the one bloke who can sort this out is away until next Tuesday - so even if he sorts it out immediately, we wouldn't be receiving the payment until the 20th or so of May, by which time the next payment is due. So we now have two missed credit card payments and we're heading for a missed loan payment too, thanks to the BBC. Here we go again. The producer of the section we work for is hugely cross and embarrassed about our money being messed up again and, bless her heart, has offered to pay us from her own personal account and then claim the money back from the BBC. I was flabbergasted when she offered that; I'm not used to such kindness from corporate entities! It doesn't feel at all right to take her up on her offer, although apparently she's done it before and is perfectly alright with it - but at this rate we may have to. Oh, the joys of being self-employed.

Once this decorating is done and dusted, we're going to have to sit down with Emily yet again and have another education re-think. We haven't been able to get back into any kind of routine since last November, when we stopped what we were doing in order to focus on Christmas craft stuff through December....then we had a few weeks off around Emily's birthday....then we had a few weeks off for reasons that escape me....then a few more...then she had a spell of experimenting with autonomous education....now she's had a couple of weeks off becuase of the decorating chaos. Ahem. It's not that Emily doesn't want to do anything - far from it, she's pretty keen when it comes to anything except maths. It's just that I'm so disorganised, and something always seems to get in the way. But I'm not happy with our lack of "doing stuff" in recent months.

A friend told me the other week about her method, where she picks an abstract word such as "water" and then together with her daughter brainstorms all kinds of mini studies and activities around that word, incorporating English, science, geography, history and everything else. Sort of like a unit study, I guess, but without the rigidity. I really liked the sound of that, so maybe Emily and I will try that. Or maybe we'll go back to "project work" for a while. We did loads of projects in the first one or two years of home ed, but then moved away from that into something more subject based rather than topic based. Between me, Emily and Jon, I'm sure we can come up with something that works again. Looking forward to getting stuck back into some decent home education!