just another morning here

… I remember my parents asking me why on earth I needed to phone school friends in the evening and stay on the phone for ages and ages? After all, I had seen them all day and would see them again tomorrow. For some reason, though, I did need to, didn’t I?

Now, I find myself in the same position as my parents. The girls get home and dive for the computer where they instantly hook up with friends, skyping (is that a verb?) at the same time as doing homework. I have to say I think Skype is awful, they end up speaking louder because they’re shouting at the screen. And I can’t stand having one of their school friends virtually in the house!! At least Facebook chat is relatively quiet, apart from the odd ‘bing’ when they get a new message.

Thankfully, though, my parents couldn’t put a time limit on my phone conversations as a teenager, apart from nagging me to get off the phone, which they did, regularly.
I, meanwhile, have access to a lovely little thing called ‘Parental Controls’
It’s just gone very quiet here as someone has run out of computer time already so had to say goodbye!

Steve has long held a wish to disconnect from technology – not a sentiment I share, generally . I like being able to instant message the children to tell them that tea is ready!!

He heard some programmes on the radio last week about this book: The Winter of our Disconnect, which re-inspired him, and so last week we discussed how we could do something similar.

We decided to have Sundays as a day off from all screen/computer based technology – so, no internet, no computers, no phones, ipods, DSs etc.

It was tricky; the girls had left some homework to do and realised that really they needed the computer for it, because they hadn’t planned well enough in advance to do all the research beforehand – they could have done that the day before, if they’d thought about it. Josiah finished all his homework quite quickly and then was at a bit of a loss, hanging round the girls while they were working. I did miss Friend Feed a bit … while Steve breezed out to work at 9am and used his phone loads but apparently it’s ok at work

The good bits though: no-one really asked to use the screens, they just got on with doing things differently. I meant to make it to church but got stuck helping with homework. After lunch the children decided to go swimming, and we got our food shopping done, along with a few other bits and pieces. Back home, Steve and the children played Monopoly while I hoovered and washed the floor, then read my book in the bath. We all went to bed early, with bags etc. ready for the morning.

Steve still wants to go the whole hog and switch our techno devices off totally, but I’m very happy with just Sundays as a compromise …

Josiah and I looked at Scratch for a while this morning. Well, everyone’s talking about it so I had to at least try it! We both liked it but by the time Joe had got to grips with it he’d lost concentration! Will look at it again later in the week I hope, I think the next step is to show him the website so that he can get some inspiration.

I went to work and wrote mileage letters while Steve pulled down our rotten porch (and half of the front wall of the house ) He was going to just replace the porch roof but now it seems that this might include bricks, and cement … aargh. I don’t really like DIY – either doing it or even being around while someone else is doing it! So it is best if I stay out of the way, although now that the mileage letters are done I’m going to have to get creative with my excuses. Joe helped Steve a bit, got paint all over his trousers, but generally had a good day I think.

When the girls came home Abbie was wasted and good for nothing; she is somehow not 100% and hasn’t been for a few days but nothing other than a few snuffles and a bruised elbow from the park the other day seem to be wrong with her. She did some nice DWN out in the conservatory ‘on her own in peace’, while the other two argued over who was going to bake what. Eventually Anna produced snickerdoodles, with help from Josiah who is more practiced at baking and operating the oven – it made me laugh anyway. She cooked dinner too – ok, it was only spaghetti and leftover casserole (mmm! ) but it was nice that she did it anyway, it’s unusual! I did suggest to her that she could cook dinner every Monday if she wanted to and she quite liked the idea but then procrastinated for a year or so by saying she’d wait until she was home educated again and I could give her cookery lessons. Oh yes, because my cooking is just so great.

Tired now. The evening has disappeared in a combination of obsessive computer games (just for a change) and then the excitement of planning a trip to see Nanci Griffith’s tour this summer

Seems a while since I wrote anything, what can I say, we’ve been busy, although I can’t really think what with.

Joe’s been doing lots of maths – shapes/area related pages from CIMT – and we had fun looking for hexagons and pentagons in the house one morning. He’s also learned lots about time and calendars recently, which is a real pain in the neck – when he asks me what the time is, I have to be precise to the minute, otherwise I’m in trouble. He knows exactly how many days it is until his birthday, and seems to spend ages thinking about time and dates, working out random useless pieces of information, or giving me a running commentary about how long it is until the next exciting event in the day. This pedantry extends to all areas of life actually but I guess I only have myself to blame for that

Josiah’s also doing a fair bit of reading, mainly late at night in bed. His favourites at the moment are the Usborne Flip Flap body book, and How Your Body Works (the one with all the robot pictures). Since he lost his knotty a few months back we haven’t replaced it because we realised that he wasn’t sucking his thumb while he didn’t have it … so he hasn’t been thumbsucking recently but the downside is that he hasn’t been going to sleep until about 10pm most nights! Still, we think he has memorised the entire Chronicles of Narnia from audiobooks

I took him to Crealy on Thursday, then he got invited out there again the next day with Robyn and Adam, so he’s done plenty of running around like a loon. He’s doing really well with swimming lessons at the moment as well, which is such a relief, after years of it being really hard work – their teacher came and told me that Abbie and Josiah had both swum well in their lessons on Thursday.

The girls both enjoyed dressing up for World Book Day on Thursday (Abbie went to school as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and Anna went as Alice in Wonderland). On Friday Anna went to a friend’s house after school, and Abbie had a friend back here. Anna’s been busy doing lots of drawing from various ‘how to draw’ books, some of the results have been quite impressive actually!

The usual music stuff has been going on as well – for all three of them. Joe’s just carrying on as per usual with his violin, very nearly at the end of Suzuki Book 1 now, although I suspect there will be a fair bit of review to do before he’s at graduation standard with all the pieces. Abbie’s working towards Grade 1 piano in the summer and is sounding pretty good most of the time. Anna’s playing in some music festival or other in a couple of weeks, so she’s practising for that as well as for Grade 4 cello in the summer.

Had a bit of a stress at the end of the week as my car got written off – only bent metal, thankfully no-one was hurt and I wasn’t driving at the time but still a bit of a nightmare generally, takes a fair bit of emotional energy to deal with stuff like that, we discovered.

Can’t remember which night it was but the smoke detector went off for some unknown reason in the early hours of one morning – batteries are fine, and we couldn’t find any other reason for it – but Steve got up and checked everything, we both work up and couldn’t get back to sleep at all afterwards, so that probably didn’t help the latter part of the week either! We must be getting old, when one broken night wipes us out for the next couple of days!

The weekend has been nice though, lots of kicking around together. Kids brought me belated-birthday-breakfast-in-bed on Saturday which was great, so it was a lazy morning. Then we went up to Dartmoor and climbed up Haytor which everyone enjoyed.

The children went and stroked a nearby pony for ages, I was surprised by how friendly it was actually, I expected them just to run away. On the way back the kids decided to roll rather than walk down the hill!

Went out last night to a housewarming/birthday party of some friends who both have the same birthday as me; played poker there too, while watching the lunar eclipse! Steve’s gone out to play poker again this evening with a different set of friends.

Today it has been chucking down with rain *all day* so we’ve been at home just chilling out. Abbie did some painting – really nice pictures, some of them. Then she had great fun with a bath bomb kit – I think she made one bath fizzer and then spent the rest of the afternoon putting various ingredients together, then covering the kitchen in red and blue fizzy stuff

Anna and Joe have been playing their way through Lego Star Wars on the PS2 together – fantastic game, they’re both really enjoying it. In the midst of that Steve took the PS2 apart as he had done a couple of days previously, the game kept crashing – it is on a blue disc that apparently the PS2 lasers can’t always read well so he adjusted the laser which fixed it for them so they were quite impressed with their old dad for once

Steve and I have been working on a new website for the garage, and doing a bit more of Abbie’s jigsaw, and sorting out laundry, and that’s about it.