Getting Lots Done

I'd forgotten I hadn't posted here since last Thursday. Well, over Friday and the weekend, Jon and I worked hard business wise and Emily had great fun in her pool, doing gymnastics in the garden, designing and colouring fashion outfits, doing shrinkles and scrapbooking her 7th birthday party. Emily also started work on the perspective section of her art course; she had to draw and shade lots of 3D shapes and letters to begin with, and will be moving onto a 3D view next.

Friday was a weird day; Grandad's surliness finally got to Jon who was seething by tthe time he got back from taking Grandad shopping early in the morning. After dropping Grandad back home and thinking Emily and I wouldn't realise he wasn't back yet, Jon drove straight off to the doctors to try to get his Dad an appointment - but we did realise he wasn't there and went into panic mode wondering where on earth he'd gone. I thought he'd driven off to hide somewhere because he was so upset over his Dad. Harsh words all round between Grandad and I and lots of tears from me and Emily while we waited for Jon to get back. Something's got to give in that relationship, as we and Jon especially are bending over ourselves backwards to try to please but just constantly being met with criticism, grumpiness and demands :-((

Yesterday morning Emily and I went to see Garfield 2 at the cinema. Emily loved it to bits; I don't particularly like Garfield or animated films in general but it was entertaining enough. Went to buy a large diet coke for us to share and a junior popcorn....was told that it would only be 10p more to have a large popcorn (not sure how that worked out, but there you go) and would I like that instead. Well, OK, why not? Why not indeed....the size of the popcorn bucket had to be seen to be believed, rofl!!! We've still got most of it left.

Back home yesterday afternoon and for all of today we've been pressing on with our body project which is....drumroll please....**finished**!!!! Not that Emily wanted to finish, mind you - she'd have been set to carry on for weeks yet, I think. Here she is with her life sized body which now has all its main bits apart from the reproductive system.

We still haven't looked at the endocrine system or hormones but we have done pretty well otherwise. Yesterday we covered the digestive and urinary systems with lots of experiments and diagrams; this morning we finished off a few oustanding experiments - testing the strenght of hairs from various family members (use them to suspend styrofoam cups and fill cups with certain no of coins), finding out why we sweat (two thermometers, one covered with dry kitchen towel and one with wet) - and we also spent ages looking at various hairs and skin tags under the microscope and comparing human hair with cat hair.

Oooh, I've remembered something we did on Friday, actually - we looked at the results of a tooth experiment; we had eggshells that had been sitting in various liquids (milk, water, coke, squash and fruit juice) for a few days to simulate the effect on teeth. That did a pretty graphic job of illustrating why plain water or milk are best for your teeth....the state of the others was ughghhh.

This afternoon we looked briefly at the female reproductive system (having covered it mostly previously) and we had an entertaining foray into genetics. Used red and yellow jelly diamonds as X and Y chromosones to illustrate the chances of conceiving a boy or a girl; Emily also did a family tree chart of blue/brown eyed genes after we'd discussed the brown gene being dominant; it was quite tricky to work backwards through the generations to establish whether the brown eyed among us were "pure" brown eyes or "hybrid" brown eyes, but she loved doing that. We also extended it forwards to find out what colour eyes Emily's future child might have with three different "Prince Charming"s, blue eyed, pure brown eyed and hybrid brown eyed. Really interesting.

So, the project's now finished and Emily's very, very pleased with it. Apparently she can't wait to start Romans next.....

Meanwhile, Romeo and Juliet are a year old! We can't be sure when they were born, but working backwards from when we got them, it must have been around about this past week. The little tiny balls of fluff we brought home mid August last year have turned into these handsome cats:
Hard to belive they looked like this a year ago (link to our August 2005 archive, can't remember how to link to individual posts, but kittens arrived half way down the page!)
Both are suffering in the heat at the moment, especially Romeo. Merlin and Cassie don't seem too bothered, perhaps they're more used to it. Both kit-bits (as I'm determined to still call them, year old or not) have been having a butterfly ball this last couple of days. The number of butterflies in the garden seems to have suddenly exploded and they've both spent hours sat under one of the two buddleia trees on butterfly watch, rofl. Juliet especailly rarely leaves it! Here they are side by side, on duty.
As well as the masses of butterflies of all different kinds, we've got lots of crickets/grasshoppers in the long grass under our holly tree, too.

Health appointments are mounting up at the moment; Jon's been for another blood test today, Grandad has to see the doctor tomorrow and also tomorrow my Dad has an appointment for a whole battery of tests for a prostrate problem :-(( Emily was booked in for extra ballet lessons over the summer but unfortunately they've decided to hold them on Wednesdays, which means we'll miss the first two (busy tomorrow and the next Weds) but she's excited about going to the rest.

Royal Mail's - ahem- overhaul of their system and move to Pricing in Proportion is pushing ever closer, which has been causing us concern. It's going to have a massive impact on the way we have to frank upwards of 300 packages a day yet astonishingly, none of the major franking machine companies really have their act in gear. With the new system starting on the 11th August, we're running out of time to get that particular hot potato sorted out :-/

This evening Emily and Jon went for a stroll to the river and back; Emily found an eggshell and tons of feathers she wants to identify, so that'll keep her busy tomorrow morning before she goes off to Romy's for a play tomorrow afternoon. [Well, tomorrow in now today - wrote all this on Tuesday but wasn't able to upload it yesterday......bl**dy blogger]

Looking Forward to a Peaceful Week

As of now we don't have to go anywhere for a whole week. Well, apart from tai chi for Jon and Emily and that's within walking distance. We seem to have been running around like mad this last couple of weeks, so I'm looking forward to getting up each morning not having to remember that we're going out later.

Emily went to her last drama lesson of term today and it was bring a friend day, so we took Romy along too. They had a party theme with some games and stuff, and they got to pretend to be cats.....which they do a lot of anyway, so no change there then!

Earlier this morning Jon and Emily went off to tai chi and I stayed here to do some work (or would have done but got distracted by ebay kicking me off to a sign in page every three minutes - very helpful). Their teacher George has asked if Emily would like to take up karate - he teaches on Sundays in Morton. She's not *that* enthusiastic about the prospect as she has in her head that she doesn't like martial arts, but she does like George so she's going to give it a go, starting in September.

Meanwhile, other bits and pieces....Jon's sent off his first batch of artwork for his course....which reminded me and Emily that she hasn't started the next section of hers yet.....I didn't go swimming this morning because I discovered my costume doesn't fit (sigh - you have to laugh. Trust me. Will start next week when new cozzie arrives).......got lots of information about various sporting days etc during the summer holidays that Emily's interested in booking into......practised Emily's yoga vinyassa with her.....Emily took great delight in teaching me how to do some of the more complicated poses......she also tried teaching me the first few steps in the first tai chi form they learnt but I got hopelessly confused......Emily's played on HP & Philosopher's Stone software quite a bit........just remembered the "don't have to go anywhere" thing next week doesn't include that Grandad wants a doctor's appointment......it's been hot, humid and horribly sticky.

And that's about it. No "work" so to speak of today but Emily's desperate to do lots next week apparently. She doesn't want a summer holiday ;-)

Tick, Tock, Tick, Tock, Tick

Awoke from a daze earlier this week to a very loud and insistent noise, previously unheard - the ticking of my biological clock. Now it won't go away - you know what it's like when you get a tune in your head ;-)

We've been perfectly happy as a one child family; in fact, we've spent the last seven and a half years actively trying NOT to have another one. It's not that we didn't want another baby, as such, just that the time was never right and it was always something to consider "in a few years". Well, I'll be 35 in just over a month's time - the few years may well be running out.

Hugely inspired by Hazel's fantastic news we've decided the time has come to try for another baby. Well. Almost. As it happens, I'm in no physical shape to cope with a pregnancy at the moment. Given Emily's incredibly traumatic premature birth, I wouldn't want to be pregnant again until I'm at least the same weight as I was then, preferably a lot less - at the moment I'm even bigger, and we're talking stones, plural, in a number greater than 5. :-(((

So, I need to get fit. I'm taking out swim membership at Gainsborough sports centre and I plan to go to their early bird swimming as often as possible, at least 3-4 times a week. And to get serious with healthy eating. I don't do "dieting" as such - I've never seen it work for anyone, really. I don't eat that much anyway, eating's not my problem - lack of exercise is. In the year before Emily started school I was terrified of being the fattest mother at the school gates - through just eating properly and going on the exercise bike every day I lost six stone. OK, OK, so in the last two years it's all come back again :-((( but the point is that I've done it once and I can do it again. So there ;-)

Hopefully by spring-ish next year we'll be in a position to go ahead with Plan Pregnancy. Anyway, that's the idea. Although we still have mixed emotions over the thought of forcing a baby sibling onto Emily when she's always been so absolutely adamant that she has never wanted a sibling. I'm not entirely sure how ethical it is to plan a baby knowing full well that she won't be over the moon at the prospect. But well, I guess it's just one of those things where we as adults have to "know better" than she does at 7. We respect her strongly held views on the issue, but we'll just have to trust that it will all work out OK if and when it actually happens. When I fell pregnant with Emily I'd only just come off the pill, it seemed to happen straight away. I'm well aware we may not be as fortunate this time round. But hey, whether or not we ever do have another child, at least I've finally prioritised - I need to get healthy, baby or not - Emily and Jon deserve a fitter, healthier Mum and wife.

Anyway, enough rambling. I just want to say something to Hazel if she's reading this: thank you. You gave us the courage to home eduate two summers and a lifetime ago; now you've inspired us again and shaken us out of complacency. We owe you. :-))

Back to the matter at hand; oh yes, home education. Well, yesterday afternoon Romy came round to play and the girls spent a long time paddling and playing on Emily's beam before finally ecaping the heat to come indoors and play dressing up Tudors-Meets-Ancient Egypt. Or something like that. Emily then went to the last yoga of the term and came home with a really long Vinyassa she has to learn by September.

This morning we went to collect her new silver glasses and we've been out in the garden the rest of the time, doing some maths and English. Oh, this afternoon we did come in for a bit to do more body project - more on teeth. We've set up an experiment with eggshells in coke, milk, water, juice, squash and something else I can't remember - we'll check them in a few day's time and see what effect they have had. We also tried an experiment with chewing crackers, spitting them out (lovely) and leaving them for set amounts of time before testing with iodine to see if the saliva had affected the starch. Except that our iodine was in a tincture and, um, the experiment failed miserably. Oh well. Guess we learnt something from that, anyway!

Plague of Greenfly!

OK, I've had enough of summer now. Warm weather is all very well, if you like that kind of thing, but there's warm, there's hot and there's too hot, with today sliding sweatily into the last category by a mile.

Late this afternoon the garden suddenly errupted in a plague of greenfly, swarming everywhere. You couldn't breathe without swallowing some, it looked like a smokey snowstorm. EUUGGGGHHHHH.

Anyway, today has passed in a heatwave blur and I have a headache that will not go away. We have variously:

• Got up far too early and assembled a big new paddling pool (Daddy)
• Cursed the big new paddling pool when it failed to work, emptied out all the water and started again (Daddy)
• Rustled up four garden chairs to prop up big new paddling pool so it could actually fill up properly (Daddy)
• Looked on aghast as the city full of spiders living on said chairs went for a swim (Mummy & Emily)
• Donned superhero cape and de-spidered paddling pool (Daddy)
• Tried to find some shade to sit in that wasn't swarming with ants (Mummy)
• Failed and ended up sunburnt because you never remember to put sun cream on yourself (Mummy)
• Played non stop in new paddling pool and boat (Emily)
• Been a pain in the posterior by disappearing all evening and having to be coaxed in from the garden at midnight and then promptly vanishing somewhere inside the house when we needed to know where she was so we could set the burglar alarm (Juliet)
• Written Christmas astrology articles for US magazine (Mummy)
• Ranted at ebay (Mummy)
• Worked, worked, worked, worked, cooled off in pool, worked, worked, worked (Daddy)
• Covered mouth and nose in horror and refused to set foot outside once greenfly arrived (Mummy)
• Wondered what all the fuss about greenfly was for and carried on playing outside regardless (Emily)
• Had a feast of greenfly (Spiders in webs all over the show)

And well, that's about it. It's been hot. Did I mention that? I really, really dislike this weather. If it's wet, you can splash about and listen to the rain; if it's windy you can fly kites and listen to the trees; if it's cold you can snuggle up warm together; if it's snowing you can have endless fun. The elements are moving, alive, entrancing. If it's boiling hot.......you get to stay sticky and uncomfortable all day, you get heat rash, you get sunstroke, you get plagued by insects, the sky stays boringly blue every day, everywhere you want to go is full of other people and your fan just moves the warm air around a bit. Lovely. I don't do summer. I'd be perfectly content with an extended spring and autumn to replace it altogether. In fact, I think I shall write to my MP demanding this be seriously considered.

Busy & Happy

We're having a ball here at the moment. Everything seems to be going very smoothly, which is nice to see. I daresay now I've said that life will turn round and bite me on the bum, but so far, all's well.

Emily went off to her friend K's fancy dress birthday party today. She had a fantastic time and was absolutely exhausted by the time I picked her up. Bit of a turning point, that - previously one of us would have stayed with her or she might not have wanted to go at all, since the only child she knew there was K herself. But this new found confidence is really growing and she wasn't at all bothered at being dropped off and left. Here's the lilac fairy ready to go out this afternoon, complete with purple hair and enough glitter to cover the carpet, rofl.

Yesterday Emily went to the last ballet lesson of term, which she loved. We still haven't been told whether the seven year olds are going to be moved up a class next term - we have to wait to see if we're one of the ones contacted, sigh - but I must confess I'm getting rather fed up with the situation. Children in the ballet school down the road took their primary exams at age 5 - Emily's group will be 8 at this rate when they take the same thing. I don't personally care whether she takes any exams or not, but she badly wants to do them so it seems very silly to have the group three years behind where they could and should be! If we don't get a phone call saying she's moving up I think we'll be looking for a different ballet school come September. Maybe. She does love it and it has done wonders for her confidence, but how much longer can we keep on paying for her to learn the same stuff over and over again with no progress??

Also yesterday Emily had a lovely surprise when Hazel and Romy popped round to deliver a Friendship Day card - it's two years since we met and Romy had made Emily a lovely card to celebrate their two years of friendship. Meanwhile at this end, I'd forgotten to mark Friendship Day on the calendar... BAD MUMMY. So we didn't have a card to give to Romy but Emily sent her an ecard instead.

Education wise we've been really busy recently, especially with the body project. We've finished our work on the brain and moved on to cover senses. Lots of experiments there: visual illusions, identifying foods when blindfolded and holding nose; navigating blindfolded towards a strong smell; identifying mystery objects first with elbow then foot then fingers; identifying sounds; sound vibrations; cotton buds with various solutions on applied to different areas of the tongue...ooh and lots more I've forgotten. Emily also read tons in books and drew and/or labelled anatomy of the eyes, ears and nose.

That done, we also moved on to look at skin, hair and nails. Lots more experiments with testing the strength of hair etc and Emily drew, coloured and labelled a fantastically detailed skin diagram showing the various different layers, glands and nerves. We're looking at the digestive system next and we've made a start on that by making teeth impressions in styrofoam plates - euggh! Emily's life size skeleton on the wall is having bits added to it as we cover them so she now has bones, a huge patch of skin, hair, nails, teeth, tongue, brain, eyes, ears, nose, lungs and a heart. Looks incredibly scary, lol, but it's really motivated Emily and she seems to be loving this project. I'd like to get it finished in the next fortnight though, hence the rush.

Emily has also been reading lots in her spare time and has spent a long time playing on Kidspeak 6 in 1 language software which she adores. It does French, German, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew and Japanese and I'm very impressed with how she's picking up bits and also making very intelligent connections regarding the similarities between the latin languages.

Meanwhile, Jon and I have been working like hell; it's busy, busy, busy workwise. We've all enjoyed a bit of a shopping spree though - the latest educational catalogues have come through from our book wholesaler and under our terms we get a nice fat discount on bulk pre-orders. Bless Emily, she devoured the catalogues ticking tons of stuff she'd like ;-) It's nice to be able to buy the books, have a quick look and see if they're suitable, knowing that if they're not we can sell them on straight away. There aren't many advantages in the rather cut throat world of book retailing, but it's certainly fun when it comes to resources!

Drama Queen

Emily's drama show was this afternoon so Jon and I went along to watch as proud parents :-)) She was playing Freddie the Chickenhearted Fox in the play of the same name and she was soooo confident! Here are a couple of pictures; Freddie begging for some food from the farmer and Freddie having tripped over a sleeping farmworker ;-)


After the show the teacher came over and complimented Emily in front of everyone about her loud clear voice, not needing any prompting with any of her lines and her lovely smile throughout :-) As we were leaving I had to check the time of next week's party with her and she again brought up how much Emily's grown in confidence this last few weeks.

She really has; I'm not sure what it's down to, although I think the ballet show helped a lot. When I asked Emily earlier if she was nervous about the play she said that she wasn't the slightest bit nervous because after performing in front of 350 people she could do anything and this would be easy peasy ;-)

Yesterday we went off to the optician's first thing. They'd phoned when we were out on Tuesday afternoon to check whether we were still coming, so I was half expecting to turn up and find a truancy officer waiting for us,lol, but in the event I have to say it went very smoothly and they were all very nice to Emily and indeed to me. The optician put Emily's prescription up a notch so she chose some lovely new silver frames that we've got to pick up next week. With her glasses on and using both eyes she apparently now has well above average vision, so we're getting somewhere. Popped into the main library while we were there and chose far too many books. Sigh. We avoid going into town whenever possible so we've only got a week to read these in becuase they have to go back next week when we pick up her glasses, or else! With the village library just a stroll away that's much more convenient but unfortunately it and Scunthopre main library are in different local authorities so we can't mix and match, lol.

Quickie Update

Just back from yoga; Emily has passed her level three :-))

Other happenings today: lots of English this morning; Emily did a revision test thingy which covered all kinds of things - suffixes, prefixes, adding -er and -est to adjectives, plurals spelling rules, first/second/third person and other stuff I can't remember. She sailed through that so I think we're ready to move a bit, grammar and spelling wise.

We also recapped on addition and subtraction with borrowing and carry over, or "Faff Sums" as Emily somewhat memorably named them nearly two years ago, lol. She's been doing this on and off for those two years but this morning she had a bit of a blank moment over it. As they do. She was OK with the additions but completely stumped with the subtractions, so we went right back to basics with coloured dots in hundreds, tens and units columns and lots of moving them around to solve the sums. Seemed to do the trick for now, but isn't it funny how you think children have something off pat only for them to then suddenly lose it again, only to pick it up again later!!

Emily also tried on a lilac fairy outfit she was given a long time ago and has never worn - it's what she wants to wear to K's fancy dress disco party and fortunately, it fits a treat. I must say she's being rather braver than I would have been at her age about the party, since the only child there she'll know is K herself and also since Emily hates pop music, lol. She's adamant she wants to go, so her self-confidence must be increasing :-))

This afternoon we played around in the sunshine. Got Emily's beam out of the garage and she mastered climbing up onto it with perfect balance and without falling off (previously she's always had to be helped with the actual getting on bit) and spent ages twirling, prancing, twisting, doing yoga poses on it (???) and inventing posh dismounts. Think that covers PE, then. Emily also spent a long time lying on her lounger reading whilst I sat in the shade and plotted and planned, business-wise.

Am currently extremely narked with an ebay "customer" from the US who bought a cross stitch kit from the new Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady range last week and paid straight away. Great. Except that despite my explicit instructions to overseas buyers, she paid the UK rate of postage only. OK, no problem, I'm used to that, so I politely emailed her to explain and to request the balance. Silence for the whole week. Then suddenly today we get a flood of rude emails from her demanding to know why it hasn't yet been sent and complaining that we are unethical and dishonest in displaying one shipping price and then asking for more "just because you want to send it airmail instead of regular mail. I didn't ask for airmail." She demands that it be sent immediately "by the method I paid for". That would be first class post, then. Dozy so and so doesn't even realise we're in the UK. We refuse to send items surface mail because of the length of time and the constant customer complaints - to overseas buyers we offer airmail only. As it quite clearly stated. Short of transatlantic carrier pigeon or perhaps hot air balloon, I'm not sure how she expected it to get there at all, let alone for the princely sum of £1.25. My instructions specifically state that postage quoted is for delivery within the UK only and that overseas buyers should either contact us first to ask for shipping costs or, if they don't want to do that, at least wait for an invoice showing the correct amount. I don't have time to list overseas costs for all of our 500 odd items. It isn't much to ask. It annoys me when people stereotype whole nations but honestly. US ebayers, far too frequently, don't do their country's arrogant image many favours. :-((

Time Flies By

I'm not entirely sure where the days are disappearing to at the moment. It's rather alarming. But anyway - time to update with "stuff" that's been going on since last Weds.

Thursday morning Emily and Jon went off to tai chi and had a ball detecting auras and talking about psychic abilities as well as learning more of the next form. On Thursday afternoon they went to Kirton Lindsey for what we thought was Emily's dentist appointment. It turned out to be Jon's appointment instead but the dear dentist saw Emily too, which was very nice of him, and she got to watch Jon's hygenist appointment too. Saves them having to go back tomorrow which would have been Emily's appointment - muggins here wrote down the wrong names on the calendar. Back from the dentist it was a quick change into her drama costume and off to the dress rehearsal for that. Out she trotted and hour later with her face painted and all smiles.

On Friday Emily went to Romy's for a play; once she came home she spent a long time telling me and Jon about a very long and complicated pretend play they'd had which seemed to involve, to greater or lesser degrees, witches, princesses, poison and seperate but connected worlds. I think I lost the plot half way through, but from the way she was chattering it sounds like she had great fun.

While Emily was out I had hoped to start whittling down the massive pile of goods-in that has yet to be listed on either our shop or ebay. Unluckily, as it turned out, I chose to start with ebay. And discovered the "new and improved" HA HA HA listing form which takes forever to load, forever to refresh after you click anything and just generally forever, even for a relisting. Spent most of the afternoon huffing and puffing over that and listing about 3 items in nearly three hours, before abandoning all hope and opting to try Turbo Lister instead.

Saturday was ballet; surprise, surprise, the teacher was absent, yet again. The lesson was taken by her teenage helper plus sister plus a new, younger helper and despite finding it hard to control waayyy too many children they did rather well, teaching the class some of the choreography from Beauty and the Beast (the Be Our Guest song, Emily got to be one of the plates which she was pleased about) and also managing to fit in some tap which the class hasn't done for **months**. Emily loves tap. Anticipating that they might finally get back to it now the show's over, we had to buy her new tap shoes last week as she's outgrown the ones she had back in February, even though they were new in January :-// Half the class had no tap shoes on Saturday for exactly that reason. Anyway, so ballet was good, and Emily enjoyed messing around with K and came home with an invitation to K's birthday party next weekend.

Sunday morning Emily took virtually every Barbie item she possesses downstairs into the dining room and had a wall to wall faff session with it all, listening to the first Lemony Snicket CD, which she pronounced excellent-and-please-may-I-have-the-book-of-it - yes, dear, it's sat on your shelf with three thousand others awaiting your attention once you've finally finished or got fed up with HP & Azkaban AND Warrior Cats 1 AND Nurse Matilda (Nanny McPhee) and History of Fashion and whatever the others are that are "on the go" just now.

On Sunday afternoon while I worked Jon and Emily did a mammoth art session. Jon worked hard on his art course, finishing off this fabulous garden seat for the "textures" part and then painting a vivid alien landscape:


Emily wasn't really in the mood for spending hours on something, but she did two pieces of art, the first of which is her abstract take on the same alien city theme as Jon and the second of which is Blue Dolphins painted in about three minutes flat, lol.

And so to today. This morning we had a mammoth yoga session to begin with, as we suddenly realised that Emily's got her test for level three tomorrow and hadn't even looked at what she has to do (we're not normally that bad, just got out of synch with it this last week or two when she missed a lesson for the show). After that we pressed on with a morning of Body Project looking at the brain. Read lots of books, labelled a diagram or two, colour coded areas of the brain and what they control and did lots of experiments to test reaction time (catching a ruler), balance (up against a wall and not) and how to confuse the brain with optical illusions, trying to write while looking in mirror, that thing where you have the word red written in green (etc) and you have to say green instead of red (can't remember for the life of me what's that called), spinning blindfolded on a swivel chair and trying to tell which direction you're going, etc etc etc. Lots of chart making, stopwatch using and general giggling.

This afternoon we started some basic low budget scrapbooking - instead of a posh scrapbook we're just using white card put into clear wallets in a ring binder. Emily produced three sheets on the theme "The Big Cats" and I did four on her Egyptian project from last spring.


And well, that's about it. Apart from the annoying conversation I had this morning when trying to book Emily's appointment for her eyesight checkup at Specsavers. "I'd like an appointment for my daughter, please." "How old is she?" "Seven." "We have after-school appointments from 4pm any day this week." "No, she doesn't go to school - I'd prefer a morning appointment, please." **Cue long silence. And I mean long.** "We have to book children's appointments for after school so they don't have to take time off, you see." "She doesn't go to school. As early as possible would be good, please." **More long silence. I could almost picture her reaching for the phone book and looking under S for social services.** Eventually I got fed up with waiting for a response. "Emily's home educated. In the past we've always had appointments for about 9.30?" "Um, errr, right. I see. We have 9:10 on Wednesday if that's suitable?" "Perfect, thank you." And I can see I shall have to turn up (again, had this problem last time round) armed with a copy of the law, a big sign on my forehead saying "Yes, it's legal" and a big sign on Emily's forehead saying "No, I shouldn't be in school today. Should you?"

Tagged by EFT, Hazel & Kris

Well, erm, there's not much to say about the contents of any of these things, but here we go anyway:

5 Things in my fridge

Bottles of wine
Blueberries that really need something "doing" with them
Some camembert that has lost its sell by date label but is, shall we say, mature
Some wine
Did I mention the wine?

5 Things in my wardrobe

Clothes that are too small
A musty old box of miscellaneous shoes that have long since lost their soulmates
A rolled up duvet
Far too many coathangers (I'm with Hazel on the alien life form theory there)
A kite

5 Things in my handbag

Erm, I don't have one any more. Used to. Now I just make do with a wallet/car keys. Refuse to carry "stuff" around with me any more. But I'm sure there used to be really interesting stuff in there like hair bobbles, old till receipts and the odd sweetie. Now it's all in my pockets instead so I guess I haven't really gained much there....

5 Things in my car

Parking ticket from Emily's final dance performance last weekend
A lonely pound coin for the Asda trolleys
Emily's pull down drawing centre thingy
Bottles of water
Various books

5 People I'd Like To Do This Too

I think I'm the last person in the known universe to have done this, but, well, anyone who hasn't.

See? It's exciting round here.

Feeling Hot, Hot, Hot

Longing for a break in this weather. Did I mention any time that I don't do summer? Oh well, thunderstorms are still forecast but everywhere in the UK seems to be having them apart from us. *Sulk*

Yesterday morning Emily and I drove all the way to this PYO Fruit place as there isn't really anywhere else locally. Despite advertising being open from 9....it was deserted and most definitely shut. So that was an hour and three quarters in a steaming hot car for nowt. Loved it. Not.

In the afternoon Romy came over for a play and the girls spent a long time playing out in the paddling pool (of course) and selling various family members freshly picked peas and carrots. Emily and I then headed off for yoga.

Today we've been outside *all day* yet again....those who know just how much I love gardens, ants, bugs and being sweaty and sticky will understand why my stress levels are reaching epic proportions, lol. This morning we did some half hearted English and maths at the garden table and in the pool but were mostly entertained by looking at just about everything through magnifying glasses, me trying to catch a photo of Emily mid jump (failed) and watching Juliet display a hitherto hidden talent for tree climbing.

This afternoon, apart from a brief half an hour on the PC trying out her editing skills (jazzing up a document for me) it was yet more garden malarky with lots of very wet gymnastics and some soil experiments.

We are now indoors and I'm not going back out again until it's cooler and less insecty. Ever.

Yesterday Emily's first batch of artwork came back marked from her tutor. She did fantastically well and the tutor's letter to her was really lovely, full of tons of encouragement, constructive advice and ego boosts, lol. The next section of the course is about perspective so we'll get stuck into that soon.

I'll hardly see Emily tomorrow as she's out at tai chi with Jon in the morning, then they're off together for Emily's dentist appointment, then it's dress rehearsal for the drama show. Yay - means I get to stay indoors. Hurray! And do some work. Slightly less hurray!

Missing Merlin

Today has progressed in a slightly unreal atmosphere, with what gradually became an ever increasing veil of sadness. Merlin went missing late last night and hadn't been seen for 24 hours. Given how fond he is of both his food and attention, that didn't look too hopeful.

He is back now. *Shakes head in a bizarre mixture of utter releif and incredible irritation* Cats. Free spirits, I guess. If you love something, let it go free, and all that. But honestly!!! Where the hell had he been all this time??

We'd all been in tears, especially Emily, and I'd convinced myself that this time it really was IT and that he wasn't coming home. Even his sister Cassie-Cat was moping around and looking lost. I wish I could read Merlin's mind. I wish I knew where he'd been, what he's been up to. Was he perfectly happy out there somewhere, playing, hunting, snoozing, eating someone else's food? Or was he shut in somewhere, miserable and hungry, but someone found him and let him out? I know some cats make a habit of going wandering, but Merlin doesn't so it wasn't like him at all. He sauntered back in through the back gate at about 9.30 tonight with no apparent signs of distress and promptly headed upstairs to raid the kittens' food bowl - and pretty much ignored the poems Emily read to him, written earlier in tears. :-//

Oh well. As I say, he's back now.

Earlier this afternoon, before the Missing Merlin situation became completely dire, Emily and I spent some time out in the garden. Emily did lots of sun prints with sun sensitive paper and she also did a lot of mental maths which, as everyone knows, is of course much easier if you're floating in a paddling pool at the time.



I'm now emotionally worn out so I'm off for an early (for us) dinner and bed. Busy day tomorrow - we're going fruit picking in the morning, Romy's coming for the afternoon and Emily's got yoga too. And you never know, if we're lucky we might just come home to a full complement of two big cats and two little cats making a grand total of four cats with NONE MISSING. Or else.

The Confident Smile That Says It All

What a week we've had. We're all still walking on air, Emily especially.

She has been performing at the Plowright all week and we are sooooooo proud we could burst :-))))

Last time her dance school did a show, Emily was five and exceedingly nervous. She did very well in her dances and enjoyed it, but was clearly anxious and overawed on stage (as were the rest of her group). Wow, what a difference this time round! Despite some inevitable pre-show nerves - although to be honest, I think Jon and I were more wound up than she was! - she completely beamed the whole way through it and seemed very relaxed and very, very confident in what she was doing. Emily was step and word perfect throughout and looked utterly gorgeous, but far more important than that was the wonderfully happy smile. All of the girls of course are taught to smile on stage, but for most of the younger ones there's not much smiling going on when it actually comes down to it as they're too nervous or too busy concentrating. Emily's smile was genuine, never faltered and shone out as brightly as the teenagers who've been performing for years :-))

That confidence means the world to us. She didn't even falter when things went a little awry in one show and the younger children got all mixed up at the front meaning she couldn't get into her proper place for a finale - she just moved along to a space somewhere else and got on with it - but that's just the kind of scenario that would have had her bursting into tears not so long ago. It was also significant that she stuck to her guns and performed the choreography she knew to be correct even when others in her group got slightly muddled - previously she would have assumed that she must have been doing it wrong and wouldn't have dared do something the others weren't doing, but this time she had the confidence to know she was right.

Emily absolutely loved doing this show and can't wait for the next one. Can't get over how much more confident she is than last time. Then, she clutched my hand tightly every time I had to drop her off. This time she strode off every evening to the stage door with barely a backwards glance, made her way to her group's dressing room on her own, sorted out her own hair and body glitter once there and helped some of the others get ready too.

Here she is made up and ready to leave the house on the first evening:
and here she is late last night after the final performance, with a congratulations cake:

Showbiz aside ;-) it's been a busy and eventful week. We had a powercut from 10am to 7pm on the Monday which was a complete and utter pain business-wise. Then once the power came back, our PC ended up corrupted and we couldn't send or receive any email for 48 hours. Despite two hours (I kid you not) on the phone to support, they finally washed their hands of it (naturally). We had to call out a PC repair guy finally on the Thursday, by which time we were so far behind with orders it just had to be seen to be believed. He spent an hour and half here and couldn't fix it either, so he took it away with him and brought it back on Friday, finally fixed - hurray!! Cue incredibly manic working frenzy to try to salvage what we could from nearly a week of lost business.

Emily had done lots of work this week. She enjoyed using her rhyming dictionary to write a beautiful poem about Warrior Cats; I was very impressed with that one. She also found a book called Fast Fiction on our shelves that I bought for me, years ago. It has a series of random prompts in it and you have to write a short story (or the opening to a short story) using a prompt and a five minute timer. She LOVED that and wrote half a dozen very thought provoking pieces from it including a wonderful one from "write a story about a church" in which she took on the church's personality and wrote about how it felt being used for weddings, funerals etc and how it had been destroyed during the war but then rebuilt.

Couldn't get to yoga on Tuesday because of the dress rehearsal, but we did make it to drama on Thursday afternoon, where Emily had one of the two dress rehearsals for her drama show; only one more lesson to go before the show now. We had to hot foot it back from there to get to the theatre in time, lol, I don't think I've ever applied make up so fast in my life! Mind you, the whole stage makeup thing is difficult for me as I don't wear makeup and never have (on principle). Trying to apply the distinctive eye makeup to a wriggly, excited small person when you've only got three minutes is FUN.

Emily also did some more work on her body project during the week and we looked at healthy eating again, something we've often touched on in the past. When making a chart of the fat and sugar content in some of the foods she found in the kitchen, Emily was interested to make several discoveries - for instance how misleading labelling can be. She found several things labelled low fat there were extremely high in sugar instead, and one soup that was labelled low fat and low sugar but had more fat and nearly five times as much sugar as one that didn't claim to be low in anything!! She was also highly amused to find out that coco pops were a healthier option (in terms of fat/sugar at least) than my museli :-//

Friday and yesterday we spent a lot of time in the garden. Emily made a Tutankhamun mask from modroc which turned out very nicely; I'll take a photo of it when it's painted. She also painted and varnished her sun images from midsummer solstice. Oh, and of course the obligatory paddling pool fun, although yesterday afternoon it was a relief when she wanted to come inside to watch the football as it was just simply TOO HOT. She's not too fussed that England lost, apparently (although she did make a point of going to ask someone backstage, once we'd dropped her off, what the result was, as they were still in extra time when we had to get out of the car). She wants Italy to win!

A Message from.....Spirit?

Something very spoooooooky happened today. A couple of weeks ago, while my Mum and Dad were away at their caravan, their phone rang. I didn't answer it as I was busy and besides anyone important knew they were away. Just before it stopped ringing, though, Jon suddenly said "That's the hospital, ringing with an appointment for your Dad. It'll be 27th July at 10.30."

I rushed to answer the phone but was too late. We were expecting a *letter* from the hospital with an appointment, but not a phone call. Anyway, Jon had said what he said with such certainty that I wrote it down and put it somewhere safe.

Today, back from the caravan for a doctor's appointment, my Mum rang the hospital to chase up Dad's appointment as they should have heard long before now and still hadn't. The lady said the appointment hadn't yet been made but that they'd ring her back this afternoon with one. They did. "It's for the 27th July," Mum told me (she didn't know about what Jon had said). I'd forgotten the date Jon had specified so I rushed off to get my note. Yep, there it was. "What time on the 27th?" I asked, cautiously. "10.30."

Spooooky. How could Jon have known the exact date (which is much later than my parents had been told to expect) and furthermore the exact time, when even the hospital didn't know it at that time? It wasn't them on the phone when he said it, but why did that phone call from an unknown person prompt this premonition? He said it just popped into his head and he felt he had to say it. He's done it before too, also spookily with another hospital appointment, when I was waiting for an appointment for a cervical biopsy after an abnormal smear. He announced one day that the appointment would be on the morning of our wedding anniversay, Feb 6th that year. And it was.

For his birthday, I had contemplated getting Jon onto a week's residential psychic development course as I've been convinced for a long time that he has latent abilities. I opted not to in the end, as I didn't think he'd want to go. Wish I had now!!

Anyway, psychic dalliances apart, it's been a productive day. Emily wrote a long letter to her art tutor telling her all about her interest and detailing (as requested) what parts of the exercises she found hardest and why. She did it in beautiful handwriting too. This morning she and I went out to PetsAtHome and to try to buy some spray on hair and body glitter for her show. Could I find any??? Nope. Could find gel but that's no good for her hair. Looked every-flippin-where. Someone eventually said that they only get it in at Christmas time; guess they may be right, the last show she did was in a November and we had no trouble getting some then.

Emily has also been busy today and over the weekend making lots and lots of fashions from this lovely kit - she's going to make a fashion scrapbook with them. She's also been watching our new Shakespeare: The Animated Tales box set. Looked again for the Shakespeare for Kids Company's Romeo and Juliet DVD - this is the performance we went to see early this year in Grimsby which was utterly *fantastic* but can't find it anywhere. They do sell Macbeth and another one on their website but they're very expensive :-(

Emily has also written her review for the Telling Pool book she was sent by Education Otherwise. She said "This is the story of Rhodri's magical quest, given to him by the Telling Pool at the time of the Crusades. I enjoyed this book because I liked the medieval setting and the connections with legends and King Arthur. I love Wales too and I picked up some Welsh words when reading it! It is a very complicated plot though and the book does take a long time to get going. It was hard to read - I think it is aimed at older children and teenagers so my Dad helped me with a lot of it, otherwise it would have taken me too long to read. The story is quite scary in places and it's easy to imagine yourself in Rhodri's place. I would recommend this book to older children who love history and myths and fantasy tales, and who have a lot of patience!"

Finally, we've spent far too long playing this TumbleBugs game which is proving strangely addictive. I'm off now to review the complicated instructions for what Emily has to wear, take and do backstage tomorrow at the Plowright Theatre. If it's anything like the last performance she did it'll be booked solid so that's an audience of about 350 - got to be good for her confidence if nothing else, lol, although the pre-show nerves are getting to me and Jon now more than they are to Emily!

A Glass Splinter Through My Heart

Well. OK, it wasn't glass and it wasn't my heart or indeed my anything or even indeed anyone's heart, but you'd have thought it was given the drama it created :-//

Yesterday morning Emily got a large splinter in her palm from an adventure playground. She was only a bit upset at the time but was worried about having it taken out so we said we'd leave it and see if it worked itself out after a bath. It didn't - in fact the area around it started to swell up, turn a funny colour and generally look nasty. Oh dear. It had to come out. It was one of those right under the skin jobs, there was no free end to pull out with tweezers. So how were we going to get it out, she asked apprehensively. The word needle was mentioned. Cue apocalypse.

A full two hours of hysterical crying and near asthma attacks later, the splinter was finally removed thanks to Jon's deft work once Emily was finally too exhausted to scream and pull away any longer. It was extremely traumatic for all concerned :-(( At several points we had to seriously consider taking her to hospital as she could barely breathe with fear. It was going to get infected if we left it there - what were we supposed to do? We'd already searched the net for tips and tricks and tried everything advised. Well, once it was all over of course there were cuddles and snuggles all round and she'd forgotten the trauma within minutes. I daresay it will stay with we two adults a goodly while longer. We had this same thing last time Emily lost a tooth, too.

Once she'd settled to sleep, we had a serious chat about it. The fear and panic Emily displays when she's in any way injured or in any way confronting even relatively minor pain is completely beyond normal. She's absolutely terrified, can't breathe, can't control her screaming, can't be reasoned with, can't be comforted. It's horrible; makes us feel like such useless parents and it breaks our hearts that we can't reach her at those times to get her through it gently. After a lot of research last night we think she may genuinely have a fear disorder/phobia centered on blood and injuries. Although she's got slightly better over this last year - for instance, a nettle sting no longer produces this reaction where a year ago it definitely did - it seems she's in for a very long haul of abject terror for some while yet. It can't be fair to just leave her to go through that. I know a lot of people would just consider her extremely babyish to react that way. Some of her "friends" have been known to laugh at her (and God knows what she'd be facing if she was at school). In other ways, however, Emily's incredibly mature. Whatever's going on in her head when she hurts herself is far, far more complicated than being "silly" and "babyish" or whatever other labels those of an unkind disposition may wish to attach.

So: we're currently mulling over whether to seek a professional opinion from a child psychotherapist or similar. Haven't reached a decision yet, but we'll see.

Aside from the drama - which happily, at least, she can see the funny side of once it's over - we had a good day yesterday. I was furious with something I'd read and really not in a very good mood but on the spur of the moment we decided that Emily and I would head out for the morning whilst Jon caught up with some work. We went to visit the Waters Edge Centre in Barton on Humber, which was OK if rather smaller than I expected. Emily enjoyed playing around with one of the cameras on the Humber Bridge, lol. It was the playground at Waters Edge that provided us with the splinter, thanks very much. From there were also went to the Ropewalk Art Gallery in the same town. That was really good; they had a big exhibition of pictures of the Humber Bridge from a BBC competition earlier this year and we had a looooonnng look at those discussing what media everyone had been using and which we liked most and why. By the time we left I was in a much better mood, having had a lightbulb moment that made me finally understand that what was bothering me is actually the other perons's problem, not mine :-)

Yesterday afternoon when we got back, Emily did the last of the three pieces of artwork she has to send in to be marked for the first section of her course. She had to draw and shade her favourite object, so she chose her favourite soft toy, Uni. He's the one that used to comfort her on her return from school each day, bless him, so he has a place in all our hearts. Here he is, famous at last:
She found this one much harder than the other two, at least partly because with a soft toy it's hard to tell where the light and shade falls and difficult to convey the texture too. She's not as pleased with it as she is the others, but she's working soooo hard on it all!

So: splinter aside, it wasn't a bad day after all :-)

Thursday was taken up with tai chi and drama as usual, so everything's jogging along nicely there. Today was the last ballet rehearsal before the opening night's dress rehearal on Tuesday afternoon. And, despite her dire warnings to any of the children who dared not to turn up....the teacher wasn't there!!!!!!!! That'd be really funny if it wasn't so infuriating. Anyways. Emily's well prepared and now can't wait for Tuesday, so let the show begin!

Midsummer Magic

It's been a wonderful day :-))

Today we set about celebrating the dual occasion of the summer solstice and Grandad's 77th birthday.

I had intended to get up, and get Emily up, in time to see the sunrise, but since I didn't go to bed until 1-ish, that was a no-no, lol. Not to worry - when we did get up Emily set about wrapping up presents before we settled down for a look on the internet and in our Circle Round book about the lore of Midsummer and the technical explanation for what is actually happening at the summer solstice.

After spending a while discussing it and reading about Midsummer traditions around the world, and pagan Litha traditions in particular, we headed out into the garden to make a fairy den for the fairies to hold their wild party in tonight ;-) Emily absolutely adored doing that. Here she is patching together the leaves for the roof.
By the time she'd finished the den had a leaf-woven roof, twig walls, a sparkly bark path, a gate of sparkling lolly sticks strung with bells, a front door bell (a foxglove bell hanging on a pipe cleaner, lol) and a sign saying "32 Daisy Street"....oooh and I'm sure lots else besides. It looked fantastic. My pictures don't show it up all that well, but I'm sure the fairies will be thrilled.

It wasn't very midsummer weather, mind you. The sun was lovely and warm when it popped out, but mostly it was very overcast and **very, very windy** - it was quite a feat to get the fairy den roof not to blow off, so I think that counts as design and tecnology for the day!

After that we came back indoors to make a sunshine fruit flan with yellow and orange fruits - bananas, star fruits, nectarines and satsumas in our case. This doubled as both a sun-honouring cake and Grandad's birthday cake. Mind you, the sunshine effect was somewhat diminished because the only glaze we had was red coloured so it wasn't exactly yellow by the time we'd finished. Not to worry, it was the idea that counted!

This afternoon we braved the wind again to get back out in the garden and Emily and I spent a couple of hours making sun emblems from clay.

We charged them in the midsummer sunlight and when they're dry we'll paint them and hang them from our big red tree to remind us of the blessings of midsummer. As well as making a few myself, I also read to Emily from A Midsummer Night's Dream while she got on with hers, and we discussed the magical lore behind the day.

At tea time, we had a fab birthday tea with Grandad, who loved his presents, flan and cards.

All in all, it was a lovely day. Emily's very keen to hear about other pagan traditions, so I think I'll be digging out my wheel of the year stuff to show her shortly. She's with Jon now reading Warriors: The New Prophecy - Midnight - yep, they finally finished the original Warriors series the other day, and a right old tear jerker that was too. I've sneakily read the first few chapters of Midnight and I have to say I was disappointed. I adored the first series of six books, cannot praise it highly enough (as regular readers may have noticed, lol) but this first book in the new series just doesn't grab me. I think it's to do with the change of viewpoint. The first series was told from the point of view of one particular cat who began as Rusty the Kittypet, joined the clan and became Firepaw the Apprentice, then Fireheart the Warrior and finally Firestar, clan leader. The new series is told by the next generation of younger kits and suddenly Firestar and the others we've grown to love so much are just background characters. It seems wrong to have worked so hard - and so effectively - to get your reader absolutely bound up with the fate of a couple of cats in particular to then just abandon them and turn them into not even secondary characters but mere afterthoughts. You just find yourself constantly thinking "but what would Firestar think/do/say about this?" Dunno, it jars. It may get better. I hope so.

It's Raining :-))

So all's well with the world. Amazing how the pitter patter of rain makes everything look and feel fresh and exciting.

Today's been busy; it helped that we were up at 7. Getting up early really makes a difference to our day - well, mine and Emily's; Jon's usually up hours before us anyway....and to bed hours later....which makes him either superhuman or a workaholic or both, but we love him for it :-)

First thing Emily made another 3D decoupage card, this time an apple tree for Grandad's 77th birthday tomorrow. After that we got stuck in with some more body project work, finishing off our look at the heart. Emily designed a poster about how to keep your heart healthy, wrote a piece describing how the body heals cuts, drew different types of blood cells and wrote about them, answered three pages of heart/blood related questions I'd made up and drew/cut out a life-size heart to go on her model body. Said body now boasts bones, lungs and heart but is longing for the day we do the digestive system as it's getting rather hungry. Mind you, having a brain would help too, I guess.

This afternoon the art bug was calling again, so Emily worked on the second of her "send in for marking" tasks in this section of her course. She had to draw and shade a shoe, so here's one of her tap shoes. She's very pleased with this :-)) and completed it much faster than the fruits one from yesterday even though she initially thought it would be harder.
Art urges temporarily satiated, we turned to the slightly less popular subject of maths. I was idly leafing through a workbook wondering whether to bother with it when it suddenly dawned on me that there were pages and pages of fill-in-the-blanks times tables stuff. Eeep. We gave up on formally doing times tables about six months ago after a short and fruitless effort. I started explaining earnestly to Emily that we really ought to get set on learning them, at least the 2, 5, 10 and 4. "But I know them!" she said. Yeah right. Sure you do. "So what's six times four?" And then she did "it" again, that indefinable home ed thing, and proceeded to rattle off the answers to every question I asked her. OK, she wouldn't have won any speed championships, but she clearly did know the answers or was able to work them out within seconds. But, but, but, I spluttered. Last time we tried this you had a tantrum, I pointed out. Yes, says she. "But that didn't mean I could do it. It just meant I couldn't see the point."

Well, that was me told, then.

We called it a day and off she went to pootle about with various Emily type things for half an hour before yoga, while I secretly made her a "well done" Hula Girl card to give her on the last night of her show next week ;-) Bought her a little wobbly Hula Girl ornament from a US seller on ebay the other day, too, as a momento. It's quite cute actually, the type of thing that's meant to sit on your dashboard and wobble!

At yoga they did some impossibly loud running about-y, scream-y, giggly game for nearly the whole hour, although the teacher assured us it really did have something to do with learning sanskrit names. Seemed to go down well, anyway! Love that child's bizarre tolerance levels. That's just the kind of thing she'd absolutely HATE in most circumstances and which would end in tears.....but tonight she was probably one of the loudest and giggliest, lol. It's astonishing how much more at ease she becomes when the atmosphere is right!

Arts & Crafts

Emily and I "popped out" to The Range this morning - we only meant to be out about half an hour just to look for something for Grandad's birthday, but we were gone all morning and could have spent an absolute fortune! Great shop; I've never seen so much art and craft stuff under one roof, let alone everything else! As it was, we came back eventually with only a single solitary item for Grandad....and lots of stuff for us :-// So that knocked my newly made "no more spending on anything not essential" resolution on the head.

This afternoon Emily settled down to do the first of her "to be sent for marking" tasks on her art course. She had to draw and shade an arrangement of three different fruit/veg. After nearly two solid hours of effort, she came up with this fabulous attempt at sweetcorn/strawbs/apple:
Emily's finding it tough going - she finds painting much, much easier - but she's determined to get there and she's showing remarkable patience with it. I'd have given up long before!

Jon's also settling into his own art course. Finding time to fit it in is a bit of a struggle, but he's had two good sessions at it so far (is working on it as a I type, in fact) and seems to be enjoying it.

After the serious art session this afternoon, Emily and I had a bit of fun with some 3D decoupage. Emily made the bird card and I made the lily. Hadn't tried doing that before, but it was very therapeutic - must do some more!

Emily wants to have a go at "proper scrapbooking" so we need to get some of our photos printed off and see what we can do. One week tomorrow the ballet show begins (eeep!) so we'd better get busy this week as next week there won't be much time!

Quiet Father's Day

Emily enjoyed giving Daddy and Grandad her presents and cards this morning. She has a card waiting for Gramps when he gets back, too.

It's been a very quiet, uneventful day - Emily's played all day, Jon's been busy tidying the stock room and considering various furniture re-arranging schemes in an attempt to create some space. I've been busy plodding away with the usual deadlines.

I'm somewhat furious to discover that a magazine that owes us a not inconsiderable amount of money appears to have gone bust......or at least, I'm assuming they have. They've pulled their website, they're not replying to my contacts and their account is waaaay over due. I am not amused. Have spent a while looking up how to pursue the flippin debt through the county courts/small claims court/whatever. It couldn't have come at a worse time. Still, I suppose we've been lucky so far - we've run this business for eight years now and never had a bad debt bigger than the odd £20. Guess it had to happen sooner or later :-((

On a lighter note, Romeo has well and truly taken to the paddling pool - we spotted him out there this afternoon wandering around and around up on the rim before settling down to lounge on the edge of it with his tail IN the water, ROFL!

How Did We Ever Live Without.....

...... a polystyrene cutter??

It's delights are so many that I really don't know why we didn't get one ages ago. Bought one from ebay a few months ago but as usual in our household it didn't actually "surface" until Friday when Emily wanted it to make some Father's Day things with. Once tried we couldn't believe how much fun it was and all manner of wondrous uses popped into our heads. Really. No piece of polystyrene is safe.

Anyway, apart from that, what else should I blog? Well, on Thursday morning Emily and Jon went to tai chi and both received their certificates: "This is to certify that Emily Dana H. has successfully achieved a high standard in Tai Chi Small Circle Form with the Sheng Chi School of TAiji & Qigong" :-))) She's extremely chuffed with that and it's waiting to be framed when Gramps gets back from holiday.

They also started to learn the 24 step form; apparently he's not going to teach the small circle form to beginners any more as it's too difficult. There are a lot of mirrored movements, which are very hard, and I gather that it also includes fa-jing which is one of the major martial art components of tai chi, rarely practised in the West. Evidently they're all going to find the 24 form much easier. Both Emily and Jon did indeed the previous one very hard work, but very satisfying. Certainly dispelled the myth that tai chi's just all about standing still and waving your arms around ;-)

Also on Thursday at tai chi they did some circle healing for one of the members of the group with an injured leg. Emily *loved* that and was very keen to demonstrate to me how she'd had to hold her hands and feel the energy flowing.

On Thursday afternoon Emily went off to drama; she was rather peeved at having to miss most of the England game but I think she was glad she went in the end - not long now until the drama performance so the pressure's increasing :-/

On Friday Emily spent most of the morning arty-crafting with the aforementioned fabulous item. She made some lovely Father's Day cards for Daddy, Grandad and Gramps. In the afternoon she went to play at Romy's house where she had a go on Romy's guitar and was instantly smitten....she's now pleading for guitar lessons, lol. Both Jon and I have guitars up in the loft (although his is broken) so we'll have to get them down for her to have a go on. Mind you, I had guitar lessons once or twice a week for about three years as a teenager and still didn't manage to play much!

This morning it was a rush off to ballet rehearsal. Despite the absolute chaos I did manage to reserve a copy of the show DVD and bought two copies of Emily's photos. Emily was reuinited with her friend K (they've been at different lesson times since Easter since they're in different nights of the show but todays' rehearsal was for both groups together) and I with K's Mum, so we had a good old chat while the girls danced their hearts out. Emily left clutching a piece of paper with details of the next set of rehearsals, the dress rehearsal at the theatre and instructions for the show nights themselves. Not long now! (Breathes sigh of relief)

Straight back and into the paddling pool, despite it by then being very overcast and notably colder - nope, that doesn't deter my girl :-)) Nothing short of hypothermia will keep her out of the pool. Since then she and Jon have been playing while I've been working (booooo!). Oh, and here's a pic of Romeo "helping" me work by sprawling out next to the printer.

Loving Learning

Emily's had a fab couple of days. Yesterday we finally made it to the Eygptian exhibition at the local museum. There wasn't as much there as we'd thought there would be (ever optimistic, lol) but Emily did enjoy it and even played a few games of "snake" with the children from the inevitable school party that was also "visiting" or rather with the school party that was being rushed through lest they actually become interested in anything and delay the teachers' lunch.

Here's Emily in front of the cat mummies:It was back in February/March 2005 that Emily did a huge Egyptian project (some pictures of which are here) - but she's never lost her fascination with this civilisation and seemingly hasn't forgotten anything she learnt back then either. She had a good chat with the museum attendant - he started off talking to her very slooowwwly and in quite baby terms and adjusted his attitude rapidly when he discovered that she actually knew rather a lot about the things she was looking at, lol. She told him about having booked to go the 2007 Tutankhamun exhibition in London, too.

We had a mooch around the rest of the museum too, although that's becoming rather over-familiar as we've been there so much this last year. Emily did have renewed interest in the WW2 bit, though, and made a list of interview style questions she wants to ask her grandparents in readiness for a WW2 project at some point soon. Should be interesting, as she'll have three very different viewpoints and experiences from them - my Dad was a child in Lancashire, my Mum was a child in central London (who wasn't evacuated and whose father worked finding emergency accommodation etc for those made homeless) and Jon's Dad was a young man farming in Wiltshire, so that should really help her understand a broad picture of what it was like. Here she is in the Anderson shelter:
Back at home after lunch, Emily spent a long time yesterday afternoon sorting out her ornament shelves. She has so much stuff in her various "collections" now! She has seven floor to ceiling shelves in her room just for special things, and barely room to move on any of them! She got everything down off the shelves, cleaned and dusted and then reorganised it all into themes. She now has a history shelf (the historical crafts she's done as well as Egyptian and Tudor ornaments, archaeology she's found etc), a fairy shelf, a gemstone shelf, a cat shelf, a wildlife shelf and two more general shelves which are housing a budding unicorn collection among other things. Phew! Now if only I could interest her as much in clearing up the rather less exciting and definitley non-speical storage areas of the room, lol.

Then it was off to yoga where they spent some time working on breath techniques and centering as well as the normal pose work. I love the way that class is run. It's so refreshing to find something that's not all about who can get to the next level fastest or who has the most medals/rewards/exams under their belt/other status symbols. They pay a great deal of attention to the whole child, not just the physical aspect of it, and learning about the history/philosophy of yoga is just as important as finding out whether or not you can put both feet behind your ears ;-))

Today Emily's done a huge amount of work. Up bright and early she finished off the last of her year 3 maths workbooks. Wel, finished as in we've finished with them, not as in she's done every page in every book. When she's actually in the mood for maths, she's well capable of everything there plus much more, so I think we'll look for something slightly more challenging.

The body project has moved on in leaps and bounds today. We've been looking at the heart and circulatory system. To much hilarity this morning, we tried out our heart rate monitor system, which is a watch type device along with a chest strap which has electrode pads in it. Emily and I both experimented with our resting heart rates, heart rate after one minute of exercise, two minutes, how long it took to return to normal after exercise, etc. Emily's results showed that she's remarkably fit, which is all good :-))) especially since she's not a stick thin child. Mine, um, didn't show the same.

Emily drew and labelled a very complicated diagram of heart anatomy with coloured arrows to show the flow of blood to and from the lungs and the rest of the body, and wrote answers to loads of questions about the heart's function, veins, arteries and capillaries, the components of blood (as in red blood cells, white blood cells, plasma and platelets and what each one does) and much more besides. We also talked a lot about how to keep your heart healthy - she's going to do a poster about that on Friday, and she also wants to do a diagram about how blood clots on Friday, as well as cutting out the lifesize heart to go on her skeleton. Then it'll be onto the brain and nervous system :-))

In between the major work on the body project, we also did a lot of French, revising the colours Emily learnt the other day, and learning numbers up to ten. Played some fab bingo games with the numbers. A certain home educated young lady is having a ball at the moment. She seems to be lapping everything up and constantly coming back for more.

Tomorrow Emily's out at tai chi in the morning and drama in the afternoon; in between she and Jon are having an art session so she's really looking forward to that!

Two More Photos

Had only just finished writing the post below when I was summoned out into the garden to meet this rather handsome visitor:Mr or Mrs Hedgehog was being followed about by a rather bemused looking Juliet - mind you, given the giant-mutant size of the hedgehog she probably thought it was some strange new cat species!
And just for the sake of completeness, I'm posting this picture of Cassandra (aka Cassie-cat); I'm not sure I've ever posted one of her before - dozens of Romeo and Juliet and quite a few of Merlin, but Cassie-cat usually looks like a black blob in the photos we take, so it's rare to get one where you can actually distinguish that she is a cat! Being in mid-scratch seems to have helped. She's quite an elderly moggy now I guess - bless em, the Big Cats must be going on fifteen by now.

A Year In The Life....

It's our blog anniversary today :-)) Can't believe a whole year has passed. That's quite a scary thought, so I think I'll mentally file it in the "too hard" box and press on!!

The bits of Emily's weekend that I haven't already blogged were, well, wet and football-y. She switched from the paddling pool and scorching sun to the shade of the sitting room and the TV with great regularity and a permanent grin. Thanks to the world cup I think she's watched more telly this last three days than she normally does in a whole week. Yet another paddling pool photo:
Today we were promised thunder, so I'm having a bit of a sulk that it has failed to materialise. I LOVE storms. So beautiful, so powerful - uncontrollable nature. And so energising and uplifting too. Must be all those negative ions flying about. Anyway, no thunder here although it has been very overcast for most of the day, but still extremely sticky and generally TOO HOT. [Added at 17:42 - stop press! Right on cue! Thunder!!!]

Emily and I have both felt inspired to get back to some serious work and today has been a good start to that. Emily steamed through some English work on suffixes and synonyms, then we spent a long time on French, revising what we've done so far and looking at colours - played some great games with that and it was interesting to see Emily make the connection between the Italian colour words she already knows and the new French ones, correctly deducing that it must be to do with their common latin ancestry. After that we moved onto maths and she completed several "tests" of mixed problems from a KS2 mental maths book. Some of them were pretty hard, so I was impressed with that.

Lunchtime was taken up with Emily gleefully sticking loads more Harry Potter stickers into her album, then she had time for a quick play on Pharaoh before doing nearly an hour of gymnastics and general "exercise" (rushing about like a mad thing with the odd bit of yoga thrown in) and then settling down to her art course. She completed the last two "practice" exercises of the first module - the next three pieces of work she does she has to send in to the tutor - ooh err! So far the course has concentrated on drawing and shading pieces of fruit and veg - Emily's done brilliant work in particular of an apple and a red pepper, and has worked really hard on it, making tonal strips with her different grades of pencil to make sure she can get the light and shading just so. Really proud of how well she's sticking at it - it's by no means easy!

For the last art task today, she had to choose an ornament to draw and shade. Off she went and came back with various china cats from her massive collection. Unfortunately, drawing a china cat is practially as hard as drawing a real cat, and she couldn't get it how she wanted it and ended up quite frustrated (read: lots of tears) with her efforts. Jon and I gently pointed out that the course example had been a kitchen egg holder in the shape of a chicken - basically just a square with a chicken's head on - and that they probably wanted her to choose something much simpler than a flippin' lifelike pair of playing kittens. Tears soothed and point understood, Emily settled on a big stylised goose thing that holds porridge oats in our kitchen, and did a very good job of it too.

Speaking of cats, I just wanted to add these two beautiful photos Jon took of Juliet yesterday. Poor Romeo hates the hot weather; it's a job to persuade him to go out at all at the moment, lol, but Ju Ju doesn't seem to mind it and just snoozes in the shade. She particularly likes sleeping under Emily's old climbing frame, which is where she is in the first photo:
Busy week ahead; we've got to fit in a trip to the museum and lots of swimming (apparently) as well as a ton and a half of work Emily wants to do. Looking back on the blog I can see that a year ago (sob!) we were in the middle of Tudor mania. A Roman project is itching to get started, so we'd better get a move on with the human body!

You Know Summer's Begun in Earnest When....

....you can post the traditional "first paddling pool pictures of the year", lol.

Emily's been in the pool at every available moment so far today (and had to be dragged out, dripping, to get to ballet in time). She's watching England now but will be hotfooting it back out again shortly, no doubt!
While she's lapping up every minute of sun I, on the other hand, have begun in earnest my ritual complaints of "It's too hot!!!!" There's a lot to be said for autumn, you know.

A Birthday & Lots of Splashes!

Thursday was Jon's birthday :-))

It was also a very busy day, between tai chi in the morning, work being rather manic and then drama in the afternoon. With remarkable patience, Emily waited until a very late tea time to give Daddy his presents and lots of home made cards.

Next week at tai chi Jon and Emily should be getting their certificates, so Emily came home very excited from the lesson to tell me all about that. After a quick lunch, we set about making Daddy's birthday cake - diabetic friendly (well almost) Honey and Almond cake adapted from this Honey & Hazelnut Cake recipe. Emily decorated it to look like an artist's palette :-))

She finished decorating it just in the nick of time to go out to drama, where this week the children were given details of the costumes they need for their plays. Since Emily's being the fox she just needs either a black leotard or black tshirt and black shorts, with tail and ears to be provided by the academy. Should be no problem there then, can't move for black in her drawers at the moment, lol. She also emerged from the lesson clutching her copy of the script to practice at home.

Back home for birthday tea and pressies. Apart from various world cup related bits and bobs, we bought Jon this Art Diploma Course which should keep him out of mischief for the next twelve months!! (If he can perform minor miracles and find some time to do it in, that is - but we're working on that.)

This morning we finally found a minute to dig out the paddling pool from the back of the spider infested shed, and we also set up a water slide thingy with fountains which spray all over it. Needless to say Emily was well and truly soaked long before we left to pick Romy up for a play this afternoon. The two girls spent a whole three and half hours out in the garden - I've no idea exactly what they were up to but it was certainly wet!!

Emily's into the world cup in a big way at the moment, so after playing with Romy she settled straight down to watch the opening match; she also watched the Poland-Ecuador match this evening and duly noted down both results on her wallchart.

Emily got her first book to review for the EO magazine in the post today. We asked to be reviewers ages ago, but that request must have fallen by the wayside. Jon asked again a week ago, and we seem to be on board now. The book that's arrived is The Telling Pool which is a novel by David Clement-Davies. It's clearly aimed at teenagers-adults, so I'm not quite sure why we've been sent it.....but it looks like an interesting read, anyway. It's set in Richard the Lionheart times and seems to be about a combination of wicca and christianity with folklore, legend and King Arthur thrown in for good measure. At 300+ pages of extremely tiny type, I'm not at all sure Emily will have time to read it before the end of June when the review is apparently due, but bless her, she's trying and has already read the first chapter tonight.

Something else she's been enjoying recently is The Lottie Project by Jacqueline Wilson. Up until now Emily's been quite averse to J.W. - I think possibly because she thought all her books were like Tracy Beaker, the TV series of which she can't stand - but she's really taken with this one, so it'll be interesting to see whether she now wants to read more by the same author.

As far as tomorrow goes, ballet rehearsals and more ballet rehearsals, plus an England match, plus the garden and the all important paddling pool - there's lots vying for Emily's attention and never enough time!

Jogging Along Nicely

The last few days have passed in a bit of a blur. I know we’ve been busy, but it’s difficult to remember doing quite what!

Saturday and Sunday Emily spent ages with her lego and ello bits and bobs. Jon and I worked frantically. Jon has been working even more frantically during Monday, Tuesday and today, while Emily and I have been pottering.

On Monday we went out birthday shopping hoping for inspiration for Jon’s birthday tomorrow. In the evening, Emily went for the ballet show photo shoot and had various photos taken for the programme. That nearly ended in disaster – seconds before they started taking the pictures, once the children were all posed and settled, the teacher decided she didn’t want Emily wearing her glasses in the photos. So she told Emily to hand them over. Told, note. Not asked. Not suggested. Emily was, understandably, extremely upset. Her glasses are a part of her; she only takes them off to sleep, to get in the bath or to swim and she doesn’t feel at all comfortable in public without them. Just the kind of thing a teacher of small children ought to understand really. I despair, sometimes, I really do.

Anyway, I intervened and gave her back her glasses. No harm done then, technically, as Emily was able to pull herself back together rapidly once she had them back and looked beautiful for the photos. But the principle of the thing really, really wound me up. Took me a goodly while to calm down again once back home :-((

On Tuesday morning Emily did, er, something educational, I’m sure. Yesterday afternoon she went to Romy’s for the afternoon and had a ball playing in Romy’s super large paddling pool. It wasn’t actually that warm and Hazel had to save the two girls from hypothermia, lol, but as this year’s first Paddling Pool Day it was deemed a big success. We’re looking forward to the return match this Friday, assuming we can actually find our paddling pool and assuming too that the weather holds out.

We had some great news yesterday afternoon too – my Mum’s urgent hospital appointment, after four hours (!!) of tests, confirmed that her breast cancer has NOT returned, so all’s well in that department :-)))

Today has been taken up largely with making things for Daddy’s birthday and playing in the garden. So there we have it; not the most exciting few days, but everything feels as if it’s pottering along nicely – which makes a change from our usual state of near panic!

Hula Girl

Only three weeks to the ballet show now (and only two more lessons) - methinks they're going to be scheduling rehearsals and more rehearsals all over the place as really the children are nowhere near ready. Emily had a bit of an Emily Moment at tai chi on Thursday morning - the instructor was taking them through something and said about releasing all their worries and watching them float away.....at which point Emily burst into tears because it reminded her she was worried about the ballet!! Gee thanks Mr Tai Chi Teacher, lol.

Anyway - she recovered swiftly and completed the rest of the lesson; they've finished the form they were studying now and are due certificates any time now - apparently they're now studying a different, longer form.

Back at home Emily tried on her Hula Girl costume for the show, ready for the photocall on Monday. That cheered her up no end:
She then spent an hour rehearsing to music as one of the dances is to music from Lilo and Stitch.

Some more French practice followed and then Emily got back to work on her Human Body project, finishing off the section about lungs and the respiratory system with a write up, answering some questions I'd set her and cutting out a pair of life size lungs to go on the life size skeleton she painted yonks ago.

The other day we had a small parcel from Lush arrive - I'd never tried their stuff before and we certainly did like the two bubble bar slice thingies we ordered....although I refuse to put the whole things in the bath at once as apparently you're supposed to (????) - we just use tiny slices and still get masses of bubbles and glitter all over the place :-)) Yesterday it was the turn of a Bath Ballistic that had rose petals in it. Now, it seemed like a nice idea at the time I bought the thing. And since it said to put it all in, just this once, we did. Ahem. I won't be doing that again!! It was like bathing in soup! It certainly smelled nice and Emily had a ball with the seive trying to get hundreds of tiny bits of petals out of the water so we didn't block the plughole....but it wasn't my cup of tea, shall we say - think we'll stick to the bubble bar slices instead!

Last night Jon and Emily finished reading Warriors: A Dangerous Path which is book five in the fantabulous Warrior Cats series (which you *must* read). Bless her, Emily was in floods of tears.......but still can't wait to start book six tonight. I must admit it was quite emotional....Thunderclan's leader, Bluestar, dies when she sacrifices her life to lead a pack of wild dogs away from the rest of the clan, which leaves Fireheart as the new clan leader. The depiction of Bluestar, who over the course of the five books had become elderly and weak, finally giving up her life and journeying to star clan was extremely moving. It was like saying a sad goodbye to an old friend. Fiction that does what fiction is supposed to do; it utterly draws you in, this series does.

Meanwhile in a life and death drama of a different kind, Merlin caught another rabbit last night. Sigh. Heaven knows where he's getting them from, we're a bit short on green spaces round here. And a few hours before that, Juliet nabbed an adult starling which was (very unwisely) sat on the low wall by the bird feeder feeding two perfectly capable but lazy youngsters. Fortunately I saw that happen so made her drop the bird which flew off apparently uninjured. The body count is definitely on the up thanks to the four cats and the warmer weather. It's what cats do, after all and just something you have to understand and tolerate if you have cats. I just wish they'd do it somewhere other than right under our noses!

This morning Emily worked on some maths, rather reluctantly it has to be said; both she and I ended up very frustrated with it. I've come to recognise that our home education adventure can mostly be categorised under two types of days: GMD and BMD, lol. Good Maths Days and Bad Maths Days. It still is and doubtless will remain an utter mystery to me how the same maths problems using the same skills can be effortless one day and the cause of WW3 the next. With The Great Maths Trauma taking up so much of the morning we didn't really have time for anything else before I dropped Emily off to play at Romy's house for the afternoon. She seems to have had a ball, as ever. Jon and I got on with work while Emily was out and I finally managed to get the gift vouchers working in the shop!!!!!

And so, the weekend beckons. Oh good, that means it's BBC deadline time again!