Monthly Archives: June 2006

quick today

at the moment I am trying to seize the moment with the girls, and banish the dark side as it were.

so today we watched some cbeebies together, played imagination stuff, geomagged, read books – SB read 2 red nose readers and an apple tree farm with a bit of help. i then read why the sea is salty, and we discussed beaches and seasides. SHe then spent a while on jump ahead maths while I played allsorts of toddler things with BB.

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when bB slept, Chris set up and experiment for SB, and we watched how cooling gas in a glass makes the water level rise – well I’ll show a picture. We used the DK picturepedia explanation of molecules – really good – to help her understand what was happening, and she enacted molecules in various states!!

science - molecules!

BB and SB have both made plaster of paris foot and handprints [well, C and B's respectively at Kessingland were so good!]

When BB woke up, we did a great deal of sorting out of the hayloft, as someone locally is putting a few boxes of hers in there. If my future becomes less than pleasant, I guess we could rent that space for storage… BB played in the car, and I rescued my box – see previous post!

we played outside a bit, and then listed to little toe whilst eating tea, and discussed real vs totally made up stories.

Not the best choice of evening pastime

in the circumstances, I shouldn’t really be looking through a keepsake box bound to make me cry – it did. I have a box my dad’s dad used to show me, and the keepsake I have of him and granny. the box is fairly uniteresting, but in it, he kept his momentoes of his father – who died as a merchant seaman when he was very young. he went into a home at that point as did his brother. larer his brother was a transport to NZ, and died there aged 16. in the box is his fathers seaman cards, english naturalisation and letters to his mother. there is one letter back. also flowers pressed from the grave of his brother, sent by the vicars wife to his mother. He had so little of a childhood, and valued these things hugely.

Also various pictures from his and gran’s childhood – some identifiable, and some not. Will flickr these as the canadian family can look and see if they can identify themselves [well, their parents/grandparents] in grans.

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i then thought how poor my keepsakes will be. I have both too much and too little.

Kessingland Camp now updated

was great, but no blogging facility in my brain. Hopefully Chris will do it.

here are the photos.

actually, we are probably both not feeling very bloggish, so while SB does jump ahead maths on the other computer, I’ll do a quick blog for posterity.

I loved all of it, there were no bad moments – wellllll, OK, I WAS a bit stressed before my craft as sure it would be a failure, and when an eager beaver child knocked a whole cup of plaster of paris over me I DID have to take some deep breaths! And I guess BB’s constant desire to run away as fast as possible, or lean throuh bridge to see ducks did get a bit much…

There wasn’t enough time, and inertia stopped me from actually being good enough to explore hookups, even though friends there that I wanted to chat to more [sorry]. And to be honest, my life so spiralling out of control at the moment, the opportunity to sit and let it wash around me was very tempting at times.
however, I was really happy to have put behind shyness to introduce new people [though not very good at it!] I loved meeting them too, as don’t want camp to become cliquey – although when you see people you know the temptation is to catch up on life and everything!

i think the crafts worked really well, getting everyone to hook up and have a good reason to say hello and chat. Although no sandcastles made, the beach expedition too was good for non-stressful meeting and socialising, and getting the children all together.

SB was much more into doing the crafts this year as well, so not me doing it by proxy. SB and Big concentrated so hard on their felting – though i do think there was a bit of pride in who stabbed themselves the most! SB made a great basket, and I made a lid for it.

I was proud of SB for learning to make compromises with her friends, and giggled at her hero worship of violet [who bought her a slinky] and her resilience when violet prefered to play sometimes with the older kids. Though also giggle at the various slaves games initiated – i think – by violet.

the africa alive trip was fun – though wouldn’t hand around to see the lions fed again! Enjoyed the swimming – i love swimming! weather was mostly great.

SB danced and sang at the caberet – though BB didn’t. And all children worthy of claps and cheers. Both my girls appeared to have a fantastic time, enjoying the increased freedom of camp, and SB was fairly responisble about it [well, mostly!] playing with a mixture of children and minimal grumps.

Also great was the last minute suggestion by Merry that why not stay another day and go to the beach in lowestoft – why not indeed?

So a perfect week indeed, and now am over initial brain stopping panic of where my life may be going, i can look back on it and think fantastic again.

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where I have visited

County map
I’ve visited the counties in yellow.
Which counties have you visited?

made by marnanel
map reproduced from Ordnance Survey map data
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Rebalancing

Life at work goes from worse to, well, thoroughly awful. It looks like there are going to be redundancies. I am last in…

O today I chilled. After all, if the worst is going to happen, worrying about it for the 6 or so months before I know, will just make them that much harder, and not actually make it any easier then.

SB spent half of the day doing jump ahead maths – its the easy one, and she is desperate to get to the giants birthday, as she gets it to 90 odd candles, and then the computer goes funy and the hard drive replaced etc etc, and she has to start again. So today she got 50 of the 100 candles. [reminds me a lot of me on games such as civ...!] Anyway, well impressed by her ability to stick to a task!

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other than that, we were mostly playing in the garden.

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I did get to play a lot with BB so we read, shape sorted, ran, cuddled, tickles, and whatever else a mummy and an 18 monther could think of! As Chris mentioned, her continuous monologue on the world is rather cute.

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oh, and I think our bees swarmed again. there was a huge buzzing noise, and a veritable ball of bees flying near the chimney, so I tooke the 2 girls in, and got distracted, so I think the main lot must have flown off before I got back out a couple of hours later – so the photos are of perhaps the remainder going back in? there has been a lot of flying activity, and also a fair number of bees dying on the lawn, so i wondered whether it was a swarm or a mating flight??? i just don’t know that much about bees. There’s still a lot of bee milling about going on anyway. They arrived May 9th last year

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Thanks Sarah – My website as a graph!

as seen first on Sarah’s blog

and yes, I did do the garden blog too!

Arrr beee chur be durrp

And so says Butterbean, or some such thing anyway, endlessy throughout the day. I love toddler pre-speech (well more than the odd real word) babble, it seems so full of meaning for them – as they point and wave at something, or give you something and then chatter away. No doubt about when she want’s you to read a book as she plonks it on your lap and says ‘book’ repeatedly :-) Her fave as the moment is Ten Little Ladybirds which she seems to BE endlessy dragging around, followed by That’s not my dinosaur . We were reading this earlier this morning and she was rather cutely getting my hand and putting it onto the textured bits to feel them :-)

Monday we went to the monthly sports session for one of the Home Ed groups, which Stringbean seems to enjoy. It’s only an hour, and starts at 9.30, which given it’s a fair journey for us, means a prompt start, but just about made it in time. We never leave in hurry though, SB likes to have play afterwards with other children, and i’m happy to sit and drink tea and natter so it makes the journey sem more worthwile anyway. So by the time we got back home, stopping for a bit of shopping) and had lunch and BB had settled down for her nap it was well into the afternoon.

Can’t really remember what else we did then – SB did some of the old DK World Explorer CDROM we have ‘New Version two – fully updated for 1998…….’, She needs a bit of help with where the places she needs to look for are, so it is probbaly helping her learn the continents etc.

Sspent some time in the garden, SB investigated the pond with a net we found – she was trying to catch the ‘pond monster’,

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but when Helen got home from work she came bearing gifts of a couple of water pistols, so we all had good fun trying them out in the garden in the sun.

Licensed to Squirt? IMG 5138

Had the Panner that SB and Helen made for tea in a curry. It wasn’t quite firm enough to fry, as it just melted and started to stick tot he pan, but was nice pooped intot he curry at the end, though did start to fall part then. Probably need to be pressed with a lot more pressure to make it firmer.
Yesterday was an long one for all concerned, SB was awake, waking up Helen before 5 am, BB was awake again (after waking at 3 ish) at about 5.30, neither really went back to sleep and me and the girls were all up early. Not good start when you are going to have a long day and possibly night at work :-(

Did mean i had two lots of washing on the line by about 8 though.

Library day/storytime today, so morning passed in breakfast, some reading of the library books some tidying up, watching a bit of the kiddies Springwatch on CBeebies. Off to the library – they both took Teddies there for soem reason, so both looked cute/funny carrying these teddies up the road, nice that BB is giood enough at walking places now that she can just trot along with us and doesn’t need a carry (to short a journey for the pushchair). Tried to get soem books out for Helen, but not sure how successful that was really, at the same time BB was going round pulling books of shelves (just such a handy height you know…) and re-arranging them. SB wanted to choose a couple of books, so not quite sure what she choose or on what criterion.

After that, lunch – including more Little Toe Radio Show, napping BB, some Explode the Code, some more of the World Explorer CD, I’d cooked loads of beans earlier, so made some up into a nice Bean Salad to go with dinner later. finally managed to get the playroom back into some sort of order, havng been a mess for days, read some of the library books, played out side for a bit, went to swimming lessons

(via a shop, got to the checkout and didn’t ahve my cards, so could only pay for little bit of what I’d got….. Very grumpy woman had to take all my stuff off and put in a trolley to put back on the shelves- yeah like I really wanted to waste my time getting a load of stuff and then not being able to buy it….)

- SB insisted that we watch the circuit trainers for bit afterwards – not sure why they are so interesting, home again, dinner finshed and eaten. I dozed off when putting each of the children to bed, and was dozing off again when H finally got home at about 10.30 :-(. so evening was a bit of right off.

So of course we went to bed at about 1am….

Simple Pleasures

sitting in garden with laughing children running about – ahhhhhhh.

thats mostly what we did. SB did some computer games and the whole of the new webland as well. She helped me plant out the runner beans – as did BB. Hands off to those of you who regularly garden with two such avid helpers! mostly she climbed, swinged and jumped. we played a lot of hide and seek together – BB usually gives my hiding place away though! Chris found the very old pop up tent and tunnel – so a lot of fun with that. Oh, and we read half of the usbourne greek myths book.


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SB and I had a practice run at our Kessingland craft – see below and leave feedback.


IMG 5180Our paneer has worked well, and plan to eat it tomorrow – we were too tired to cook anything inventive this evening.


IMG 5176BB is singing and doing the actions – she likes twinkle twinkle, wind the bobbin and peter perkins
We have a ‘pond monster’ It was flailing in the shallow muddy bit, and I went to investigate – i could only see the tail end, which seemed long for a fish, and wrong shaped – @ small eelish? broen coloured. disappeared fairly sharpish, but don’t think long enough for eel – I wonder what it is? Maybe its the culprit for the declining goldfish numbers?

Polyfilla craft

is rapidly undergoing a rethink. Polyfilla taking ages to harden being thought 1 – so prob plaster of paris instead. It looks nice tinted, so will bring some paint for colouring. Making a mould out of playdough [whether home made or not] was not something SB skilled at. took me ages to get her to understand, she pressed things in half heartedly, and then wailed she wanted to stick shells in the top – so prob not doing that. [i want something relaltively simple as a number of the crafts are definitely with a fair bit of adult help/supervision.]


IMG 5113So, at present polyfilla is in margarine tubs [have piccies will flickr] Sb found it easy to mix the water and paint in, and then stick shells in without me doing anythng at all. She enjoyed it. As I said, polytfilla taking a while to dry out much!

So I think this is what I’m going to do – bring plaster of paris and apint and stirring things. Suggest people bring a margarine tub or 2, and collect shells/stones from the beach and bring them. It might be as cheap as 50p a tub.

if enough fo you think your children would prefer making moulds then either I can bring playdough and charge a bit more [or alike] or you can bring it.

thoughts please?