Gosh, a blog entry for Thursday two weeks in a row! *faints*
Today was absolutely lovely. The HENCAST outing (for those families who were too slack to book their kids in to the production of My Grandma Comes From Gooligulch, that is) was an informal meet-up at the National Museum. Given that last time I ended up wrestling an extremely displeased toddler back to the car to give myself the option of imprisoning her in a stroller for five minutes of peace at a time, I was a little reluctant to just rock up without making contingency plans. So I rang Meredith, and she was happy to be Beth’s nominal adult-in-charge if I wanted to drop her off and then run. As it happened, I convinced B that the world wouldn’t come to an end if she and her friends spent a little time looking after K, so we ended up all going in. J, L and C then out-voted B and took K away with them for over an hour, leaving me to have lunch and a comfortable natter with Meredith and Sue. Then they all came back for lunch, and after K was finished I took her outside and we mooched about in the garden for about 45 minutes. The older kids were out with us for a while, and after a couple of hairy moments (such as B leading K up onto the top of a stone wall which had a drop-off considerably higher than my head on one side), they were generally very responsible. K was extremely pissed off that she couldn’t join them in rock climbing on another wall, but terribly insulted if I suggested taking her up to the top of the hill where the wall was only a couple of feet tall so I could help her practise! Sometimes being three feet tall is just not fair… Eventually she did manage to climb enough to satisfy her. We also saw a possum peering out of a nesting box high in a tree, which was entirely too cute for words. K then watched a big bunch of schoolkids rolling down the hill, so decided that she was going to do that. All in all we had a lovely time.
As we were walking out to the cars, we were thoroughly bemused by some bizarre plane behaviour overhead. There was a smaller plane, which looked like some kind of fighter aircraft, following a Boeing-type plane around and around. Given the world of post-9/11 paranoia in which we live, our first thoughts were that the smaller plane was somehow needing to shepherd the bigger plane, which was a rather worrying thought considering we were right underneath it. Then when they kept coming back for fly pasts we couldn’t figure out what the heck was going on… But apparently it was an RAAF plane-to-plane photo shoot – the smaller plane was following the bigger one in order to take photos of it. That was certainly not an explanation which crossed my mind! *g*
Other than that, B read me some Harry Potter in the morning (bloody well, I might add), with some discussion of punctuation and how it affects your understanding of what you read when you ignore it and read straight through the end of a sentence without stopping *g* She was going to read me some more when we got home, but wriggled out of it with the promise that she would read to E this evening. She’s played more Rune Scape, and made some arrangements for further socialising. Meredith put the 14th of July down in her diary as B’s sleep-over birthday party at the farm, so now we just have to sort out the arrangements at our end and let her know (they won’t be in town on the weekend of her actual birthday, so there go our tentative plans for ice-skating). And she discussed plans for taking Caitlin to see Shrek 3 and have a sleep-over at the farm on Saturday night with Caitlin’s Dad, who will confirm with Fiona and get back to us if it is doable. It was very odd to hear her very politely asking to speak to Caitlin’s parents when Caitlin turned out not to be available when she rang, and then outlining all the arrangements with great care to Charles. I cannot imagine doing the same thing to any of my friends’ parents at the age of not-quite-10. Homeschooling really does help children see adults as people, and vice versa…
ETA: I forgot to mention that I talked about the slideshow What The World Eats to B in the car this morning, and suggested that it might be a fun project for us to do as a family. She seemed to like the idea. I think the best way to do it, given that I shop monthly not weekly for non-perishables, is to keep a record of what we eat for a week, then recreate what a weekly shopping trip would look like if we only bought what we needed for that week.
She was absolutely fascinated, and also shocked, by the incredible disparity of wealth revealed in the slideshow. Although given her eating habits, it was somewhat ironic to have her moralising about the amount of processed food bought by some families, and enthusing about the amounts of fresh foods being consumed by others! I think it was an immediate demonstration to her about some of the factors which influence diet, such as living in a developed country or an urban area in a developing meant greater access to processed food, whereas families from farming areas or poor nations had very little that was not fresh. After seeing the slideshow, she became much more keen to do the project ourselves, although she was somewhat disappointed that it wouldn’t become part of the slideshow or the book, as she’d originally thought. So we might start making notes of what we eat from now on, and do the photospread after the next shopping trip.