Monster & Teeny

Monday Dentist for us all first thing which is always interesting for the children, and of course creates a whole new wave of enthusiasm for cleaning their teeth . We’d planned a pretty quiet rest of the day with the children rediscovering their toys and the TV again after a week of living in a field! We watched Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and some Discovery Kids and they had a mammoth play with their toy plastic animals and dinosaurs.

Whilst away at camp last week Monster had been privy to a rather silly conversation between several adults about evolution and creationism and has been asking questions about it all ever since. Which I strive to answer as best I can! Today he wanted to know if the whole big bang followed by dinosaurs followed by people thing would repeat again and what would come after people? This led to various conversations of mind blowing type questions and ‘we don’t actually know…’ type answers. We also talked about how we only know as much about the world as we do because people ask questions, challenge the accepted way and set about finding out answers. Bit like HE then really!

Badgers in the evening for Monster which he is really enjoying despite not being able to tell me what he’s actually been doing when he gets back in the car afterwards - he’s making friends and seems to be fairly popular though and it gives him some time alone to be just Monster without anyone watching him, A and Teeny some time to have just the two of them and me a whole hour per week to sit in my car in complete silence reading a book - bliss!

Tuesday A mostly at home day today with a couple of brief outings. One to the post office to post an ebay parcel off which was a lovely half hour round trip walking in the sunshine with a child holding each hand, talking about the gardens and various things we passed on the way. When I was small and imagined motherhood that was exactly how I thought it might be - walking in the sunshine, holding hands and talking about the world around us.
We also popped out to collect a freecycle fish tank for Monster’s fish who are now swimming in luxury with pumps, lights and gravel. They hardly know themselves but are loving their ‘free upgrade’.

Plenty more Discovery Kids watching, which I adore. If they watch it themselves they often come away and incorporate it into their play, if I watch with them we chatter about what is happening.

Wednesday Socialising aplenty as we met up with SIL and cousins in the local park for a couple of hours with picnic lunch and then Ros came round with Pea, Boo and Buzz for further playing and chatting. Pea also discovered our much ignored tadpoles have turned into tiny little frogs so we rehomed them into an old sandpit with rocks for climbing and shady places.

Thursday More socialising, very last minute in it’s arranging with Lucy, R & R. We went to their house which tends to work better and Monster & Teeny played very happily with R & R inside and out, upstairs and down while Lucy and I managed lots of chatting. We also wandered down to their local park for a while too.
When we got home we put the toy animals away by annoucing the name of each one and making appropriate animal noises or making up songs about them. This took slightly longer than just chucking them in the box but was great fun!

Friday Food shopping in the morning followed by packing up a picnic and going to the big pleasure park on the seafront at the end of our road. We drove there as although it is probably only a 15 minute walk or so the idea of the return walk with two tired children and a picnic bag was too much to bear. We had our lunch, a play on some rocks which are ideal for climbing about on and a ride round the park on the miniature train before Monster came over feeling ill so we cut our visit short and came home (another reason to be glad we’d driven!).

He recovered once home again so we made some popcorn, watched a film and had a lengthy communal game of Zoombinis.

Saturday A lunchtime barbecue at BIL & SIL’s house followed by a very nice afternoon for the children plus cousins playing in their lovely garden while we sat and chatted. Loads of imaginative play, including using props such as sand, water, climbing frames and various bugs and beasties!
A last minute invitation to my parents to join us for dinner was turned into a bit of a party by friends calling in on their way home from a party making for a loud and riotous evening with the children allowed to get back out of bed and join us all for a while.

Sunday Off to London for the day for the documented elsewhere already Feminist Parents meetup. We had a lovely day, as fun meeting up with online friends and putting faces and real names to usernames as the journey through London there and back was including loads of people watching and a look round a big Chinese supermarket complete with live lobsters and crayfish. We’ve been up to London a fair few times in the last year or so and it’s lovely to see the children on such familiar terms with landmarks such as Big Ben, the London Eye and Nelsons Column.

I was far too relaxed at last weeks Muddle Puddle summer camp at Kessingland to recall what happened on any specific day so this will be a summary rather than diary of the week.

This was our fifth Home Ed camp, our second Kessingland but our first time in a tent. We’ve spent lots of time with many of the people present including sleepovers, local meet ups, parties and a group holiday last year, but there were several new families to the group to get to know too.

Tent living was far from the dreadful existance I had been fretting it might be and we all loved it, the weather was pretty much perfect for each occassion with wind for kite flying, sun for clothes drying and sandcastle making and cloud cover for a day at the local zoo.

We did tie dye, sandcastle building, needle felting, polyfilla crafts, kite making and basket weaving. We had a communal barbecue and a cabaret night event. A day trip to the local attraction, Africa Alive! which we had a couple of animal encounter talks with a chance to meet, hold and stroke various animals and a sponsored event on the last day thought up and organised by the children.

There was adult and child socialising aplenty with water pistol fights, team games and education at every corner.

My flickr snaps are here for anyone wanting to get the full visual experience of the week! 

As we’re heading off on the Muddlepuddle Summer Camp this morning so rather than do a two week catch up when we get back I’ll do a Monday to Friday round up for this week so far.

Monday Lots of plasticine playing during the day with Monster making an excellent Shrek and a Wallace copying from the dvd covers of the films. The Shrek was his first attempt at that character and was instantly recognisable so he is really getting good at spotting the key features on characters. Must speak to him about caricatures and see if that is something he wants to play around with a bit.

Badgers in the evening for Monster where they continued they Germany theme by trying some German food. He was unsure of precisely what he’d eaten other than it was sausage (I assume frankfurter) and some round meat with was lovely. Will have to take him to the deli counter at the supermarket and have him try and identify it again.

Tuesday Another at home day aside from a quick trip to the local library in the morning to return a pile of books and gather a smaller pile of new ones. We also found Kronk’s New Groove on dvd to hire. We watched The Emperors New Groove last month as part of our Family Film Night monthly event and it was so enjoyed that we got it on video from a charity shop, so the follow up was found and borrowed with great excitement.

We spent the afternoon watching that and enjoying having a front row seat out of our lounge window for some road resurfacing going on outside. We watched the various vehicles come along and do their respective bits - the tar spreader, the gravel chucker, the roller and the gritter. We’re now a bit sad that we will probably miss the white lines being repainted as we’ll be away.

Wednesday First thing we had a very lengthened search for some yoghurt for the curry I was cooking for dinner. Our local shop didn’t have any, the slightly less local shop didn’t either and we ended up having to drive to the nearest supermarket. But it did mean we had a nice half an hour or so out and about walking in the sunshine spotting flowers, creatures and getting a closer look at the new road as we walked alongside it. We talked about the obvious indicators of Spring changing to Summer, bumped into a friend we’d not seen in months and months and spent some time chatting to neighbours.

After lunch we met up with SIL and cousins for fruit and veg picking at the local PYO farm. Strawberries, rhubarb and broad beans were all on offer. We picked (and ate ) massive amounts of strawberries, which we’ve spent the rest of the week eating so there was much discussion about planting, crops, when different things are sown and ready to eat and so on. Not to mention the loveliness of being out in the sunshine picking fruit.

We came home via my parents and called in for tea with my Dad.

Thursday Last minute shopping at Tescos in the morning for things like cat food and cat litter to leave for Dad to look after our cats at home, and another air bed for us to bring camping. We had an interesting conversation about creation vs evolution with Monster asking some fairly unanswerable questions which I could only give him various beliefs or perspectives for rather than concrete proof. Tough being quite so simplistic on quite such enormous issues.

In the afternoon Ali and F came over for lunch, playing and chats so a lovely time was had by all there with various dressing up and imaginary play for the children and a variety of the deep and meaningful and the inane and nonsensical. In the evening I packed all our stuff up ready for camping and spent ages agonising over which clothes to take for us all given how good the weather forecasts are and how typical it would be for last minute wind, rain, hail or even snow to descend over Suffolk!

Friday My Mum and I took the children to the South Of England Show  we went last year with A and my Dad too and it was excellent then. It is a big agricultural and livestock fair above all else but like most things it has become fairly commercial so there are hundreds of stands selling stuff like camping and outdoors gear as well as posh handmade clothes, bags and shoes hoping to attract the more upmarket end of the annual visitors there. In the showground in the middle there is a constant display of horse competitions and livestock competitions and plenty of promotional giveaways, birds of prey demonstrations, arts and crafts and so on to look at and have a go at. We had a lovely day there, the weather remaining perfect and the children got lots out of it. Monster had a go at milling his own flour from grain and it was bagged up for him to bring home so we’ll be making a cake from that next weekend and Teeny particularly enjoyed watching the Hackney Carriage horse racing with the prancing horses. I have photos which I’ll upload next week and add into this post.

Monday - A rare Bank Holiday with A off work. We went up to London for the day so I could take Monster to the Pixar Exhibition at the Science Museum. I’ve been wanting to take him there for weeks and had originally planned to leave Teeny at home with either A or my parents but we realised it was due to end soon so we all went and Mum, Monster and I went to the exhibition while Dad, A and Teeny went round the rest of the museum.

It was quite pricey to get in and clearly aimed at an older audience than Monster but I had hoped it would be something he would get something out of now and be able to refer back to as well. He loves films and wants to work in some area of cinema and animation (or so he tells me with all his five year old wisdom ) so it was great to have some illustrations of things we’ve talked about, some real life story boards and models of characters from Monsters Inc, The Incredibles and Toy Story all of which are firm favourites of his anyway and there was stuff there which I am sure we will talk about in the future.

There was a short film shown on a massive screen which was good but by far our favourite bit was the Toy Story zoetrope  which we watched three times and discussed at length how it worked. That clearly went in as two days later he brought me a jointed figure, told me to keep blinking and moved the joints so it appeared to be running - he told me that blinking is the same effect as the strobe lights used in the zoetrope display and that moment alone probably justified the entrance fee for me!

We had a long bus ride round looking for somewhere to eat our lunch and ended up in Holland Park for a picnic and a play before heading back to Victoria via two bus rides. Lots of chatting about London generally, spotting things through the train and bus windows and lengthy games of noughts and crosses too.

Tuesday - Half term meant we enjoyed a lovely day at a local garden centre attraction with some friends who’d normally be in school and their mum, Mel. Monster, Teeny and their friends L & L spent a lovely couple of hours dashing round the various attractions and completing a flag treasure hunt and a round of crazy golf. We had a picnic lunch and ice creams in the cafe. Lots of pirate role play for a lengthy game on a wooden pirate ship too.

Home for some hama bead play.

Also worthy of note was Monster putting his own shoes on and then helping Teeny with hers while I was tidying up the geomags. Cute!

Wednesday - I had the doctors first thing where the children sat and played with a strange plastic toy with eight legs on wheels and antennae made from springs - an interesting to listen to conversation between them about what species it might be (’But Monster it can’t be a spider, spiders don’t have antennae!’). We also discussed how if someone mentions a body part being itchy you automatically scratch it on your own body, so much fun making each other scratch eyebrows and elbows for the rest of the day.

Another picnic lunch taken to the park to meet up with SIL, cousins and another family from our local HE group. It’s a fab park with huge open spaces, a playground and an area in the middle with trees surrounding a bike track. Monster and one of the older boys headed off into the trees together so Monster enjoyed spending time with an older friend for an hour or so. We stayed until the wind drove us home again, where the children did some drawing, dot to dots and watching Discovery Kids.

Thursday - A quick walk round the local shops turned into a letter hunt as I tasked the children with finding all the letters of their names. Monster on the way there and Teeny (with Monster’s help) on the way back. They found them all, on lamp posts, drain covers, house nameplates, car registration plates, the post box, the board with the local newspaper headline on outside the newsagent and the road names signs.

Parent 1 and 3/4 of the children from HEMUK arrived at lunchtime, so the children played, watched films and generally had a great time while P1 and I moved round the house infront of them drinking tea and chatting. They stayed for dinner and left us with a tent to borrow for Kessingland next week.

Friday - First thing we did food shopping for the week. I never used to take the children unless forced to and it was always an ordeal but I have started to take them along more and actually they are pretty helpful now and seem to get lots out of it if we are unhurried about it. They can identify most of the fruit and veg now even if they don’t eat much of it and Monster has started to look at the flags on the packaging and chat about country of origin too. We also talk about cost, ingredients and what we can use foods for as we go. Monster is also now familiar enough with the geography of the store to dash off and get any forgotten items too.

We came home and I set about putting the tent up in the garden as a practise run - far better to have gotten the swearing and red faced through sheer effort out of the way in the relative privacy of my own garden than waited for the audience of next weekend! I managed it and was quite proud of myself and the children sat in it drawing and proclaiming it ‘the best tent ever!’

Saturday -  I had a very long lie in while A and the children did some gardening, heaped various items ready for camping in a tidy pile in the garage, inflated our air bed to test for holes, set up the camping stove and lanterns to test they were working and cleaned both cars inside and out including hoovering. I did some baking and then A and I took the tent down together.

My Mum arrived at lunchtime bearing luxury lunch items so we had a nice lazy afternoon in the garden and the children played with sand, water and a wide variety of bugs and insects.

Sunday -  We packed our final picnic of the week and headed off to the local Springwatch event  where we had a fab time. It was free and there was loads to do. We watched sheep shearing and nabbed a couple of small bits and talked about how it is spun into wool and can be dyed, we made badges, butterfly prints on sticks, potted up sunflower seeds and made decorative pot covers, made animal footprint casts, clay coil pots, coloured in masks, made bird feeders, pledged a promise to help save The Earth and stuck it on a footprint sticker on an inflatable globe, looked at bats, stroked a crab and generally had a great time.

Then we dropped the children off with my parents while A and I went and collected a porta potty from some kind folk from freecycle which I hope will make all the difference in turning our tent into an en suite!