The Great War and the Kindness of a Stranger

Education has been happening. Emily's firmly getting to grips with So You Really Want to Learn Maths Book 2...funny how her enthusiasm for maths has quadrupled since she discovered that she'll probably need some kind of maths evidence if she wants to study programming at college, lol.

History has been happening too, as someone has discovered an absolute fascination for World Wars I and II. Emily's been learning about and writing about the causes and build up to WW1 and about life in the trenches, with lots of background reading too and intelligent questions. We've got some videos of newsreel from the first and second world wars that she'll be watching and we're going to take a look at some famous war poems too. Naturally, it's also a good excuse to watch some more Blackadder. Tomorrow we're finding out about the Treaty of Versailles - funny how I'm learning far more about both wars now, with Emily, than I was ever taught at school, even at my supposedly outstanding girls' senior school. Sigh.

When it comes to WW2, Emily wants to read Anne Frank's diary and I suppose we could watch Carrie's War, among other things, although I was never that keen on that one. She also has a great resource in my Mum, who lived through the blitz as a young child in London; her father was (damn, I forget the correct title) one of those responsible for finding accommodation, shelter, support etc for those who had been bombed out of their homes. We have lots of other books and sites to look at too - it's odd how Emily has re-found her enthusiasm for history over this. She was such a history buff when she was younger - we spent months and months on end looking at Tudors, Victorians, Egyptians etc - but then she went off it all. I think it's the fact that this is modern history, within living memory of people she loves, and that she can see how it has had a direct impact on some of the world's situations today.

Emily has also expressed an interest in properly studying a Shakespeare play; probably either Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth. I did Julius Caesar at school and loved it, but I can't interest her in that one particularly. I'm rather enjoying getting our teeth back into some hard work, education wise. I still wish we were more organised and had more hours in the day, though. Don't we all?

Meanwhile, Jon was stopped in the street by a very kind lady today. She wanted to tell him that she was the one who had found kibby Voldy - she had knocked on various doors looking for his owners but it was someone else who eventually came to find us, so we didn't know who had found him. She said that she had come across him in the road and she felt that it had only just happened at that time. She picked him up out of the road and laid him on the side, out of further harm's way, bless her heart. She was able to confirm that he had died outright, or at least that he hadn't moved from where he had been hit and had passed by the time she got to him, thereby laying to rest my nightmares that he'd struggled to the side of the road himself or had lingered in pain. She said a lot of very kind things to Jon and reduced me to tears again when he came back in and told me. We're very thankful to her, that someone showed such kindness to kibby Voldy's body, moved him and set off the chain of events that then found us.....otherwise who knows what might have happened if he'd been left in the road.

Severus is still very lost; he seems to have grown up all of a sudden without his brother around to be a kitten-cat with :-((

On a happier note, we have all three of us discovered the "joys" of facebook (yes, I know, we're late starters). Lots of hours have been wasted this week sending one another daft things and catching up with old friends from school!