Books and burbles

I can’t be bothered to catch up. So, what shall I blog about?

How about a bit about books? I’m currently reading Pearlie Halfmoon Investigations, which is pacy and fun. Dani and Leo are sharing Percy Jackson and the Titan’s Curse. I’m not too sure what the kids are reading to themselves. Pearlie recently read The Hunger, another in the My Story series. Leo is, I think, still ploughing on to the end of the Amber Spyglass. He’s been quite diverted by Indiana Jones and is awaiting some spin-off book he’s bought on Amazon. We had a good conversation about racism and sexism after watching ‘Temple of Doom’ last weekend. Leo observed that women on tv and in films all seem to be like Barbie Dolls! Dani is reading The richness of life, which is very learned and not really my cup of tea. I’m writing more than reading right now – after running out of Ali Smith. Mind you, I’ve been dipping into Brilliant Careers: the virago book of 20^th century fiction. Dani and I both read The Queen of Whale Cay too. That was an astonishing story.

I’m enjoying the kd lang album, Watershed, on my cheapo mp3 player. It’s a lovely summer album and I spent a joyful half hour sitting on the beach people watching, while listening to it, last week. The kids were at Squeezebox and I was able to be entirely alone. You know how, sometimes, the music in your ears runs like a soundtrack to the people around you? This young couple of women were on the beach, totally wrapped up in each other. Made me smile and took me back to lunch-hour encounters in my youth!

There’s not much else to report here. Kids went to the dentist and all was well. Pearlie lost a big, back tooth. She must have nearly run out of milk teeth now. Leo seems to have hit something of a plateau in tooth changing. The dentist said they might have to take out some milk teeth to kick start some more coming through. I think we’ll just wait. He is probably going to hit the family curse of big teeth in small jaw, which leads to an overcrowded mess – hence my buck teeth.

The kids and I got free Flakes in town today. We even went back and got seconds. Pearlie took off her cardigan and Leo his hat, so they wouldn’t recognise us!

Oh yeah, here’s a little witticism from our area. We live near a pub called The Constant Service. It is named after the introduction of a piped water system to the area – rather ironically, I’ve always thought. Anyway, bit by bit, letters have been going missing from the name. Last week, someone managed to arrange the remaining ones to re-christen the pub Vices Cost.

I can’t blame drink for my recent inability to speak properly, though I did have a rare bottle of beer with my tea tonight. But the other morning I looked intently into Leo’s face and asked:

“Will you be alright with bare teeth?”

I did, rather unsurprisingly, mean feet, not teeth. What is sad is that I can remember my mum making similar verbal stumbles in my childhood and I’d think, “what IS the matter with her, why can’t she just say what she means?” I’ve learned the hard way that it is the creeping of age.

Freewheeling

Pearlie and I went for a lovely bike ride on Monday. We’d planned to do it straight after Kids Club, and I’d taken the last hour off my morning’s work, so that we could get away a bit earlier, and then we heard that a new home ed art group was starting that day, at 12.30. We talked about it and decided to go anyway, after the art group.

We went by train to Berwick, then followed National Cycle Route 2 down to Exceat, where the visitors centre for the Seven Sisters Country Park is. We carried on beside the wiggly river, to the sea. Altogether, we cycled about 11 miles.

We saw horses, sheep and cows, hundreds of rabbits, and a fox ran straight across the road in front of us. The weather was glorious. We cycled along very quiet roads, overhung with green branches, surrounded by birdsong. We saw the Long Man of Wilmington and a white horse carved into a hill in the distance.

Pearlie dipped her feet in the river when we got there, and delightedly spotted little fish and shrimps in the water. On the way back up the river from the sea, we talked about why rivers have fresh water and sea water is salty, and she tasted the water every now and then, to see how long it took to change.

We folded up our bikes and took the bus home. Lovely.

Busy in the sunshine

Here’s some bits and bobs from the last few days.

Thursday included Kids’ Club for both the kids where they did detective things: identifying whose fingerprints were on a particular item and who had taken a bite from an apple. They are planning to make a little detective film next week, I believe.

Dani had rather less fun at a meeting. We then got carried away talking in the park and nearly missed Woodcraft for P and a Woodies parent meeting for Dani. I was off work on leave again and so got to join in with all the panic!

Friday was the big drop-in session that happens a couple of times a month. I took along some Japanese braiding to share with people. Some people loved it and some endured it and I think it was worth doing!

After that, Leo and I popped to the doc to get a prescription for anti-histamine that seems to be working well for him. Saw a new, young doctor who spoke to Leo in a lovely, straightforward, non-patronising way. She also impressed me with her willingness to prescribe just what I asked for!

Then there was a quick park visit to put up our new tent, which seems to work well. In the evening there was a Hedline meeting at our house. That was enough for one day!

On Saturday morning, Pearlie was lucky enough to be taken to see Michael Rosen by a friend and her family. She said he was SO funny and she came back very jolly. Then we went to the swimming pool, where we had organised a private booking to be shared between local home edders. Those who came seemed to enjoy it a lot and I hope we can do it again.

After swimming, the kids were really enjoying playing in the park with cousin S and friends A and C. Sadly, the fun came to an abrupt end when A got hit on the head by a heavy metal catch. It is a ‘safety feature’ to stop little ones reaching the pond but it managed to make a rather horrible, bloody wound on A’s head. We went home and A and C came to sit in our cool basement for a while. A was quite calm and ok by then, thanks, in large part, to her very calm mum. I am rather hopeless when ours get hurt and tend to let my fear affect them.

On Sunday, I had to go back to work. Pearl and cousin S had an exciting trip to see Caroline Lawrence who told them all about how she writes. Meanwhile, Leo was playing in the paddling pool with cousin D. That must have been fun because he’s still asleep at 10am this morning!

Enjoying my leave

I had a day off today and missed the discovery of an unexploded 2^nd ww bomb on the campus!

But, anyway, we had a lovely day. Leo went to Kids’ Club this morning and had a good time doing some treasure island themed things and playing with his chums. Pearlie and I popped to town to get a pressie for a friend of hers and them came home to brush up our division skills with an MEP book.

We met Dani at the cycling park, once she had finished work. It was wonderful weather and both the kids had a great time cycling about the place.

Pearlie took some beautiful photos of things like bluebells and damsel flies - but I'll let her blog those. Leo got more and more confident and was whizzing off, away from us, in no time.

Yesterday deserves a quick mention. Kids had Squeezebox sessions and Leo went to Green Pig writing group. We also spent a few hours in the park with lots of home edders and scoffed cafe treats.

We are having lots of great conversations at the mo but I can’t remember any details to blog, I’m afraid!

Our new tent arrived today. It is wonderfully old fashioned looking object with the kind of poles that tents had in my childhood, rather than the spindly things they have these days. We need to find some time to get to a park in a quiet moment so we can have a go at pitching it.

Boy on a Bike!!

We’ve had a busy weekend here. I was, sadly, at work on Saturday and Sunday afternoons but we did enjoy a day together yesterday.

Saturday was the Children’s Parade that kicks off the Brighton Festival.

Pearl and Leo weren’t taking part this time but they, and Dani, went to watch cousins and friends. The theme was children’s games and there were some fab constructions. After the parade they went to the beach and met this lovely hermit crab.

We watched Dr Who in the evening and ate roast dinner.

On Sunday, Leo had a friend round to play. They had a great time playing with all his toys and then played games on the Doctor Who website. Pearlie went with uncle and cousins to the family beach hut. I struggled a bit with being at work because I was battling a migraine. Dani has been doing lots of writing/thinking about local authority home ed stuff that is still ongoing. I’ve been doing my best to share that work but my head made it hard to stay up late.

We gave ourselves a lovely, family day on Monday. It was beautiful weather and we went across town to the best park for cycling. Pearlie enjoyed buzzing around on her new bike and Leo, who has inherited Pearlie’s old bike, learned to ride! We managed to forget to have the camera with us, which is a shame. Leo did wonderfully well. He never rode tricycles as a toddler, and found steering and balance a big challenge when he started riding a scooter. But, last year he got really good on the scooter and I think the balance skills were very useful. Within an hour on the bike, he was able to keep riding when Dani started him off. Within two hours he was doing the whole thing – starting, riding, and stopping without falling off. HOORAY!

After a few hours in the park, we walked home and had showers/baths and rest. It was real sweaty summer weather! In the evening we went down to the travelling fair that comes a couple of times a year. The kids went on a few rides and hooked a Tweenies character to get a teddy.

Here's some anti-car chalking that has appeared out side our door ;-)

Right, got to get dressed before Ocado arrive with the shopping...

Nasty little notion - rant alert!

It’s not often that my jaw hits the floor these days. I feel like I’m often existing in some bizarre Orwellian nightmare when I listen to the pronouncements of the great and good. Let’s face it, when people vote for Boris Johnson in large numbers (because they think a public school educated bigot acting the clown is funny?) the world can’t get much stranger. But, today, this little gem (sorry links not working) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7381817.stm caught my eye on the BBC website.

Can others see the inherent contradictions here? First, Clarissa Williams criticises the push to get all children into early years settings asap and says,
“Are parents so distrusted that we want to separate them from their children at the earliest opportunity?"
I was rather pleased to hear someone so far on the inside of the system say something so sensible. But then she goes on to propose that people’s benefit levels should be affected by whether or not they “engage with schools”. It seems she can’t quite let go of the distrust herself. Patronising is the word that springs to mind. Would she like star charts down at the benefit office too?

Like Ms Williams, I dislike the punitive attitudes of councils who jail the parents of truanting children, and so on. But, unlike Ms Williams, I don’t favour an approach that seeks to replace the stick with a carrot. I know that it is unfashionable to say it, but when it comes to the welfare of their children, people are best motivated by their love for their children. They don’t need slapped wrists or extra pocket money. They need a system that respects their relationships and stops lecturing long enough to listen to what people actually say they need and want.

It seems to me that, deep within our culture these days, is an unshakeable idea that we are consumers. The rhetoric is all about participation but, when you dig a little, it is clear that you are meant to shut up and ‘engage with’ what is doled out, with a happy smile and a thank you. Public services should be just that – services that belong to us all. They never are. Sometimes people manage to access a bit of funding to get some, genuinely participatory, project off the ground but it is always a struggle. I encountered that when D and I were volunteers at the local Breastfeed Drop-in. At the time there were funds aplenty for Sure Start initiatives but this, well-established, peer to peer support project, was always in financial crisis. Running costs were very low but it seemed that, unless you were operating under the umbrella of the ‘good thing’ that was Sure Start, then you had to be constantly seeking new sources of funding and spending hours of volunteer time on filling in grant applications. You’re really not meant to do it yourselves - just turn up at the approved venue and get your services as they see fit.

This is, it seems to me, the key to understanding the state education system. It was why it always felt so hard to influence anything when we were parents of a school child. We were meant to be constantly grateful for everything (not that I’m against gratitude to individuals who do a good job) but never question. We did our best and were just the sort of ‘engaged’ parents that Ms Williams wants. We helped out in the classroom, washed paint pots, read with ‘slow readers’ and all that stuff. I can remember taking down Santa’s grotto well into the evening, after the Christmas fair. But, that really wasn’t participation. We could raise the money for play equipment but still had to abide by every edict without question. One day it was decreed that parents could no longer take their children to the classroom at the start of the day. Children had to be handed over to their teacher in the playground. Teaching assistants were posted, like bouncers, on the doors. I had to fight my way in to help my five year old out of her waterproof trousers, because no-one else was doing it and I could see her mounting panic and distress. That just made me a ‘naughty mummy’ and, no doubt, I would have been docked some of my golden time. You must be ‘engaged’ it seems, just how and when the PTB want you.

The truth, I suspect, behind Ms Williams bright idea is that she has a nice little stereotype in mind of the kind of parents who need to be motivated with extra benefit payments. They’re nothing like her, or her friends, of course. People ‘like her’ just do the right thing because they are socially responsible and mature and have their children’s best interests at heart. It is all about us and them, isn’t it? People like ‘them’ need bribes. I’m surprised she didn’t suggest free scratch cards. But, it’s all the rage at the moment, this sort of idea. Where we live, primary school children’s names are entered in a lottery for a new bike – if they achieve 100% attendance at school. Quite apart from the inherently unpleasant notion that being ill or unable to attend school is always a BAD thing (what about children with serious health problems who will never get entered in the lottery?) the whole scheme is aimed squarely at certain ‘types’ of school where attendance is a ‘problem’. It’s also aimed, rather transparently, at children who don’t already have a nice bike – or whatever the bribe may be. You can read between the lines. Just like we can read between the lines of what Ms Williams is proposing.

The state education system is clearly about ensuring compliance – far more than it is about education. But what is particularly scary about Ms Williams’ idea is the ease with which people now accept that ‘the state,’ acting as a single entity, should be able tweak the lives of individuals to suit a current political/ideological goal. Benefit payments should be about ensuring the basics of life to everyone in our society, not a means by which the state can make people jump through hoops. YUK.

Park life

We live in an area where hardly anyone has much of a garden. Ours is typical for the area – a concrete rectangle of about eight foot by twelve. The fronts of the houses have no gardens at all – the doorstep is right on the street. About ten years ago, as soon as we realised that we had a child who needed to run, lots, every day, we started to factor our local park into our day to day lives.

I can remember jogging around the play area in steady rain, tailing Pearlie, in her all-in-one waterproofs and welly boots. She was about two and I was probably fitter than I ever was before, or since! Later on, I spent most of a whole summer in the park, with little baby Leo feeding and sleeping under the big tree by the sandpit and three year old Pearlie learning to swing herself and climb to scary heights on the climbing frames. She watched her friend D chalking his name around the place and was doing it herself by the autumn. We took toys of all kinds – balls, scooters, little trucks to fill with sand, skipping ropes – and books. As Leo grew older we usually took paper and pens too. Leo has often sat beside me, drawing for an hour or more, while P plays with friends.

This park is really a communal garden for the people of this area. There have been days when I guess there must have been fifty people I knew, to a greater or lesser extent, in the park. There are plenty of people who I never really see in the winter months but nod to in the park - people I was at breastfeed drop-in with eight years ago, people I see in the shop, people whose kids are at school with my nephews and niece. And, in the last four years that we’ve been home edding, I have realised that the park has always been a key feature in that part of the local community too. At least once a week, in the summer, we can usually be found with other home edders in the park. There are often children from babies to teens playing, chatting and hanging out.

It’s a bit sad that you don’t see more schooled older children in the park, but you don’t. Most of them get bussed across town to secondary schools and by the time they’re back it’s quite late and they have homework to do, I guess.

It isn’t an idyll, by any means. Sometimes things kick off a bit and last weekend somebody set fire to the lovely, wooden train during the night - and pretty much destroyed it. Our kids were sad to see it go and so was I. Many is the hour I spent in the back - being driven to London, the sea, the shops. I’ve also sat crammed in there in a downpour, handing out biscuits and waiting for the rain to stop.

But the park will be fine. It’ll survive because it is loved. It’s a circular thing – people use the park because people use the park. I have known plenty of other parks in my life that weren’t used much at all – so there was no-one to hassle the council when the stuff got broken, no-one to dissuade vandalism and violence and they weren’t nice places to be. I’m not sure how you change that. Round here, there is a combination of lots of families with children, without large gardens of their own, but with a thriving park nearby. It must have evolved that way. Possibly, one of the other strengths is that people have enough money to support the wonderful park cafe. It is just a kiosk but it serves home-made cakes and scones, sandwiches, hot drinks and crisps. This means that adults are generally quite relaxed – not itching to get home for a cup of tea!

Over the years, people campaigned (off and on) for toilets in the park - instead of the one, dodgy, dirty automatic cubicle. Now we have them. They aren’t the most beautiful toilets you could ever use – as lots of small people use them unaccompanied – but they’re fine. You can change your baby in there when the weather’s rubbish. They have solved the problem of wee and poo in all the bushes!

For me, the park has been little short of a sanity saver, at times. We can shut the door of our house, leave all the stuff for later and just escape to somewhere with a bit more space. In the summer when Leo was a baby I sometimes spent the entire day there. I think it was serving as a sort of alternative village square or something. There was usually someone who could hold the baby for a minute or who would come to fetch me if P fell over. I’m not someone who could function living in a commune – I need my personal space – but I love the hub that is our local park. It is one of the many reasons why I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

Picture Post

As we left for Bath early on her birthday morning, Pearlie opened her pressies on the train. I think this is a rather lovely picture.

Here we are on a boat trip in the early evening of the same day. We were really lucky with the weather.

This is the point where the boat turns round.

This is the family gathering, once we were back home. It was a lovely day in the park. I am mulling a post all about the park, what it means to us as a family and how central it has turned out to be in the lives of our children. I look quite bizarre in the photo, don't you think? I was trying to shield the candles from the breeze but it looks rather like i'm preparing to slap poor Pearlie round the head!

Electrician came today and fitted us with lovely, new fuse box to replace the two old (about thirty years?) boxes. I feel very re-assured that it is all safe and checked.

We have an education student popping round in the morning to interview us about home ed. Better tidy up a bit...

We’re Ba-ack!

Well, that was a strange experience – nearly a month with no internet at home. Apologies to all those to whom we owe emails and so on. I lapsed back into a pre-internet state and actually got quite calm about it. I have read more books and watched some old videos. Dani was looking decidedly twitchy by the middle of last week (she says it was actually by the second day!) and I think she is very relieved to be back online. The kids were pretty ok with it, though they missed i-player.

A catch-up is impossible. Here’s a few things, in no particular order.

Pearlie had her eleventh birthday last week. We went to Bath for an overnight stay and bought her a new bicycle there. It is a rather fabby Dahon and should last her forever, or until she reaches 6 foot 4!

Bath was lovely. We stayed in a Travelodge room for £26 and crammed in lots of fun. We went on a little boat trip up the river, in the beautiful, early evening sun. We also visited the Bath Fashion Museum and went to Pizza Express for a birthday meal.

We all enjoyed a sunny, family gathering in the park in honour of P’s birthday.

I have been enjoying a continuing dalliance with the writing of Ali Smith. I was mesmerised by Hotel World and have read two of her books of short stories too.

Leo has been prompted to learn a joined up writing style by Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide. We bought a little workbooky thing, which goes through each join in turn, and he’s doing some every day. He is pleased with it and has abandoned his previous writing style (mixture of upper and lower case letters) and is using it all the time.

Pearlie has been enjoying all her birthday presents. She got lots of Jessops vouchers and has had a lovely splurge of processing. Some of her pictures are gorgeous. She got a plant for her room and some lights for her new bike, and is planning to buy an i-pod. She got clothes, too, and has been looking very sophisticated.

Leo is back to reading the end of the Amber Spyglass but has also started The Hobbit.

Dani has made lots of progress with her big, celtic knot blanket.

Pearlie went away for a weekend camp with her Woodcraft group. She had a great time, including playing games in the dark! Leo got to choose dinners while she was away and we ate lots of veggie lasagne and fruit crumbles.

We’ve bought tickets for an exciting Festival show, which we’re all looking forward to. Dani and I have also treated ourselves to tickets to see kd Lang in August. It’ s Pride weekend so everyone should be on a high. If you want an example of how spine tingling kd can be, when singing live, then check this out on YouTube.
Anyway, better get some sleep as electrician is coming tomorrow to fit the new fuse box.

Dead computer

Our computer died yesterday so things will be quiet from the Greenhouse for a while. We're trying not to think about all the unsaved treasure on it...