These little ones were my other favourites from their set, because they made me smile for one reason or another!
And likewise, my faves for one reason or another from Mark & Heidi’s set:
We normally only get together with this branch of our family all together at special occasions like Christmas, so it does sort of feel like an elongated version of that, rather than any other time of year!
Of course Easter is a special occasion as well. We celebrated yesterday together – we had an egg hunt in the courtyard here, with chocolate eggs as well as plastic ones with clues to the Easter story inside (which my friend Liz had sent – and I have to specially thank her as everyone here appreciated it, it worked really well ). After hunting we went indoors and sat round the table to look at the Easter story clues, and then Dad read the Bible and we all tried to sing a hymn that only three of us could remember! (think Steve has some amusing photos of that but he’s not as sad as me so you won’t see those till we get home).
After dinner we went on a long walk from the farmhouse to Belstone Tor – didn’t quite make it to the very top before turning round to come back. Stopped for a drink in the pub at Belstone and then walked home again. Took us 3.5 hours altogether and Elodie walked most of the way too which was very impressive! Played Trivial Pursuit in the evening. In fact we’ve played board games most evenings which has been a highlight of the week for us so far.
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.
We woke up to another bright November day here, so I decided to scrap the idea of going to Crealy with home ed friends, much as I love them, we can do that when it’s raining. Instead we threw some lunch into the van, and headed up to near Lettaford for another ‘explore Dartmoor’ day. Lettaford itself is a tiny hamlet with just one road going to it, and the road just stops there. Beautiful little hamlet with a few gorgeous, interesting old buildings.
The children were so excited by the amount of frost still on the ground as we drove up, you would think they’d never seen it before! They also spent ages poking an icy puddle when we first arrived
He and I headed back to the van straight away, sorted out his wet clothes, and started making lunch. The others joined us 20 minutes later, just in time for soup and bread. After lunch the girls went off exploring again, but it was bitterly cold, and getting colder as the sun got lower, so they didn’t last long. We all sat in the van for a while, reading and drawing, which felt idyllic – all stuff we could do at home, but it was just good to be out in the middle of nowhere, doing it together.
