… otherwise entitled ‘your wish is my command’, if you ask for Wall-E in hama beads you will have it!

Adapted for hama beads from this cross stitch pattern.

They did have shadows underneath them, too, but I kind of cocked that part up during ironing, so this is as good as it gets.

Josiah has been hard work to live with! He’s done the usual music practice, some maths work from workbooks, started a science kit, played on Carmen Sandiego Maths Detective, and that’s about it. We went to HE Group on Wednesday and he raced around the park with some other boys, I think he and I both appreciated that a lot. And he’s had piano, violin, and swimming lessons as usual. In fact his teacher commented that he’s doing really well in swimming at the moment so that’s positive (clutching at positive straws here!). But generally it seems to be a huge struggle to have him at home on his own, especially compared to what a day is like with the girls around as well. Not quite sure if there are any easy answers to this particular dilemma, might just have to ride out the storm, as it were.

Abbie and Anna have both had a good week at school; Anna’s going to be a school librarian so she’s happy about that. Abbie’s doing swimming lessons in school as well this term, so she’s enjoying that. They’ve both been working hard at music stuff as usual too.

Personally it’s been a rough week, for some reason that I can’t quite put my finger on and probably wouldn’t want to blog even if I could! But, just for the record, I don’t think it was anything to do with either Steve shaving his beard off (although he thinks it was, so he’s grown it back already!), or deleting the Animal Crossing town that I’ve spent goodness knows how many hours on over the past year

Anyway, the end of the week has been much better The children and I have made Hama European Flag badges for all the countries in the Eurovision Song Contest; we’re having friends round so we’re going to concoct some sort of badge-earning game to play throughout the evening as we score the songs, just for a laugh. Probably the sort of game that really should have alcohol involved as well!

This morning we’ve all mucked in and done lots of housework, then rewarded ourselves with chocolate I just have a small pile of sorting out to do, and the hamster to clean out, and we’ll be finished (well, until Monday at least). Happiness is, after all, a clean house, a Grand Prix weekend, your sisters being at home, a birthday party to go to, and pocket money

Joe and I spent 3 hours this afternoon making this ship … only for him to then ask where his hama pirate was (don’t know how many months ago he made it but it went into the recycling bin ages ago )

It actually looks quite impressive from a distance …

Abbie’s latest hama bead effort, made because it wouldn’t use too much white (which we knew we were running low on), and then we ran out of flesh pink!

This is what Abbie and I ended up doing while the others were out this evening – I still haven’t managed to start on any operations!

Time for the Apprentice now though

Otherwise life is back to boring humdrum carry on … with one highlight for Josiah – this week he is the ‘special person’ in his class at school. This caused rather huge excitement over the weekend as he gathered together bits and bobs to take in to school. I failed to produce a photograph though, just don’t do paper photos any more – they’re either good enough to be on the wall in a frame, or they’re on the computer, nowhere inbetween, and I don’t have a printer! Ah well.

Being ‘special person’ apparently means you get to stand at the front of the line every time the class lines up for something, take the register back to the library, and on Friday they get to do show and tell about their stuff/photos which has been sitting on a table all week.

Perhaps it would be worth adopting this approach at home too; less arguments about who should push the coffee down, sit in the front of the car, have the first bath, or choose which game to play!

We stopped in the park on the way home so Joe came home all muddy and I made him strip so that I could wash his uniform. He refused to put any more clothes on to go and play outside with the girls, so he and I spent a happy hour hamaing together, having been inspired by Merry’s flickr pictures.

He chose a pirate pattern to follow, from one of the pattern books. Swords do it every time

I don’t think he’d ever really bothered following a pattern before, only followed the shape of a board, iyswim, so I showed him how to count it, and we did a pretty good joint effort. He’s really pleased with his pirate, and I’m thinking of taking it to stick it up on the ‘special person’ board in place of Joe’s photo tomorrow!

Why did we do it? I guess I agree to do these things simply because I’d rather someone relatively normal did an interview than they had to scrabble around and end up finding someone way out who might not be very good at communicating the whys and wherefores of home ed, or who was doing it for such a particular reason that it might give a skewed impression of home education. If I didn’t do it, someone else would. It’s interesting, I like meeting people, I like thinking through what we do, why we do it, the advantages and disadvantages of it, and while being able to communicate those to the rest of the world isn’t vitally important to me, if an opportunity comes my way I don’t mind agreeing to it. I don’t think there’s anything in it for us, really, either – I don’t particularly like that sort of publicity, but then again I don’t dislike it enough to not do these things in the first place! I sincerely hope that it will be okay, I’m expecting it to be good, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Anyway, the kids also enjoyed being part of things – first thing in the morning we had a look at this website and discussed the platonic solids and why they are a special group of solids, then they set about constructing them from Geomags. Anna made little labels for a display, and by the end of it they were happily counting vertices (balls), edges (rods), and faces (panels), and using that language correctly. They also got the hama beads out, and games like Connect 4 and Downfall, which are both strategic and therefore very educational, imo! I was really proud of Anna having an interview, too, and being articulate about home education – for once she didn’t say that she’d rather be at school! Instead she said that sometimes she feels like going back to school but that most of the time she likes being home educated. This is progress, and I’m pleased about it – because while we’re happy that we’ve made the right choice for our family at the moment, I’ve always kind of wanted her to agree with us! It’s taken two years to get to that! She was really proud to show off her Different Life video, too.

We took the reporter with us in the afternoon to our HE dance session, so she was able to interview some other parents there, as well as observing us socialising, and then she left from there. We carried on to Anna’s cello lesson, shopping at Sainsbury’s, then home for a quick tea before dashing out to Miscarriage Support Group in the evening.

We wrote some Christmas cards, did a little bit more painting, a little bit more hama beading, entertained friends, but that’s been about it, we couldn’t even be bothered to get to gymnastics today once we heard that Caitlin & Riona weren’t bothering. Steve brought chips home for tea which was very unhealthy but yummy all the same, so nice to have a break from cooking every so often!

I tried my hardest to get a decent photo of all three children to go in a photobauble but they did not want to co-operate – this was as good as it got. I might have to try again tomorrow

Oh, and I spent half an hour looking through Christmas activity sites with Anna, and we stuck a few in our kids’ page (which is their homepage – best viewed in IE, sorry … one of these days I’ll get round to changing it!) for her to use over the next couple of weeks. Steve came home saying that Anna had been IMing him during the day and that he was impressed with her typing/writing (don’t know if that means much, actually, but at least he noticed!).

Tonight is laundry & TV as per usual – might snatch a bath beforehand if I’m quick, especially as Steve seems to have all three kids upstairs singing pirate songs with him and his guitar … definitely time to retreat to the bathroom! Tomorrow we must make sure we get the cello out for some practise, and hopefully finish writing at least the MuddlePuddle Christmas cards, and finish the painting …

So I guess I’m feeling quite pleased with ourselves, and I’ve cooked a decent enough dinner for when Steve gets home in a bit. Also had a HE’d friend round for the girls this afternoon, then Ruth and her girls popped in after school. They hama-ed together, played imaginary games, and generally enjoyed one another’s company. Fri-D-Fish, the strangely named kids’ club, is on this evening so we’re going to that in a while as well.

I particularly enjoyed our painting session this morning. We had the music on in the background, and after Abbie and Josiah had finished their paintings they disappeared off to watch a video, leaving Anna and I together painting for quite a time, and chatting. It was lovely just to be spending time together – I appreciated it, talking about relatively grown up things …

Anyway, if we’re going to get tea before it’s time to go out we’re going to have to get a move on so I must go and carry on!