Yay - Education!

We're finally back into a stable (ish) routine of home ed and so far it's going really well, with Emily keen and enthusiastic and me feeling like we're getting somewhere.

The sleepover Emily had the other week went very well, although neither Emily nor Mei Lin slept for a single minute, apparently, lol. Jasmine did rather better, so how she slept through the chaos the other two were creating is beyond me. Here's the three girls about to have their midnight feast in the new sofa bed :-)

We then had several days of chaos while Jon and I struggled against deadlines and I tried to get some home education in order, getting a vague plan for where we're heading. Mind you, Emily was busy occupying herself throughout that time. One morning she photographed various Barbies in her room and then came and spent a couple of hours on the PC - she created, entirely without assistance, a fabulous powerpoint slide show, complete with captions, sound and special effects, telling an X-Files story she had made up, for which the dolls had posed various scenes. We were extremely impressed :-)

Education aside, Emily has also been having fun recently playing out in the garden in the dark, especially balancing on her beam and trampoline - the fact that the garden is *covered* in huge spider webs doesn't seem to bother her at all. I was heartily told off the other night for insisting on fetching Jon to deal with a spider on the bedroom wall. An exasperated Emily thought I should just leave it be. My child has clearly been kidnapped and replaced with some alien life form.

Over the last week or so we've been gradually decorating our festival tree; we didn't have time to celebrate Mabon as such, but we're doing an Autumn theme for the tree in any case, to cover both Mabon and Samhain. We've embroidered leaves and mushrooms and this morning we spent an enjoyable hour or two decorating the god and goddess figures for the altar and making some of these pentagrams from twigs. All good stuff. We're going away to St Bees again on the 5th October for ten days or a fortnight, but we'll be back in time for Halloween, when we're planning a big family dinner with the dining room all decorated and an evening of spooky games by candlelight. Emily's pumpkins in the vegetable patch are *massive* already!

Now then, since this is supposed to be a home education blog, let me record for posterity what I've finally decided we'll use as our core texts for the next year or so. I'm putting this here in case anyone finds the recommendations useful; I should point out, yadda yadda, that in amongst this lot Emily still has time to do plenty of art, tons of crafts and a whole raft load of self-directed and inspired projects, activities and all round child stuff. When we let her out of the broom cupboard we keep her locked in.

Science
Galore Park So You Really Want To Learn Science Book 2

Kingfisher Science Encyclopaedia

Lots of experiments: rather than the little "done in five minutes" type experiments you get so many of, we're going for something a little bit more indepth now. The "science fair" projects they have in Janice Van Cleave's books are quite good, I think - a little bit of a step up from where we were, and they're extended projects that take quite a while to complete. We have the physics, chemistry and biology ones of those, and I also found this fantabulous website: Science Buddies, which details over 700 extended science project ideas across all the branches of science you can think of. Certainly didn't have when I was at school. Anyway, I'm very pleased to have "discovered" these resources.
At the moment in science, we're looking at space. Of course, because it ties in with the X-Files obsession, lol.

Geography

Letts KS3 Geography Classbook - I like this one. It has double page spreads which are just enough to get the key points across and which you can then use for further investigation/experiments/whatever. This mostly covers physical geography.

Trail Guide to World Geography - this one's very US centric, obviously, but it does give a good overview of world geography and I like the activity ideas, such as making a dictionary of geography definitions as you go along etc. Lots of mapping too.

History

Well, I've got to admit, I'm still all over the place on history. We're fine for now, working on the Middle Ages, but we're using books from all over the show and I'd really like to find a decent spine we can stick with, but none have quite worked - although lots have "nearly" worked. At the moment, we're using:

Medieval Minds - which is cute, but a bit simplistic even though it's meant for KS3

Medieval Realms for Common Entrance and KS3 - which has the opposite problem; it's *very* thorough and rigorous, but a bit too much so.

Plus of course lots of reading books, King Arthur, Robin Hood, castle books, fun bits and bobs and all that malarkey.


English

I think Emily's way ahead of where she "should" be in most spheres of English, but she asked to do some structured English work, so I looked for "a book". We found one, the title of which escapes me, but it's "OK" so far, I suppose. It's the best of a bunch and boy, have I seen a bunch of English teaching books this last couple of years. I still think we'll end up doing without any kind of textbook in the long run for English. It's not as if we're short of ideas for ways to do all the various different kinds of writing one is supposed to learn how to do. The other day the book asked for a paragraph of writing about what makes a good book. Emily looked at it, and me, blankly. She knows what makes a good book, she's read a ton of them, and she knows what makes a howler, but the way the question was phrased was enough to kill all inspiration stone dead.

So instead, she pretended to be a publisher and wrote me a long letter about the book I had submitted, pointing out all of its faults and offering some extremely well crafted humorous advice. What goes on in the English curriculum they have in schools these days? Why is it all so....alternately ridiculously simple or mind-bogglingly boring? Not all home ed children love to write as much as Emily does - it's her "thing" - but in my experience most home ed children love to write when they can see a point to it and find fun and enjoyment in their writing. I can't help but think that none of the English textbooks I've seen do anything other than kill that natural enthusiasm. Guys, you're supposed to be teaching children to **love** using their native language. If they look at you blankly, you've failed so drastically that I can barely find the words for it. Sigh.

Maths

Emily has apparently discovered a love of algebra and has genuinely *begged* for a maths book entirely on algebra, for Christmas??????? See previous remarks about my child having been kidnapped.

We're working through Galore Park So You Really Want To Learn Maths Book 1, which contained an introduction to algebra, among many other things. It's a good text book; I do like this one and we will definitely be sticking with it through books 2 and 3, which apparently will take us up to the end of Year 8 maths; Emily would be in Year 5 at the moment, so we have that about right then.

One thing I *have* discovered is that when I buy book 2, I'll be buying the answer book to go with it. I'm not "bad" at maths - I got a B at O level (my lowest grade) and would have had an A, no doubt, if I could have been bothered - but I was struggling with some of the final algebra questions, especially the ones where the problem is given in words and you have to figure out what the algebraic expression is before you can solve it. (Jon was excellent at these, lol, so it must just be me!)

I know some people who would throw their hands up in horror at that admission, and point out that this is exactly why parents should not be "allowed" to home educate their children. I happen to disagree. I actually, genuinely, believe it's very healthy for a child to realise that grown ups do NOT always (or even ever) have all the answers and that grown ups CAN find it interesting and fun to have to work things out, even when it's tough. I think it points out to children that while all of us shine somewhere, nobody shines everywhere; also that all of can improve at something if we try hard enough. I'll take that as a role model for my child, any day, over the "how dare you question me?" attitude of most teachers I ever met.

Which brings us back to the point of education. It's about learning to learn and learning to love to learn. It's not about proving who's smartest and it most definitely is not about domination and "I'm right, so shut up and listen to me". If that's what we wanted, we'd send her to school......

Poorliness

Thanks for the kind comments on Emily's new room. She's been using it for just over a week now and it's - gasp - still tidy (almost)! However, within two days of being in there, Emily came down with a horrible bug which has plagued her, and us, ever since and won't seem to shift. We've been coughing, spluttering and retching with the best of them.

Which means that the planned return to education for this last week hasn't happened; not in any formal sense, anyway. We've watched lots of TV, including numerous X-files episodes, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a good cry over E.T., played board games in The Blue Room, and Emily has done lots of fashion designing and X-files episode writing. She also designed a range of X-files merchandise, including an alarm clock which plays the theme tune and has the words "I want to wake up" on it as a parody of the I want to believe tagline, lol. So I suppose her brain hasn't completely turned to mush after all, although mine somewhat feels as though it has.

Tomorrow Jacki is bringing Mei Lin and Jasmine over to us for the normal Friday routine, but the girls are staying for an extended sleepover too, which is causing much excitement. Emily's still struggling valiantly against her persistent cold and has found it difficult to sleep with coughing recently, but hell, high water and highly infectious diseases are insufficient to prevent The Sleepover from taking place, apparently. Kids.

We'll be off back to St Bees at the beginning of October (assuming any of us have stopped feeling like poo by then), which gives us a couple of weeks to get back to "normal" routines......just long enough to get into said routine and then have to get out of it again. Sigh. We're so disorganised. Not that the lack of formal schooling seems to be doing Madam any harm whatsoever, mind you - but I'd really like some routine for me!

And even though everyone must be heartily sick of photos of this room by now, here are a couple more of the completed Blue Room showing off Emily's silver curtains, beauty counter, painted ornament shelves and desk etc. We were going to paint all the wooden stuff that's still unpainted......but I lost the will to live somewhere along the line after the umpteenth day of painting things, so the other cupboards will be done gradually. Oh, and Romeo - who's bagged the corner sofabed as his own new bed. Ignore the patchiness of the walls - it really doesn't look like that in real life, there's something weird going on with the flash photography! And a random fashion thingy Emily drew the other afternoon while I was on the phone - gotta love the "normal sized woman" in the middle, rofl!

Starry, Starry Night Part II

We're very happy :-))

Today was spent finishing painting all the bookcases, desk etc for Emily's new room, while Gramps did all the electrics and laid the new carpet. So, at about 8pm, we were able to bring up the sofa bed and coffee table, with everything else going to move in tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll put up the curtains, install the beauty counter, bring up the desk, fix the mirror on the wall and hang the door. Well, we = Gramps :-))

So here she is, the proud owner of a new room that we will have to stop calling The Dollshouse Room! The colour scheme fits together beautifully - Emily had far better vision than we did.

Starry, Starry Night

So thrilled with how Emily's new room is coming along. Woke up yesterday morning about 8.30 to find that Jon had been up since six and had already painted half the room in the beautiful deep, rich blue that Emily chose :-))

During the rest of yesterday he painted the rest of the walls, and Gramps put in the door frame, and this morning Jon painted the skirting board and radiator, while Emily stamped stars on the walls and Gramps started work in her beauty counter. The stars look stunning now they're done in silver glitter paint. They're scattered around the room, vaguely following the lines of where the furniture will go, so they look like constellations across a midnight blue sky. Together with silver curtains, the blue sofa bed with big silver cushions, Emily's desk painted silver, blue carpet, silver lamps, and her assorted bookcases and cupboards in shades of blue and silver, it's going to look fantastic.

We're getting close to done now. We need to install the new lights, move some plugs around, lay the carpet and paint some bookcases, but then it's action stations to move Emily into her new room :-))

Here's where we are. The paint is a much deeper blue than it looks in most of these photos. It's called Lapis Blue on the pot and it's a match for the deep blue in Tutankhamun's mask (which I believe had a lot to do with why it was chosen, lol). I'm so glad we went with Emily's vision instead of trying to talk her out of it - despite having been told several times over the last few weeks by well meaning people that we shouldn't have "let" her have total say and that it would be much too dark and look awful. Rolls eyes. The paint looks a little patchy in some of the photos, but that's more the way the flash catches it; it looks great in the flesh :-))





And as you can see from the last photograph, even Juliet was impressed!

Work-wise it has been a hectic weekend. Jon has worked his socks off with putting up lining paper and painting, I've been mostly stuck on boring old deadlines, and we've both been trying not to think about the state of our bank account once the first of September rolls round tomorrow. I've also been working on a plan for getting back to Emily's education with some degree of sense and structure. Mind you, we'll be going away at the beginning of October, so it's not as if there's long between then and now to get back into a routine!

Birthday Bliss

Well, it was my 37th birthday on the 27th August and my, I had a truly lovely day :-))

First thing in the morning Jon and I took Emily out to Lincoln with a budget of £30 for her to spend in Waterstones. Since we have accounts with various book wholesalers, we have only very, very rarely bought books from "real bookshops" over the last ten years, since it's a heck of a lot cheaper to get them from the wholesalers or from somewhere like amazon, but with fond memories of many mispent hours in bookshops when we were kids, we wanted to let her loose, lol, as a birthday treat for me and absolute heaven for her. In the end, we spent just over £40, but for that she has seven wonderful books. We also had a coffee and cake in the Costa Lot (ooops, sorry Costa Coffee) shop within Waterstones - another rare treat!

Back home, my Mum and Dad cooked us all a fantabulous birthday tea; Emily and Daddy had made me absolutely *the* most delicious carrot cake *ever* covered in candles :-) I was a very lucky lady with some superb books from Emily and Daddy and an extremely thoughtful present that had me in tears - I've always had a thing about golden eagles.......last time we went to a wildlife park in Cumbria I couldn't tear myself away from their eagles...... so my lovely hubby and daughter bought me a year's adoption of one of that park's pair of eagles as part of which I get to go and spend time with the keeper and get up close and personal with the eagle :-))) I'm so excited about that! To go with that part of the present, they also bought me a stunning eagle statuette which now has pride of place in our bedroom. I was spoilt rotten by my Mum and Dad too, who bought me lots of wine. Always a Very Good Thing.

Later that evening, we were just about to settle down for a family games evening when friends turned up unexpectedly and brought me another beautiful present, a stunning Chinese display plate. Jacki stayed and chatted for an hour or so while Mei Lin and Emily played in the garden in the dark, lol, much to the amusement of the assorted cats. After they had left, we played Balderdash, which had everyone in hysterics and which Jon won by a mile (as always) followed by lots of games of Coffee Pot. So all in all, a very special birthday - I feel very honoured :-)

Yesterday afternoon another friend and her daughter dropped by unexpectedly too, so that was a lovely chance to catch up on some news and for Emily and Maisie to play in the complete chaos that passes for our house at the moment.

The decorating continues apace. Yesterday we stripped the wallpaper; this morning Jon papered the wooden partion wall with lining paper to give the paint an even base and we all chipped in with painting the other walls with the white base coat; then I painted half of the sash window frame. Decorating and me don't mix well, alas - yesterday morning was very fraught when I started to clear the last shelves in the room only to discover that we literally had *nowhere* left to put the contents of the shelves or the two large chairs that needed moving out of the room. Tears and tantrums and other very un-adult behaviour followed. Not one of my finer hours. As ever, Jon came to the rescue and calmly moved stuff around, aided by a very grown up Emily.



Yesterday, the BBC finally got back to me regarding this month's payment. They sent a cheque. I was livid. It only arrived today, and even after depositing it same day it will take another 4-5 days to clear into our business bank account and then another 4-5 days to transfer to the personal account. I had been banking (definitely not a funny pun) on receiving the direct payment into the bank account on the 22nd, as they had promised, leaving me just enough time to transfer payment to our personal account to cover our outgoings on the 1st September. Obviously, that's not now going to happen, so everything will bounce - for the fifth month running. To cut a long story short, it's time to take legal advice over this farce since they are consistently in breach of the contract; it's also time to invoice them for the hundreds and hundreds of pounds in bank charges we've incurred over the last five months as a direct result of this fiasco. Colour me distinctly unimpressed.

I'm set for a crappy weekend meeting non stop deadlines, my mood not exactly heartened by the thought of our financial situation come Monday the 1st. I'm still trying to catch up with work that was lost when the PC crashed, although the super duper new (tiny!!!!! the box is about a quarter of the size of the old one!) PC that my Mum and Dad stepped in and save us with is up and running like lightning. Had to cancel our weekly Friday date with Jacki and girls this week, so we could press on with the decorating, but next week Emily's been invited to go and stay there for a couple of days, so she's a very excited bunny :-) One the new room is finished, she has a long list of people to invite for sleepovers here, lol, so it should be a busy few weeks ahead.

The Fun and the Fury

Emily's new room is progressing very well. We've cleared two thirds of the room and Gramps has built the partition wall in absolutely record speed, despite today being his 75th birthday :-)) In chronological order: The first part of the frame going up:
Frame in place, boards leaning against it:
Same view from inside the room formerly known as the Dolls House Room:
The master at work:
The railings are now down, leaving a sheer drop from the framework down the stairs:

Starting to put in the main panels of the partition:Emily inspecting the handiwork so far:
The Master and The Apprentice square up :-))
Taking shape from inside the room:
What a thing to be doing on your 75th birthday: Gramps in a precarious position, with Nana acting as ladder support!

And taking a bow - the partition structure is done, now it just needs decorating on both sides, and the door fitting, when it arrives :-))
Clearing out the room has prompted mixed emotions. It's very hard work, for a start, and whilst it's in progress, of course, we get to live in total chaos with boxes stacked everywhere. However, it's been satisfying. If a little fraught. Tempers have run high at various points, admittedly. Looking at old photographs and school reports we found has been a deeply philosophical journey for me. I look at photographs of me aged around 12 and I don't even recognise that person. I long to know what I was thinking when a photo was taken, and who I was. What was worrying me? What was I looking forward to? What was going through my head seconds before someone pointed a camera? And the photos we take of Emily now.....she too is no doubt destined to ask the same questions of those photos in twenty or thirty year's time. This life passes so quickly. More and more, I'm starting to realise that the only sensible option is to grab the moment and live for the now.

Sunday was an "interesting" day. First thing in the morning, Jon, Emily and I went out and bought the paint for her room, stencils, new carpet, lamps, cushions and other bits and pieces. From home, we ordered her sofa bed and curtains. Whilst inwardly crossing our fingers that the BBC will actually pay on time this month, on which all of the above expense hinges. That bit was the fun. Then came the fury. At about half past two, our main PC descended into a spiral of despair that was only to end at about half past two in the morning this morning when it finally died and refused to be sparked back into life.

I'll spare you the gory details - basically, the damn thing's buggered, and that's that. The hard drive is completely gone and apparently our only option would be to reformat it, losing everything in any case. So it's gone. And with it, years' worth of important business files and all of our existing email account. There was screaming and there was sobbing and there was cold, hard hair-pulling fury. It was not a good afternoon, evening or night. Fortunately, we still have Emily's PC, that I'm using now. We also now have new email addresses, but I've had to re-write several large pieces of work that were due in today from scratch and the stress is only just beginning to die down.

Today is my Dad's 75th birthday. We had a lovely little sit down and cake with him while we gave him his presents; meanwhile he and my Mum gave us a very large present indeed, by offering to buy us a brand new PC to replace the heap of junk that even now sits, smouldering and glaring at me, in the corner. The day after tomorrow is my birthday - we're taking Emily out for a shopping spree in a bookshop to celebrate, lol, and coming back for a joint birthday meal for me and my Dad. Then it's wallpaper stripping and room decorating with a vengeance. So much for the nice bits. The sofa bed that I ordered for Emily yesterday was supposed to take 14 days to arrive. They rang up this morning, in the middle of our PC induced fury. It's coming on Thursday. We have *nowhere* ready to physically put it. American Express broke their record with no less than 58 phone calls to our answering machine yesterday. There is no sign as yet of the BBC payment despite repeated assurances from their end that payment would be released early this month. Life continues to conspire to induce maximum inconvenience and stress. And we continue to try to smile through it - mostly. What else can you do?

The Before

Shortly to be followed, one dearly hopes, by The After. Our attention has been focused this last couple of days on clearing the space affectionately known by some as The Dolls' House Room (and known by others as The Junk Hole). We're preparing to turn it into an amazing deep blue and silver retreat for Emily.

Well, that's the plan. Her choice of colour scheme is....brave. We've dithered about it for weeks now, wondering whether to veto it or to persuade Emily to go for lighter colours (it's a very dark part of the house), but finally we decided to trust her judgement. She's not normally wrong :-)

The room as it stands at the moment isn't actually a room - it's a large rectangular landing above the entrance hall downstairs, so it only has three walls. My Dad is going to build a partition wall, no doubt dangling precariously above the sheer drop of the stairs as he does so......Emily doesn't call him her "Angel Who Fixes Stuff" for nothing. He's also going to fix the lighting for us and add some new power points, and build a corner "hair and beauty unit" for Emily with a high work surface and mirror backing, at which she can sit on a bar stool. He and my Mum created one for me when I was a teenager, which is what gave us the idea :-) Meanwhile, Jon's going to take care of the room and ceiling painting, with Emily's help of course.

We've been working solidly to clear the room for the last two and a half days....and we don't seem to have made much progress. For those among you with a strong stomach, here are some "before" pictures........and if these worry you, it's a good job you didn't see it two and a half days ago.



We're going out to buy the paint, new carpet and assorted DIY bits this weekend. Hopefully by next weekend, it will be more or less done, although the corner sofa bed Emily wants may have to wait a couple of weeks to be ordered, given our dire finances. Exciting stuff. Or traumatic, depending on your point of view. We'll go for exciting, shall we?

Education-wise, we've been having a bit of a break. The house is in absolute chaos, which makes it hard to get organised for "work" - besides, it is school summer holidays. Emily normally works through the holidays, so I'm sure it won't hurt to have a few weeks off until we get back into some sort of order. There have been odd educational moments - we're still doing maths every day, and some form of English on most days, and Emily's reading a great deal and writing X-Files scripts every five minutes, lol. She was very proud to have a comment on our last blog post from Nick Green, author of The Cat Kin, saying that he liked her poem, so thank you Nick! I'm being nagged to read Cat Kin at the moment, as apparently Emily would like to do some work related to animal ethics based on themes from the book. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list :-)

There's been a fair bit of craft and fashion related work going on too, come to think of it. Emily and I made Barbie clothes the other weekend, which was fun. I really need to get our huge craft collection in some kind of order. Clearing out the Dolls House Room today I found an enormous stash of tissue paper - only the other day I'd been running around looking for tissue paper for the festival tree, and couldn't find any. Rolls eyes.





The BBC sent us a cheque in the end. Very late. Again. We've been promised that this month the payment will be early. We live in hope. American Express have taken to ringing me very twelve minutes on the dot. Or should I say, ringing our answerphone. Yep, that'll work. I don't have the money to pay you, but hassling me to that extent will make the money appear faster. Of course. I *would* have the money to pay if the BBC didn't make such an almighty mess up with their payments on a regular basis. Perhaps Amex would like to hassle them.

Took the baby kibbles Voldemort and Severus to the dreaded V.E.T on Tuesday for their booster vaccinations. They escaped. From the basket when it was all over and I was trying to put Severus back into it. Good job the window was closed. V.E.T. lady had to help me and Emily catch 'em. £65 that little escapade set us back....I wonder if they charged extra for the stress factor?? We have to take Romeo and Juliet soon for their boosters too. Cassie-cat's due hers in November, but I think we might leave her be. The stress (for her) of keeping her in all night and then getting her into the basket and in the car and into the V.E.T. is a little bit much at her ripe old age, I think. She's still fighting fit and was playing like a kitten in the garden the other day with Jon........but when considering whether to take her for the vaccination our thoughts inevitably turn to the way her brother, our beloved Merlin, went so rapidly down-hill after his "routine" vet treatment for fleas two years ago. We're convinced that sparked off his rapid and traumatic decline, as he'd been fit and healthy before it. Yes, I think Cassie-cat and "routine" vet treatment are done. She doesn't need the indignity and fear factor at this point in her life, for minimal health gain.

Took this of Juliet a couple of days ago - she was almost completely hidden in the basket, camouflaged against the leopard skin. She's been a lot more loving to the babies recently - she even licked Severus without hitting him!
Work-wise I'm still plugging away at my existing contracts, and Jon's still plugging away writing stuff and working on the online shop. I've been very busy at Best of the Web, where I was very chuffed to be asked to lead an important and satisfying but highly complicated project, which is taking up lots and lots of time. It's all good stuff. And it's nearly my birthday :-))

The X-Files and Financial Recklessness

Oooh, look, another month. Rolls eyes. Can't believe I used to find time to post here regularly. Oh well!
X Files Mania
Since I last posted, Emily has developed a passionate interest in, of all things, The X-Files. Jon and I have been watching the entire nine seasons worth of episodes, one on most nights, for months now and have just about got to season 5. It was something we used to watch while I was pregnant with Emily, although I don't think we ever got that far along with it, and we're re-visiting it now. Random fact alert: Emily was actually named after the series in some respects, in as much as Emily is Dana Scully's daughter, and Dana is Emily's middle name.

Anyway. So Jon and I have been working our way through the series after Emily's gone to bed each night. She's always *hated* anything to do with aliens or outer space and even the music to the X Files terrified her, to the extent that she accidentally overheard it one night and was hysterically upset, bless her. Needless to say we'd always been turning the sound right down after that. BUT. She saw an interview about a week ago with the actors, promoting the new film, and suddenly announced that she was interested in it after all. Now, nobody could say that my daughter ever does anything by halves. Within an hour of deciding she wanted to know about the series, she'd read everything she could find on the internet about it, had made posters of it and was playing the theme tune non stop, rofl!

And it's become something of an obsession since then. We've been carefully picking and choosing episodes to watch with her that aren't way too adult in nature or too gory or too frightening. Or rather, she's been carefully picking them herself after diligently reading through countless episode guides. She has a very good handle on her own tolerance levels.

I guess it counts as citizenship, at least. With Jon and I on series five, even I'm starting to get a little lost in the conspiracies to cover up conspiracies to cover up lies to cover up conspiracies - if nothing else, watching it with Emily, as she gets past the first series, will prompt interesting discussions about how far a government might go to protect its own interests and about how much one can or should trust what we're told or not told. She was doing a quiz about the series this afternoon and she got more right than I would have done!

Financial Recklessness
I turned down the opportunity to take on a very large writing contract from the press association last week. It's quite simply not what I want to do any more and it would have taken up way too much time, leaving me unable to develop the things I DO want to do. So, financially unstable though we are, it was a big No Thanks. Which I suppose was reckless, but hey, a little bit of recklessness never hurt anyone. It's time to trust that things will work out OK, financially. And they will. I've had it with doing stuff I hate doing. I'll honour existing contracts, but I'm not taking on any more. If I wanted to spend all week doing things I don't like doing, I'd go out and work for someone else doing it, and get a guaranteed income. I can't see the point any longer in working for yourself and not enjoying it.

Reiki Master
Jon completed two full day's training recently to gain his qualifications as a Third Degree Master Practitioner in Tera Mai Reiki and Seichem, which he's exceedingly chuffed about. He can now teach, and is considering where he wants to go with it. I'm very proud of him!

Father in Law Issues
We've spent a goodly part of the last few weeks running around after Jon's father, as usual. And he has been even more obnoxious than ever. In one particular bout of vitriol he raged at Jonathan that he (Jon) should be going out to get a "proper job" but then swiftly followed that up with a spiteful "But nobody would ever want to employ *you* anyway." What a delightful thing for a father to say to his youngest son. Seems he's conveniently forgotten that Jon *chose* to give up a lucrative career position as a company director in order to move up here. Seems he's also conveniently forgotten that Jon's practically singlehandedly supported us for the last ten years via self-employment. I'd be spitting with fury if I hadn't already used it all up, years ago. We're subjected to nothing but constant praise and adulation of his eldest son followed by constant put downs of Jon. It would be sickening even if we weren't running around after his every whim, but to be treated this way when we're doing our best to take care of him is just beyond words. I have no idea where such spite comes from or why he's doing it. All I can say right now, at the very end of my exhausted tether, is that Jon's father had better be careful not to ever turn that kind of deliberate, spiteful, mental cruelty onto our daughter, because if he does, father in law or no father in law there will be consequences.

Emily's Social Life
Well, Emily's certainly seen plenty of her friends recently. We're still seeing Jacki, Mei Lin and Jasmine every Friday; last week she saw them for four days running as we were at theirs on the Friday, then Emily spent all day Saturday with them too, then on the Sunday it was Mei Lin's 11th birthday and Emily was there all afternoon at her party, and then again on Monday night. Miraculously, they didn't manage to fall out even given the constant company, lol. We've also had friends over to play at our house and Emily's been busy writing lots of letters to friends too.

Emily's Education
There's been lots of education, honestly. I just can't remember much of it. I know Emily's done plenty of fractions work, and she's also done lots of geography and geology. We made salt dough sheaves of corn for Lammas, learnt about why the Normans won the Battle of Hastings and Emily's been keeping close tabs on the flowers and caterpillars in the garden. Speaking of caterpillars, both kittens (must stop calling them that, they're over a year old now) have been on constant butterfly patrol. Poor flutterbies. Keep finding dead ones on the floor or spotting a kibbie dashing up the stairs with a mouthful of wings :-(( Not very nice.

This Friday just gone I did some poetry work with Emily, Mei Lin and Jasmine, using the famous "I Saw a Peacock with a Fiery Tail" poem, examining how you can twist the lines around to make sense, and then the girls all wrote their own versions using half a sentence on one line and the other half on the line above. Here's Emily's:

I saw a rat floating on the breeze
I saw a leaf cover up his sneeze
I saw a man shining with light
I saw a crystal squawking with might
I saw a bird swallow a whale
I saw a salmon jump through a gale
I saw a raindrop, fluffy and proud
I saw a rabbit climb through a cloud
I saw a pegasus skating on a pond
I saw a dragonfly with its chicks so fond
I saw a swan crack on the floor
I saw a plate squeeze under a door
I saw a mouse as a house so tall
I saw a cat who saw this all.

Future Plans
Jonathan's going to Grasmere for a meditation and spiritual retreat for a week in October, so Emily and I will be going up to stay in the caravan during that time. I'm hoping to stay for several weeks longer too, so we'll be away for most of October. It sounds like a long way off, but it can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.

Meanwhile, Jon is writing a runes package, and I'm going to be starting on some children's spirituality books. Having turned down the writing contract I didn't want has actually made me feel very empowered. Yep, definitely time to start pleasing *ourselves* for once instead of chasing every penny or running round after others all the time. The BBC failed to pay us on time at the end of July. Again. That's five months in a row now. The payment won't reach us for another week, apparently. All of our first of the month payments out went bouncy-bouncy. But you know what? It's only money :-))

Slow Return to Normality

Just as we were getting back to normal, ever so slowly, after the holiday, poor Emily's developed a stinking cold and is holed up on the settee losing her voice. Meanwhile, a hospital appointment for Grandad tomorrow morning further knocks on the head any plans I had for the week. Still, two "normal" days, Monday and Tuesday this week, is a start.

On Monday morning, Emily had a good old root around the garden, spotting new things that had burst into flower while we were away, collecting seeds from dried seed heads and investigating some weird white bugs on the kale plants. We've got a garden full of poppies of various types at the moment.I *love* poppies. Some of them, Emily grew from seed this year in little pots before we transplanted them outside. Her sunflowers have suddenly burst into life too, and the runner bean she grew in the glass, and which was transplanted into the earth before we went away, has shot up. Her pumpkins are practically taking over the vegetable patch!

One of the sunflowers has developed a strange double head; not two complete sunflower heads on the same stalk, but one large oval with two separate seed heads and sets of petals contained within it. We also have a couple of very clever sunflowers who grew accidentally (as in we didn't plant them) behind a group of poppies; they've grown horizontally along the earth right through the poppy clump before starting to grow upwards at the front once they'd found the light :-)

Emily spent a happy hour or so out in the garden drawing the life stages of poppies in her nature notebook and writing about the sunflowers. On Monday afternoon, we went to visit Hazel, Romy and Tansy, which was lovely, as we hadn't seen them for ages.

Yesterday morning Emily continued on her garden project which has somehow included birds of prey, not that we see many of those around here, alas. She read about birds of prey in general and then went off to research her chosen bird, the Merlin (what else?) on the internet, before preparing a lovely little report about the Merlin and its habitat and habits, including threats to it, illustrated with cut out pictures she'd found from various sites.

In the afternoon, we had another wander around the garden and spent some time playing with the cats out there - but just as we were about to come in, a beautiful little bright yellow bird landed in the middle of the garden. It could barely fly, so Emily rushed to get the cats shut in while Jon and I tried to catch the little bird. It must have been someone's pet canary/budgie, I should think; it certainly didn't look like a wild British bird. It's just as well we got the cats out of the way; it hopped all over the garden but really struggled with taking off. Eventually, it managed to flutter its way to the top of the garage. Jon climbed up with the cat basket, hoping it would fly into it and we could keep it pending finding out who it belonged to, but it wasn't playing that game. Sadly, we then completely lost sight of it. I hope it managed to find somewhere safe and that whoever it belongs to has been able to find it :-(

Later yesterday afternoon, Emily and I did some word play and poetry exercises from a great book I found, very cheaply, in a charity shop when we were away: To Rhyme or Not to Rhyme - Teaching Children to Write Poetry. I've seen (and tried to use) various help-kids-with-poetry type books before, but this one is by far the best I've seen; it's a long way from the fill in the blanks nonsense drivel that seems to pass for poetry teaching these days, and it's full of exercises and ideas to really encourage children to love playing with language. We barely ever touched on writing poetry when I was at school, which with adult hindsight I think was such a shame. I'm thrilled that Emily seems to love trying her hand at poetry; we must have done quite a lot of it over the last four years (and have we *really* been home educating that long??)

There's been quite a bit of reading going on; Jon has just finished reading Marco's Pendulum to Emily, which they both absolutely loved. It's very dark in places, set in Glastonbury and dealing with the myths and legends surrounding Glastonbury Tor. Very grown up stuff. They're looking forward to reading the sequel and other books by Phil Rickman. Now they're half way through Cat Kin by Nick Green, which is based on pashki, which as far as I can tell has something to do with the ancient Egyptian cat goddess Bast and the life force, chakras etc. Meanwhile, Emily's currently reading Scarlett by Cathy Cassidy, having recently finished the audio book of Dizzy and much enjoyed it; she's also starting Midnight by Jacqueline Wilson and Deep Trouble, the fourth book in the series by Debi Gliori. I'm not a huge fan of Jacqueline Wilson stuff myself; I'm sure they're well enough written, but the subject matter is always so depressing - I'm more a fantasy/mythical/magical person, I guess. Cathy Cassidy's books are also on a lot of serious themes/real life issues. Not really my cup of tea either, but Emily's really enjoying them, which is after all what counts. She seems to be developing a very varied taste in reading matter, which can only be a good thing!

[This post did have pictures, but it seems blogger isn't playing fair today. I'll have to re-add them later]

St Bees: A Holiday in Photographs

We're back from an amazing holiday. It poured with rain on and off - very British! - but it was the most relaxed I've been for years and we've all returned home bursting with positivity :-)) Highlights included fossil hunting, a picnic in torrential rain at a deserted lake, feeding seagulls on an empty beach under stormy skies, playing dams and wildlife parks on the beach, mixing ground rock potions, watching Prince Caspian at the cinema, visiting the Beacon in Whitehaven and hunting through the charity shops in Keswick, watching Jon and Emily sensing the energy at a stone circle, lots of card and board games, lots of wind, lots of laughter.

I took photos. Lots and lots and lots of photos, all clickable if you want to see one larger. Indulge me....one of the things I (re?)discovered on holiday was a love of photography. Some of these were just quick "record the moment" snaps and some were more thought out...... I'm quite pleased with lots of them :-))