Boing!

Yes, the sound of boing-ing has been coming thick and fast round here for the last 24 hours, of which more in a mo. Very zebedee like.

I am so looking forward to the time when I can get this blog back to being a home education blog. At the moment, all I seem to have to say are constant updates on the Grandad-Hospital fiasco. May has passed in a complete and utter blur of continuous hospital admissions and visits; I'm extremely alarmed that tomorrow is the first of June, it feels as though we have just fast forwarded a month :-((

Anyway; Jon's Dad is STILL in hospital. After his cancelled angiogram last Tuesday (post below) and the hospital records fandango, he was supposed to have an angiogram on Thursday last week. They prepped him for at 6 am, and all through the morning they kept telling him they'd be ready for him in half an hour, ten minutes, another ten minutes and so on. Lunchtime arrived and he was refused any lunch (which bearing in mind he has severe diabetes was not a good move). It wasn't until about 12.30 that they finally admitted they weren't going to do the angiogram because....drumroll please....they still didn't have the bloody records. Unbelievable. He was extremely upset. Jon and I were absolutely livid.

I rang the ward to find out what the hell was going on and was put through to a dopey staff nurse who told me that she couldn't answer my questions because she also didn't know what was going on. OK, I'll speak to a doctor then. No can do. They're not available (are they ever??). Saw red at this point and emailed the hospital complaints manager explaining what was going on and stating that we wanted to make a formal complaint about the whole fiasco. To be fair, she did respond within ten minutes, which was something. She said that *we* couldn't make a complaint, it had to come from the man himself, but that she had alterted the "modern matron" to the situation and it was being immediately investigated. The complaints manager then rang back about an hour later full of profuse apologies. She admitted that they had made a "huge mess up" with the records situation and that the way Grandad had been treated was "completely unacceptable". OK, but now what? She assured me that the records would be obtained urgently, and that his angiogram was still on course....but that there were no more angiogram slots until next Thursday, i.e. today.

Sooo.....on Friday, Jon's Dad was given a choice of whether to come home and go back into hospital today for his angiogram, or whether to stay in as an inpatient for another week. Inexplicably, he decided to stay there. Apparently because it saves him money as he doesn't have to get any shopping. OK. Never mind the cost and inconvenience to us then. Fair enough. Anyway, he's still there. It's now 4.30 on Angiogram Day. As far as we know, he hasn't had it done yet. Which means he probably isn't going to have it done. Which means I am going to have to throw the paddy to end all paddies with that bloody hospital. And I'm so tired of having paddies with them. Which also means that the whole of this month's inpatient and visiting saga has been for - nothing. Happy bunnies? Nope.

Right, so apart from all that, has there been any education going on? Well, er, not really. Bits and bobs, here and there. Emily has displayed the patience of a saint, to put it mildly, but she is now beginning to get bored and really wants to get back to some degree or normality. Which isn't much to ask.

We have at least been socialising, as it were. On Friday afternoon last week we went to visit Hazel, Romy and the increasingly, if that's possible, adorable Tansy, who were the proud owners of a new and huuuuggge trampoline, which Emily naturally fell head over heels in love with. We'd been debating getting one at Easter time, but had decided against it. Having seen how much fun (and, more to the point, exercise) Emily had on Romy's though, we had to change our minds. So with thanks to them, we do now own a trampoline.

It arrived yesterday morning. We had Emily's friend Maisie over for the day, so she and Emily enthusiastically "helped" my Dad and Jon put it up, lol, which largely consisted of playing Egyptian Mummies in the big box and helpfully asking every five minutes "is it nearly ready yet?" When not boing-ing, Emily and Maisie also had fun making home made pizza dough in the morning, which they baked with the toppings of their choice in the evening. Plus hairdressing, dressing up, nintendo-ing and all sorts of other malarky. All capped off with a late night phone call pondering over the intricacies of neopets. Some pics from yesterday:





Tomorrow we're off to visit George's wife Jackie and her two youngest kids (9 and 10, I think they are) for the day, for a mixture of work and play for the girls and a good chinwag for me and Jackie. George is Emily's karate and tai chi teacher, and together with Jackie runs the psychic circle Jon attends. They home educate too, but it's taken us a while to get the kids together. Jackie and I do have very much the same approach to home ed, so although at the moment the girls barely know each other, hopefully they'll all gel together and it should work nicely. Then on Saturday, Emily's playing with Kayleigh and on Sunday she has a birthday party for twins to attend. So at least she's having some good play times, even if the education is rather lacking!

Oh, and both Emily and I were rather narked with these two pieces of Harry Potter news: US Order of the Phoenix Film Release Date Moved to July 11th and Universal Studios to Open Harry Potter Theme Park. What's the deal with the US all of a sudden? I though JK Rowling was supposed to be keen to keep the books a basically British thing. So could someone explain to me why the hell the film release date is moved so that the US gets to see the film BEFORE the UK??? Why not on the same day? And as for the theme park, well. A) I hope they don't ruin it and b) yet again, if they must have one, why the US?? Yeah, money talks and Harry Potter is big business. We all know that. But we're narked.

Another Poorly Patient

Although this patient isn't in hospital, thank goodness, just curled up on the sofa. Emily's had a very high temperature for the last two days and a horribly sore throat. We've been snuggling up watching DVDs in between going back and fore to visit Grandad, who's still in hospital. Yesterday we watched Night at the Museum (good, but about half an hour too long) and this morning we saw The Devil Wears Prada, which we really enjoyed.

Poor Emy missed yoga last night and is probably going to miss tai chi tomorrow too. She did have a good Monday, though, before the poorliness kicked in at bedtime. We did the next science lesson in physics, which was about potential energy. Fun experiment involved running a toy car down a ramp at various heights to see how high the ramp had to be in order for the car to smash a banana slice, then repeating with the car weighted down with pennies, and working out the car's gravitational potential energy in both cases. Emily also went to football on Monday night and came home very chuffed to have been praised by the coach for her good tackling.

In the hospital, things are getting pretty surreal. Yesterday morning, Grandad was supposed to be having an angiogram first thing. They had him all ready - shaved, medicated, gowned...then they came to tell him at the last minute that they weren't going to do it.....because they had only just realised that they didn't have his hospital records from when he had a quadruple heart bypass ten years ago. He had that done in the Middlesex Hospital in London, which is now closed down. Why it took them until that long to realise they didn't have the records, when he had repeatedly told them his history and where it was done, I don't know. Even worse - they then told him that it was impossible to GET his records, because of the hospital being closed down. Oh, OK, what did they do with all the records when they shut it? Burn them? Hello?????

It took me less than ten minutes yesterday morning to google for Middlesex Hospital, establish that everything from there was now being dealt with at University College Hospital, ring their records dept, confirm with them that they did have the records from Middx ten years ago, get the exact name of the administrator the hospital needed to speak to, plus his direct phone and fax numbers and details of exactly what the hospital should put in their faxed records request. Now hard was that, and why couldn't Scunthorpe hospital manage it????

On top of all this, they then told him that, depending what the records showed, they may not ever be able to do an angiogram anyway; something about it depending on how the grafts on the bypass were done. Well, OK. But then WHY has he been kept in hospital for the past week awaiting a procedure that a) they knew they may not be able to do anyway and b) that they didn't bother requesting the records for in order to find out????

To say that everyone, including of course Grandad himself, is now hugely fed up is a bit of an understatement, shall we say. When I got back from the hospital this afternoon, he's been told that his angiogram is back on again for tomorrow morning. Except then a doctor appeared - asking Grandad whether HE had any news about what was being done and when. So the doctor didn't know and seemed to think that it wouldn't be taking place at all and that he should go home. So the last week has been for what, exactly? Okkkaaay. I'm not holding out too much hope for this fiasco having a successful resolution any time soon.

Anyway. I shall stop writing about that now before I scream.

LOL, Emily's just come upstairs asking if she can have her paddling pool out tomorrow, for the first time this year. And she's ill? Well, yes, she is - but nothing comes in the way of that girl and her pool. She practically lived in it last summer. I'm afraid big bad Mummy and Daddy are going to have to deny that request until her temperature's gone, but I guess next week "It Will Begin"!

Back in Hospital

For the third time in just under three weeks, on Thursday morning we called an ambulance for Jon's Dad. He had another angina attack and they admitted him back into hospital. Friday morning, in hospital he had yet another one. The consultant came round while Emily and I were there on Friday evening - they now think that there's a problem with the grafts from his quadruple heart bypass that he had ten years ago. Looks like one or more of the grafted veins is partially or even completely blocked. They're going to keep him in hospital until next Thursday when he's scheduled to have an angiogram. Depending on the results of that, they'll know whether he a) just have to live with it, b) they can do balloon angioplasty to relieve the blockage(s) or c) and most drastic, whether it warrants a new bypass operation.

It's a lot to worry about, but at least things are moving towards being sorted out, one way or the other. If they do decide to treat him after the angiogram (as opposed to just send him home with medication), he'll have to have the treatment in Hull hospital, as they only do diagnostics in Scunthorpe apparently.

Anyway. Hopsitals aside, Emily's been busy this week. On Monday we did the next lesson in chemistry, which was all about exploring four different types of chemical reaction: combination reaction, decomposition reaction, exchange reaction and displacement reaction, and about observing signs of chemical reactions such as precipitation, bubbles/gas production, colour or temperature changes and so on. Emily had a blast mixing together various combinations of salt water, sugar water, vinegar, lemon juice, milk, egg whites, bicarb, bleach and ammonia to observe the reactions. She's not a fan of the smell of ammonia ;-) but we were very impressed with the reaction of mixing bleach with ammonia - lots of manic fizzing and smoke coming off, lol. Not to mention the stink!

On and off this week, Emily's been working on a latin translation from stage 4 of the latin course, which is going really well. When I got back from the diabetic clinic on Tuesday we had a good old mess around with clay, making texture plaques as well as temple archways, plus I made an alien rose and Emily made a coiled snake jar. We haven't got round to painting these yet, but we did use glitter and coloured sand in the clay which was quite effective.

Also this week, we looked at lesson 3 in the biology course, which was about photosynthesis. Our basil plant volunteered for the experiment, so it now has some of its leaves covered in cardboard but still attached, or unattached and covered in cardboard, or unattached, covered in cardboard and in water, or unattached and in water, or just unattached, while we monitor their progress. Emily's really, really enjoying the Real Science 4 Kids stuff.

In history, the History Odyssey course has wound its way up to the Egyptians, much to a certain someone's delight. Emily did a HUGE Egyptians project back in spring 2005, but she's delighted to be re-visiting all that. This part of the course uses a resource called History Pockets; at first glance this seemed a bit boring to me - there's lots of colouring in and sticking pictures in the right place on sheets, etc. It seemed to me a bit too reminiscent of the busy work they do in school history. With hindsight, now we've actually started using it, though, Emily seems to be enjoying it. I guess it's a nice change of pace from the rest of the course. That's my one criticism of History Odyssey, actually, come to think of it - the pacing. Some of the "lessons" are wayyy too long, with far too much to do in one session, but others are really quick. We're enjoying that too, though. Although I think it's going to take more than a year to get through "ancients" before we move onto the next stage.

Bought a "creative writing machine" CD rom resource thing off ebay the other day, 'cos it was cheap and sounded like a good idea. Was very disappointed with it though. The principle was good (it had 100 each of characters, situations, objects and places that you had to randomly pick in order to come up with a creative writing "task") but the actual content was very bland and unimaginative. So Emily and I came up with our own instead and had great fun on Friday morning brainstorming 51 each of characters, places, situations and objects of particular interest to Emily. She then picked one of each at random and wrote a super story around them. She wants to do that regularly now, so I guess although the ebay buy was a bit of a let down, it did lead to something better, so that's good.

Yesterday afternoon we went to visit Hazel and Romy; the girls got up to who knows what in the garden, including busking at the garden gate (??), whilst I got to cuddle the increasing even more adorable baby Tansy. Hotfooted it from there to the hospital to see Grandad.

I did have loads more I wanted to write about, but I've started this post about eight times since Tuesday and it's all very disjointed in my head now, so I think I'll leave it at that!

Stunning Meditation Garden

We've been a bit devoid of pictures lately, so I'm going to chuck all these on from Jon and Emily's early morning trip to the Pureland Japanese Garden & Meditation Centre, which they found absolutely stunning - perhaps all the more so because it was pouring with rain - and the perfect place to meditate. All pictures are by Emily (apart from the ones *of* Emily, lol). She and Daddy loved it there and are keen to go back. Emily was particularly bowled over by the energy coming from the crystals in the crystal garden and she loved that there was something beautiful and interesting hidden just about everywhere. The owner, Buddha Maitreya, brought umbrellas out to them, and had a lovely long chat with Emily :-))

Grandad Home Again

It's been an "interesting" week again, lol. Virtually nothing achieved, education wise, although Jon did finally find the letter we had from the LEA last November. Since they were so polite and stayed firmly within the boundaries of what they were legally allowed to say, we decided to play ball and send them a report. I wrote it months ago, but then we lost the letter, so I spent half an hour yesterday updating it and now we've sent it off.

Jon's Dad came out of hospital again yesterday afternoon, and this time we're hoping things will settle and he won't end up having to go back in yet again next week.

Between hospital visits, we haven't managed to fit in very much else, although Emily did make it to yoga on Tuesday afternoon. She handed in her work for levels 7, 8 and 9, and is now busy learning the sanskrit she needs to know for her next test on Tuesday next week.

Yesterday morning before fetching Grandad, we went to visit Hazel, Romy and baby Tansy. Emily had a lovely play with Romy and I had a fabulous cuddle with the utterly adorable Tansy, although Hazel declined my offers to adopt her ;-)

This morning I dropped Emily off at ballet and came home to frantically work through some deadlines. Trish picked Emily up after the lesson and she's spending the afternoon at Kayleigh's house, no doubt besotted with the baby rabbits they've just had. Tomorrow, Emily and Daddy are off to visit a Japanese garden and meditation centre while I plough on with more deadlines. Jon's been hard at work on ebay all week, so between the personal account and the business account we must have nearly 800 items listed at the moment!

And, er, that's about it. I'm counting on an altogether less eventful and more productive week next week.

Chaos Continues

Well, Grandad came out of hospital last Thursday. About two hours ago, we had to call an ambulance again and he and Jon have gone off in that. I don't know what's going to happen now, whether Grandad's being readmitted or not. That's why I'm blogging, lol, I'm tied to the phone on the desk waiting to hear what's going on, cos if we go back downstairs we'll never hear the phone.

Anyway, since I'm here I may as well catch up on the last week's lack of blogging. We all visited Grandad twice a day when he was in hospital. After bringing him home on Thursday afternoon, we had a fairly relaxed Friday. Emily and I finally got to celebrate a very late Beltane. We didn't have all that much time, but we did decorate the festival/seasonal tree with paper flowers, leaves and pictures of the Green Man.

We also read lots of Beltane stories and myths and tried making fairy mushroom mereingues. Um, that didn't work. Even though they were in the oven for over two hours, it still seemed like raw egg at the bottom. Not very appetising! More successful was the honey bath Emily and I had - we loved that! Used up a whole pot of (Tesco value, lol) honey all over us and got incredibly sticky and very giggly. I'm sure it's good for the skin and it was certainly great for morale.

On Saturday Emily went to what would have been her penultimate dance lesson, but despite saying she didn't want to go any more, she was upset when it came down to it, and now she DOES want to carry on going. She wants to do the modern exam which is coming up next, then the next ballet and character dance exam, and by the time they've done those, it will time for the next theatre show, which she also wants to do. I guess we'll play it by ear then. I'm really cross with the teachers, but if Emily's happy to go, then I guess that's the only point that matters. I think Emily was also upset at the thought of not seeing her friends at ballet any more, which is probably the crux of the matter, really. We see Kayleigh outside ballet, but she doesn't really see the others except in class (bad mother, must do better in that dept!).

Yesterday Emily and I got back down to some work as hardly anything's been done in the last fortnight. Think we crammed quite a lot in, really, with maths, spelling, lots of latin, finishing off Hammurabi and his code of laws in history, finishing off a biology lesson we abandoned half way through for some other crisis previously, which was all about the parts of cells. We also did a physics lesson about force, work and energy, which involved taking a slinky out in the rain, hanging it from a tree and measuring the amount of work various fruits did when they extended the slinky. Emily worked it out using the work = force x distance formula and seemed to get the hang of that easily enough.

This morning we did more latin before Grandad was taken ill. It's funny how much you miss the "normal" mundane daily life when you've had extended periods of chaos, isn't it? I guess it stops you taking "normal" for granted, at least. We're so desperate to get back to some kind of "normal" now and beginning to wonder if it will ever happen.

The lack of normality hasn't been helped by huge computer woes yet again. In order to get Emily's new PC online, I had to order a new BT voyager hub and wireless adapter, as vista refused to work with the existing wireless adapters and BT were thoughtfully refusing to release vista drivers for it as they deemed the hardware too old. OK. New stuff arrived, installed it all painlessly in fifteen minutes. Knew it was too good to be true. Within mintues of installation, our main work PC (this one) running windows XP started to freeze solid, with great regularity. I think on Saturday we must have been forced to switch it off at the power more than a dozen times, which no doubt mangled its insides thoroughly. Much hair tearing out later and we'd tried just about *everything* we could think of, every solution that we'd found searching online, you name it, we'd tried it. Nothing.

Finally on Sunday morning I managed to get the *old* BT hub and the old adapter working again on this old PC, and much huffing and puffing later finally managed to get Emily's vista PC to talk to the wireless network after all via the new adapter. So far, it's sorted, but I'm not holding my breath. I loathe computer hardware!!

On a more positive note, on Sunday night Jon's psyhic circle held an open evening and Jon did his first ever public platform mediumship demonstration, which went fabulously well. My friend Janette and two of her friends went along to support Jon as I couldn't go, having deadlines up to our ears still. After the mediumship demonstrations, all the members of the circle offered free readings to the various guests. Jon did six or seven psychometry readings, with impressive results. The evening was supposed to wrap up around 10pm but they were still going strong gone midnight when Jon finally left, so I guess you could count that as a success!

In amongst all the chaos recently, Emily and I have been having fun on some computer games. We both love the Dumbledore's Army Multiplayer Spellcasting Game and Fairy Godmother Tycoon is a huge hit too. Very addictive that one, and very, very hard!

Grandad's Heart Attack

Well, he had one, on Monday. Came in from sitting in the garden, very pale, and said he thought he should see a doctor. Doctor couldn't see us for hours, and Grandad had pains across his arms and looked like he was going to pass out, so we called an ambulance. The First Responder got here within five minutes and the ambulance was only about five minutes after that. They gave him oxygen and took ECGs as he was sat down, then put him in the back of the ambulance to take even more. They said it looked like he was having a heart attack; I went with him in the ambulance at full speed with lights and siren - now *that* was a scary ride, I kept thinking the vehicle was going to roll over the speed it was cornering :-//

The A&E department confirmed that something was definitely not right and admitted him straight away to the coronary care unit, where he's been ever since. Although he feels quite a bit better now, the results of the blood tests they took came back today to confirm that it had definitely been a heart attack as opposed to just angina.

So, he'll be in hospital on bed rest for a few more days before they allow him to get up and about. We're hoping he'll be home by the weekend, but we'll have to see. We're visiting him lots. Emily was quite frightened by the necessity to call the ambulance on Monday and the flurry of activity that ensued, but she's been a star with him in hospital, and is very taken with his bedside TV/games console, rofl! She made Grandad a lovely card on Monday evening when she got back from visiting him, and we took it to him this morning straight from Emily's tap exam. The other two men in his room have asked her to make cards for them too, lol!

So, it's been an activity filled few days, as it were, and we'll be fitting in twice daily visits to the hospital for the next few days at least. On a happier note, Emily passed her karate grading on Sunday morning with the second highest marks out of everyone, including the much older kids who were going for higher belt levels. She's a very chuffed orange belt now :-))

This morning's tap exam went OK. We're proud of Emily for seeing it through - given the horrible time she's had there recently it would have been easy and understandable for her to back away from doing the exam, but she wanted to meet the challenge and she certainly did. She says she made a few mistakes, but from what I could hear from the waiting room, so did everybody else. Teacher said to her after the exam "I hope your dance went better than it did last Friday, Emily!" How charming.

At yoga this afternoon, Emilys teacher asked me if I'd help out in the lessons. Ummmmmmm, okkkaaay. *Shock* I'll have to get police-checked in order to be covered by her insurance, but she's going to bring me the forms for that next week.

Sunday we spent ALL DAY trying to fix Emily's computer. The sound card was dead and it was refusing to recognise the newly introduced sound card. So muggins here had the bright idea of trying to reinstall windows xp in the hope of uncorrupting whatever was corrupted. Boy was that a bad idea. Got caught in the apparently quite famous "34 minutes to go" freeze up during the installation process. At that point, it's too late to abandon the installation the operating system is half on, half of - so whenever you restart the PC the only option you're given is to try to complete the installation - at which point it freezes again. Tried numerous solutions found in technical forums, involving all sorts of weird and wonderful things like .inf files and BIOS settings - all alien to me, but we followed the instructions to the letter several times over and still nothing. Nana and Gramps stepped into the breach and have rather wonderfully bought Emily a new PC and equipment to salvage the hard drive from the old one. Thank you!!!!!!! We could no doubt have spent another twelve weeks of our lives trying to fix the damn thing, or paid a computer guy to come fix, but we don't have the time and last time we called a PC guy to come fix something it cost us almost as much as a new PC would have done in any case.

So. Still not much school work happening at this end, and we're still struggling to keep on top of the business among all the chaos. And I've still got people emailing me demanding to know why the item they paid for on Sunday still hasn't arrived. It's Tuesday. Hello??? How come we're so patient with everyone who sends *us* stuff?

Oh, and Happy Beltane to those who celebrate it. We had a whole load of lovely festival stuff planned for today, but what with tap exam, yoga and hospital it just wasn't going to happen. We're out most of tomorrow too, but we'll probably try and have a very late Beltane day later in the week!

A Remarkable Week

Jon is now back from the Magic of Mediumship course he attended in Scarborough last week. As life changing moments go, the week was pretty full of them. During the week he exhibited some really pretty extraordinary talents in mediumship, handing out information he couldn't possibly have known about people he'd never met before. The three course tutors were impressed and apparently spent quite a while discussing Jon and his growing abilities and his spiritual energy. During this week Jon has also become aware of people's auras and has returned home with a level of serenity I've never seen in him before :-)) The course ended with individual personal assessments, during which Jon was told in no uncertain terms that he needs to continue down this path.

So, that's pretty much where we're heading. I'm soooo pleased he went ahead with the course despite the spiteful put downs from certain people who are supposed to care about him. It's as if everything has a new and rather wonderful perspective now. We have on going business worries etc but they're starting to become pretty unimportant in the scheme of things. There's a huge amount of personal and spiritual growth going on and I think it's all rather amazing and fantastic :-)))

Emily and I have been "home alone" all week without Jon, missing him terribly but loving the phone calls. Emily has been an absolute star and more or less completely took over the business of pulling out orders to be packed. She was pulling out well over 50 items a day, faultlessly and tirelessly, which considering our stock is scattered pretty much throughout the house in fairly random order (!!) is quite some achievement for a littl'un. We didn't do any "work" this last week education wise, as I was so busy trying to keep up with the daily business running which Jon normally takes care of - but I reckon Emily learnt a lot about commerce, if nothing else! She was wonderful company and we did find time for lots and lots of pretends.

It's Emily's karate grading tomorrow - it was supposed to be last Sunday, but George put it off a week especially for Emily, bless him, as last Sunday we were up in Scarborough all day dropping Jon off. It's also Emily's tap exam next week. Things have rather come to a head with the dance lessons; I think I've mentioned before that she hasn't been happy there for quite a while now, but Friday and today were the last straw.

Yesterday my Mum and Dad took Emily to her lesson as I couldn't get there - Emily and all the other children who dared to make a mistake during the set dance were sent out into the waiting room for most of the lesson!! Is that what we're paying for?? This was after Emily had been belittled by the teacher and reduced to tears after being made to do the same move over and over again. The teacher is apparently too stupid to realise that with some (most?) children, forcing them to do something over and over again in an increasing state of nerves and tension, in front of everyone else, whilst alternately making sarcastic comments or yelling at them, is not likely to help them get it right. I know the kids have to be taught and they have to be shown how to get it right, but that woman's attitude is just going beyond. She has no clue how to handle children respectfully or kindly, especially the more sensitive ones. This morning, the other teacher announced in front of all the children and parents at the end of the lesson that Emily, her friend Kayleigh and one other child would have to stay behind at the end of the lesson because they just couldn't get a particular step right. This again after a whole lesson of being belittled and wound up. Emily didn't want to stay. Nor did Kayleigh. The four of us walked out.

Emily will do the exam (because she wants to, having worked so hard for it), and she'll return for the following two weekend lessons (only because we have arrangements in force for picking up/dropping off Kayleigh to play). Then that's it. We've had enough. I'm extremely sure we can find something to do on a Saturday morning that's actually *fun*. If we wanted our daughter bullied by teachers, made to feel two inches high and turned into a nervous wreck, we'd send her to school!

On a lighter note: my Dad found this great site: Archimedes Puzzle Lab. Really fun stuff there. It took me AGES to figure out how this trick is done, but I was quite pleased with myself when I got there in the end!

Marshmallow Molecules

I think we have finally found where we're at with home ed. Famous last words, I'm sure, but the new "curriculum" really seems to be suiting both Emily and me. We're getting so much more done, and Emily's enthusiastic and into it, so neither of us are bored or wondering what to do next. I'm a happy bunny with the way it's going and it's been several weeks now, which is the longest I've stayed a happy bunny about any style of home ed we've tried so far.

All good. I want to document that feeling so I can look back on it later if and when it all goes pear shaped yet again!

Latin is going fabulously well; we're near the end of Stage 3 in the first book now and Emily's just soaking it up. She especially loves talking latin in the car on the way to somewhere, lol. She seems to have intuitively grasped the grammar so far too, although we've only covered nominative vs accusative case and first/second/third declensions.

On Tuesday morning Emily checked on and watered her tomato seeds, got to grips with long multiplication, did latin, spelling and made a sequinned headband with her sequin thingy. In the afternoon we looked at the second of the Chemistry lessons, which was all about molecules. Again, I learnt more there than I think I ever did in school. The practical task was great fun, and involved making molecules from marshmallows :-)))


Tuesday evening was yoga, with just four girls there for some reason so that was a very intensive lesson. Emily's flexibility is coming on in leaps and bounds just at the moment.

Yesterday there was more latin, more long multiplication and a stab at long division, history looking at the Hittites and the second section of biology, which was an extremely indepth look at the anatomy of cells, and the differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells and between animal and plant type cells. Lots of diagram labelling and enthusastic "can we find out what that bit's for?" stuff. We looked at cheek cells and onion cells under the microscope a few weeks ago, but I think I'll try and find some iodine/methylene blue to stain with and we'll do it again now we know what we're looking for.

Yesterday we also took Emily's new glasses back to Asda to ask about the seeing-rainbows-all-around-the-edges-of-her-vision-that-can't-be-right-surely thing. Apparently, this was happening because the top and bottom edges of the lenses had been buffed to a high polish for "cosmetic reasons", so of course any light entering there was being refracted (if that's the right term) hence rainbows. Well, um, OK. Yes, I guess that would do it. So - why were they polished then??? I've checked the numerous pairs of glasses in this household including all of Emily's old ones and none of them have had this polishing the edges malarky. It would, after all, appear to be sensible NOT to polish the edges. The glasses have now been returned and no doubt we'll have to wait another month before they come back in a useable, non rainbow state. And I was so impressed with Asda to begin with. Sigh.

Today Emily and Jon went out to tai chi whilst I struggled vainly in cyberspace trying to fix the fact that elysian.co.uk has vanished off the face of the earth. It's still gone. I have hopes of tracking it down at some point. We've abandoned OSCommerce and parted with the "designer" who was "helping" us with that; we're going back to good old actinic and a brand new domain name for the shop, which has yet to be uploaded and faffed about with. The main elysian.co.uk site, however, merely transferred hosting from the least-said-about-the-better designer to a household name company. This happened on Monday. The site was fine yesterday. Today, I have no clue what's happened to it and I can't re-upload it either. I'm so not the right person to be handling this technical stuff.

No "work" as such for Emily today, although she's been extremely busy working anyway, lol. She's been focusing on writing the yoga sequences she has to do for her next test - she's completed the ten pose one and the twenty, but she still has the thirty to do and the meditation to write as well. She's also written me a comprehensive walkthrough for one of the Harry Potter PC games that I got stuck on. It's 8 pages of closely written A4 so far, and counting. It looks every bit as good as any of the ones I could find online, so maybe we should publish it when she's finished!

Tomatoes and Thrushes

Had an extremely busy weekend, as I had three article deadlines today, so I spent most of the time hunched over the desk. Jon took Emily to tap and to karate on Sunday - karate grading again week after next, that's come round very quickly.

This morning Emily and I set up our seed growing experiment from Tomatosphere so we now have a little forest of plastic cups, peat pellets and hopefully developing seeds. There are also some pumpkin, poppy and sunflower seeds waiting to germinate in the forest somewhere, and some rice and a few other things Emily wanted to try out.

While I was taking the above photo, I noticed a beautiful adult thrush, complete with meal, hopping around on the wall just outside the window. It seemed very agitated. Yesterday, Romeo had a baby thrush on the lawn, but Jon rescued it and it seemed unharmed, so he put it in the hedge at the bottom of the garden, hoping it would be OK. I was buy taking pictures of this adult thrush without realising....that there was a baby thrush nestled in the stonework lattice of the wall - that's what Mum must have been looking for! I took this first photo without even spotting the baby until afterwards.



The position the baby was in was extremely vulnerable to the cats, and Ju Ju had already spotted it, so we felt we had to do something. Jon rigged up a hanging basket type arrangement and we were going to pop baby bird in that and hang it from the tree nearby, hoping that Mum would still be able to find it. However, the baby had other ideas. It was clearly on the verge of fledging and it hopped straight out of the basket and onto the ground again, fluttering and hopping away. It could fly, but only at grass level. Anyway, it hot footed it off across the garden and eventually into next door's garden. Well, we tried. Kept the cats shut in for an hour to give it a good chance of finding somewhere to hide. I daresay, since Mum found it the first time, she'll find it again, and it's on the verge of flight. Better off hidden next door than sat in the wall just waiting for a cat :-//

Meanwhile, on return from investigating where it was going, Jon found another baby thrush on the lawn, although this one was dead :-( Looks like the moggies found the nest and destroyed it. It's very sad, but that's the thing with cats, I guess. Although I must say that Romeo and Juliet are far more active hunters than any of the other cats I've owned. Merlin used to bring back baby rabbits, and both Merlin and Cassie-Cat hunted bats and the odd mouse when they were little, but with these two little ones it's almost constant. If it's not a mouse, it's a butterfly, if it's not a butterfly it's a bird. Sigh.

Today as well as lots of planting and attempted bird rescues, Emily's done lots of maths, continued her history study of Sargon & The Akkadians and has been busy examining the meanings behind various world flags. She's out at football training at Scunthorpe FC now; Jon will bring her back just in time to dash out again to his psychic meeting. He's going away on the course next Sunday for a week. Eeek! Emily and I have never been at home without him, and we're not looking forward to it :-(( Between Emily being about 6 months old up until she came out of school, I used to go away a couple of times a year on interpreting jobs for a week each, leaving Daddy and Emily at home, but this is the first time the situation's been reversed. It always amuses me when people say they don't know how Jon and I manage being together 24 hours a day working together from home. I don't know how couples who *aren't* together all the time manage! Emily and I are going to feel like we're missing a limb for a week :-/

Getting Crafty in the Park

We've had a fab day today - no Friday 13th bad luck here. Went to pick up Emily's friend Maisie this morning on the way to Normanby Hall. We had a picnic lunch, fed the (completely stuffed and definitely not hungry) ducks, then went for a huge woodland walk collecting nature bits along the way. Back to a tree stump (or worktop, lol) to dig out all the arty crafty stuff I'd taken along: wire, beads, coloured tape, wool etc. The girls had a ball making beaded wands and "painting" on pieces of bark using crushed up fallen flower petals. We also had a go at twig weaving in a huge Y-shaped branch, which turned out very nicely indeed.



Emily and Maisie also played on the climbing tree and fussed over the resident cats. The playgrounds were absolutely packed, despite the less than briliant weather, so we didn't stay long in those bits. Emily still hates crowded playgrounds, and even Maisie with her school experience wasn't that keen. Had a brief "oh dear, if Emily was at school she'd have learnt to push and shove her way in like all the other little darlings are doing", but that was swiftly followed by a "thank goodness she's not at school and thefore *hasn't* learnt to push and shove like that". After all, when exactly is she going to need that skill? When was the last time we as adults had to jostle like that, refuse to let others take turns, screech, shout and physically yank younger and smaller people out of the way? Seems to me that kids at school learn exactly the sort of "social skills" that they then pretty soon have to *un-learn* if they're going to behave like civilised adults.

Anyway; after several hours at Normanby we headed back to ours, where the girls played in the garden, neopet-ed and played with Emily's Harry Potter figures. At one point Emily got a bee stuck in her hair (????) which was quite traumatic, but other than that I think they had a great time. When we dropped Maisie back home a little while ago her Mum, who has yet to get used to the resourcefulness of home educators ;-) was astonished to be greeted with beaded wands. I'll settle for Maisie telling me I'm apparently a "really fun Mum" which I thought was sweet. Mind you, she also told me I was completely crazy. Probably a compliment. I think.

Rhinestones 'n' Stuff

We had a lovely Easter weekend. Emily went out to karate first thing on Easter Sunday, and was one of only three children there, so that was a very individual lesson! When she got back we had an Easter treasure hunt - we don't really do much chocolate wise, but Emily normally gets some little Easter presents to make up for it being such a long time from a 2nd Jan birthday all the way to the following Christmas. This year she had some Harry Potter bits and bobs and various pagan-y items for her altar, which she loved. Nana and Gramps made us all a big Easter dinner, which was much enjoyed too.

Emily's Easter present from my Mum and Dad was a Gem Magic stud setting gadget, which was a huge hit. Lucky girl! She's spent hours this week decorating a t-shirt, shorts and a pair of shoes with it so far, with plans to do lots more shortly.

Yesterday we went to Asda opticians to (finally) collect Emily's new glasses, but alas it seems my confidence in them was totally misplaced. We were asked to take a seat and wait by one woman - about 25 minutes later, with still nobody attending to us despite there being nobody else in the shop, another woman came and asked if we were waiting for something, at which point the woman who'd taken our name said she hadn't seen us before and that we shouldn't just have sat down without telling someone we were there. Sigh. Emily's glasses finally materialised.....and next week, we'll have to take them back, as there's clearly something not right with them. Emily's seeing rainbows all around the edges of her vision and at tai chi this morning the effect was so bad it made her feel sick. She's wearing her "old" glasses again now, until we can get back to Asda. I'm not best pleased with the whole episode.

Yesterday lunchtime Hazel, Romy and new baby Tansy popped in for a quick hello, which was lovely. Needless to say, Tansy is absolutely gorgeous :-)) It's such a long time since Emily was a baby, you forget how tiny newborns are.

Also yesterday (and today, as well), Emily's been out at garden centres with my Mum and Dad, looking for pampas grass, with which, for some reason, she's developed a fascination. They found some in the end.

The rest of the week we've been playing a lot, along side bits and pieces of work. Lots more latin. We also did the first biology and the first physics lessons from the Real Science 4 Kids curriculum, and Emily loved both of those. Biology was learning about taxonomy and classifications, with a fun activity where Emily had to work out how to classify twenty household objects. Physics was learning about the scientific method and "discovering" Newton's First Law of Motion via lots of ball throwing, ball throwing with string attached to it, and marble rolling. We also had lots of fun playing with my Dad's Ancient Brunsviga Mechanical Adding Machine - that was extremely educational in terms of place value and understanding long division!!

Poor Cassie-Cat

Poor old Cassandra is missing Merlin a lot these days. She keeps systematically sniffing around rooms, as if she's trying to pick up his scent. I don't know how long a cat's scent will stay around once the cat is no longer there, but maybe Merlin's scent was around until recently but is now wearing off. It's two months since Merlin died now :-(

To add to Cassie-Cat's woes, she seems to have a problem with one of her eyes. Emily took this picture of her yesterday which shows it quite clearly:It's the brown spots on the iris of her right eye. She's had them for a long time - bad owners that we are, we assumed it was just an old cat thing - age spots, if you like. However, I've just been researching it having seen how noticeable it is on the photo, and it looks like it could be iris melanoma which sounds pretty drastic and is basically a tumour or tumours on the iris, which can spread throughout the body. Having said that, Cassie generally seems in very good health. She doesn't seem to have any problems with her vision at all, she spots movement of toys etc immediately and is generally very purry and affectionate. I guess we ought to take her to the vets and hear what they have to say about it, but since all of the treatment options (if it is that) are extremely invasive....I don't know. I'm loathe to put Cassie-cat through the kind of stressful treatment that Merlin went through :-(( We shall have to see.

Anyway. In happier news, Emily's been busy doing lots and lots and lots and lots of Easter crafts, most of which are secret surprises for me and Daddy tomorrow, bless her. Today she made this scrummy looking almond, marzipan and chocolate cake ready for our Easter family meal tomorrow.
Emily has also been busy practising tap. She had a tough time at the tap lesson on Thursday and seemed to spend a lot of time being made to do things on her own at the front of the class while the teacher shook her head a lot. Charming. I really dislike that woman. Emily says she's nervous about the tap in the lessons, and that's why she makes the mistakes - there's probably something in that, since she does the routines fine at home. Doesn't say much for the teacher's people skills, I have to say. Emily is finding it hard, though, and it's knocking her confidence. Not long now until the exam on the 1st May. I wish she'd decided not to do it, but she used to like tap so she wanted to enter for it. I say used to, since I'm not at all sure that it's very much fun any more :-(( What is is about teachers that destroys the enjoyment of things??

A Trip to the Ballet

Tuesday was another good work day for Emily. She whizzed through maths, English and Latin and we spent the afternoon looking at Mesopotamia and the Sumerian civilisation in history, finding out about cuneiforms and ziggurats, with lots of pictures being drawn too. Got back upstairs late afternoon to hear Hazel's Extremely Exciting News :-)) so that was lovely.

Yesterday, Emily went with my Mum and Dad to see the Swan Lake ballet in Grimsby, which enthralled her, so she couldn't stop dancing when she got home, lol. I had been due to take Emily, but what with one thing and another it just wasn't possible, so we're pleased that Nana and Gramps were able to step into the breach.

Emily and Daddy have gone off to tai chi this morning as normal and we're off to an extra tap lesson this afternoon. Emily's cold has developed into a cough, which is always a bad sign, but hopefully she'll shake it off in time to enjoy her Easter.

Stone Age Art & A Pink Volcano

Emily and Daddy came back from the car boot sale yesterday absolutely laden down with goodies - among which a certain Harry Potter featured heavily, lol. They got some really nice stuff; they'd like to go more often, but with karate normally on a Sunday, it's not often possible.

Today we had a bit of a drama at lunchtime - a water pipe under the sink in the kitchen burst and flooded the kitchen floor to paddle-able level :-// Had my Mum not happened to be in the kitchen at the time it happened, who knows how much damage would have been inflicted. Emily naturally thought it was exciting - who needs paddling pools? I love that magic of childhood, when a kid can look at a crisis as purely an object of fun and fascination, free from any worry about it at all!! Fortunately, the old Vax water hoover thingy was still in the shed, so it only took about half an hour to mop and suction it all up, although it took my Dad the rest of the day to replace the pipe with the whole sink unit having to come away from the wall.

Aside from the flood, we had a good home ed day today. Emily did brilliantly with her latin this morning, ably translating four paragraphs full of nominative/accusative bits and bobs and lots of words she'd not met before but mostly figured out without help. She then worked on some literacy exercises connected to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.

Our history curriculum starts with the Fertile Crescent so it misses out the "stone age", so we're doing bits and bobs about that separately but alongside. Today Emily made a "rock" and tried out cave art on it, painting an animal and hunter on one side and experimenting with hand prints on the other. That turned out rather nicely.

We also had lots of fun with a plaster of paris volcano. For some reason, the dye provided only produced pink lava instead of a nice bright red, but hey, it was still as messy as hell and a big hit.
We like this volcano kit a lot; it comes with earthquake stuff too and various models to make, so we've lots left to do with that.

While we were busy getting suitably messy, Jon managed to install our new fax machine - it's been waiting for over a week now, since the old one gave up the ghost, but he hasn't had two minutes to breathe until now. He also hot foooted it out to the football club to sign Emily up for the next set of lessons after Easter. Got back to find that Grandad expected him to mow the lawn. Apparently it simply had to be done today. Fortunately common sense prevailed. The lawn did not get mowed. Frankly, as priorities go, it doesn't even make the list.

This afternoon I took Grandad out to the doctors while Emily made more "props" for her Remus Lupin pretends and tried to get the better of her out-of-control cassette collection. We're, um, not the tidiest household at the best of times, but Emily's audio cassettes and CDs are threatening to take over the house. It's not helped by the fact that she has all but the first of the Harry Potters on tape rather than CD (can't afford the CD versions, lol) but they come in such inadequate little cardboard boxes. It's murder to get the tapes in and out virtually every day (yes, she does listen to them in her every waking moment......obsessed? My child? How dare you??) so they end up just scattered about loose. So that's 64 HP tapes rattling around, plus dozens and dozens of other tapes and CDs - we need a storage solution.

Have just bought 50 blank cassette cases to tame the worst of the HP ones, and bid on a 72 tape storage unit on ebay, so that might help with those. What to do about the rest I just don't know. No matter what, they always seem to end up in the wrong cases, half missing, or with cases broken or lost. Since my beloved daughter seems to take after her father in her ability to do twelve different things at once of which only one is listening to a tape/CD, I guess she's usually too preoccupied to marshall them into order every day.

We could do with a house elf.

I Want To Be A Chemist

Well, not me, but Emily does, apparently. We'll add it to the list, which currently comprises (in varying order of importance): artist, author, poet, fashion designer, safari park ranger, teacher (?????), hairdresser, make up artist, archaeologist, historian, ballerina.

We didn't go out for the day on Friday in the end - couldn't bear the prospect when it came down to it, as where we were going was guaranteed to be full of school kids on their "Easter treat" school trips just before they break up.

We did, however, manage a rather nice day. Emily was feeling a lot better with just a stuffed up nose left from her cold, so we got back to some work. Lots more Latin - can't believe how well she's doing with that. More percentages in maths, and a bit more about Stonehenge in history. After lunch, we started the Chemistry section of Real Science 4 Kids. Wow! I'm so impressed with that! We read the first chapter of Emily's textbook which was all about matter, atoms and the periodic table. Think I learnt more on Friday afternoon about all of that than I ever learnt at secondary school - and Emily soaked it all up enthusiastically. Within minutes she was jumping up and down from the table to the poster on the wall, working out the number of neutrons in various elements by subtracting the atomic number from the atomic mass, recognising element names she's already familiar with (calcium, etc), debating the nature of the groupings and so on.

We gathered a load of items for use in the first "experiment", which was basically driving home the concept that everything on earth is fundamentally made up of these elements. Emily looked at ingredients lists on food and made the connections between the periodic table and things like sodium bicarbonate, sodium chloride; she looked at lots of cleaning items and beauty products and made connections concerning things like magnesium sulphate, hydrogen peroxide and so on. Emily also looked at some less obvious items like wood and steel, using the internet to look up what they're actually made of, e.g. wood is made up of cellulose, but what is cellulose actually made of? She really enjoyed that.

Emily also wrote down a list of no less than 14 questions she wants to find out about, based on that first lesson alone - things like "how do they KNOW they've discovered ALL of the elements?", "how do they KNOW that the number of protons is the same as the number of electrons?" etc. I haven't a clue as to the first question; I know the second question will be covered at least partially when we move onto ions and Emily discovers that protons and electrons are not always equal; as to the rest, I'm just delighted that it has sparked such an interest. Oddly enough, this level of interest was always conspicuous by its absence from the standard British KS2 national curriculum "fill in the blanks" science work we've done. I'm beginning to question the sanity of anyone who really believes that UK schools are truly providing a decent education.

Yesterday was dominated by yoga, with two rehearsals and Emily's yoga show in the afternoon. She did so well, we were really proud :-)) She couldn't stop smiling all the way through the show, delivered her lines in the play with perfect comic timing, and was introduced by her teacher to read the yoga poetry she'd written herself. Oh yeah, and all the kids were given an early Easter Egg as a pressie for doing so well, lol, which seemed to go down rather well.

This morning we all got up at the unearthly hour of 6.30 so Jon and Emiy could go out to a huge car boot sale near here. Well, unearthly for me and Emily - Jon's normally up by 6 anyway, so technically he had a lie in! No karate today as the teacher's away, so they've gone off bargain hunting instead :-))

An Up & Down Week

It's had its highs, but it's had rather a lot of lows too. I've been very upset/depressed about lots of things and have spent much of the week in tears, and managing to upset everyone else too. Oh well, even if I am a crappy mother and wife, at least I'm honest about it.

Grandad broke his glasses over the weekend, so I spent most of Monday and Tuesday on the phone about them, taking him into the town centre to get them fixed and then going back again to pick them up. Have also spent ages on the phone trying to rearrange his diabetic clinic appointment. He's been given another appointment for the first of May, although we only went last week. It's clearly a mix up, since he's meant to go every 6 months. But he's keen to go every six weeks. Figures. Emily's tap exam happens to be on the 1st May at 10 am, while his appointment is on the 1st May at 9.30 am. No prizes for guessing which is apparently supposed to take priority. Meanwhile, STILL no word on Emily's new glasses. They're now due next Tuesday, but it's been I think over a month since our appointment and this is now the fourth time we've been told they're due in only to find out they weren't. Starting to lose patience. It's a shame, after I was so impressed with the actual appointment.

Emily was very poorly yesterday and today. We've spent a while curled up on the sofa watching films, notably Snow White with Miranda Richardson and Jack & The Beanstalk: The Real Story, both of which came free with a paper last week, and both of which were really enjoyable (although 3 hours for J&B was pushing it a bit!). We also watched Haunted Mansion with Eddy Murphy which was entertaining too.

Hopefully, Emily will be better tomorrow. On Saturday she's got two rehearsals for her yoga show plus the show itself, so we could do with a big health improvement in the next 24 hours.

Let's see, what else have we been up to. Well, the release of the cover art for the Harry Potter & The Deathly Hallows book caused a stir of excitement, and we've spent a long time discussing clues in the artwork and an even longer time reading newsgroups and stumbling over yet more fascinating theories.

Workwise: Emily's done more latin, which she's really loving. In geography, we've been looking at plate tectonics and the ancient pangea super continent. Emily spent a long time on this Mountain Maker, Earth Shaker simulation and got a good grip on that, making notes in her geog notebook as she went along. She also tried her hand at a pangea jigsaw puzzle.

In history, we studied ancient European megaliths, which was very interesting. Emily's dying to go to Stonehenge. Personally, I'm just dying to go anywhere south of Lincoln. Anyway, Emily made her own little stonehenge from a kit we had, so it now has pride of place on her altar under the Ostara tree. She also filled in more relevant dates on one of the History Odyssey timelines and wrote about the theories behind stonehenge.
Maths was lots more percentage work and Emily also created a lovely page in her notebook with some of the percentrage rules and information. She wrote letters to Kate and her Mum in Poland, which I guess counts as English. A bit. The cat grass Emily planted on Ostara has grown amazingly well, so we've given that to the cats now. Not that they're that fussed, mind. Think they might like it better if we put it outside. At the moment they're looking at it with "What do you think we are, nuts? Grass doesn't grow on the living room floor...." faces.

No science this week, although we have abandoned the Great Science Adventures book. Just too fiddly. By the time you've faffed about building the little books, there isn't much time left to actually DO anything. We're going to go with the Real Science 4 Kids curriculum instead. I love that it's split into chemistry, physics and biology and that it jumps straight in with all the correct terminology etc. Emily's been wanting to learn "real" chemistry for ages and jumped up and down with excitement when the poster of the periodic table arrived yesterday. Strange girl.

I get the distinct impression that we're breaking some unwritten rule of UK home education by actually wanting to follow a structured system. I hardly ever post on newsgroups, but from lurking on some of them you'd think anyone NOT trying really hard to be autonomous was guilty of some henious crime. Well, whatever. It suits us, and it's actually working really well so far, with what limited time we've been using it given the constant interruptions and distractions. I feel a whole lot better about our days education wise, and Emily seems to be enjoying it, so that's what counts.

So, having got the education side of things sorted, if I could only start feeling better about everything else, we'd have cracked it. Sigh. Tomorrow we're off out for the day in an attempt to improve everyone's mental (if not physical) wellbeing.

Ebay Stalkers

Don't you just love them?

We're now being cyber-stalked by some illerate woman from ebay who claims not to have received the two CDs she was sent. You know when you get the feeling, right from the start of a transaction, that something's not right? This particular woman hassled me non stop before she even bought the CDs, wanting to know exactly how long it was going to take, whether we could send to a friend's house, yadda yadda. Not just simple questions, but dozens of questions, in dozens of emails, often repeated over and over again. In one afternoon alone I think we had fourteen from her. Against my better judgement, I let her buy the stuff, but I think I said to Jon even as I was packing it that it was bound to "go missing". Surprise, surprise, it did. So we get another flood of emails asking where it is, why haven't we sent it, when will we send it, why isn't it there, when will she get it. Reply politely, reminding her that it was sent to a "friend" at her request. Yes, she says (minus the spelling, puncutation and grammar and over the course of half a dozen more emails) but the friend hasn't received anything.

OK, says me, sensing trouble. Check with your sorting office. If it's not there, get back to me and I'll issue a refund. Anything for a quiet life. Next thing I know she's opened a paypal dispute claiming that we won't answer her emails and have refused to refund her money (how did we do that if we didn't answer any emails, I wonder?). She got her refund, which she would have had anyway - and then sends me a threatening email stating that she intends to ruin our business and that we haven't heard the last of her and that we've defrauded her (sorry? Who's defrauded who, exactly?) and that she's going to report us to the Sun (?????????). She's clearly unbalanced. Leaves us a ton of negative feedback to that effect. I report her threat to ebay, who, of course, have done nothing. Next thing I know she's opened a new user name and "bought" something from us, then immediately emailed pretending to be this other person saying that she's read our disgusting feedback and wants to cancel. Sigh. I think she's too, um, intellectually challenged even to realise that her illiteracy is so distinctive that it's perfectly obvious who she is. Report her to ebay for malicious bidding/buying. Next I know, she's gone to our normal online store (not ebay) and started emailing us from there using yet another email address.

Honestly. Someone needs a psychiatrist.

Still, you win some, you lose some. With the bank at least, we appear to be winning. They've refunded us £700 so far, which accounts for the charges they took in March alone. They've also admitted a catalogue of mistakes and errors verbally, although we're still waiting for it in writing. They'll be coughing up a lot more than that before we've finished with them.

After our Ostara celebrations on Wednesday, Emily and Jon went off to tai chi on Thursday morning. Thursday afternoon Emily did bits and bobs of literacy work mostly. On Friday we got stuck back into our new curriculum, starting with Latin. We're onto chapter 2 now and we're studying the nominative and accusative cases. Emily did the online vocab tests for chapter 1 - she got 10/10 Latin-English in 22 seconds and 10/10 English-Latin in 16 seconds, lol, so I think she's getting the hang of it ;-))

After Latin we started on a new maths textbook. Heartily sick of all the normal KS2 cartoony rubbish, we found this Maths: Basic Skills textbook which is written for adult numeracy courses. Finally! A maths textbook like the ones I remember, without gimmicky pictures and patronising sweeties and rabbits examples. This one is really good. As far as I can see it covers everything that's covered in the primary maths curriculum plus a bit more, with worked examples of everything and sensible, challenging questions to answer, no fill in the blanks. We jumped into the middle with a chapter on percentages, which we've never formally done before. Emily loved it (and this is maths we're talking about!) and within minutes was confidently working out things along the line of "For each of these hourly pay rates, calculate the new rate of pay following a 4% pay rise". Think that one's a winner.

In the afternoon we just about had time for some history, the second part of the first lesson in the History Odyssey course. Emily filled in a map with the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers and the Fertile Crescent, and wrote summaries about irrigation and Goddess worship to go in the binder. We had to rush out to the tap lesson after that, but having got there Emily started feeling really sick and poorly, so we had to come home again. She's better now, though.

There was no tap lesson yesterday morning as their Saturday teacher is away for 3 weeks, so Jon and Emiy went off mooching around charity shops instead and came back with an enormous haul of goodies including a rather fun Harry Potter quidditch game they found for the princely sum of £1. Meanwhile, I took my Dad for a run in our car, hoping it would play up while we were out so he could hear it and investigate, but it failed to misbehave, darned thing. So we're none the wiser as to what's happening with it, but it keeps slipping out of gear and making weird noises.

This morning Emily went to her karate lesson and was one of only five children who turned up, lol - the rest presumably got caught out by the clocks moving forwards, as did George himself who arrived ten minutes late. Ater a quick lunch, she got dressed up in lots of black sparkly things with glitter in her hair and went off out again to her friend Rhiannon's birthday party back at the same hall karate was in. She was very excited about that, so hopefully she's had a great time - they're not due back for a while, so I'd better get on with some work!

Celebrating Ostara

I think technically the spring equinox was yesterday, but we couldn't celebrate yesterday so we've celebrated Ostara today instead.

We read a lot about the history and symbolism of Ostara traditions, read the myth of Persephone and the Underworld again, read about the forms the pagan Goddess and God take at this festival and read about how the Christian church hijacked Ostara and its symbols of eggs, rabbits etc to become Easter.

Emily had fun blowing six eggs and blow painting them with food colouring via a straw. They're now in her special bowl on the altar under the tree.
Then she decorated lots of polystyrene eggs to go on our seasonal tree, which we also decorated with peacock feathers to honour the birds that begin to return to our lives at this time of year.
Since Imbolc, we've had on the altar some twigs from various trees and bushes in the garden. They all sprouted buds and leaves and one of them had rooted in the water too. Today, in honour of the Goddess, we planted all of them, using rooting gel for the ones that hadn't yet rooted.
Finally, Emily made some really scrummy Springtime Strawberry Bread.

Yesterday I was out all day taking Grandad to two separate hospital appointments, so Emily got a day off and spent it playing and making more fashion designs.

Monday, we started properly on our new curriculum. I abandoned the idea of having a day for science, a day for geography etc and decided it would be much better to have a little bit of everything, every day. So we started with maths, consolidating time telling again. Then Emily did the first half of the first lesson from History Odyssey, looking at the first nomads-turned-farmers in the Fertile Crescent. She wrote a summary in her history binder and filled in pertinent dates on the beautiful classical history timeline that came with it. While she was doing that, I read to her from Story of the World. After lunch, we continued with the Trail Guide to World Geography, this time doing a world mapping activity, with Emily having to identify and outline the seven continents on a world map, and add in the equator and the Arctic and Antarctic circle. We also studied map projections and Emily drew the world onto a blown up balloon before cutting the balloon and trying to turn it into a rectangular map, noting the distortions that occurred.

For science, we started on the Great Science Adventure space project book. It's quite fiddly, making little flap books for all sorts of things, but it was fun. Emily made a very posh looking vocabularly book where she wrote the definitions of astronomy and constellation, and she also made a question and answer book about why the constellations appear to rotate. Best of all, she got to play on my Dad's Sky Map astronomy software which he's kindly copied onto our laptop for us. She had an absolute ball with that, setting it to the correct date, time and place and finding her favourite constellations (on screen, not outside on this occasion as it was still light!) and stars. She got to grips with it very quickly and was soon setting it into time lapse mode to see everything rotating, and changing the place, dates and times to find some of the constellations not yet visible or not visible ever from here.

[added later - forgot!] We also started our Cambridge Latin course on Monday. Loved, loved, loved that. Emily picked it up really fast and I was hugely impressed with her ability to work words out. For instance, she worked out without even a second thought that the "scribit" in the sentence "Pater in tablino scribit" meant writing "because it's connected to words like scribe, scribble and script". We've got the DVD (ooops, sorry, "E Learning Resource" to give it its posh title) to go with the Cambridge course and that was excellent too. We'll be doing a bit of latin on every "normal" day, and I think we'll do rather well with that.

So, it's been a succesful few days for education, at least.

However, we've spent a lot of today in tears of anger and frustration thanks to the bank, yet again. This time, they decided to bounce two £200 cheques yesterday (and apply £70 charges, of course)....even though we were thousands of pounds in credit at the time. It's just beyond belief. Plus, on screen, our account balance says £x....but under available funds, where it has *always* until now said whatever our account balance is plus any available overdraft, now it says that "available" is less than £500, despite the "balance" being thousands. I have written and faxed with undisguised disgust, and I also telephoned. The woman on the phone adopted an "of course we're perfectly entitled to do this, you stupid customer, you just don't have a clue how the system works" attitude, which presumably will be their entire defence. The stress this is putting us all under is incredible. We're just waiting for them to get back to us in writing before we can take it any further, as the ombudsman can't intervene until we have their final position letter. Which, I'm certain, they are stringing out as long as possible.