In At The Deep End

The boys are doing a sports camp today and Bob has taken them into town and then stayed to do some Christmas shopping or something - he got a bit shifty when I asked!

The girls and I have made fudge (bit crunchy though - the recipe called for icing sugar but we need that to decorate the cake so we used granulated; still L says it’s yummy anyway ), emptied and filled the dishwasher, done and hung out a couple of loads of washing, found a home for most of the 5kg of carob chips which came with the recent Suma order (and tried a couple, but they’re unsweetened so actually not very nice as they are - need to find a couple of good recipes to chuck them into to be sure they’re worth having ) and generally pottered, then we decided to snuggle up in bed to watch the Scissor Sisters concert on tv (L loves SS ). This had the hoped-for effect of getting A off to sleep, but also a slightly unexpected side-effect: I woke up at the end of the concert (oops!) to find that L and A were both sound asleep next to me So I tiptoed down here, thought about doing house-work and decided that actually blogging was becoming a necessity before I completely forget everything we’ve done over the last few weeks!

I think the last substantial blog post I did was Meet the Orchestra, way back in November, so there’s a lot to catch up on and I’ve probably forgotten most of it already, but I’m sitting here with calendar in hand hoping to get at least the bare bones down before the girls wake up…

The boys have finally started swimming lessons with the local HE group and K is loving it. J likes the time in the toddler pool afterwards, but I think would happily dispense with the actual swimming bit. Nonetheless he has made some progress - one of the other mums goes in with the children so that the teacher can squeeze another couple into the group and that has really helped his confidence, I think, because he was always rather nervous that the teacher stayed on the poolside rather than in the water. It also means that I can get some idea of what he’s up to and how well it’s going, even though I am in the toddler pool with the girls while the class is happening and so unable to watch. As long as there are enough adults to go round (2 children under 8 per adult) we try to stay and play/chat for a bit after the class too, and I think this time is as valuable to the children as the lessons themselves. They seem to spend a lot of time trying out the things they found either fun or tricky in the lesson
Swimming means we spend Tuesdays on the A14 as well now (it used to be our one and only guaranteed free day in the week) but we’re working on clearing another day or two instead and for me swimming is one of those things which is non-negotiable - as J was informed when he said he didn’t want lessons

Thursday P&t is still going strong, and gives us another day of non-negotiable driving each week - including holidays as well as term-time, because I remember what it was like to have got a toddler into a routine of going to groups on different days and then hit a long holiday period and find there was nothing at all to do. We are quieter in the holidays, as a rule, but there is the occasional parent who is so relieved that the group is on that it makes it worth being there! The sessions have gradually evolved, in any case, so that they are now fairly HE based, with more than half of the families bringing older children (Gina does sterling work producing a craft or similar activity each week to keep them all busy) and most of the baby or toddler only families starting to get interested too We’re hoping to find a space to house some of the local HE group library so that we can also offer a kind of drop-in resource centre for families thinking about HE. This is alongside the slingmeet aspect of the group; when a new person puts their head tentatively round the door and asks for me I’m never quite sure whether it will be for sling advice or to talk about HE! Perhaps I should think about either getting a BF counsellor along or doing some training myself and then we could offer a full granola experience! We used to say we would run every week except the one between Christmas and New Year, but in fact this year we will even do that session, because J will be doing holiday orchestra so the other children and I will have to be in town anyway. If it’s a quiet session then I’m hoping to get some serious toy sorting done and clear a cupboard or two for HE resources.

The week of 26th November Bob was in Germany for work, so the children and I had to manage on our own. This made me realise how much I rely on that first cup of tea in the morning - the one Bob makes and leaves on the table for me to drink as soon as I make it downstairs, even if that means having to nuke it to get it to drinkable temperature. Apart from that the mornings seemed to work okay and the only major problem each day was bedtime, when normally I sit and do snuggles and feeds while Bob does baths and teeth. A bit of forward planning and lots of cooperation and we managed it - J is great at being a helpful big brother when he likes Bob cunningly managed to miss A’s jabs (second lot - we delayed vaxing) and the subsequent 24 hours of grumpiness and 48 hours of sore bottom. That week was also an appointment with Danielle the osteo for J, which was preceded by a visit to B-a-R just in time to sign up for their Christmas party and followed by a trip to Waitrose to get a few odds and ends, including (frozen) sweet chestnuts - a treat for the children and me, as Bob doesn’t much like them Talking of frozen, J has discovered that he loves frozen raspberries - yay!

Friday should have been Friday Club, with us doing a music session, but the traffic was so bad (problems on each of the three routes we could have taken!) that it took us nearly 2 hours to get there (rather than 30-40 minutes) and we arrived too late even for snack and certainly too late to do the music We did catch a fun art session, having a go at making our own cave paintings, which the children loved, so it was not all in vain

Bob has already blogged the weekend (B-a-R party ) then Monday 3rd December was CHEF sport, where J has now started to do the older children’s session and is really enjoying it. It’s a little more expensive, but rather longer and gets him running around a bit more, which has to be a good thing when you spend most of your life curled up in corners with books! K is still doing the earlier session, for younger children, so hopefully I should be able to use the time to do some work with each of them while the other does sport, especially once L starts joining in with the younger session too. Afterwards we had the usual trip to the park, but not for too long this time, as it was freezing and there weren’t many of us around. That evening we had a Friday Club planning meeting, which had been moved and changed and cancelled and reinstated… In the end only three of us could make it anyway and when the two of us who were not hosting got there we found the hostess was not feeling well and her DH had been very ill for a couple of weeks… Actually, I wish she had just told us and cancelled or postponed, because it was not a terribly productive meeting, given that only half of us were there and she was ill, and of course all of us who were visiting, A included, promptly came down with the horrid bug that it had just taken her DH two weeks to shake off Ho hum!

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 22nd, 2007 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Home Education, Katy's day, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.