The Brick House

Today was absolutely freezing. K and I were mostly sensible and stayed indoors, although I did go out to check on the bunnies and let the chooks out. I found two eggs in the hen house, one, rather disgustingly, buried half in a pile of droppings. I washed that one off and gave it to the dog – given how susceptible eggs are to picking up smells, I didn’t want to risk wondering why a cake I had made with it smelled like poop! We spent the morning pottering and tidying up the dining room and playroom for Mum’s visit this afternoon. The playroom is now ridiculously bare, except for the pile of beanbags on the floor from where B, K and I spent the evening playing with Duplo and Tummy Ache!. But I’m getting ahead of myself there…

For my first Mum’s Afternoon Off having a mango frappe at my favourite cafe while writing a shopping list and musing about frugality (rather unfrugally, I had to buy a notebook to do my musing in because my children keep stealing and losing the ones I buy for my handbag, grrr). Then I went to the markets and bought various fruit and veg, including a big box of marked/bruised apples and pears marked down to $5 a box. I’ve found quite a few which are worth eating, and made a batch of applesauce in the crockpot with the rest. K was very happy to find all the pears in particular, and has already eaten one and a half.

We had complicated car arrangements today since E had a job thingy in Belconnen at 5:30, so he took the car into work and when I went out I borrowed Mum’s car. He came home at 5:15, then I dropped him off at Dee’s before heading out to pick up B from riding, then back to Dee’s to pick up E, and then finally home! Over an hour in the car, for most of which K was asleep. I had gotten dinner underway before I left so I only had about half of it to do when we got home again, otherwise we’d have been eating at midnight… Kangaroo bolognaise, to be turned into lasagne tomorrow. I even remembered to take the applesauce out of the crockpot this evening, pureed it, and put it in the fridge, so it won’t have to be thrown out like the last time I made it!

K, as ever, loves “helping” me cook. While she’s stopped chopping the mushrooms, she likes taking the stems out for me, and putting the chopped pieces in a bowl. While I was chopping up apples she was supervising, and handing me new apples when I needed them. She absolutely loves her little stepladder – a wonderful Aussie Junk find for $5. When she wasn’t “helping”, she was happily parked on top of the ladder playing with the play dough. B joined in, and got down the toy potter’s wheel we bought a while back, and showed K how to use it. There were a few squabbles, but mostly they were playing together well. B retreated to her room for a while, then came out and said, “I should come out and say this more often instead of just sitting down in front of my computer, but – I’m bored”. Awesome self-awareness there, munchkin! So she joined in with K and I in making a Duplo house, then helped us tidy the Duplo away so we could play Tummy Ache!. Lovely Bear that she is…

Tomorrow’s HENCAST thing is a Knitting Day, which B is quite keen on, but will probably turn int me chasing K around for an hour or so, so I can’t say I view it with any huge enthusiasm. I really can’t wait until she’s old enough to get involved and be less of a chore in these situations… although of course when she is, Rosy will be just about old enough to take over her role as PITA! B has also expressed an interest in doing the acid rain experiment kit which I bought a while ago (speaking of which, I might go out now and put out a pot to collect rainwater, since we need some of that for the experiment). I also printed out the free story and activities which arrived from Newsademic, billed as the international newspaper for young readers. We’ll see if she’s interested in a newspaper pitched more at her reading and knowledge level.

PS. Of course, when I went outside to put out a pot to catch some rain, I discovered that it’s actually stopped raining for the first time in two days. Typical!

Beth went to see Shrek 3 with Nannie and Caitlin on Saturday, then headed out to the farm for the night. She spent most of Sunday afternoon at Gooroomon Park, doing her horse management course and then competing in the games day. Because she is a twit she forgot to pick up the homework – despite seeing it out on the table she didn’t take one “because they didn’t tell her to”. Who is this automaton who only does what she’s told, and what has she done with my daughter?

Monday we did a bit of maths in the morning, with a visit to Smartkiddies. She’s now finished the first module. Nannie picked her up to go to pottery, then K and I picked her up. After lunch, she played lots of Runescape, watched some Doctor Who and did some reading. At dinner she talked to E about computer games. There was probably more, but I forget…

Today has been grey and rainy the whole time. When I got up, B was doing crafty things with CDs, which are now stuck all over the back windows. K had a go too when she finally woke up. The munchkins had a go at playing in the garden, but it was too cold to stay out for long, even with puddlesuit and rainboots on. B watched BTN , Science Clips – Friction, and most of Arrows of Desire (on poetry). K made a bowl of Weetbix entirely by herself, spilling milk all over the kitchen in the process, but on the other hand she did put it back in the fridge when she was done! (can’t imagine where she picked that up, nobody else ever does…). B decided she didn’t want to read any more of Harry Potter, so scouted the bookshelves for something she was interested in. She pulled out the books I bought a while ago which are part of a series called The Whole You, about growing up. She read the first page of the intro to Body and Mind before getting bored with it, then read 2 stories from The Cat on the Mat is Flat. After that they both helped me measure out ingredients to make muesli bars, then Nannie arrived to take B out to the farm. Swimming was called off because of the rain – with the creek rising Nannie didn’t want to risk being cut off if they went home later today.

K was getting a bit sleepy after lunch so as well as doing some drawing, cutting and pasting, and some reading together, she spent a while relaxing in front of Play School. It’s not a day which is inspiring me to do anything other than curl up somewhere warm and go back to sleep, either… but since K is now napping, I might go and do something a bit more constructive!

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.

Beth rang up this morning to say she’d read a page and a half of the first Harry Potter book. We worked out that each chunk of a longer book would count as a “block” under MS readathon rules, the way that a chapter of one of the shorter books does. She says she wants to continue reading it. I will forgive J. K. Rowling for all most some of her sins against literature if B does indeed persevere with the tripe book.

She also nagged me again about ringing Russell, but this time I bounced it over to Nannie and gave her R’s mobile number. She talked to him tonight and he would love to meet B, now we just have to set up a time, and I need to decide if I want to be there or not. I know I ought to be there, but there’s a lot of baggage…

Anyway. B had a rather exhausting horse riding lesson with a very stubborn pony, then came home and watched Rollercoaster, then Hogfather and/or Doctor Who episodes in her room until she went to bed, with a short break for dinner. Nannie included a couple of pages of spelling words and a comprehension sheet based on HP. And apparently there won’t be any repercussions about missing the course on Sunday – she picked up the second homework sheet and we will try to make a start on it tomorrow.

In the meantime, K and I had quite a nice day, which didn’t contain as much Play School as usual after about 11am because I dragged myself away from the computer to be entertaining. We went to the library to return our overdue books, and borrowed more (including our old friend Kipper’s A to Z), most of which I have already read to her. Go me. We have also played her favourite let’s pretend, where she is Dr Katy and I am her hapless patient in hospital. I am eating a lot of imaginary jelly, and taking doses of medicine which are apparently delivered through the medium of a large yellow pencil. She is using a piece of one of B’s construction toys as her doctorly equipment – it’s a cord with a miniature solar panel on one end and a screw-type attachment on the other. She adds other bits to it at random, the better to poke me with. I am tempted to suggest getting her a doctor’s dress-up kit, but it’s just so enchanting seeing her imagination flow that I think I will continue to let her make it up from bits and pieces instead. There was also quite a lot of silly giggling of the mutual face-squishing , peepo- and jack-in-the-box singing and ferocious tickling variety. I like having my belly-bag back, it means I can lounge in much greater comfort while playing with Katy, even with Rosy kicking the bejeezus out of my insides when I’m lying face-down.

What else? She “helped” me make pumpkin soup – there’s nothing soft enough for her to actually cut up in this recipe, but she did get to pour lentils out of the jar into a pot, then pour them from one pot to another a few times, which kept her entertained while I did the actual vegetable surgery. She has coated the floor throughout much of the house with sultanas, having somehow taken the dried fruit container (heavy and above her head) off the shelf and burst open the packet all over the dining room floor, in order to fill up a bowl which she then ended up tipping all over the living room floor. Scrublet… She did have a nap this afternoon, which she was most reluctant to be woken out of in order to go pick up her sister. And after dinner she read many books, with both me and her Daddy, prior to fairly reluctantly going to bed at about 9:30ish.

Oh – and the cuteness! I asked E if his Dad had spent a lot of time with them as kids, and as he was thinking about it a little voice piped up immediately, “Yes! Yes!” Katy had obviously heard the question as addressed to her. What a testimonial, you wonderful Daddy you 🙂

This morning we concentrated on finishing off B’s homework for horse management, which ought to have been finished before the Sunday afternoon course which we forgot about. There were only three questions left, which B was okay with answering at first, but then got upset about not knowing the answer to the last question. We looked them up together in her horse book and then wiffled around trying to get her to put it into her own words. She really got emotional at having to write out the answers longhand. Eventually we just did it question by question with lots of breaks. I discovered that part of the issue is that she just can’t focus on long words because they just look like a long string of letters, but we found that she could transcribe a very long word (surroundings) if she blocked off all but three or so letters at a time. I will have to find out exactly what Mum talked to the instructors about when she explained initially that B would need extra help in the exam. I think the best course would be for her to go off quietly with someone and give her answers verbally – they are checking whether she knows the material, after all, not whether she can write it!

That said, I was very impressed with how well she was able to read questions like, What safety aspects should you consider when you want to lead your horse past other horses or people? She had virtually no difficulty with that at all.

Apart from that she basically played Rune Scape all morning. And she is definitely trying to read what’s going on onscreen, as she called me in to help with some words. Apparently she was having a conversation with someone she thought was Caitlin but turned out not to be, which rather weirded her out!

We headed off for swimming with Nannie at 1:30 as usual, and B’s out at the farm now. I recommended that she ask Nannie to support her tomorrow at riding when she hands in her homework and talks about whether she can still do the course, and also apologise for missing it on Sunday. She’s quite worried about it, I think, so I hope Nannie is prepared to back her up.

K is watching yet more Play School on my ‘puter (I’m on Ocelot and B’s shows are recording on the DVD player). We did have a lovely time together earlier when I turned the TV off after the broadcast of Play School, then she helped me pick up the Duplo, then we played Tummy Ache! and drew and coloured in together, but apparently I am not exciting enough as after an hour or so she decided she wanted more of her show… I also pulled the rice basket out for her when she was mooching about earlier and I was trying to help B with her homework, and she had a lovely time with that. The ease with which she helps tidy that up has shown me that if I have an expectation that toys are cleaned up after an activity is finished then she will internalise that and be quite happy to help (or even do it herself when she’s finished if I’m not immediately available), whereas if I am happy for it to stay on the floor she will happily let it stay too. Surprise surprise! We made a point of packing the Tummy Ache! game up straight away, and she was happy to put it away while getting another puzzle off the shelf. Food for thought. I’ve been treating K as if she’s as intrinsically disorganised as B, but that seems to be pretty off-base…

Last night involved a mad panic and lots of shouting as I did six months’ worth of portfolio stuffing in one night. This is the point at which my beloved’s procrastination becomes A Good Thing, as it means he hasn’t got a chance of being able to criticise me on the topic *g* The poking-their-nose-in visit went well considering we were all violently diseased and braying or honking at the departmental rep every few minutes. As ever, most of the actual contents of the portfolio is just there as padding, although I did get to flick through it a bit to illustrate the points we were making, so it didn’t strike me as an enormous waste of time to do anything beyond the English and Maths sections, as it has on occasions in the past.

The rest of today involved bugger all formal work, although B and E did sit down to do some Lisp at one point. Dinner table conversation touched on the Black Death and disease vectors, with mad cow disease and kuru for good measure. And now I’ve gone and distracted myself, and spent the last fifteen minutes looking up kuru and the Black Death on Wikipedia. Interesting stuff! She spent a fair while in her room playing Runescape and watching Doctor Who. Yesterday was pretty similar, although K and I made blueberry muffins together, and B made chocolate brownies, virtually independently. V. yummy they were too… B decided not to go to Scouts tonight, which is something like the fifth night she’s missed, and I think the decision reached was that she wouldn’t go this term and would start back again next term, although I may be wrong here…

I must remember to note on B’s MS readathon form that she read some more of The Cat on the Mat is Flat to the rep this morning. She started reading it to me on the weekend, so that makes two “blocks” of reading to record on her form (I like having that option there). I found the actual form online and printed a copy, so now I can transfer over the records I’ve been keeping on my computer.

Too tired to write any more…must…go…to…bed……now……………….

*sigh* I’m crap at this blogging thang, aren’t I?

The last two days are a bit hard to blog about since I was at the homeschooling conference and Nannie/Grandmoogi were taking turns looking after the munchkins. Nannie said that yesterday B read Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy and Hairy Maclary’s Bone to her, but didn’t do any reading today. Yesterday I set up the Smartkiddies maths website, and I think B did at least one module of that. They also worked a bit on the homework she was set for her horse management course.

That course is held at Gooroomon Park on five successive Sundays, and involves a mixture of practical and theory with an exam at the end. She will get a certificate to take up space in her portfolio at the end of it. Apparently they are planning on running four or five levels of this course, and if she completes all of them she can become a junior staff member there when she’s old enough. She also had horseriding tonight, and confirmed that she did want to book in for the games day next Sunday (24th).

As well as the basic academics with Nannie, B has been listening to a Harry Potter recording, playing Runescape, her keyboard, and her didgeridoo, and doing some quick programming stuff with E in which (I believe) he introduced her to the beginnings of the text-based adventure game he wants to write with her. Can’t comment on her level of interest tonight – Beloved?

We’ve all been getting sick progressively over the last few days. Gawd knows what we’ll get up to tomorrow, if I get any worse overnight then probably not much! Must make at least a vague attempt at organising a portfolio tonight/tomorrow, since we have a departmental visit on Friday morning. Blargh…

I’m feeling completely superfluous this morning. B has spent over two hours playing Runescape and consulting with Caitlin over the phone; K tossed me off my computer after Play School so she could listen to Playground Radio and then watch her Play School DVD for the nth time. So I’ve been doing laundry and occasionally helping K to whatever food she wants to eat (so far cereal, Mexican beans with sweet chilli sauce, and olives). As for any overt educational content, I have just finished recording a documentary on ABC about the possibility of humans colonising other planets, which sounds like it’s something that E would very much enjoy watching with B since it definitely takes his utopian, technology-will-conquer-all approach to the future of humanity 😉

We did graze the academics this morning with B reluctantly doing some multiplication flashcards, then starting to read The Bad Book. I was cross with her about refusing to try to reach an understanding about the flashcards, and she was in an “I can’t do this! SCREEEEAM!!!” mood, so the reading didn’t last long. But since then she’s been happily, if slowly, reading her way through the instructions in the Runescape game, which is why I’m fine with her doing that for hours. I certainly can’t think of any other way of getting her to do something which involves reading (however tangentially) for hours! *g* We’ll be meeting up with Nannie to go swimming at 1:30, so there’s not much point in expecting her to do anything between now and then…

Yesterday was also fairly relaxed. We didn’t get organised to do anything in the morning, especially since I thought B was having a sleep-in after her late night on Sunday and told Nannie not to bother coming in until 10am. I think B did a little bit with her after K and I left for playgroup, and before she and Nannie went off to pottery. Nannie brought her back again, and we all had lunch, but I can never really be bothered doing work after we’ve gone out and come back in again. Instead, we went to Spotlight so I could get ripstop nylon as an inner waterproofing layer for the AIO/pocket nappies I’m planning to make. She read bits of her new Double Helix magazine to me in the car on the way to Spotlight, although the vocab and font size meant it was a bit of a struggle. But she was reading words like “conceives” perfectly from the context, which impressed me. She expressed her frustration with not being able to read this magazine easily and asked us to re-sub to Scientriffic!, but I pointed out that she several years of back issues, most unread, so she was happy with that compromise. K fell asleep in the car on the way, so B didn’t bother to get out of the car and I managed to be in and out in under twenty minutes, a mighty feat! K did wake up on our way home, so we went op shopping at Belconnen SVDP, where B found a pair of roller blades which actually fit! How could I expect her to do any work after that? *g* It was about 4:30 by the time we got home, anyway, so that was it for the day.

On a more general note, I have noticed that B is increasingly reading environmental print, and from what she said to me the other day, it appears that she’s finally tipped over into automaticity – ie. see print, read print, instead of seeing symbols which have to be mapped onto sounds (like me looking at Cyrillic, for instance). Yay!

Crude – the website. Contains videos of the entire series, plus other stuff I haven’t looked at.

I really don’t blog the tail end of the week, do I? We seem to have slipped into a rhythm where the first two days of the week I concentrate on the academics, then after she gets back from the farm, that momentum has been lost so we just relax for Thursday and Friday.

Yesterday the HENCAST get-together involved a tour of the Japanese Embassy. I didn’t take K along, so have no idea what it involved. When asked, B said she didn’t remember *rolls eyes* Talking to parents, it apparently included a film and talk from embassy staff, then a quick walk through the grounds. Sue (the organiser), who had been keeping an eye on B for me, said she did in fact ask some intelligent questions, so presumably took something in but didn’t feel like regurgitating it (“No seal!”, as her little sister would say). When I left, B was looking a bit unsure of herself as none of her particular friends were there, but Julian and Lauren must have arrived late as she was talking to J when I arrived. There was a picnic organised at Lennox Gardens afterwards, but as it was about 7 degrees out and neither K or I had adequate clothing, plus we had no picnic lunch, plus we had already frozen our butts off at Weston Park for the best part of an hour while B was in the embassy, we didn’t stay long! Highlight of the picnic for the big kids was finding a dead kangaroo floating in the lake. After we got home nobody felt like doing much, so we basically veged out and did our own thing and had lots of cuddles.

Today, again, nobody was feeling particularly motivated. B watched the final episode of Life of Mammals in the morning, which was about the evolution of humans and the development from hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and early civilisations. She was completely fascinated by it. They played outside together for a while, while I did a mountain of washing up, and also played online Elmo games together. Very lovely to hear them getting on so well! Of course it wasn’t roses all day, but whenever B got sick of K plaguing her she’d call me instead of getting obnoxious, which was a nice change from yesterday! K had a sleep this afternoon, and B and I read another chapter of Tai’s Penguin, since I’d forgotten it was already June and she should get cracking on her MS Readathon! B got grumpy and borderline hysterical when she couldn’t figure out some words, but we had a chat about the way her brain seems to work when it encounters unfamiliar words, and after she’s assimilated what I was saying about it being a habit, and heartened herself by practising a few ways of working round this response, she went on and read the rest of the chapter without difficulty. That was about as academic as we got, although she did sit down and try to read some of the book I bought on the science behind Walking With Dinosaurs. Obviously it was pretty tough going for her, but amazingly she didn’t sound at all disheartened when she said she’d only been able to read parts of one paragraph before giving up. Now we just need to find the time to read it to her…

Must not forget Scouts…at least I know where her uniform is!

ETA: This afternoon we also watched this Youtube video, which was linked from Hoyden About Town.