just another morning here

After ranting this morning, we leapt into action, tidied and cleaned upstairs (well, hoovered, at least) and went off out to Crealy where we had a lovely time. Had to leave early to pick Steve up and then go on to kids’ club, which was manic as usual … then got home to find that Steve had eaten my tea! Time for a sandwich, think Steve has the projector set up for a film tonight as I’m avoiding Children in Need. Both the D&Cs I had following miscarriages happened to be on Children in Need weekend, four Novembers apart, so I prefer Comic Relief, as far as big charity bashes go! I’m not really that sensitive about it but it does bring back some memories – Steve remembered, which is amazing … I got a special ‘I remembered, hope you’re ok about it’ kiss, aaah.

Sorry everyone, I just got a bit bored of blogging the ‘we did this, then we did that,’ type thing. It seems so introspective sometimes, and irrelevant to the bigger picture!

We have been busy with friends round, and the Miscarriage Support group was on Tuesday night, plus I’ve fielded a couple of calls from people who’ve had miscarriages, which leaves me feeling so useless and unable to say anything that I’d rather not say anything at all. When I think I’m over my miscarriages I just have to hear the pain in other people’s voices when they call me and it all comes flooding back, you remember it like it was yesterday. And you wish you could take it away, make it all better, and make people’s experiences of hospital better, but you just can’t. They ring and they’ve been treated so badly by health professionals it makes me absolutely livid, so not blogging was for everyone’s sanity.

Also, I got particularly CROSS yesterday with the FF people. I wanted to blog it but thought I’d probably get done for libel so had to restrain myself from blogging anything at all!

Part of me is really struggling with the whole home education thing at the moment, too. I would always have to conclude that educationally and for the children as people it’s absolutely the best thing, but I’m just not sure whether it is for me. Then that sounds selfish – while I’m really happy to be at home with the children, and most of me loves it most of the time, and I do think it’s the best thing for them, there is part of me that would also really like to go and work with Steve a bit more. One of the reasons we started home educating was so that Steve and I could manage the business together, but as it’s turned out with getting a premises and an employee, it hasn’t worked out like that. Most of the time I like being different, and doing things differently, Steve working at the weekends and us being flexible in the week, and then sometimes I just think life would be so much simpler if we did the Mon – Fri, 9-5 thing like the rest of the world. To be honest, I think that feeling like this is all tied up with what we’re trying to achieve in terms of church/faith as well … which I still haven’t really managed to explain to myself, let alone blog about!

Basically we felt God challenging us about doing things differently with regard to church. The outworking of this has been to make a decision to stop going on a Sunday morning – while still having a very central faith, and being part of the group of people that we call our church family, we’re trying to strip away the religious add-ons that our church culture has added on! There are other reasons to stopping going on Sundays too – well, Steve was always at work anyway so it was hardly a whole-family activity, as I think it should be …

The picture of home education has been a really helpful one to us in it, and I know that here I might be able to use that to explain what I mean – when I try and talk about it to anyone else I get very stuck, because generally they completely don’t understand what I’m talking about. If you equate faith with education, and the religiosity of established church with school, I hope you can get the picture. We want the faith, but we want it grounded in our everyday life rather than boxed into a Sunday morning. It’s as much a challenge to work out what that means for us as a family as it is to live the challenge of what we believe about home education! And it’s equally hard to go against the flow with it, because people just don’t understand. The socialisation question, as with home ed, is the one that persistently rears its head – and is difficult to answer, as people have such a set idea about what being part of a church means, in the same way as people think that school provides socialisation!

Anyway, we are very pleased that actually the leadership of our church have given us some space to try and work things out, and are supporting us in it. Having said that, it feels like a mountain has been made out of a molehill – what is actually a simple concept has been given so much discussion and questioning in the church recently that it feels a lot more complex than it actually needs to be! We have one of the leaders of the stream of churches that we’re part of coming round this evening so I guess I’m thinking about it all even more, because I know he’ll ask us what we’ve been doing and although I don’t feel I have to justify anything, I wish I could have a few more answers. I’m not sure I’ve explained anything very well at all here, but there we go. I’ll go back to the usual tone of blog now

Other than having booked Centerparcs on Tuesday there really is nothing exciting going on here. The projector is Steve’s latest toy, and as it just means that he’s rearranged the lounge to fit it in and is getting rid of excess junk (all his guitar amps, which he never uses in the house anyway) to make space, I don’t mind too much. It’s only going to be used on special occasions, we have a Kill Bill evening planned sometime soon so that will be its first public performance

The girls have been working quite hard this week, we’ve done some workbooky stuff most days. Maths has been general number bond stuff for Abbie, and Anna’s done some basic stuff on right angles. Anna did some work on verbs in an English book too.

As well as practically memorising the Groovy Greeks audio CD which we’ve had on in the car recently (must get more of those, they are quite amusing, they remind me of Blackadder!), they’ve watched the whole of the BBC ZigZag Ancient Greece series, and today Steve’s Aunty Jacky is coming for her first official ‘Ancient Greeks’ session with them. I bought the first volume of Story of the World plus the activity book to go with it and there are some lovely resources in there – not sure if I’ll get round to reading it with them, but having the activity book will really help I think. And having seen it I expect as we go on to other periods of history I will invest in the rest of the SOTW series, as history is my weakest point, and if nothing else, *I* can read the books myself!

The other thing that I ordered which arrived this week is the Draw Write Now set, which went down really well here. The girls absolutely love the format, and were really keen to try it straight away. I like the fact that the writing is just four lines of text, so it’s a really manageable amount when it comes to handwriting practice. Thanks very much for the recommendation!

Few photos to add from today – the girls doing covers for the Ancient Greeks notebooks, and a geomag flower that apparently had to be photographed!

Anna’s had a couple of cello lessons this week and she is coming along quite nicely with it. I’ve agreed to practise with her and that’s been good when we’ve done it, too.

Josiah’s gone off to Start Right again this morning so the girls and I will probably do some more of all of the above. And here’s a blog. Hope it’s enough to count for a couple more days

Saturday
The KBC reunion was a nice day – it was fab to meet up with old friends. A few of our rebellious year group had a major giggle during a quiet prayer time … which was quite hilarious. Some serious contemplative parts to the day as well, so it was interesting and thought provoking as well as having it’s frivolous moments! The children enjoyed their day too, and I even did some home education ‘evangelism’ with a family I met in the creche!
The girls had a Finding Nemo theme to their activities so obviously that went down really well, while Joe just played (and I was really proud of him, because apparently he was really good and the people running the creche said his talking and understanding were way above the other 2yos there – big-headed Mummy moment!).
It was nice to stay with my family again and have some good chats, all the driving was plain sailing too, although for some reason I feel completely wiped out by it.
Got home to find the article in the newspaper which (a) had the most awful photo of me and (b) had all the details for the memorial service wrong – they’d said it was in Plymouth not Exeter! How daft could they get? Of course it was too late to do anything about it by then. Anyway, we watched Casualty then had an early night.

Sunday
Today has been busy too – started by watching the first Grand Prix of the season this morning – we’d taped it overnight, not quite committed enough to get up at 2am for it! Steve went off to work and the children and I went to church. Just to help us out, as we got into the car Joe stepped into some dog poo which was right outside our back gate, smeared it all over the car and himself, ugh. (not as bad as sick, but pretty close!).
We went out to Open House lunch after church which was nice, but we had to rush away to get the children to Grandma’s before I could go the the hospital.
The ‘Service of Remembering and Sharing’ was okay – I’m not a big fan of that sort of thing really, and some of the service was a bit twee and sickly sweet, not to mention being theologically unsound (!!) but I do think it helps people grieving the loss of a baby to do something symbolic to remember them. The best bit of it is always the part where people can light candles and place flowers into a vase, it’s strange but somehow you can do it at whatever level you want to, which makes it a personal, more intimate response. Considering the newspaper had printed the wrong details, there were still plenty of people there. The pain of losing a baby always hits me again when we do these services, I see people whose loss is perhaps more recent than mine are, now, and it brings it all back. Just about got through my reading, and by the end my sense of humour had returned, I wondered if anyone else noticed the line in the final hymn (Lord of all hopefulness) which said ‘be there at our labours’ … not quite the most appropriate line to sing at a thing like this – should I point it out?!
Chatted afterwards to someone who I’d been at university with – we both recognised each other but didn’t know where from … he and his wife had recently had a termination at 20wks of a baby with a heart defect, who wouldn’t have survived outside the womb. Scary stuff, to have to make that sort of decision – don’t know if I could do it.

Anyway, then I picked Steve up from work and we went for tea with his mum and dad. We talked business for a while – and then houses. Every so often we wonder about getting a big place together, and we think we might take a look at this. I think we get on well enough to share a house, as long as we had enough space to get away from one another now and again! Perhaps one of the compromises to getting the space we want in a house might be to not live in the centre of Exeter, I don’t know if it’s a worthwhile compromise though, I have yet to be convinced.

Better go, I’m being told off for typing too loudly. Steve and Anna are watching Hulk and I’m interrupting their viewing – see, we need more rooms!

Something I don’t write about very often but someone wanted a picture of my tiny feet lapel pin so here we go, it’s taken next to a 5p piece to show size. It’s a bit old and worn, think it’s been through the wash a number of times, but I wear it in memory of a baby (Joel) that we lost at 18 weeks gestation in April 2000.

We’ve had our fair share of miscarriages, having lost a baby at 12 weeks before Anna, one at 12 weeks before Abigail, then two very early losses before Joel. And Steve wonders why I spoil Josiah! There’s so much more I could say about all this, but I won’t, it would go on for a long time. Suffice to say, the badges are the exact size of a 10 – 12 wk gestation baby, and they’re available from Care.

Since October last year I’ve been running a small miscarriage support group locally, which is a branch of the Miscarriage Association and supported by my YMCA who give us a venue free of charge. Miscarriage is one of those things that it’s so hard to deal with, because it’s often an unseen, unacknowledged grief, and it’s also not understood, often with no reason for it to have happened. Anyway, there we go.