Happily Home Edding

Sad Family News & Notes from the Asylum

2009-05-11T16:39:00.012+01:00

It's been a roller coaster few weeks here, with some exciting highs but also some terribly sad family news and related family tensions.

My brother-in-law, David Harper, died on the 2nd May, in Canada, his adopted country, following a short battle with pancreatic cancer. David's death was unexpected, as the news until then had been that although in hospital, he was fighting well and expected to make a good recovery, but I gather that complications with his lungs set in and in the end it was all too much. Our thoughts since then have been very much with David's partner Barbara and his four children, and my own concerns have also been for Jon, who is dealing with his big brother's death with quiet strength and dignity.

Jon's passport has expired and although we were ready to head to an emergency renewal appointment in order for him to be able to attend David's funeral in Canada, my elderly father in law, who lives with us, pretty much emotionally blackmailed Jon into not attending - for reasons that make me spit with fury and which I shan't go into here.

Sadly, my relationship with my father in law has become ever more strained since the news of David's death - at one point, he accused us, behind our backs, of ignoring him and not caring about his grief, despite the fact that he never has anything to say to us other than to complain or belittle us, and despite the fact that when invited to join us at any time he's usually totally uninterested and rates watching TV far more important than being with us. Oh, and despite that fact that he couldn't care less about Jon's grief for his big brother, even moving Jon to comment the other day that he feels he may spend the rest of his life being blamed for not being David and that his father perhaps feels that "the wrong one" died. I'm disgusted with the way father in law has behaved.....but as anyone who's read here for a while might now, this kind of behaviour from his is sadly nothing new. I can make allowances for grief causing people to behave oddly - but for him, I'm afraid it's normal. I could rant for hours, but out of respect for my brother in law's memory, I shall - temporarily - leave it at that.

Jon was asked by The Henley Standard to write an obituary for his brother, as they grew up in the Henley area and David was well known in the community there. I'll add a link to it when it goes into this week's issue.

On a happier note, Jon's first paranormal investigation on the 1st May went exceptionally well. I'm so proud of him. He had no idea where they were going right up until the time the arrived but he was able to tell the investigating team, among other things, details of the floorplan of the ruined building (which room was the kitchen, that there used to be a walled garden in such and such a spot, etc, all verified), information about the landscape of the area before the building existed and details of various spirits who were communicating that night. Notably, he gave the names Rosalind and Samuel and told how Rosalind was searching for two children who were not her own, but for whom she was the nursemaid; further details emerged from his spirit link about how Samuel (who it turns out was Rosalind's young boyfriend) had been looking after the children during a flood during which one of them drowned and that he had been full of guilt and remorse. All of this was verified too.

During the investigation, the team took lots of recordings, both video and audio. On the audio recording, there's some very clear EVP, including a voice saying "Jon, go now, it's my fault" and repeating again "It's my fault". Fascinatingly, this took place during the time at which Jon was holding a "conversation" with the spirit contact Samuel and the EVP on the recording is hear during the pauses after Jon speaks each time, during which the people present heard nothing. I gather from those who've heard it that it's spine-tingling stuff! On the night, the team noticed that during Jon's pauses, as he was listening to spirit, their sound meters were recording spikes in the gaps, even though nothing could be heard.

There's a report about the evening on PP Paranormal's site here. We're all exceedingly chuffed and very proud of Jon :-)) This Wednesday, Jon is going out on another investigation with the team, again to an unknown but apparently prestigious location, this time with the press present and an audience of staff members from wherever they're going too. Can't wait to hear about it!

The other week, Jon took Emily out and about to the Newark Air Museum, which she much enjoyed, and we've also been to visit The Deep with friends. We had to cancel a planned trip to the National Parrot Sanctuary for a variety of reasons, but will be going soon. Meanwhile, Jon came back from a shopping trip the other day with a sparkly surprise - he'd had his ear pierced :-)) Well, re-pierced, since he'd had it done before as a teenager, but had been wanting it redone for ages and hadn't got round to it.

Emily's at her kickboxing grading tonight before visiting friends. She had a mini trauma earlier this week when she half knocked out a molar tooth, leaving it at a very weird angle and bleeding profusely. She has quite a fear of dentists, so that caused a few tears, but ultimately the dentist advised down the phone that there was no need to attend unless it didn't come out on its own within a couple of days. It did, eventually and as an added bonus the matching one on the other side also popped out this morning, with no warning, lol.

Home ed wise, things have been progressing nicely. Emily's been doing lots of maths and English, and a fair bit of history and science too. We didn't get all that much done last week as we were all somewhat thrown by news of David's death, but we're starting to get back on track now. Towards the end of April, we did do some fascinating microscope work, more of which will follow soon as Emily loves doing that. Some photos:

Emily's cheek cells, stained blue so you can see the cell nucleus.

Blood cells....mine, lol. Emily didn't want to volunteer her blood, even in the interests of medical science ;-)

SandTable salt

Fashion designer has apparently gone on the back burner, career-wise - Emily has decided, very seriously, that she wishes to become a vet. Lol, probably one of the most academically demanding things she could have chosen - I read on one of the university vet school sites the other day that they had nearly 200 applicants for every place this year. Eeep. Whereas we could most likely have found a way around formal qualifications for entry into a fashion course, I really don't think that Emily's going to be able to waltz her way into an incredibly competitive vet degree course without at least some of the relevant bits of paper. For which, we're talking a minimum of seven As at GCSE, plus top grades in biology, chemistry and either maths or physics A levels. Double eeeeeeeeeep.

Should Emily still want to go down this route in a few year's time, we'll have another serious think about qualifications and I'll talk to admissions tutors etc about home education....and yes, we have plenty of time...and yes, of course she might change her mind....BUT in the meantime this does back up my instinct that faffing about for the next six years "hoping" that everything will be OK doesn't quite cut the mustard. We'd already decided that we were going to be knuckling down to some serious work, so we still will. It may or may not ever lead to any formal exams and bits of paper and hoops to jump through, and time will tell in that department, but for now we're going to focus on plenty of science (and lots of sewing, lol, should fashion design make a comeback).

Oh yeah, and before anyone goes away thinking what a terrible mother I am for putting all this pressure on my sweet little ten year old....I'd like to point all that all of this "career focused" stuff comes from the little ten year old herself. She's very aware of her future and very determined and actually wants to work hard towards a goal. None of it was put into her head by us. Some ten year olds haven't even thought about any of this kind of thing, which is great. Some have, which is also great, and mine has. *Steps off soap box but is tired of feeling that I have to defend my home ed approach*

I found some brilliant and rigorous "old fashioned" science books, one each for chemistry, biology and physics. My Dad was going to do lots of physics with Emily anyway, so that's sorted, and we'll take our time working through the biology one. As far as chemistry goes, I found this amazing book which goes into enormous detail about what you need to set up a "proper" chemistry lab at home and where to find the equipment and chemicals. The shop bought chemistry sets are all very well and good, up to a point, but quite frankly health and safety stuff has dumbed them down soooo much that you have to wonder why they bother at all. If Emily's still serious about the vet thing by the time she's, say, 13, I think we will go ahead and kit her out with some proper equipment.

Jon's been working very hard in the garden and it's looking absolutely divine out there. The vegetable patches in particular are pretty impressive, I think. We have a huge variety of things growing out there :-))

Web of tiny spiderlings, from the greenhouse. Ugh. All very well and good, but Jon left them out of the greenhouse during a windy spell....so next thing we know, there are hundreds of tiny spiderlings....everywhere. Double ugh.

Lulu is now nine months old, and after a very wobbly week during which the stress of everything else didn't exactly sit well with a very demanding parrot, we've finally figured out that apparently the parrot "terrible twos" can start around now in African Greys. Indeed. And they have. Our beautiful girl is adoring and loving one minute and an absolute little devil the next. She's figuring out where she is in the pecking order and acting up, pushing the boundaries, just like a little toddler, bless her. It's infuriating at times.....but now I know that it's normal at this age, I can relax a little bit more and not get so stressed about it. Lulu's a real handful sometimes....but if we won the lottery, I'd still want a houseful of parrots, so I guess she can't be all that bad!! She's just being a parrot. She's doing her job. It's our job to understand her natural behaviour and work with it rather than trying to stop her being a parrot. We're getting there.

And some tabbies, to finish with. Kibby Juliet, looking rather alarmed, plus a rare sight these days - the two tabbies, Romeo and Juliet, together in the same place and not hissing at one another. They were inseparable as kittens, but they seem to have taken a dislike to one another recently. Funny moggies.

Working Out Rather Nicely

2009-04-21T16:16:00.004+01:00

Life is motoring along and things seem to be coming together rather well, for a change.

Jon has some exciting news: he's been taken on as the medium for a paranormal investigation group and will be going off on two investigations in May. Very much looking forward to hearing all about those :-))

We had a very pleasant Easter; skipped a big Easter dinner this year in favour of an evening of family games and buffet instead. Couldn't miss an Easter egg hunt, though - this year we hid a dozen plastic eggs in the garden, each one containing a cryptic clue to somewhere else in the house, where Emily found some little gifts, mostly books and the inevitable chocolate, lol.

With the arrival of her new bed and mattress, Emily is now finally and firmly ensconced in her "blue room" for real, and the junkheap aka the pink room aka the old bedroom is now a spare room cum parrot training room. Speaking of parrot training, there's been a definite improvement over this last week. Emily and Lulu and either Jon or I are now making a point of spending ten minutes a day in the pink room, where there are no distractions for Lulu and nowhere for her to fly off to out of reach. Using the clicker and bits of custard cream biscuit (!!) as her all time favourite reward, Lulu will now take treats from Emily without puffing up or biting and will tolerate Emily putting her hands near Lulu. In order to help Emily get over her fear (because the bites do *really* hurt), she is temporarily wearing gardening gloves during these ten minute sessions.

It's natural that Emily is wary of putting her hands near Lulu, given her experience so far, but unfortunately of course that has "rewarded" Lulu and reinforced her behaviour - if she lunges at Emily, Emily moves, which is what she wants. So we have to break that cycle by proving to Lulu that no matter whether she lunges or bites, Emily's hands are staying put. I do believe it will only take a couple of weeks of consistency for her to finally figure out that Emily is a senior flock member ;-) and could do with a little respect.

The last couple of days, Lulu has been out of her cage from 8am until 6pm, in a combination of free upstairs, free downstairs and in her huge garden cage. She was worn out yesterday evening and couldn't wait to get back into her "home" to go to sleep, bless her. She does enjoy being out in the garden though and now willingly steps into her big garden cage. She's also enjoying being "showered" with the hosepipe on mist setting. Jon has been working soooo hard in the garden and it shows - we have an amazing selection of vegetables on the go now and the fence and veggie beds have been painted and cleaned up, as has the brick border at the end of the garden, new grass seed is down in the bare bits, flowers are sprouting all over the show - it's a delight :-)

Home education has been going very well recently too. Among other things, over the last ten days, Emily has studied longshore drift in physical geography and has completed lots more work on the second world war, including interviewing my Mum about her experience of life during the Blitz - my Mum lived just outside London, in an area full of munition factories and the like, and much of her area was completely destroyed. She was five when war began and has some very vivid memories to describe and fascinating information about her father's work; he was responsible for finding food, temporary accommodation, clothing etc for those who had been made homeless by the bombing in their area.

Yesterday, Emily started having maths lessons with my Dad, which they both seem to have rather enjoyed. She had another one this morning, and that will be a daily thing for half an hour or so once Autumn arrives and Mum and Dad are around here instead of up at St Bees. She'll also do a couple of hours of physics/technology with Gramps once a week. Yesterday afternoon, we enjoyed working on the earthworm and soil survey - we were sent a pack for this a while ago from Opal. Emily found sixteen earthworms altogether and had great fun measuring and identifying them and classifying our soil; she was bare handed most of the time, but having discovered that some of the worms emitted yucky yellow fluid when handled - very hard to wash off, too! - the gloves came out, lol.

This morning, after maths, Emily and I started on a study of Anne Frank's Diary and the holocaust in general. Emotionally demanding, to put it mildly. This afternoon, we had a debate about the pros and cons of capital punishment, including mock interviews with Emily taking the part of someone on each side of the debate in turn. She then wrote up the arguments in an attempt at a formal essay - I was very impressed with her efforts at that, especially considering it's the first time she's tried to do a full scale essay of that nature. We've also been doing a lot of English mixed in among everything else and we're looking forward to getting stuck into projects from this Letts KS3 Star English book. I've seen a lot, lot, lot of English textbooks over the last few years, but this one is completely different. It's a series of indepth investigations into (for instance) the origins of the English language, with research tasks for children to undertake and report back on; it looks so much more fun than the bog standard, uninspiring workbook route.

We're off to swimming tomorrow, The Deep on Friday with friends, an RAF/WW2 museum next Tuesday and the National Parrot Sanctuary later that week or the beginning of the next one. It's a busy time, but things are falling into place nicely :-))

A Schizophrenic Parrot and Other Musings

2009-04-10T15:33:00.011+01:00

Oh dear, a month since my last post. How ever did I manage when I used to update here almost daily?? I must be growing very inefficient in my old age.

It's been a real mixed bag of a month, with some highs and some lows. Our financial situation has long since reached crisis point and is now wavering between blind optimism ("something'll turn up, it always does") and extreme pessimism ("better get used to bread and water from now on") with disconcerting frequency. We lost one major contract, with the client citing financial cutbacks, and we've had to accept a pay cut in the last remaining biggie, so it's quite dire when one has on one's bleak reality glasses. The money situation has caused quite a few tears, many tantrums and countless moments of despondency in the last few weeks....but we'll cope. It's not like there's a Plan B in which you don't cope, is it?

On a nicer note, there have been lots of good moments with friends over the last few weeks. We still see Jacki and family every Friday and we have plans to take the girls to all kinds of places once the dratted school holidays have finished. The other week, we went to the Museum of Lincolnshire Life, which was fun. Emily and I are back to going swimming every Wednesday; last Wednesday we took Romy too which was lovely, as it's ages since they've been swimming together. Emily and I have also been pottering around and we have a growing list of places we're determined to get to this year. A return visit to Gainsborough Old Hall the other week was pleasant too.

Emily went on her first ever camping trip this week with her friend Maisie and Maisie's Mum Janette. They went off to stay at Thornwick Bay near Flamborough Head; it was just for the one night, but a fantastic time seems to have been had by all :-))

We've been wrestling with trying to work out some kind of holiday event this year - given our dire lack of funds and the need to cater for a parrot, that hasn't been all that easy. However, we've found a few places not too far away who will take parrots while their owners are away, which is a relief. It wouldn't be fair to leave Mum and Dad with responsibility for Lulu as well as the cats and we can't take her with us, so parrot boarding it must be. At least the places I've found are all family homes with their own parrots so we know she won't be just stuck in a cage for days on end.

With that now sorted out, it looks as if we'll be able to get to St Bees a few times this year, hopefully with some of Emily's friends coming too for a few days at a time. We also want to go somewhere else, possibly Somerset for a week or two, and there might be a few one night trips in the pipeline too to various parts of the country that are just a bit too far away for day trips.

Cats are all fine, although Severus is still missing Voldy very much, I think. He seems to be looking for him in the garden often, which is quite heartbreaking :-( Here's an enormous looking Juliet with Emily, and her brother Romeo sleepy in the garden of Emily's dollshouse!

Lulu is being a schizophrenic parrot. For me and Jon, most of the time, she's completely adorable and very affectionate and largely well behaved. Every day she's out of her cage for a good five to six hours and she's looking very healthy and happy. Her "vocabulary" is increasing all the time, with lots of new clicks, tunes, whistles and vocalisations - she now does a faultless miaow that is indistinguishable from Severus' miaow, lol. Once, she did say Lulu - but she hasn't ever repeated that, so maybe it was a fluke. African Grey's don't really begin to talk until they're over a year old though, so she's still at babble stage :-)) Last week we bought a large dog cage which we can use as an "outdoor cage" for Lulu so she can keep us company in the garden during the summer. We do have a parrot harness for her, which would allow her to be out with us and not caged, but I'm a bit concerned about the fact that the leash is not elasticated....what happens if she goes to fly and then comes to a very sudden full stop?? Anyway, here she is trying out her outdoor cage for first time:

We are still having problems with Lulu and Emily, though :-(( If anything, it's getting worse in as much as Lulu now dive bombs Emily if Emily's walking underneath her play rope or anything like that and Emily's been nastily bitten a few time in the last week or two just for offering Lulu a treat. That girl has the patience of a saint, I have to say. Although I'm sure it must be upsetting for Emily, she's still trying and she's not giving up on Lulu, which makes me very proud of her. We've tried most of the ideas and methods that have been suggested to us for improving the relationship between Lulu and Emily, all to no avail so far, which is distressing. Not quite sure what we can try next, but we'll think of something....

Emily's done some Easter crafts over the last week, with decorated eggs for our seasonal tree and blown and painted eggs too. This morning she spent a few hours making Easter cards and tomorrow she'll be making an Easter cake and cupcakes. There's plenty of chocolate involved in that, naturally. Emily's new bed has arrived, but we're still waiting for the mattress to be delivered before she can move permanently into her blue room and her old, tiny, pink room will be spare.

Education has been going well, if rather patchily. We're focusing on history at the moment and Emily's enjoying learning about world war II still. We watched Carrie's War the other day and Emily wrote letters in the role of an evacuee. We've also learnt a great deal about the lead up to WWII, who did what, when, why and how things might have been different. Emily's going to interview my Mum shortly about her life in London during the Blitz.

There have been a few education wobbles, mind, notably one afternoon where it took Emily a whole hour to do ten fractions. When she presented me, eventually, with a scribbled on, illegible page of fractions some of which hadn't even been copied correctly from the book in the first place, I, um, wasn't happy. To put it mildly. We had a huge battle over that - it just pushed all the wrong buttons for me. We're a tolerant family and by and large Emily gets to do pretty much whatever the heck she likes....so when I ask for a mere ten minutes of her time to do a focused task, I expect to get it without a fuss. So I was upset and angry, then she was upset and angry....poor Jon got to mediate, yet again, but we all learnt something from the situation.

I still don't honestly know what to do regarding secondary level education for Emily. I'm (mostly) convinced that a) she doesn't need to jump through GCSE hoops BUT b) that doesn't mean that she doesn't need to be learning. At the times when she goes off down a self-directed avenue, that's great...but I'm not an unschooler and I don't think days on end playing on facebook (!) can be counted as an education. Up to a point, sure...IT skills and all that, lol....but not at the exclusion of anything else. So I think we'll vaguely follow some GCSE-ish syllabi and see where that gets us, without the pressure of having to sit the exams at the end of it. Every time I talk about this to someone, I end up changing my mind, because the rosy picture of autonomous education is very seductive ...but in practice it doesn't work for us. I'm tired of being made to feel guilty about that, to be honest. Emily gets masses of time to tiptoe through the daisies, to play and to follow her interests; I don't see the harm in ALSO requiring and encouraging some formal study.

Anyway, with the above in mind, I was delighted that my Dad has volunteered to help Emily with the scary subjects, lol, most especially maths, physics and technology. Having spent most of his career teaching maths/science/engineering type subjects at Reading College and then later in an army college, he's ideally placed to work with her on all the subjects I....dislike. He's having a read through some textbooks to get an idea of the scope and level we're looking for and has a real gleam in his eye ;-)

Daunting Responsibility

2009-03-11T11:50:00.006Z

Emily, bless her heart, is feeling a little worn down by the cares of the world just now. In particular, she is worried about her future. Having successfully convinced herself that she's no good at anything at all, she worries about whether she'll be able to get qualifications she might need and whether, having obtained qualifications, she'll even be any good at her chosen career, whatever that might end up being. She worries that the fields she thinks she might want to enter, particularly fashion, are too competitive and that she won't stand a chance. She worries about all kinds of things which, presumably, a ten year old shouldn't be worrying about and which if we were doing our parenting job well she wouldn't be concerned about for a long while yet.

Meanwhile, Jon and I stand and watch and weep internally if not externally. How easy it would be if she were in school. Hand over all that responsibility to the school. Let them "guide" her towards a future career in the same way that they guided us - guidance which, it must be said in my case at least, wasn't worth the ten minutes it took to deliver the bloody obvious in a chilly careers room one winter morning aged 16. Largely incompetent and unpleasant my teachers may have been, but I wasn't worrying at ten years old about my future, because I knew I'd be getting the "right" qualifications at the "right" age and that it would all become clear just like it would for any other "normal" child at school.

Emily's career angst was sparked by the letter about the 11+ from the local grammar school; that's what brought all these conflicting emotions to a head, for all of us. If Emily genuinely wanted to go to school, we would facilitate that as I know many other home ed parents have done. She maintains that she doesn't want to go if there is any way round not going....but no matter how much we reassure her that there are plenty of ways around the s-word, there still seems to be some nagging doubt in the back of her mind.

It's becoming ever clearer to me that home educating a primary aged child is an absolute delight...but that once the child approaches secondary school age, it becomes altogether a different kettle of not entirely sweet smelling fish. Blend raging hormones and normal pre-teen angst with a naturally sensitive disposition and a still-working-on-it lack of confidence and we have a fairly tricky situation going on here with Emily. She's at the age where kids start to realise that their parents are fallible after all and can and do make mistakes....so what, she wonders no doubt, if we make mistake with her education? What if we bugger it up royally and she ends up unable to access the opportunities she could have accessed at school?

What indeed. We would never play games with Emily's future and would put her into school in a heartbeat if we genuinely believed she would be better off there or that by staying at home she is limiting her future. I wholeheartedly *believe* that we can do a much better job than any school can in giving Emily a decent childhood, a flourishing family life and an excellent education. I wholeheartedly *believe* that my child is an individual and that I do not want her jumping through someone else's entirely arbitrary hoops for the next six years of her life. I wholeheartedly *believe* that we can take alternative qualification routes, perhaps via the OU, which will stand her in much better stead than a set of identikit GCSEs will. I believe all of those things fervently. But what if I'm wrong? What if we're wrong? What if, in ten year's time, Emily curses us to hell and back for not having sent her to school?

My rational mind has it all planned out. We've looked at college courses and their entry requirements in Emily's areas of interest. We've reassured both ourselves and our daughter that yes, we can do this. We've planned at least three alternative routes to any one destination. And of course, at any age up to around 14 or so, the s-word remains an option should she suddenly change her mind and want to join the rat race. It's all going to be absolutely fine. We can do this and we don't need to delegate the task to a bunch of strangers, even strangers in a "good school". Who better to safely guide Emily towards a happy and fulfilling adulthood than us? On paper, it's perfect.

It's our job to listen to what Emily wants to do with her life and to make absolutely bloody sure that she gets every opportunity to do just that. And move heaven and earth to that end we will indeed. But when you're faced with a tearful ten year old in a panic over what might happen in six or eight year's time, the odd wobble in your self-satisfied and confident can-do approach is probably inevitable. I guess it's a good sign that we adults question our own decisions under these circumstances. At least we're not going into this blindly. Perhaps a wobble or two is justified....but we'll get there. The alternative simply isn't good enough.

Blue Velvet....

2009-02-26T21:31:00.004Z

....is now officially the colour of my hair. I dyed it late last night and earned myself purple fingernails, scalp, toenails sand feet for my trouble, not to mention a blue ring around the bath and a blue spattered shower curtain. My hair is blue..ish, although not as deep a colour as I'd hoped for. It's certainly not as vibrant a blue as Emily's was a green, but I guess that's to be expected since my hair's much darker than hers.

I did try to take a picture of it, but it's not showing up at all well on camera and just looks black, so I'll spare you ;-)

Went to visit Hazel, Romy, Tansy and their adorable new rats today, which was a nice break. Was briefly rather concerned when I tried out Hazel's blood pressure machine only to find that it gave some sky high reading...and then gave an even worse one after that. Fortunately, "Nurse Hazel" came to the rescue and took it a third time for me, while I thought nice thoughts, and it turned out to be "ideal". I should think so. Thank goodness for that!

Nothing formally educational today as I spent all morning working on a deadline which turned out to be not required after all (breathe, breathe) and then we went out, but on the plus side I've tidied a bit. Which is always worth reporting as it happens so rarely. The morning's procedures weren't helped by a parrot who seems to think my new blue plumage is rather attractive and wants to sit on my head and preen it, lol.

Speaking of Lulu, she's being a darling at the moment. She's become so good at stepping up when requested that now she absent-mindedly waves her foot in the air if anyone mentions "step up" even if you're nowhere near her, bless her! She's very comical and still super-affectionate to Jon, affectionate to me and getting there with Emily. Lulu has discovered that custard creams and/or unbuttered scones are heaven on earth and will do just about anything if you mention the magic word "biscuit". Not that we'd resort to bribery or anything. Perish the thought.

I just remembered that I never did put up any photographs of Lulu's rope in the dining room; it's been up for a few weeks now and she absolutely LOVES it. It runs the whole width of the dining room, with lots and lots of hanging toys and ladders and climbing things on it and the giant hanging cube that Gramps made for her too, plus she has her hanging swing perch at the other end of the room, the hanging hexagon climbing thingy (technical term) and her downstairs playstand in there too, so it's parrot heaven :-)) Lulu's getting to grips with the fine art of foraging too, so now we can attach little cereal boxes and paper bags and things to her various toys stuffed with her foot toys or treats and she knows to tear them open to find what she wants :-)) She has a passion for baby rattles and things like that, so I've bought a few job lots of second hand baby toys from ebay for her to play with and chew to bits. Little love is extremely acrobatic on the rope and hanging toys and frequently swings from one toenail whilst squawking manically, usually just when Emily's supposed to be concentrating on maths. Perhaps they have a telepathic link!

Emily's New Blog

2009-02-25T15:40:00.002Z

... is at http://home-eddedandproud.blogspot.com

Various things and people have heartily annoyed me today, so it hasn't been one of my better days all round. We did squeeze in a bit of education this afternoon, looking at the rise of communism and facism following the end of the first world war. Emily keeps asking intelligent questions.... to which I don't know the answers... so that's either an indication that I'm stupid or that she's growing up to be an insightful and thoughtful young woman. I think I prefer the latter option.

I did finish some work for the press agency first thing this morning, which is a weight off my mind, but there has to be a way out of having to meet those deadlines for the rest of my life. Hey ho. Colour me "out of sorts".

The Great War and the Kindness of a Stranger

2009-02-23T21:02:00.002Z

Education has been happening. Emily's firmly getting to grips with So You Really Want to Learn Maths Book 2...funny how her enthusiasm for maths has quadrupled since she discovered that she'll probably need some kind of maths evidence if she wants to study programming at college, lol.

History has been happening too, as someone has discovered an absolute fascination for World Wars I and II. Emily's been learning about and writing about the causes and build up to WW1 and about life in the trenches, with lots of background reading too and intelligent questions. We've got some videos of newsreel from the first and second world wars that she'll be watching and we're going to take a look at some famous war poems too. Naturally, it's also a good excuse to watch some more Blackadder. Tomorrow we're finding out about the Treaty of Versailles - funny how I'm learning far more about both wars now, with Emily, than I was ever taught at school, even at my supposedly outstanding girls' senior school. Sigh.

When it comes to WW2, Emily wants to read Anne Frank's diary and I suppose we could watch Carrie's War, among other things, although I was never that keen on that one. She also has a great resource in my Mum, who lived through the blitz as a young child in London; her father was (damn, I forget the correct title) one of those responsible for finding accommodation, shelter, support etc for those who had been bombed out of their homes. We have lots of other books and sites to look at too - it's odd how Emily has re-found her enthusiasm for history over this. She was such a history buff when she was younger - we spent months and months on end looking at Tudors, Victorians, Egyptians etc - but then she went off it all. I think it's the fact that this is modern history, within living memory of people she loves, and that she can see how it has had a direct impact on some of the world's situations today.

Emily has also expressed an interest in properly studying a Shakespeare play; probably either Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth. I did Julius Caesar at school and loved it, but I can't interest her in that one particularly. I'm rather enjoying getting our teeth back into some hard work, education wise. I still wish we were more organised and had more hours in the day, though. Don't we all?

Meanwhile, Jon was stopped in the street by a very kind lady today. She wanted to tell him that she was the one who had found kibby Voldy - she had knocked on various doors looking for his owners but it was someone else who eventually came to find us, so we didn't know who had found him. She said that she had come across him in the road and she felt that it had only just happened at that time. She picked him up out of the road and laid him on the side, out of further harm's way, bless her heart. She was able to confirm that he had died outright, or at least that he hadn't moved from where he had been hit and had passed by the time she got to him, thereby laying to rest my nightmares that he'd struggled to the side of the road himself or had lingered in pain. She said a lot of very kind things to Jon and reduced me to tears again when he came back in and told me. We're very thankful to her, that someone showed such kindness to kibby Voldy's body, moved him and set off the chain of events that then found us.....otherwise who knows what might have happened if he'd been left in the road.

Severus is still very lost; he seems to have grown up all of a sudden without his brother around to be a kitten-cat with :-((

On a happier note, we have all three of us discovered the "joys" of facebook (yes, I know, we're late starters). Lots of hours have been wasted this week sending one another daft things and catching up with old friends from school!

Green Hair, a Wedding Dress and My Life's Lesson

2009-02-16T22:58:00.009Z

Thank you for your kind comments about Voldy. There have been lots of tears here and it still hasn't really sunk in. Emily has been distraught at times and her howls of utter misery when Jon and I first told her, late on Saturday night, will stay in my head for a very long time. She experienced losing Merlin, of course, and all the sadness and heartbreak of that, but this is different yet again; not any easier or harder, but different, perhaps because Emily was prepared for losing Merlin as he'd been ill for such a long time and we'd discussed it. With Voldy, it was such a shock and he was still a baby.

February and romantic moments are clearly not good times for our cats - we lost Merlin the day after our wedding anniversary two years ago and now Voldy on Valentine's Day.

I'm haunted by uncertainties over exactly how Voldy died; can we be sure it was a car or motorbike not a deliberate act of cruelty? If we'd got to him sooner, was there something we could have done? Was he conscious of what was happening to him? What silly, trivial thing were we doing, inside the house, when he was hurt? Was his spirit sad at not being initially recognised? You can imagine the thoughts, I'm sure and I'm sure others who have lost pets in similar circumstances have felt the same too. It's been doubly hard because I was so sure initially, finding the body, that it wasn't him. He just didn't look like our fluffy baby... or perhaps we were just desperate for it not to be him. He was jet black all over, with no distinguishing marks as such and it was very dark outside and there are a number of other black cats around here apart from ours. Alive of course, we could recognise him instantly, but although it sounds silly we just couldn't be sure at first. So although we picked him up and took him back to our home, we did so initially thinking it was someone else's pet - we took him off the pavement because we couldn't leave *any cat* there on a Saturday night with the drunks walking past and because we knew we would have wanted someone else to take our baby's body somewhere safe too. We did all that, still thinking it wasn't him and still calling for him and searching for him. It wasn't until much later, on yet another close look with a torch that we finally realised the worst.

But, life goes on, of course.

Today in an effort to take Emily's mind off things, we dyed her hair green. As you do. It's now Sonic Green from the lovely people at Bee Unique. We'd bought the dye about a week ago and I also bought Blue Velvet for me too, although we haven't got round to doing mine yet. The coverage isn't absolutely salon perfect, since I'm a novice at dying anyone else's hair, but it's pretty good and I think Emily's hair looks beautiful (just as well as she's got to live with it now for a month or two at least, lol) - she's very happy with it :-))) Plus, as only ever so slightly an ulterior motive, it didn't hurt to point out to her that she wouldn't be allowed to dye her hair that colour if she was attending school..... ROFL! Never being one to post one picture when half a dozen will do, here she is in all her sonic green glory, including one cuddling our poor bereft Severus.

On Valentine's Day, before our hearts broke, we opened up the box containing my wedding dress, the first time Emily had ever seen the real thing. Of course, she had to wear it. And of course, I was thrilled that she did. It's obviously far too big, but she looked so pretty :-))

Work went out of the window on Sunday as we were all a bit numb, so I've only just now finished my deadlines that were due first thing this morning. Emily's gone off to kickboxing and to play with Jacki's girls - she wasn't going to go (didn't go to karate on Sunday morning because she was too tearful), but I guess it's better that she carries on with her routines rather than sitting moping. I think the green hair helped since she was then keen to show it off ;-) Lulu is doing well. We're going to have to start leaving her loose at the same time as the cats are around, provided we're there to supervise. We can't keep shutting cats out forever.

And of course, that's yet another thing to feel guilty about. Since Lulu arrived in early January, Voldy spent much of the last month of his life being shut out of various rooms at various times. Of course, he still had oodles of love and attention...but these things prey on your mind when it's too late. The night before he died, I was really cross to be woken up at 3.30 am by Voldy wanting to go out and threatening to rip his claws out under the door if he didn't get his way ... heck, most nights for the last few months I was really cross to be woken up at 3.30 by Voldy wanting to go out (you could almost set your clock by him). And when you're grieving, these are the things you have to go through remembering and feeling horrid about.

I'm beginning to seriously think that it might be my life's lesson to learn - to appreciate things while you still have them and not take them for granted. When Merlin died, I felt that I'd taken him for granted for a long time; now the same with Voldy. When I had my wobble about Emily being so suddenly grown up, just before her 10th birthday, I was in bits over the times I'd resented this and that instead of just loving every single day of her life. I'm really making a conscious effort now to just enjoy the people and animals in my life; it's hard when you tend to suffer from depression and when you live in utter chaos, lol - but I'm working on it. I get the message.

Sweet Dreams, Voldy

2009-02-15T12:45:00.003Z

Baby kibbie Voldy was hit on the road last night and killed. We didn't find out until someone came to knock at our door to ask if one of our cats was missing; it must have happened an hour or two before we were told; we didn't hear it happen. He was on the pavement, within sight of our front door, with a lot of injury to his head..... we couldn't be sure it was him, for a while. But it was. Haunted now by wondering whether he was killed outright but some kind soul moved him out of the road or whether he lingered and made it to the pavement himself. Poor baby was only 20 months old. Sev Sev is completely lost without him.

Jon's buried him in the garden next to Merlin. Emily's beside herself :-((((

Sweet dreams, baby Fuffles. I know you'll be walking alongside Sev Sev as he grows up; when summer comes I know you'll be around watching the butterflies and hiding treasures under your treasure bush. Emily has put the feathered peacock ornament you kept trying to steal on to your grave; it's yours now. She's sitting at your grave as I type, reading to you. We love you.

So...Lots of Snow

2009-02-08T20:20:00.009Z

Lots of snow indeed over the last eight days. It tickled me at one point when I looked at CNN and found that the UK's snow "issues" were suddenly headline news in the US. Weird. It's always seemed rather unfair to me that when it snows here everyone lines up to moan that we can't cope. Of course we can't cope. Because it rarely snows in England more than a light dusting. So we're not used to it. The transport systems aren't used to it. We don't have the equipment and logistics in place. It's not what we do. England is outstanding at many things, but snow isn't one of them. So? I don't expect colder parts of the world would cope well with a sudden heatwave either. Kudos to those essential workers here who carried on regardless....for everyone else, who cares if there are some days off? Sounds like a healthy excuse to have some fun for once.

We certainly had fun in the snow, although a heavy dose of yukky cold in the middle of the week meant we unfortunately had to cancel a visit to friends. Snowy pictures from various points in the week, from barely there dusting to full on fluffy white stuff, in assorted stages of unsuitable clothing!

In the middle of the week, a letter arrived from the grammar school in Gainsborough, giving the dates for the 11+ exams and open days etc and wanting a signed confirmation that Emily would be doing the exams. Oh yes. It had all seemed such a good idea until that point. Reading it in black and white was a different matter and a horrid, horrid feeling. We had A Serious Family Talk. Emily had been worried that she wouldn't be able to follow her chosen career with taking exams and that to take those exams she'd have to go to secondary school. She's worrying far ahead of her years, of course, but all credit to her for taking her future so seriously. Duly reassured that there are ways and means of accomplishing just about anything without the S-word, she was adamant that she didn't want to go to school and we were adamant that we didn't want to send her. So that was that. She's not going, but we are going to seriously look into alternative routes towards various qualifications when she's a little bit older.

Meanwhile, Emily made some beautiful beeswax candles to celebrate Imbolc, which we burned with our dinner that evening. Although we had to miss seeing friends mid week, we did see Hazel and her girls on Friday, which was good. Emily's been busy texting and phoning Mei Lin and Jasmine like mad, since they were away last week. It was Jasmine's 14th birthday on Wednesday..... !!!! 14!! Where are the years going??

This morning Emily came back from karate as pleased as punch because she'd asked George, on the spur of the moment, about kickboxing classes and he'd said she could join the ladies class rather than the kids class. That's on Monday evenings, so it's a bit of a logistical hiccup since Jon always goes to psychic circle on Monday nights and Emily always goes with him so she can play with Mei Lin and Jasmine while the adults are doing their stuff. Turns out though that Jon can just drop Emily off at kickboxing, go on to Jacki's and start the circle and then George will bring Emily back to theirs when they pack up after the class, so she still gets to play with her friends. Looks like Emily will also be going to the Tuesday kickboxing class in the village, so that's All Good.

What else? There's been lots of wii-ing in the cold evenings; I confess to being unhealthily addicted to Super Mario Galaxy and Emily and Jon love racing people from around the world in Mario Kart. We're still failing to watch any TV that is actually on at the time, lol, but we've been watching various DVDs. As a family we've watched The Waterhorse, Independence Day and X Files: I Want To Believe, the latter much anticipated now that Emily has finally watched every episode ever made (!). The assortment of films prompted much discussion over film ratings, with Emily wanting to know why the X Files film was a certificate 15 as opposed to a 12 (largely due to its references to paedophilia and some fairly strong medical horror). By the way, the British Board of Film Classification has a great site, with a children's section where kids can review/classify trailers and see if they match the official decision and on the main site it gives very detailed information about the whys and wherefores of recent classification decisions.

Meanwhile, Jon and I have been ploughing through some late night DVDs, notably Cold Blood starring Matthew Kelly and John Hannah - I only really knew Matthew Kelly from Game for a Laugh and Stars in their Eyes, but he was absolutely superb as the serial killer in this. We also watched the latest series of Wire in the Blood and now we're on more Robson Green with Touching Evil (although I preferred Wire in the Blood).

On the 6th Feb it was our 12th wedding anniversary :-)) Emily made us Cream Cheese Brownies for a treat, which were absolutely superb!

Programming Fun

2009-01-31T21:23:00.009Z

There's an astonishing amount of education going on here at the moment, considering our normal levels of chaos. Emily has become very interested in programming. We downloaded Small Basic and its little manual and she has been working her way through that, ably assisted and encouraged by Gramps :-)) She got the hang of it at lightning speed and has had great fun cobbling together some little basic programs and messing around with the code of example programs.

We had also purchased Game Programming for Teens; unfortunately, although the book looked excellent, the accompanying software was infuriating and refused to work properly, and even the free download from the book's website didn't fix matters and in fact made them worse. Very disappointing. Undaunted, however, Emily has been spending hours reading on the net about various programming languages, asking questions to which I have no answers and working with the small basic thingy. We're very impressed.

In addition to that, Emily's also been doing a lot of reading about evolution and Darwin, and I've been writing snotty emails of complaint after discovering that neither Survival Rivals nor The Great Plant Hunt were willing to send materials to home educators, only to "proper" schools. Fume, swear, fume. What else, education wise? Oh yes, lots of maths, lots of English, lots of logic work and some North American geography, modern history in the form of the Kennedy assassination and Nixon's resignation (courtesy of a free DVD someone lent us), law, ethics and morality in the form of much discussion after various crime dramas, and lots and lots and lots of cooking. That's *lots* of cooking, completely unsupervised and in most cases with us not even knowing where Emily's gone before she arrives back triumphantly announcing that such and such is in the oven, lol. We're being spoilt :-))

After a rather long lull, festival-wise, we hope to get back to celebrating various festivals imminently, starting with Imbolc next week.

Lulu seems to have come out of her psycho phase, lol. She's stopped being aggressive to Emily, I'm delighted to say. She's not exactly friendly, either - she's kind of indifferent at the moment, but it's a big step forward and a big relief all round. Lulu's happy enough around Emily, but she doesn't fly to her and won't step up onto her hand..... but she will soon, I'm sure. Emily's still being very patient with her and is totally in love with this parrot, lol. As indeed are we all.

Clever Gramps made Lulu a fabulous swinging climbing frame last week which she absolute adores, and she also became the proud owner of a new set of hexagonal swinging rings plus a ton of old baby toys, rattles and the like which she loves to play with. Next week, we'll be putting a rope across the dining room ceiling for her in addition to all her swings and perches down there. Parrot play room, lol.

Lulu's becoming very, very brave and bold, which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it's delightful to watch her personality really emerging. On the other hand....with five cats around.... it's "interesting". Previously, Lulu would sit quietly on my or Jon's hand or shoulder to make the trip from the upstairs sitting room (where her cage is) to the downstairs dining room when Emily and I are down there. This is quite a long trip, through and past various other rooms. Last week, however, she decided she'd rather like to investigate these new areas, and took to flying off for a good look round en route. Eek. One day, she flew straight into a window (because she wasn't familiar with the room) and crashed to the floor...Severus was in the room and had pounced before I could get to him.... he landed, literally, six inches away from Lulu who was then on the floor. That was close, and not pleasant. The following day, on the way downstairs, Lulu flew off into the big downstairs sitting room.... elderly Cassie-cat wasn't so elderly that she wasn't on her feet and stalking within seconds. Sigh.

If Lulu sits on a hand during the journey, we can put a thumb across her feet so she can't fly off...in theory. In practice, she tries anyway and you end up feeling awful as this flappy thing tries to wrench its feet out of your hand. A little more training required in that department, I think! If it wasn't for the cats it wouldn't matter and she could fly around where she wanted, but we can never be sure where there is or isn't a moggy. We'll get the hang of it. Training-wise, we've been doing some clicker training and other bits and pieces and she's taking to it very well and seems to enjoy it.

Anyway, some more pictures, as if you aren't all fed up of parrot pictures! Here's Lulu with Gramps' hanging climbing frame:

Juliet waiting in prime position, hidden on a stool underneath the kitchen table, just in case Lulu decides to make an inspection flight of the kitchen on her way through. "You ain't seen me, right?"

Severus, a picture of injured innocence. "What?? I don't even like parrot!"
Lulu with her new swingy thing; she's certainly not frightened of new things, she was on this and Gramps' one almost before they'd been hung!

Playing in her "paddling pool", rofl :-)) She loves to paddle in there, but she *still* hasn't got the full idea of getting herself properly wet. She doesn't like it any deeper, but she does fluff all her feathers up as if she's *thinking* of having a bath....like in one of the photos here. She did finally get a wet tail and wet tummy, though and then celebrated by demolishing a corn on the cob ring - sweetcorn beak!

Parrots.... They're Not Easy

2009-01-22T21:30:00.008Z

Not that I thought having a parrot would be easy. But it sure as hell isn't.

It's been a fairly traumatic week. Not one but two of our major clients, BBC and the Press Agency, have failed to pay us on time (and still no money from either), leading to knock on repercussions in paying off our credit cards and paying back my Mum and Dad the money they lent us for Lulu. That's nearly £2000 "missing" this month, which is a hell of a lot when you're budgeting down to the last fiver.

Emily's earrings had their six weeks up on Tuesday, so she was supposed to take them out and put new ones in. The taking out was fine. The putting new ones in wasn't. To put it in a nutshell, Emily was scared to death of putting new ones in. To put it in an even finer nutshell, I tried putting them in for her and couldn't - it was as if the holes at the back had already healed up, and I wasn't about to punch through the flesh of my hysterical daughter for the sake of a bit of sparkly stuff. That's cutting a very long and very difficult story very short....Tuesday wasn't a good day.

So....we're leaving them to heal up. She can have her ears pierced again in a few year's time if she still wants them done.

Meanwhile, amid all this joy, Lulu decided to temporarily become the parrot from hell, at least as far as Emily was concerned. For a couple of days, she took to biting Emily at every opportunity and even when she was in her cage, running at Emily (and only Emily) through the bars, feathers all fluffed up, trying to attack. Last night when she was out of her cage she flew right at Emily's face in full on attack mode, only fended off by a split second arms-up-to-face by Emily. Much tears ensued, not only from Emily. When Greys bite, it *hurts*. A lot, lot, lot. Facial bites in particular frequently require stitches. You should see some of the pictures I've seen. Having a Grey in fury flying at your ten year old for no apparent reason is not a great thing to witness. We felt like complete failures - failing to help Lulu feel at ease with Emily, failing to help Emily feel at ease with Lulu, failing to do any damn thing and likely to spend the next sixty years with a psycho, Emily-hating parrot.

Ahem. Did I mention it's been traumatic?

Like I said, parrots - they're not easy creatures to get to grips with. I'm pleased to report however that today has been a lot better, Emily and Lulu wise. Lulu's still being a bit anti-Emily (heaven knows why, Emily's had the patience of a saint with her) but hasn't outright attacked and isn't running at her. She shared Emily's sugar puffs at breakfast time ;-) She will even (occasionally) fly to Emily for a sip of fruit juice and is certainly happy to be handed treats and toys by Emily and for the odd stroke. On the plus side, Lulu is an absolute darling at other times. She's very affectionate to me and to Jon (**especially** Jon, lol) but for some reason she seems to be playing up with Emily, which is of course deeply upsetting for Emily who'd been so looking forward to having Lulu and who really hasn't done anything at all to disturb or frighten Lulu, so it's a bit of a mystery.

Sigh. We'll get there. Lulu has a "forever home" here; we're not about to give up on her. Lots of love and patience are required; it's very unfortunate that she's being fearful of the child in the family rather than one of us grownups who might not take it so personally, but we'll get there. The issue seems to be mostly related to territorial behaviour in the room where her cage is, since she's so much more amenable to Emily in any other room. We're so used to cats, but of course cats are predators - parrots are prey animals and their psychology is sooooo different. I've asked for lots of advice on a parrot forum, but they're....not very helpful. Very cliquey and I think rather disapproving of anyone who has both parrots and cats (not that that's remotely the issue here). So we'll figure it out ourselves. Everyone's loved - it'll work. Today was already better. Repeat: we're all loved. We'll get there.

From everything I've read and observed, I'm thinking at the moment that perhaps Lulu is jealous of Emily as being her (Lulu's) rival for our attention. Greys are renowned for their intelligence, but as I think I said before, it's believed to be like having a permanent toddler in the house, including the emotional tantrums. I know Emily's hurting over the situation - and there have been many tears - but I'm so proud of her for persevering and for realising that a) it's not Lulu's "fault", she's not being "naughty" and that however she's behaving there's a reason behind it, a reason that we need to understand and that b) it's not Emily's "fault" either, and that with love and patience it **will** pass. It simply has to. Cats are fairly low maintenance compared to parrots, lol - and even though we were fully aware of what we were taking on, we're still learning.

Education has been happing amid all the chaos. Emily has developed a sudden and very deep passion for computer science and has been reading and researching all kinds of things about how computers work and about viruses and internet security. She has now upgraded her "when I grow up" list to include computer expert as well as archaeologist, author, baker, chef and fashion designer. Bless her. We've also been learning more about birds in general and about viruses and bacterial infections, the human immune system and the development of medicines. Oh, and maths. It's amazing how long it can take to do a few sums when you have a beautiful companion swinging upside down from one claw and warbling at you ;-))

Anyway, I've rambled again. Some photos. These first were of Lulu in Emily's blue room last weekend (when she was only half psycho, lol)

These others are from today and yesterday downstairs while Emily and I were "working".....although how much of that is possible with such a lovely distraction still remains to be seen. The first are of Lulu in flight to Emily's hand for a sip of fruit juice, although in typical fashion I managed to lose this rare and joyous moment in a silhouette because of the light coming through the dining room windows....grrrrr!

Others include Lulu enjoying her bungee rope - she loves this and it bounces about wildly as she climbs and hangs from it - and an improvised table top play stand which used to be a shelf unit in the bathroom! Oh, and her ladyship lording it over us all with a carrot stick, naturally.

When she's not being psycho, Lulu's adorable :-))

Bare Bones of a Routine

2009-01-13T18:03:00.005Z

This is apparently my 500th post on this blog :-))

Ever so slowly, a routine is beginning to emerge which will mean we can get back to some education, having got used to having Lulu around the house.

Yesterday, we took Lulu downstairs to fly free in the big dining room where Emily does most of her work. She'd been down there before, but only in her travel cage, so we were a bit nervous about yesterday as there are so many shelves and cupboard tops for her to get into mischief on. Sure enough, she immediately flew onto a large picture and wouldn't come down, lol.

Once she had settled, though, she did wonderfully well on her playstand and on the easel my Dad made ages ago for our whiteboard. Late yesterday, my clever Dad made a hanging swing perch for Lulu right up at the ceiling level in the dining room, to satisfy her instinct to be high up. So today, she's spent nearly all day downstairs with us and has been a very happy birdie indeed.

Which has meant that Emily and I have....drumroll....done some work! This morning, Emily did some maths puzzles and this afternoon we read a lot about birds and examined a tiny nest Jon found in a hedge the other day.

In theory, so long as we can keep the five cats away from the dining room while Lulu is loose, we should now be all set for some kind of return to normality. Says she with fingers crossed. Juliet, Romeo and Cassie-cat aren't bothered about Lulu, but the baby kibbies Voldemort and Severus are still unhealthily fascinated and not particularly impressed at being shut out of various rooms at various times. We're trying to make it up to them with lots of cuddles.

Lulu has started to fly to Emily's arm now too. Onto her ceiling swing (Lulu's, not Emily's, although she did express a desire to have one too....) we fixed a cardboard cone which we can fill with assorted bits and bobs and titbits of food for extra play value while she's up there. She's developed a particular love of blank beer mats which we had in stock years ago for craft purposes - it's a good thing for her to shred and chew safe cardboard, so it's just as well we've got lots of them!

We also tried persuading Lulu to have a bath today, as she needs to get wet on a regular basis to help with her preening and feather condition. We have a spray bottle we can use for her but she's not that keen. She took better to a washing up bowl with shallow warm water and some cabbage leaves floating in it, although she still didn't really get the idea and had to be splashed a fair bit. It did help with her preening though and she had a good old clean up afterwards up on her swing :-))

Keeping Lulu occupied and happy is incredibly time consuming, but we're getting the hang of it (and we knew it would be). She's enjoying several hours of out of cage time every day and she likes her cage too, so fingers crossed we're doing OK for first time bird owners! It's good fun foraging around the house to find things to make toys for her too. She needs to exercise her brain as well as her body and we have a lot of puzzle type toys she could enjoy too, but she doesn't like standing on a flat surface (floor, table, playstand base, whatever) which is where she needs to be to enjoy an abacus and that kind of thing. We'll have to have a think about that.

Lulu Update

2009-01-09T20:17:00.002Z

This week has been pretty much dominated by Lulu ;-)

We're slowly starting to get into a routine of her cage cleaning and her feeding and letting her out to fly and play at roughly the same kinds of times each day. Lulu had until today been quite strong willed when it comes to going back IN her cage - she's not daft, and although she'll step up onto your hand in seconds to come OUT, she plays up something chronic when it's time to go back in. Not surprising, I suppose. Plus she's a baby still, only three months, so she's exerting her independence. Yesterday we bought a new spray bottle (like you spray flowers with) to give Lulu a daily "shower" of warm water which is supposed to help her keep her feathers in tip top condition. She liked it yesterday. Today she objected strongly, lol. She has a mind of her own.

We'd also been worrying a little over Lulu's diet. She loves her seed mix, but it's nowhere near sufficient in itself for a parrot's diet, and she won't touch the "complete" pellets the breeder said she loved. We'd been preparing three lots of lovely, varied fresh fruit and vegetable and pulse and cereal mixes for her each day, but she was leaving them largely untouched and just eating the seeds.

Early this evening we had a bit of a breakthrough, though. By being extremely patient and just sitting watching the TV and talking to her while she was out on top of her cage, I eventually managed to persuade Lulu to fly to my hand by calling her and waggling her favourite toy. Once on my hand, with lots of praise and neck scratches, she allowed herself to settle in my lap and completely demolished huge chunks of carrot, apple and cauliflower off a plate. She then flew back to her cage and I thought I'd had it, lol - but as soon as I called her name and waggled her toy again, she flew back to my hand, paused for a tickle, then flew a large circle round back to the top of the cage....then within seconds, back to my hand, tickle, nibble toy, back to cage...back to hand, nibble toy, tickle, back to cage - four or five times in total, and once play time was over, she flew to my hand and allowed me to pop her back in her cage, for a reward of half an apple wedged for her in the bars next to her favourite perch.

Just now, she's out of her cage again, on Jon's shoulder as he's watching football in the dark. She did have a crash landing at the back of the settee and was hanging upside down from the back of it (!) but she let herself be rescued without a fuss and was making her excited noises again within seconds when she was fussed over and calmed down.

So, I think she's starting to get the hang of this.... and so are we ;-)

Lulu's very affectionate towards Emily when she's in her cage, coming running to see her and have her head scratched through the bars. She won't fly to Emily's hand yet, but it's early days - I think that might just be because Emily a) doesn't have *quite* as much patience yet and b) her hand might be slightly wobblier than ours are. But she's getting there.

It feels like such a huge privilege to have her fly to you. :-)))

Lulu aside, we have briefly done a few bits of maths this week, mostly revision of fractions. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had Lulu downstairs with us during the afternoon in her travel cage, but yesterday we didn't do that and today we were out at Jacki's all day, so Jon had Lulu out on and off all day with him. A new play stand arrived for her today with lots of perches and places to hang toys - I'm hoping that once she's used to that, she will be able to play out of her cage but on that for extended periods of time, in which case we can have her loose down in the dining room with us. We shall see. :-))

Not much textbook education going on at the moment, but we're all learning a lot about birds!

New Year, Birthday and New Family Member :-))

2009-01-06T21:19:00.014Z

Thank you for the kind remarks following my morose post; I feel a lot better now.

Emily's ten now :-)) We've had a very eventful week.

New Year's Eve
On New Year's Eve, my Mum and Dad cooked us all a lovely celebration meal and then we stayed up, of course, playing games. We always used to have our New Year meal on New Year's Day, but with the rush to get things ready for Emily's birthday (plus the occasional hangover, lol) my Mum had the brainwave of having the meal on NYE instead, which was much less hassled and much more fun.

New Year's Day
Happy New Year, by the way! We had a pleasant, quiet New Year's Day. Emily and Jon and I played lots of games together, and I also made Emily's birthday cake (yum - orange and white chocolate cake!) and decorated the dining room. The theme this year was tropical paradise because that's the only thing I could think of that included parrots!

Emily's 10th birthday!
So...Emily turned ten years old on the 2nd January. She had a lovely day (I hope). Presents included Wii Fit (very fun indeed), some other Wii games, a pasta making machine and accompanying recipe book, an ex-Avon set of 100 perfume samples (!) and a selection of earrings, since her newly pierced ears will soon be ready for the initial studs to come out. Plus assorted parrot related items. From Nana and Gramps, Emily had received in advance their customary £100 worth of premium bonds - they have given her this every birthday since she was born, so now she has £1000 worth! - and they had also bought the big parrot cage as part of her birthday present, but they also found some beautiful bits and pieces for her including a gorgeous white and turquoise watch and a large vanity case style black jewellery box which she was over the moon about.

We had a nice birthday tea of traditional party food bits and pieces for the family, and I made some scrummy punch from fruit juices, lemonade and cut fruit; Emily had hers in half a coconut shell to match the theme. We stayed up late playing roulette, which was another of her birthday presents as she's wanted for ages to know how to play it. Nana won hands down having broken the bank, but Emily did quite well too - me and Jon were out very early on, lol.

Tasting white wine while playing roulette, lol ;-))

Meet Lulu
Our African Grey parrot baby was due to arrive on around about the 9th January, but on Saturday 3rd we had a phone call from the breeder - his son would be in the area on Sunday and did we want our baby delivered then. Blimey. With a bit of last minute panic furniture-moving and cage-assembling-wise, we were more or less ready. It's a lovely big cage, with a large low rectangle shape and a tall tower too. We were lucky to have a temporary financial loan from Nana and Gramps because the (large sum of) money to pay for her hadn't yet cleared into our bank account - and so, on Sunday lunchtime, our baby arrived :-))

Emily named her Lulu and it seems as if she's been here forever. She's a gorgeous English-bred Congo African Grey baby, three months old today. Super tame and super affectionate and with one heck of a personality and a will to match! We're absolutely enchanted with her. The cats aren't quite so sure. Romeo, Juliet and Cassie-cat are nervous of her, but Voldemort and Severus are fascinated. A little too fascinated, to be honest - we've had to keep the door shut when we're not in the room or they'd be climbing on her cage, and we won't be letting them sleep in the sitting room at night until we're absolutely sure they've all got to grips with one another (and not around the neck). Lulu's not scared of the cats (or anything else), but cat saliva can be deadly to a parrot if she was bitten, and (perhaps more to the point, so far, it seems) she has one hell of a bite and could easily hurt the kittens if she was spooked or annoyed by them.

They'll all settle down, though. Of course the cats are not allowed in the room when Lulu comes out of her cage, and I don't suppose they ever will be, but I'm sure they'll be fine when she's in her cage very shortly. African Grey babies are notoriously clumsy ;-)) until they grow up and Lulu has certainly lived up to that in this first three days. She has a worrying tendency to fly into walls and then slide to the floor with a sickening thud (!!!!) - quite heart stopping the first few times you witness it, but she seems unfazed once you've picked her up and promptly carries on as normal. It's getting better, though. Today's she's only done that once. The very first time we let her out of her cage on Sunday, she flew straight to the highest cupboard in the room, knocked our huge wedding photo frame over on top of her and slid down to the middle shelf where she promptly pooed. Baptism of fire, lol.

Lulu's also discovered that if she flies to sit on the curtain rail, we can't get her down without climbing on a chair. Mischief is her middle name. To be fair, though, she's generally very good and only plays up when she doesn't want "out" play time to end. She loves to snuggle up on your lap or under your chin and she spends most of her out time playing on her cage top stand or climbing over the cage or climbing over her adoring public. She was a little ungainly getting from one perch/toy to another in her cage, but she's getting more adept and agile all the time and we've noticed a big difference even in days. She loves to land on your head when she's free, which is....um....off-putting...and can be painful with those talons....but we've already managed to train her to "step up" onto your hand or onto a stick when wanted, so that's good news. Lulu didn't eat very much for the first two days, but today she's completely stuffed herself on seed, banana, apple, oranges, peas, lentils, broccoli, couscous, sprouts and shredded wheat, lol, so I think she's found her appetite.

This afternoon, Emily and I finally (after an hour....patience is a strong point with baby parrots) coaxed Lulu into her large travelling cage so that we could take her downstairs into the dining room to keep us company while Emily did some maths. The idea is that once she's fully used to the environment, she'll come downstairs with us during the day and play on a play stand or fly free in the room while we work. Hmmm. We've a long way to go before we can let her loose down there yet (too many high cupboards full of ornaments), but she settled well enough in the travelling cage in the end and had fun shredding bits of paper and showing off her acrobatic skills. Not much maths was done.

So. My next challenge in 2009 is getting us into any kind of routine. We had enough trouble getting into a routine when we only had five cats to worry about. Now we have a baby Lulu as a beautiful timewaster too.... the maths may have to wait. Sooner or later, we'll figure it out and the cleaning cage/feeding Lulu/getting Lulu out/picking dazed Lulu up off the floor/cuddling Lulu/playing with Lulu/feeding Lulu again tasks will slot in around the rest of it. I read somewhere that having an African Grey is a bit like permanently having a toddler in the house with the emotional age of two and the intellectual age of five, with all the attention that demands. So far, I'm beginning to think they have a point....but my husband, my ten year old and I think it's rather lovely :-))

Ten Years - Long and Morose

2008-12-30T11:41:00.004Z

Ten years ago on the 28th December, I was admitted to hospital, pregnant with Emily and with very high blood pressure. Ten years ago yesterday, I was having steroid injections to boost her lungs in the womb. Ten years ago today, I was a nervous wreck and so was Jon. Ten years ago tomorrow, New Year's Eve 1998, we sat and listened, late at night, to the baby's heart rate dropping on the monitor and it looked as if we were going to have the first baby of 1999. We spent New Year's Day 1999 in a state of fear as the baby's heart rate deteriorated, before finally, in the early hours of the 2nd January 1999, I had the emergency caesarian and tiny, premature Emily was born.

We can't quite believe that ten years have now passed. The last thing Emily's Newborn Intensive Care nurse said to us when we were finally able to take Emily home was "Enjoy her."

Ten years down the line, those words ring in my ears like some kind of siren of guilt. I spent the first four or five years of Emily's life in a deep depression, even though I didn't realise it at the time. Assorted reasons, including my only brother's spiteful and deliberate rejection of my only daughter and his only niece, plus the shock and trauma of Emily's early birth, kept me in a state of anger for years and far too many of my memories of Emily's early childhood are of me being angry for one reason or another. I was a virtual hermit, not even taking turns with Jon to take her to playgroups.

I remember shouting and shouting at a tiny two year old who couldn't get to sleep - why didn't I just pick her up and cuddle her to sleep? I remember exhaustion and pure resentment when a tiny baby, a few months old, wouldn't be put down for even a few moments without crying. Why did I want to put her down in the first place? What I'd give now to get another shot at those moments. Jon was exhausted too when Emily was tiny....but he never lost his temper. My memories are of him as the best father I could ever have hoped for for my child ... my memories of me are of screaming, shouting, walking out of the house and a sinking feeling when my baby woke up.

Of course these are isolated memories - I wasn't a total harridan - but it was an awful time. I loved Emily with all my heart; I wasn't a bad or neglectful parent in that sense, but I was detached and too wrapped up in my own feelings. I now recognise I was ill. So I didn't "enjoy" her (or at least, looking back, I don't seem to remember much of the good times) - and of course, I can never get that time back again.

Things got a lot better once Emily was four or so, and particularly once she was out of school and these days we, all three of us, have a wonderfully close relationship. But this is a very poignant time, as Emily grows out of being a little girl and grows into being a young woman, and large parts of me yearn for the little girl back again so I can have a second chance. I didn't expect to feel this sad or this guilty, so these feelings, largely coming around since Christmas, have hit me quite hard. Jon reassures me that everything was in fact pretty much fine when Emily was little....but even if that's true (and I guess he would have made sure that was the case and would have sought help for me if it wasn't the case)...even if that's true, it's not my memory. What can I do? I'll just have to learn to live with it.

The anger and hatred I still feel towards my brother isn't going to go away - I haven't seen him since Emily was a few months old and I hope I never have to see him again - but ultimately, that's an excuse. I chose to react badly to his spite and crassness and the associated family fall out from it - I could have chosen a different route, but I didn't. I've come to realise that I can't blame anyone else for the way those first few years went, much as I'd like to. I did what I did and I can't undo it or shift the responsibility on to anyone else.

So. As Emily approaches her 10th birthday, I'm filled with very mixed feelings, in common I'm sure with many other parents of growing kids. I'm hoping to shake off my moroseness and guilt by the end of 2008. My one resolution for 2009 is to stop looking backwards, let go of the guilt for mistakes I made and to look ahead to the future. To "enjoy" our beautiful, growing up daughter for every minute from now on and to stop wasting time weeping over things I cannot change.

Wish me luck!

[added]This blog was taken off the Home Ed ring as I hadn't posted.... I can't work out how to put it back on again. It won't let me re-add it at the ring hub; does anyone know what I need to do?

Happy Days

2008-12-26T20:47:00.009Z

We had a laughter filled Christmas Day :-))

I went to wake Emily up at 6am because I couldn't wait any longer, rofl! On previous years she's brought her stocking into us anywhere between 3am (!!!) and 5am, but I guess she's growing up....anyway, she had a lovely stocking with grown up bits and bobs like perfume samples in it and was extremely chuffed. We had croissants for breakfast and then Emily got to open her main presents from us.

There were considerably fewer presents than in previous years, but Emily loved them all, the main three being a stereo system for the blue room, some stunning goth dolls (move over Barbie...these are very different, to put it mildly, lol) and..... for all of us.... a Nintendo Wii :-))
"Hmm, Mum and Dad said this is my main present, I wonder what it could be?"

"It can't be...can it?"

"Ooooh! It is!!"
We took it downstairs to see Nana, Gramps and Grandad and set up the Wii down there. I was very impressed with how quick and simple it was to set up and within minutes, Emily and Nana were playing bowling, lol. We all had a go at all kinds of things and we also set up the Mario Kart game with two steering wheels, which has proven to be an absolutely huge hit (can't get Emily off it!).

After playing all together with that for a while, Emily opened her presents from Nana, Gramps and Grandad and we grown ups handed out pressies too. Nana and Gramps had put Emily's presents in a big straw filled box like last year, which was extremely popular! In addition to money for a clothes shopping spree, N&G bought Emily lots of little bits and bobs for cooking such as knives, her own mixing bowl, moulds, cake sprinkles, a mouli grater, little electric mixer and so on, so the budding chef was delighted with all that and had a whale of a time chucking the straw around. Grandad gave Emily a Jacqueline Wilson board game which looks like lots of fun.

Can't believe how many orbs there are in these photographs; it's not dust from the straw or anything like that, as I have ones with straw flying around with no orbs in too. Weird.

Grandad also gave Emily three audio tapes..... last year, we gave all three grandparents boxes of questions about their lives, with a request that they either recorded or wrote the answers and gave them back to us this year. Grandad did his on tape, hence the audio tapes. Nana's not quite finished hers yet (saving it for Easter!) but Gramps had gone one better and done a huge book for Emily complete with dozens of old photographs and appendices of information about places he worked and so on, all absolutely beautifully bound up and presented in a handmade slipcase; absolutely stunning heirloom.

Christmas dinner was beautifully cooked by Jon as always; after dinner we, N&G sat down and watched Mamma Mia on DVD, which was lovely (even if the "Slipping Through My Fingers" bit when Mum helps her get ready for the wedding did have me in floods of tears again...) After that we played charades for a while and then last thing at night we all played some more Wii games. Nana was the champion at bowling and did pretty well at golf too!

All in all, it was a lovely, lovely day. Lots of laughter. Grandad was in a bit of a mood and wouldn't join in anything - but then that's what he does and I've given up expecting any different. Nana and Gramps had a great time, I think, and so did we. I'm really glad we bought the Wii - some people I know tend to turn their noses up a that sort of thing, but it's such huge fun and gets everyone involved together.

Today we got up really, really late ........ played more Wii games, including trying to figure out NiGHTS, which is extremely hard ........... ate leftovers, watched another DVD with Nana and Gramps ..... played more Wii and um, played some Wii. And why not? Hope everyone reading had a wonderful, fun-filled day too.

Gulp. Next stop 10th birthday!

Three Months

2008-12-23T19:24:00.018Z

Not sure how I managed to go exactly three months without posting here, but I regret now that I did. I was looking back over the blog the other day and I was sad that there'll be no record to look back on in October, November and December 2009. Oh well. Must try harder!

It's been an eventful time. We went back to St Bees again in October, and Jon went on two more mediumship courses. Emily grew up overnight into a young lady who'll be ten in ten days time - ten going on fifteen, that is; we've had teenage moods in all their glory, but we've also had the most wonderful company you could ask for. Strange, this growing up lark. Emily had her ears pierced recently and is contemplating dying her hair. She's suffering from a type of alopecia areata which is making her eyebrows and eyelashes fall out and her hair is slightly thinning at the temples, bless her, which is affecting her self-confidence and self-esteem quite a lot, and she's also being bothered by early spots. We're focusing a lot on celebrating differences right now. Emily has a interest in all things goth related, but I think she's a bit taken aback that Mum and Dad are more than happy for her to die her hair, experiment with heavy make up and learn about all things "dark", lol - what's she supposed to rebel against?? First photo of pierced ears below :-)

All five cats are happy and healthy, although Cassie-cat is showing her age and looking increasingly frail. She still loves to go out though and is very affectionate. Looking at this picture reminds me that we need to redecorate Emily's bedroom next year. I did say, having done our bedroom and Emily's "blue room" this year that I would never, ever, ever again redecorate anything....but my resolve is weak, so Emily's bedroom, our office and our sitting room next year it is then!

In early January we will be welcoming the pitter patter of two tiny new feet. No, not that kind. Our menagerie will be joined by a baby Congo African Grey Parrot :-)) We have a huge cage and toys waiting and assorted play stands etc as the parrot (tentatively named Lulu, at this stage, but we'll have to see) will spend much of the day out of his/her cage and keeping us company around the house. We need to go right up to North Northumberland to collect him/her but we're so excited! I say him/her because apparently the only way of reliably sexing a parrot is via DNA testing, which we're not having done.

Over the last three months I've worked very hard at Best of the Web, in addition to my normal writing commitments - the new UK & Ireland Directory has finally launched, which I'm very pleased and proud to have been around for. Jon has also been working very hard at his end and we have some very definite career/business plans for the New Year to look forward to. Emily's education has been.... "interesting", especially with the hormone swings factored in. But we're doing OK and we'll be doing even better in the New Year since we've had time recently to discuss together what we're doing and why, and how we want to proceed home-ed wise. One thing that has been going on a huge amount is cooking - Emily now cooks a full meal for us at least once a week and regularly disappears downstairs where she throws together a cake or cookies - without recipe - in minutes. She has a real knack for this kind of thing. Yum, yum!

Other than that brief round up it seems pointless to try catching up on everything I've missed posting, so I'll just pop in some photos from recent months.

Halloween tree and our glorious collection of home grown pumpkins, plus Severus looking like a truly Halloween cat:

Emily experimenting with the knex set and learning about levers by building and working with a set of scales. She also built a grand piano. As you do.

Beautiful kibbies sharing a basket:

In terms of more recent life, last Saturday was the annual Christmas party at Emily's karate club, which she loved. Jon was Father Christmas for the third year running.... even one of the grown ups wanted to sit on his knee, rofl!

We've spent some time recently out in the garden in the dark with lots of hot chocolate and the Christmas lights.

On Sunday, Emily passed a karate grading with flying colours and moved up to purple belt. She's moving into the adult class from January onwards, so she's very excited about that. Yesterday we went to the cinema with Hazel and Romy to see Inkheart; very entertaining, but I gather very different to the book, especially in the ending - perhaps they're not planning to film Inkspell and Inkdeath. We also braved Tesco which was ridiculously busy; we wanted a frozen turkey, but they'd removed all the frozen ones and replaced them with fresh turkeys - for up to £50 a throw. Yes, ladies and gents, that's fifty pounds for a turkey. OK. Refused to pay that and went away without one. Jon later found on in the Co-op for a fifth of the price. What happens to people at Christmas time? It's insane. Today, Emily's made Kirsch truffles as a gift for someone and has also made marzipan biscuits for Christmas day and used quilling to make three beautiful Christmas cards for Nana, Gramps and Grandad.

And that's that, news wise. Christmas Eve tomorrow :-)) Wishing everyone a very Merry and Peaceful Christmas with family and loved ones.

Yay - Education!

2008-09-23T21:47:00.004+01:00

We're finally back into a stable (ish) routine of home ed and so far it's going really well, with Emily keen and enthusiastic and me feeling like we're getting somewhere.

The sleepover Emily had the other week went very well, although neither Emily nor Mei Lin slept for a single minute, apparently, lol. Jasmine did rather better, so how she slept through the chaos the other two were creating is beyond me. Here's the three girls about to have their midnight feast in the new sofa bed :-)

We then had several days of chaos while Jon and I struggled against deadlines and I tried to get some home education in order, getting a vague plan for where we're heading. Mind you, Emily was busy occupying herself throughout that time. One morning she photographed various Barbies in her room and then came and spent a couple of hours on the PC - she created, entirely without assistance, a fabulous powerpoint slide show, complete with captions, sound and special effects, telling an X-Files story she had made up, for which the dolls had posed various scenes. We were extremely impressed :-)

Education aside, Emily has also been having fun recently playing out in the garden in the dark, especially balancing on her beam and trampoline - the fact that the garden is *covered* in huge spider webs doesn't seem to bother her at all. I was heartily told off the other night for insisting on fetching Jon to deal with a spider on the bedroom wall. An exasperated Emily thought I should just leave it be. My child has clearly been kidnapped and replaced with some alien life form.

Over the last week or so we've been gradually decorating our festival tree; we didn't have time to celebrate Mabon as such, but we're doing an Autumn theme for the tree in any case, to cover both Mabon and Samhain. We've embroidered leaves and mushrooms and this morning we spent an enjoyable hour or two decorating the god and goddess figures for the altar and making some of these pentagrams from twigs. All good stuff. We're going away to St Bees again on the 5th October for ten days or a fortnight, but we'll be back in time for Halloween, when we're planning a big family dinner with the dining room all decorated and an evening of spooky games by candlelight. Emily's pumpkins in the vegetable patch are *massive* already!

Now then, since this is supposed to be a home education blog, let me record for posterity what I've finally decided we'll use as our core texts for the next year or so. I'm putting this here in case anyone finds the recommendations useful; I should point out, yadda yadda, that in amongst this lot Emily still has time to do plenty of art, tons of crafts and a whole raft load of self-directed and inspired projects, activities and all round child stuff. When we let her out of the broom cupboard we keep her locked in.

Science
Galore Park So You Really Want To Learn Science Book 2

Kingfisher Science Encyclopaedia

Lots of experiments: rather than the little "done in five minutes" type experiments you get so many of, we're going for something a little bit more indepth now. The "science fair" projects they have in Janice Van Cleave's books are quite good, I think - a little bit of a step up from where we were, and they're extended projects that take quite a while to complete. We have the physics, chemistry and biology ones of those, and I also found this fantabulous website: Science Buddies, which details over 700 extended science project ideas across all the branches of science you can think of. Certainly didn't have when I was at school. Anyway, I'm very pleased to have "discovered" these resources.
At the moment in science, we're looking at space. Of course, because it ties in with the X-Files obsession, lol.

Geography

Letts KS3 Geography Classbook - I like this one. It has double page spreads which are just enough to get the key points across and which you can then use for further investigation/experiments/whatever. This mostly covers physical geography.

Trail Guide to World Geography - this one's very US centric, obviously, but it does give a good overview of world geography and I like the activity ideas, such as making a dictionary of geography definitions as you go along etc. Lots of mapping too.

History

Well, I've got to admit, I'm still all over the place on history. We're fine for now, working on the Middle Ages, but we're using books from all over the show and I'd really like to find a decent spine we can stick with, but none have quite worked - although lots have "nearly" worked. At the moment, we're using:

Medieval Minds - which is cute, but a bit simplistic even though it's meant for KS3

Medieval Realms for Common Entrance and KS3 - which has the opposite problem; it's *very* thorough and rigorous, but a bit too much so.

Plus of course lots of reading books, King Arthur, Robin Hood, castle books, fun bits and bobs and all that malarkey.

English

I think Emily's way ahead of where she "should" be in most spheres of English, but she asked to do some structured English work, so I looked for "a book". We found one, the title of which escapes me, but it's "OK" so far, I suppose. It's the best of a bunch and boy, have I seen a bunch of English teaching books this last couple of years. I still think we'll end up doing without any kind of textbook in the long run for English. It's not as if we're short of ideas for ways to do all the various different kinds of writing one is supposed to learn how to do. The other day the book asked for a paragraph of writing about what makes a good book. Emily looked at it, and me, blankly. She knows what makes a good book, she's read a ton of them, and she knows what makes a howler, but the way the question was phrased was enough to kill all inspiration stone dead.

So instead, she pretended to be a publisher and wrote me a long letter about the book I had submitted, pointing out all of its faults and offering some extremely well crafted humorous advice. What goes on in the English curriculum they have in schools these days? Why is it all so....alternately ridiculously simple or mind-bogglingly boring? Not all home ed children love to write as much as Emily does - it's her "thing" - but in my experience most home ed children love to write when they can see a point to it and find fun and enjoyment in their writing. I can't help but think that none of the English textbooks I've seen do anything other than kill that natural enthusiasm. Guys, you're supposed to be teaching children to **love** using their native language. If they look at you blankly, you've failed so drastically that I can barely find the words for it. Sigh.

Maths

Emily has apparently discovered a love of algebra and has genuinely *begged* for a maths book entirely on algebra, for Christmas??????? See previous remarks about my child having been kidnapped.

We're working through Galore Park So You Really Want To Learn Maths Book 1, which contained an introduction to algebra, among many other things. It's a good text book; I do like this one and we will definitely be sticking with it through books 2 and 3, which apparently will take us up to the end of Year 8 maths; Emily would be in Year 5 at the moment, so we have that about right then.

One thing I *have* discovered is that when I buy book 2, I'll be buying the answer book to go with it. I'm not "bad" at maths - I got a B at O level (my lowest grade) and would have had an A, no doubt, if I could have been bothered - but I was struggling with some of the final algebra questions, especially the ones where the problem is given in words and you have to figure out what the algebraic expression is before you can solve it. (Jon was excellent at these, lol, so it must just be me!)

I know some people who would throw their hands up in horror at that admission, and point out that this is exactly why parents should not be "allowed" to home educate their children. I happen to disagree. I actually, genuinely, believe it's very healthy for a child to realise that grown ups do NOT always (or even ever) have all the answers and that grown ups CAN find it interesting and fun to have to work things out, even when it's tough. I think it points out to children that while all of us shine somewhere, nobody shines everywhere; also that all of can improve at something if we try hard enough. I'll take that as a role model for my child, any day, over the "how dare you question me?" attitude of most teachers I ever met.

Which brings us back to the point of education. It's about learning to learn and learning to love to learn. It's not about proving who's smartest and it most definitely is not about domination and "I'm right, so shut up and listen to me". If that's what we wanted, we'd send her to school......

Poorliness

2008-09-11T14:18:00.005+01:00

Thanks for the kind comments on Emily's new room. She's been using it for just over a week now and it's - gasp - still tidy (almost)! However, within two days of being in there, Emily came down with a horrible bug which has plagued her, and us, ever since and won't seem to shift. We've been coughing, spluttering and retching with the best of them.

Which means that the planned return to education for this last week hasn't happened; not in any formal sense, anyway. We've watched lots of TV, including numerous X-files episodes, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a good cry over E.T., played board games in The Blue Room, and Emily has done lots of fashion designing and X-files episode writing. She also designed a range of X-files merchandise, including an alarm clock which plays the theme tune and has the words "I want to wake up" on it as a parody of the I want to believe tagline, lol. So I suppose her brain hasn't completely turned to mush after all, although mine somewhat feels as though it has.

Tomorrow Jacki is bringing Mei Lin and Jasmine over to us for the normal Friday routine, but the girls are staying for an extended sleepover too, which is causing much excitement. Emily's still struggling valiantly against her persistent cold and has found it difficult to sleep with coughing recently, but hell, high water and highly infectious diseases are insufficient to prevent The Sleepover from taking place, apparently. Kids.

We'll be off back to St Bees at the beginning of October (assuming any of us have stopped feeling like poo by then), which gives us a couple of weeks to get back to "normal" routines......just long enough to get into said routine and then have to get out of it again. Sigh. We're so disorganised. Not that the lack of formal schooling seems to be doing Madam any harm whatsoever, mind you - but I'd really like some routine for me!

And even though everyone must be heartily sick of photos of this room by now, here are a couple more of the completed Blue Room showing off Emily's silver curtains, beauty counter, painted ornament shelves and desk etc. We were going to paint all the wooden stuff that's still unpainted......but I lost the will to live somewhere along the line after the umpteenth day of painting things, so the other cupboards will be done gradually. Oh, and Romeo - who's bagged the corner sofabed as his own new bed. Ignore the patchiness of the walls - it really doesn't look like that in real life, there's something weird going on with the flash photography! And a random fashion thingy Emily drew the other afternoon while I was on the phone - gotta love the "normal sized woman" in the middle, rofl!

Starry, Starry Night Part II

2008-09-03T20:36:00.003+01:00

We're very happy :-))

Today was spent finishing painting all the bookcases, desk etc for Emily's new room, while Gramps did all the electrics and laid the new carpet. So, at about 8pm, we were able to bring up the sofa bed and coffee table, with everything else going to move in tomorrow. Tomorrow we'll put up the curtains, install the beauty counter, bring up the desk, fix the mirror on the wall and hang the door. Well, we = Gramps :-))

So here she is, the proud owner of a new room that we will have to stop calling The Dollshouse Room! The colour scheme fits together beautifully - Emily had far better vision than we did.

Starry, Starry Night

2008-08-31T18:51:00.005+01:00

So thrilled with how Emily's new room is coming along. Woke up yesterday morning about 8.30 to find that Jon had been up since six and had already painted half the room in the beautiful deep, rich blue that Emily chose :-))

During the rest of yesterday he painted the rest of the walls, and Gramps put in the door frame, and this morning Jon painted the skirting board and radiator, while Emily stamped stars on the walls and Gramps started work in her beauty counter. The stars look stunning now they're done in silver glitter paint. They're scattered around the room, vaguely following the lines of where the furniture will go, so they look like constellations across a midnight blue sky. Together with silver curtains, the blue sofa bed with big silver cushions, Emily's desk painted silver, blue carpet, silver lamps, and her assorted bookcases and cupboards in shades of blue and silver, it's going to look fantastic.

We're getting close to done now. We need to install the new lights, move some plugs around, lay the carpet and paint some bookcases, but then it's action stations to move Emily into her new room :-))

Here's where we are. The paint is a much deeper blue than it looks in most of these photos. It's called Lapis Blue on the pot and it's a match for the deep blue in Tutankhamun's mask (which I believe had a lot to do with why it was chosen, lol). I'm so glad we went with Emily's vision instead of trying to talk her out of it - despite having been told several times over the last few weeks by well meaning people that we shouldn't have "let" her have total say and that it would be much too dark and look awful. Rolls eyes. The paint looks a little patchy in some of the photos, but that's more the way the flash catches it; it looks great in the flesh :-))

And as you can see from the last photograph, even Juliet was impressed!

Work-wise it has been a hectic weekend. Jon has worked his socks off with putting up lining paper and painting, I've been mostly stuck on boring old deadlines, and we've both been trying not to think about the state of our bank account once the first of September rolls round tomorrow. I've also been working on a plan for getting back to Emily's education with some degree of sense and structure. Mind you, we'll be going away at the beginning of October, so it's not as if there's long between then and now to get back into a routine!

Birthday Bliss

2008-08-29T21:15:00.003+01:00

Well, it was my 37th birthday on the 27th August and my, I had a truly lovely day :-))

First thing in the morning Jon and I took Emily out to Lincoln with a budget of £30 for her to spend in Waterstones. Since we have accounts with various book wholesalers, we have only very, very rarely bought books from "real bookshops" over the last ten years, since it's a heck of a lot cheaper to get them from the wholesalers or from somewhere like amazon, but with fond memories of many mispent hours in bookshops when we were kids, we wanted to let her loose, lol, as a birthday treat for me and absolute heaven for her. In the end, we spent just over £40, but for that she has seven wonderful books. We also had a coffee and cake in the Costa Lot (ooops, sorry Costa Coffee) shop within Waterstones - another rare treat!

Back home, my Mum and Dad cooked us all a fantabulous birthday tea; Emily and Daddy had made me absolutely *the* most delicious carrot cake *ever* covered in candles :-) I was a very lucky lady with some superb books from Emily and Daddy and an extremely thoughtful present that had me in tears - I've always had a thing about golden eagles.......last time we went to a wildlife park in Cumbria I couldn't tear myself away from their eagles...... so my lovely hubby and daughter bought me a year's adoption of one of that park's pair of eagles as part of which I get to go and spend time with the keeper and get up close and personal with the eagle :-))) I'm so excited about that! To go with that part of the present, they also bought me a stunning eagle statuette which now has pride of place in our bedroom. I was spoilt rotten by my Mum and Dad too, who bought me lots of wine. Always a Very Good Thing.

Later that evening, we were just about to settle down for a family games evening when friends turned up unexpectedly and brought me another beautiful present, a stunning Chinese display plate. Jacki stayed and chatted for an hour or so while Mei Lin and Emily played in the garden in the dark, lol, much to the amusement of the assorted cats. After they had left, we played Balderdash, which had everyone in hysterics and which Jon won by a mile (as always) followed by lots of games of Coffee Pot. So all in all, a very special birthday - I feel very honoured :-)

Yesterday afternoon another friend and her daughter dropped by unexpectedly too, so that was a lovely chance to catch up on some news and for Emily and Maisie to play in the complete chaos that passes for our house at the moment.

The decorating continues apace. Yesterday we stripped the wallpaper; this morning Jon papered the wooden partion wall with lining paper to give the paint an even base and we all chipped in with painting the other walls with the white base coat; then I painted half of the sash window frame. Decorating and me don't mix well, alas - yesterday morning was very fraught when I started to clear the last shelves in the room only to discover that we literally had *nowhere* left to put the contents of the shelves or the two large chairs that needed moving out of the room. Tears and tantrums and other very un-adult behaviour followed. Not one of my finer hours. As ever, Jon came to the rescue and calmly moved stuff around, aided by a very grown up Emily.

Yesterday, the BBC finally got back to me regarding this month's payment. They sent a cheque. I was livid. It only arrived today, and even after depositing it same day it will take another 4-5 days to clear into our business bank account and then another 4-5 days to transfer to the personal account. I had been banking (definitely not a funny pun) on receiving the direct payment into the bank account on the 22nd, as they had promised, leaving me just enough time to transfer payment to our personal account to cover our outgoings on the 1st September. Obviously, that's not now going to happen, so everything will bounce - for the fifth month running. To cut a long story short, it's time to take legal advice over this farce since they are consistently in breach of the contract; it's also time to invoice them for the hundreds and hundreds of pounds in bank charges we've incurred over the last five months as a direct result of this fiasco. Colour me distinctly unimpressed.

I'm set for a crappy weekend meeting non stop deadlines, my mood not exactly heartened by the thought of our financial situation come Monday the 1st. I'm still trying to catch up with work that was lost when the PC crashed, although the super duper new (tiny!!!!! the box is about a quarter of the size of the old one!) PC that my Mum and Dad stepped in and save us with is up and running like lightning. Had to cancel our weekly Friday date with Jacki and girls this week, so we could press on with the decorating, but next week Emily's been invited to go and stay there for a couple of days, so she's a very excited bunny :-) One the new room is finished, she has a long list of people to invite for sleepovers here, lol, so it should be a busy few weeks ahead.

The Fun and the Fury

2008-08-25T18:10:00.005+01:00

Emily's new room is progressing very well. We've cleared two thirds of the room and Gramps has built the partition wall in absolutely record speed, despite today being his 75th birthday :-)) In chronological order: The first part of the frame going up:
Frame in place, boards leaning against it:
Same view from inside the room formerly known as the Dolls House Room:
The master at work:
The railings are now down, leaving a sheer drop from the framework down the stairs:

Starting to put in the main panels of the partition:Emily inspecting the handiwork so far:
The Master and The Apprentice square up :-))
Taking shape from inside the room:
What a thing to be doing on your 75th birthday: Gramps in a precarious position, with Nana acting as ladder support!

And taking a bow - the partition structure is done, now it just needs decorating on both sides, and the door fitting, when it arrives :-))
Clearing out the room has prompted mixed emotions. It's very hard work, for a start, and whilst it's in progress, of course, we get to live in total chaos with boxes stacked everywhere. However, it's been satisfying. If a little fraught. Tempers have run high at various points, admittedly. Looking at old photographs and school reports we found has been a deeply philosophical journey for me. I look at photographs of me aged around 12 and I don't even recognise that person. I long to know what I was thinking when a photo was taken, and who I was. What was worrying me? What was I looking forward to? What was going through my head seconds before someone pointed a camera? And the photos we take of Emily now.....she too is no doubt destined to ask the same questions of those photos in twenty or thirty year's time. This life passes so quickly. More and more, I'm starting to realise that the only sensible option is to grab the moment and live for the now.

Sunday was an "interesting" day. First thing in the morning, Jon, Emily and I went out and bought the paint for her room, stencils, new carpet, lamps, cushions and other bits and pieces. From home, we ordered her sofa bed and curtains. Whilst inwardly crossing our fingers that the BBC will actually pay on time this month, on which all of the above expense hinges. That bit was the fun. Then came the fury. At about half past two, our main PC descended into a spiral of despair that was only to end at about half past two in the morning this morning when it finally died and refused to be sparked back into life.

I'll spare you the gory details - basically, the damn thing's buggered, and that's that. The hard drive is completely gone and apparently our only option would be to reformat it, losing everything in any case. So it's gone. And with it, years' worth of important business files and all of our existing email account. There was screaming and there was sobbing and there was cold, hard hair-pulling fury. It was not a good afternoon, evening or night. Fortunately, we still have Emily's PC, that I'm using now. We also now have new email addresses, but I've had to re-write several large pieces of work that were due in today from scratch and the stress is only just beginning to die down.

Today is my Dad's 75th birthday. We had a lovely little sit down and cake with him while we gave him his presents; meanwhile he and my Mum gave us a very large present indeed, by offering to buy us a brand new PC to replace the heap of junk that even now sits, smouldering and glaring at me, in the corner. The day after tomorrow is my birthday - we're taking Emily out for a shopping spree in a bookshop to celebrate, lol, and coming back for a joint birthday meal for me and my Dad. Then it's wallpaper stripping and room decorating with a vengeance. So much for the nice bits. The sofa bed that I ordered for Emily yesterday was supposed to take 14 days to arrive. They rang up this morning, in the middle of our PC induced fury. It's coming on Thursday. We have *nowhere* ready to physically put it. American Express broke their record with no less than 58 phone calls to our answering machine yesterday. There is no sign as yet of the BBC payment despite repeated assurances from their end that payment would be released early this month. Life continues to conspire to induce maximum inconvenience and stress. And we continue to try to smile through it - mostly. What else can you do?

The Before

2008-08-21T22:02:00.006+01:00

Shortly to be followed, one dearly hopes, by The After. Our attention has been focused this last couple of days on clearing the space affectionately known by some as The Dolls' House Room (and known by others as The Junk Hole). We're preparing to turn it into an amazing deep blue and silver retreat for Emily.

Well, that's the plan. Her choice of colour scheme is....brave. We've dithered about it for weeks now, wondering whether to veto it or to persuade Emily to go for lighter colours (it's a very dark part of the house), but finally we decided to trust her judgement. She's not normally wrong :-)

The room as it stands at the moment isn't actually a room - it's a large rectangular landing above the entrance hall downstairs, so it only has three walls. My Dad is going to build a partition wall, no doubt dangling precariously above the sheer drop of the stairs as he does so......Emily doesn't call him her "Angel Who Fixes Stuff" for nothing. He's also going to fix the lighting for us and add some new power points, and build a corner "hair and beauty unit" for Emily with a high work surface and mirror backing, at which she can sit on a bar stool. He and my Mum created one for me when I was a teenager, which is what gave us the idea :-) Meanwhile, Jon's going to take care of the room and ceiling painting, with Emily's help of course.

We've been working solidly to clear the room for the last two and a half days....and we don't seem to have made much progress. For those among you with a strong stomach, here are some "before" pictures........and if these worry you, it's a good job you didn't see it two and a half days ago.

We're going out to buy the paint, new carpet and assorted DIY bits this weekend. Hopefully by next weekend, it will be more or less done, although the corner sofa bed Emily wants may have to wait a couple of weeks to be ordered, given our dire finances. Exciting stuff. Or traumatic, depending on your point of view. We'll go for exciting, shall we?

Education-wise, we've been having a bit of a break. The house is in absolute chaos, which makes it hard to get organised for "work" - besides, it is school summer holidays. Emily normally works through the holidays, so I'm sure it won't hurt to have a few weeks off until we get back into some sort of order. There have been odd educational moments - we're still doing maths every day, and some form of English on most days, and Emily's reading a great deal and writing X-Files scripts every five minutes, lol. She was very proud to have a comment on our last blog post from Nick Green, author of The Cat Kin, saying that he liked her poem, so thank you Nick! I'm being nagged to read Cat Kin at the moment, as apparently Emily would like to do some work related to animal ethics based on themes from the book. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list :-)

There's been a fair bit of craft and fashion related work going on too, come to think of it. Emily and I made Barbie clothes the other weekend, which was fun. I really need to get our huge craft collection in some kind of order. Clearing out the Dolls House Room today I found an enormous stash of tissue paper - only the other day I'd been running around looking for tissue paper for the festival tree, and couldn't find any. Rolls eyes.

The BBC sent us a cheque in the end. Very late. Again. We've been promised that this month the payment will be early. We live in hope. American Express have taken to ringing me very twelve minutes on the dot. Or should I say, ringing our answerphone. Yep, that'll work. I don't have the money to pay you, but hassling me to that extent will make the money appear faster. Of course. I *would* have the money to pay if the BBC didn't make such an almighty mess up with their payments on a regular basis. Perhaps Amex would like to hassle them.

Took the baby kibbles Voldemort and Severus to the dreaded V.E.T on Tuesday for their booster vaccinations. They escaped. From the basket when it was all over and I was trying to put Severus back into it. Good job the window was closed. V.E.T. lady had to help me and Emily catch 'em. £65 that little escapade set us back....I wonder if they charged extra for the stress factor?? We have to take Romeo and Juliet soon for their boosters too. Cassie-cat's due hers in November, but I think we might leave her be. The stress (for her) of keeping her in all night and then getting her into the basket and in the car and into the V.E.T. is a little bit much at her ripe old age, I think. She's still fighting fit and was playing like a kitten in the garden the other day with Jon........but when considering whether to take her for the vaccination our thoughts inevitably turn to the way her brother, our beloved Merlin, went so rapidly down-hill after his "routine" vet treatment for fleas two years ago. We're convinced that sparked off his rapid and traumatic decline, as he'd been fit and healthy before it. Yes, I think Cassie-cat and "routine" vet treatment are done. She doesn't need the indignity and fear factor at this point in her life, for minimal health gain.

Took this of Juliet a couple of days ago - she was almost completely hidden in the basket, camouflaged against the leopard skin. She's been a lot more loving to the babies recently - she even licked Severus without hitting him!
Work-wise I'm still plugging away at my existing contracts, and Jon's still plugging away writing stuff and working on the online shop. I've been very busy at Best of the Web, where I was very chuffed to be asked to lead an important and satisfying but highly complicated project, which is taking up lots and lots of time. It's all good stuff. And it's nearly my birthday :-))