It's cold outside

A Christmas review full of Christmassy things like presents, time spent with family and friends, food and celebrations. Not a lot else to report as we have become incredibly seasonal in our home ed journey and have spent multiple days snuggled up on the sofa(s) watching endless tv and cuddling in the warm. The combination of dark days, school holidays, cold and wet, windy weather have encouraged us to spend more time as a family enjoying all things at home together.

I have got into house planning, how can we make our indoor environment work better for us as a family...and daddy has been obliging and listened to my grand plans. Mostly lego storage. Bean was inspired by his friends lego arrangements and i am secretly glad as i have it in me to organise such things well i have just been itching to organise the lego but holding off until the smalls show an interest otherwise it would be me getting frustrated that no-one was using the system correctly! Bean has mostly been immersed in minecraft (books,gaming and youtube videos) with Pumpkin looking on and joining in. Bean and I have played all his new board games together, several times over. The Star Wars Lego game is a big hit. We're enjoying Flat Stanley books and have more Paddington bear lined up on the book shelf.

Pumpkin has also been enjoying his joke kit and watching Mr. Bean and Dennis the Menace as he relaxes in his new Spiderman suit (which he has owned for 48 hours and hasn't taken it off yet) I finally feel like we might have found something that makes him tick after several viewings of Mr.Bean and the whoopee cushion having endless uses. Pumpkin is really testing out the 'how much control do i have in my life?' scenario atm especially with the endless supply of chocolates and sweets around, coupled with the refusal to wash or brush his hair, and his need to constantly wear the same outfit, ironically though he is fastidious about brushing his teeth.

Plum has been learning new words at a rate of knots and in the two weeks that it's been since we wrote a family newsletter and wrote down about 25 words that she could say, i reckon that she's doubled that easily. The very best being that she now says 'mummy' without prompting, hurray! We have read every board book in the house and have spent hours rolling marbles down the marble run together.

The lull between Christmas and New Year has allowed a little thought to be put into January's birthday fest (Plum 2nd, Pumpkin 20th, Cousin J 18th, FA#3 20th) Plum and Pumpkin's will be small affaris this year, by choice. Pumpkin has requested a family day where he and Bean wear their spiderman outfits and we will be venturing out as a family for Plum's birthday too.

London's calling

Yesterday the whole family ventured to London. It began with Pumpkin refusing to go and then moving to 'i'll give it a try but if i don't like it then i want to come home' as we drove to the station. Great things that happened on our trip were visiting Winter Wonderland and the smalls riding on various fair ground rides. Bean choose to ride on the vehicle round about ride twice, Pumpkin joined him for one of the turns. Bean then carefully choose the fun house. It took him a long time of wandering to and fro past it to be sure that this is what he wanted to do but he loved it so much that he wanted to take us all on it. Pumpkin also chose the helter skelter, which he loved and struggled to choose between a return visit to the roundabout with his brother, the helter skelter or the aeroplane ride. He went for the aeroplane ride. And daddy took Plum on a Rudolph carriage ride. We ate candy floss and had lunch sat by the Serpentine. I had made rather crumbly egg and bacon pie which was an invitation for every bird going to visit our bench!

We took several buses on our route back to the station travelling via Oxford St and Regent St and onto Convent Garden to take in all the Christmas lights. We found the lego creation in Convent Garden which predictably the boys loved and we spent quite some time analysing the different building and all their lego components. Bean noticed the use of robot pieces on The Houses of Parliament. The journey home was eased with a kids meal. It was a busy and tiring day and i'm glad that we took the stroller as well as the sling as both were well used.

The whole experience confirmed for me that solo trips to London with the smalls are really not an option at the moment.

Today took us to our Home Ed Winter Wednesday group where we had a Christmas theme. I completed the snow globes that we had started a few weeks ago, with the help of my creative friend, and Plum had her face painted as a cat (very topical for her atm) the boys ran around and play fought with their friends. Pumpkin is clearly tired and was quite fractious at times but changed completely after taking himself off on his own for a few minutes. There was music and food and balloons and lots and lots of friends.

a tornado by Pumpkin

Oh Christmas tree

The Christmas tree is up, the decorations are up and there is Christmas spirit in the air! This is only the second year that we have had a tree and daddy went off on Saturday with the boys in tow to go and choose a fitting one for our house. Santa doesn't make an appearance during our festive celebrations but we are carving our own family traditions and the next week or so will be full of them, helped by daddy having four days off work (yippee!)

Today we went to the Booth Museum in Brighton, inspired by the boys interest at the recent dinosaur and taxidermy and stones on display at Summer's Place, a nearby auction house, we ventured out to find more of the same and we were not disappointed. It was a friend who mentioned that museum to us and how she had spent many an hour there with her son enjoying the natural history collections and draws of specimens of eggs and butterflies and bones and feathers and fossils and glass eyes! Each showcase of taxidermy provided enough scope for the scene of a story and there was no shortage of those. The smalls were all taken with the collection of skeletons from the huge to the tiny and Pumpkin announced, 'i want to come here everyday!' so a revisit is definitely in the diary. We bought a few items from the shop on the way out, Bean linked up a range of interests and found some fools gold in a pirate bag, joining his interest in stones with that of pirates and Pumpkin found a dinosaur fossil kit. We were interested to read that dinosaurs  were first found in Sussex and the very first tooth dug up in a village that we had driven through on our way to Brighton.

We went down to the seafront to picnic, we ate in the car and watched the waves crashing onto the beach. It has been a very wet and windy day and grey grey grey, not long now until the winter solstice and it is grim and cold and miserable out there....but hey, who wouldn't want to go for a walk on the beach in this weather? Well, mummy actually, and i exercised my right to stay in the car for once and daddy took the keen and excited smalls onto the beach. They were so excited by their walk that they returned to the car and insisted that i went back with them. This time it was just mummy and the boys and they showed me their game of running away from the tide, the only rule being that if you got your shoes wet you were out. The waves were monstrously fierce, averaging as tall as mummy (5ft) and we had a roarcous time playing this game, even when we didn't see one tide coming and all got very wet, there was laughter and joy. And we were once again glad that mummy carries spare clothing around in the boot of the car. Well done mummy.

guinea pig skeleton

Happy Talk

Today we discovered that Plum can say more words than we thought! Clearly (to us, anyhow) she has said, 'Raggles', 'Rosie' (she has a toy of each bought for her for her first birthday by her brothers,) she has said, 'ball,' 'ipad,' 'nappy poo,' and  'hair.' I suspect to the untrained ear that none of these are articulated well enough but that's the way it goes.

We have had a couple of days with daddy in tow and more planned next week. Wednesday took us to our friend's house and a walk in their nearby woods. The smalls, six in total, swapped minecraft tips and played cars and lego and collected large sticks on the walk. Mummy followed this by going to the monthly home ed grown-ups rejuvenating evening, which lived up to it's name and included therapeutic mulled wine and discussions ranging from onsies to recent unschooling articles in the press.

Thursday is traditionally gymnastics day but has been a waning event in recent weeks and the boys choose to go swimming instead (a possibility with daddy around) and we spent over an hour with the pool to ourselves. Both the boys can touch the bottom in the deepest part which has contributed to an increase in confidence and Plum was a brave little girl boldly walking into ever deeper waters (closely follwed by mummy.) 
We followed this with a trip to the dentist, a family excursion. Bean had already said that he didn't want to go, which was fine but he still had to tag along as both mummy and daddy had a check-up booked. The boys both came into the surgery with mummy and Pumpkin went and sat straight onto the dentist chair. It was daddy who later pointed out that Pumpkin really enjoys brushing his teeth and always shows them off and asks if they are shiny. Mummy went next and then Bean went and sat on the dentist chair too. He paused for a moment and asked if he could sit on my lap (which he did) and then had his teeth checked. I suspect a combination of watching two people go before him and the dentist engaging with him (easily done when Bean has clearly lost three teeth.) 

Today has been an at home day with a late outing to Boys Brigade for their Christmas party. Bean went with his pj's on under his clothes as he didn't want to stay, just collect the craft items from previous weeks. Pumpkin joined in and i took Bean and Plum into a side room, Plum soon disappeared and went and joined Pumpkin. After about 15 minutes Bean went and joined in too. The rest of the day has been minecraft and Christmas gift making. Plum enjoying sensory play, working on rush hour with Bean and teaching him quarto (which he won!) and baking banana muffins.

Fighting Dragons

Any one who reads regularly will know that dinosaurs and dragons have been a recurring theme in the last few months. Fortunately we live in a town with its very own dragon legend but that aside the theme keeps popping up here and there.

Today it was Bean who set out to make a portal in minecraft. Anyone not familiar with the game will get entirely lost in the next paragraph or so but to ignore our success and not record it would be a momentous shame. It all began about an hour after Plum had gone to sleep and I had had a tough few minutes with Bean who had previously said that he wanted to make Christmas biscuits and had now changed his mind (I was a little upset...sometimes it's my expectations that need managing!) We went our separate ways for a while. After half an hour he came to find me to ask if i could help with his portal on minecraft. I honestly didn't have a clue what he was talking about! So we started at the beginning. What is it you want? What does it do? Where did you get the idea from? How far have you got? He showed me what he had built and expressed his frustration because it wasn't working. Not having seen one before I didn't know what it was supposed to look like, how you could tell it wasn't working, what it was supposed to do, or how to fix it. To Youtube we went! We used the first clip that we found to fix the portal that Bean had made but it still didn't work. We looked up a second clip, hoping it would show something slightly different and therefore shed some light but, it that showed exactly the same thing, (except it showed where the ender portal took you.) So we returned to the game and tried again to fix the portal Bean had made. It still didn't work. We decided that we needed to start again someplace new. After searching for a flat space Bean began placing the blocks in the correct formation for the portal. Unfortunately, just he was standing in the middle of it as he placed the last block and was immediately transported to the Enderworld. Fortunately we were all clued up on what to expect as the second Youtube clip had showed us where and what to expect. We (thought we) knew the only way back was to kill the Ender dragon. We spent the first 15 minutes trying to kill it before realising that it was replenishing itself from the Ender towers. Bean then destroyed these. After a further 30 minutes he discovered that if he killed himself by jumping down a large hole that he respawned back in the original world! But by now he was determined to kill that dragon. One and a half hours later he had done it, and the portal home was opened. (n.b. he did also flit about doing other things in this time: helping his brother; hopping about in excitement; getting himself a drink etc) Most importantly for me was the sheer joy he got out of setting and completing the challenge. He really persevered and was not disheartened at all by our repeated failing efforts. And we got to work at something together, even though it wasn't Christmas biscuits!

Pumpkin has been quiet today. Mostly playing games on the ipad. He (and me) had a disturbed nights sleep (awake from 4-6am) and for the first time in months (possibly over a year) came into bed with me early this morning and then fell back to sleep for a few hours. He said, later in the day, that he had had a sore tummy in the night but rubbed it and it felt better. He ate breakfast but skipped lunch, snacking on apples and grapes all day and then ate dinner.

Plum has had a fantastic day, making fudge and drawing, making Chritsmas cards and sorting laundry. All the things that take me away from doing and being with the boys have become things that Plum does with me and I have realised, in the last few weeks, that she is moving beyond the 'care' stage and learning more and more from the things that we do together. In truth she has probably been doing this for a while but it has just taken a while for me to cotton on and, of course, the care package continues.

And I must mention (fanfare please) that Bean, who does not eat fruit or vegetables and hasn't for over a year has this week eaten green beans and broccoli. In fact, the other night, he said, 'can i not eat my dinner and just have the green beans?' I tried not to fall of my chair with surprise and said, 'of course, that's fine. (n.b. we don't make our smalls eat food they don't want to. I tend to put something of everything on their plates or buffet style on the tale and they eat what they choose to.)

fire! fire!

Today has mostly been about fire. We made Christingles over the weekend and this morning, at breakfast, Bean asked if he could light them so we got out the matches and away he went.He had to use all the matches in the  box and then relight them until they burnt down to his fingers. This was then repeated when we ate dinner together with the added experiment of using cocktail sticks to toast mini marshmallows!

In between these two events I was left nursing and cuddling Plum who, after waking up for an hour, fell back to sleep for a further three and then after eating was very sick. Bean was amazing. As i was a little bit covered he voluntarily and of his own thinking went and got a bowl and then several towels and a carrier bag, all of which i made good use off.

And Pumpkin, well today he got himself dressed and was really excited to go to meet our friends at the park (which had to be cancelled last minute) It was such a shame as his reluctance to leave the house and the resulting negotiations and accommodations have been difficult to manage and so we were happy to all be keen to go together. However he was equally happy to be at home and watch Dennis the Menace.

All in a days work

The dinosaurs made a final appearance stuck in ice over the weekend. The smalls all joined forces to rescue them mostly using hot water and work tools.

There has been Christmas card making, Bean got half way through his first card and then disappeared with my crafty box because it has lots of small compartments that would be good for sorting his lego into and then spent half an hour doing just that. 

There has been sword fighting between all four of us at once, which rather overwhelmed Pumpkin.

We had a playdate at our house today which involved cars and lego and watching Horrible Histories, lunch and a trip to the park around the corner. Bean and Pumpkin played a 'let's pretend it's Christmas' type of game where they both got dressing up outfits and were superheros (thankfully we have ordered these for Christmas!)

And this afternoon we have watched How To Train Your Dragon, i love that film. 

And in between all this we have discussed the difference between conjurers and magic; magnetism; how brothers and sisters become twins; seasonal changes and why fruit only grows in the warmer months; how many days until Christmas; the use of shading in art work; and I have cleared up two major spillages, one was my fault and the second was Plum, 21 months, helping herself to milk from the fridge- well, it has been a while since i cleaned out under the fridge!

Soldier on

It's not always easy. I have spent two days listening to a new home ed mum recount her experience of a visit from the LEA. To be fair i've never heard a bad experience before in our area but then i've only heard of three families who have had visits. Predominantly I couldn't help but think that so much time and effort is now being put into liasons with the LEA when the time and effort could be better spent home educating her children. 

Bean has been particularly aggressive today. I'm not sure how best to handle it. Half the battle is me remaining calm, which i managed today but i'm exhausted and i've run out of ideas. 

The backdrop for the day was a two hour trip to the park, a quick visit to Seawhites to buy scrap books and home to watch Tom and Jerry race around the world. We had to get the map of the wall and find and name all the cities they went to. Pumpkin could name a fair few, recognising them by the landmarks on the cartoon.

Bean told me today that he uses his imagination very day and Pumpkin has been rhyming words non stop. Plum still has her cough but soldiers on...and I need chocolate.

All quiet

We have had a Total Home Day! A rarity for us that becomes more common as the winter months draw in. Also a rarity for us on a Thursday as it is gymnastics day. Both boys decided against it today, Bean is still fighting with a cold that is now causing him to have a sore throat and Plum is coughing away too. 

I spent most of my day cleaning the bathroom, planning our diary for December (extra treats as daddy has a few days off ) cooking yummy soup and carbonara, and getting a bookcase out of the loft and assembling it, all with Plum's help. The boys spent 99% of their day playing minecraft or watching minecraft videos on youtube as well as watching shows on cbeebies. There was a time, not so long ago, that the request to do this would have sent me crazy but I see so much learning in everything they do that it's not an issue anymore. For them, we are only two weeks in to their total freedom to choose what, when and why they use various technological devices so between the excitement of having total freedom over it and testing out whether mummy and daddy really mean it, they are using these devices above other choices at the moment. Part of me knows that this will probably change as time goes on, as the novelty wears off and as they come to realise that we did mean it, and the other part of me isn't worried about it either way. Today Bean and I worked out how to build a track in a cave and are puzzled by why you can eat cake but not other foods, we also figured out how to cook fish...all on minecraft! My involvment with Pumpkin was more food orientated today, he was keen to keep his minecraft exploits a secret and I suspect that he has been building something in mummy's world as a surprise. 

We did spend a few minutes looking up a picture of a centaur after seeing a model of centaur bones at the auction house this week and read a few library books together (Mr Tick the Teacher,The Diabolical Mr Tiddles, and Charlie and Lola) and Bean told me that he already knows how to write 'cat.'

Dinosaur very, very, long

Who could resist a second (and last) look at the diplodocus skeleton? What an amazing opportunity to get close to something so special. We managed to work out that we could fit Misty in our back garden. I took far more photos today and realised that Bean was predominantly interested in the taxidermy, Pumpkin spotted anything skeletal and Plum enjoyed the statues of people. The number of photos still wont capture the eclectic feel of the place. Bean insisted on taking notepad and pencil with him but didn't use them when we were there, however, he did use them on the car journey to and from to draw pictures. We talked about the possibility of extending a  porch on the front of our house and he draw a version for me. 

The dinosaur visit led to watching a few news reports on the subject, the BBC and Newsround both reported on it, and we discussed the process of filming and interviewing and editing and journalism. I'm hoping that it'll make at least the local paper this week too. Bean and I have played dinosaur snap and pairs, as well as getting out the dotty dinosaur game that we have. There has been a lot of minecraft today from both the boys and other than a brief moment when Pumpkin went and did a pencil drawing of a tractor, he has been engrossed with games on the ipad today.