But today see the logo it is historyetc. This week with the theme of christmas crafts. Not everyone could make it, as lots of christmassy activity all over the place, so we missed them, but still had fun

first craft out of the stable was chocolate making. we smashed 3 polos and stirred into 6 squares of melted milk choc and then filled a 12 days of christmas mould with them. was hoping at the end to take a pic of all the finished objects, but half of them were eaten within seconds

next we planned to do wreaths, and sent the girls out into the garden. Merry arrived and so her girls did chocolates. the girls did a fab job of getting lots of greenery. it became v clear that making the wreath bits out of straw would take longer than planned, so excavated out some old opitec kits, and the girls all happily coloured theirs in whilst Z mostly but i helped [grin] made the wreath bases.

Nanna and grandad bean arrived, having had a v relief inducing hospital visit [phew emoticon] and so hugs and joyousness

then we started the wreath crafting, and apart from some nasty stab wounds from the pyracantha and holly, it all went really well, and there were some very different yet all gorgeous wreaths created. BB and J went off and played instead, i think they did a bit of felting, as BB was finishing a mouse house. it took quite a while to do the wreaths, so lunch was pretty late. and didn’t have mildly alcoholic mulled wine and mince pies in the end, but did have carols blaring forth [even if some of them were sung by the monks of prinknash, and perhaps an acquired taste ] SB ‘judged’ the wreaths, and i think that went ok. not encouraging the ranking thing tho as always risks upset.

4th craft was making lovely bead christmas stars to hang on the tree. slightly complicated, but Merry worked them out, and then all did some lovely ones. we also started decorating the girls trees in the playroom. slightly scared by all the climbing up and down the ladder it was too cloudy though to wheel out the telescope.

i forgot to say that all this gadding to carpet shops [the excitement] was only possible due to my dad having driven up this morning to do some painting in said home ed room – coving and gloss, daddybean in charge of ceiling. the girls have been v good whilst this going on. SB doing lots and lots of the easier home ed options both in morning and then in aft whilst we were at carpet emporium. [11 ticks today!] she was somewhat disgruntled that i yelled c# up the stairs to where she was practicing recorder as my hello, rather than something a bit more, well, motherly! BB did some more of her lego house, and started the chicken mosaic and played with her new doll. A very happy girl there

On return from the carpet not-quite-decision-making trip, SB and i whisked off to ballet for the end of show open lesson, which i really enjoy. SHe is definitely improving at ballet, just needs to have stiffer arms i think, but the rhythm and concentration is there. We then did a good piano practice before she settled down to do some colouring whilst i read story of the world and BB having found all her old bricks made various buildings. BB also doing manic inline skating [with SB's old inline skates - there will be an accident there!!] and I tried to sort out the photoshop database a bit more – daddybean stayed up until 3am last night doing something or other to fix most of it.

unfortunately, we haven’t been able to locate skittles in our garden – it has lots of hiding places, but also a 6 foot wall enclosing it. So he isn’t safely in his hutch. grr, it is usually snowy we have to chase more, but skittles being black and now snuggled somewhere for the night is impossible to find. worried…

SO to today, SB was soooo late getting up – she insists though that since she was reading in bed that should count as up BB insisted i get up to help her in a craft, tho as soon as i had dragged my stumps down here she changed her mind, and instead played with her yesterdays presents – sylvanians and baby. She did then finish her dolphin mosaic and then finished also a new dove djeco mosaic that was a birthday present. SB did manage to join us and did some more of her giraffe window mosaic.

the girls started some more sylvanianing, so i went out a played with rabbits and cleaned the hutches. If my iphone communicated anymore with the puter, i would even show you! They are really gorgeous, but I am glad they are the last babies, because actually i am worried about finding good homes for them all. we need to at least find a home for one boy, so that our worst case scenario is having 2 couples… Anyway, they are adorable!

Girls chivvied out after lunch to help gardening – rofl!! They did start weeding, after a half hour search for gardening gloves, and the right trowel, small fork … It being a lot of chick weed I then wowed them with the use of a rake [right tool for the job moment!] then pulled out the rest of the perennials. Daddybean had been sorting out the bird feeders, so SB peeled off to fill then, BB peeled off to play indoors, so we finished off the bed and put membrane on the top. Then had fun thinking about the bed, we already had a good idea, some structural herbs this year and slate mulch, and then when sure the weeds died down, some more holes through the membrane and plant creeping thyme through as well, tho next year have some pots with some herb varieties in. should look good have the bed infront of the conservatory to clear as well. Daddybean has been clearing around the greenhouse too. maybe next year might be the year that it looks like adults rather than squatters live here

We had tea and teacakes to warm up, and SB has finished her jade rune stones silk bag [very nicely] and BB is doing some of her birthday sculpey kit. We plan to watch the 1930′s shops programme, which we are all enjoying and have a takeaway pizza.

We trialled the 3 groups today, which TBH I found quite stressful as a lot to say and do in a small time, the dynamics will take a bit of settling down, the middle group got a partic raw deal and i was just ready to cry. Lack of sleep on my part prob didn’t help, but I now have migraine. Will give it a few more tries as it works better for everyone else, and I really want to keep latinetc going as a strong group as it is fab.

That said, all the children had read or had read to them chapter 1 of real science 4 kids chemistry and we romped through the periodic table, protons, neutrons and electrons and then atomic mass unit and moles. I do think the 3 levels of the chemistry first chapters are all really great, and so far like the text. we did pre-k and 1 with BB and 2 with SB at home. We then shuffled my deck of elements and chose the ones to make a window decal each. For the first and last groups we read up about the elements in my periodic table book, but ran out of time with the middle group. I have suggested they might want to do that . i think the decals looked really good when finished. Unfortunately my camera had a flat battery, and the spare also flat. partic as when i checked last night there was allegedly 2/3 battery power left. Luckilly le ciel rouge took some photos and we plan to nick them from her flickr stream

[tho not periodic table view ]

edited to add at kirsty’s request to make the decals we got some of that bookbinding clear stuff [loads of it] and had an a3 size each. i cut out old 10p piece size protons out of yellow see through sweetwrapper plastic that you can buy, and the same with blue for neutrons, then 1/2p size in red for electrons, which we placed in shells, but talked about the unplaceability effectively of electrons and this was just for ‘display’. we put them on one a4 side, with the protons and neutrons clumped in the middle but accurately counted, and then folded over the other a4 side, and it worked

SB did clarinet [with g's as hers is in service, and sounded quite good from the kitchen] minimus, tesselating art and skoldo french, all of which she enjoyed, tho she said the skoldo now too easy for her. K’s plan tho is to race through it looking for gaps in knowledge, so hopefully a fast consolidating race will work well for her and then move on. It is nice to hear her say french is easy tho . BB didn’t do french – no such get out again – but really loved doing z’s tesselating art.

We had a further chat about whether we could work into the afternoon whilst G and K take children to cello some short while of something else, either a bigger craft, a bit of music theory or perhaps some singing or group music. Whilst the morning stressy for me, i need the afternoon to be a bit less intensive, so it kind of depends how pans out, but really love the group, and it would be lovely to get a good working balance. SB and L shew each other their piano skills , poor J got *really* attacked by a thorn bush and i drew out a thorn of nearly a cm. He was *very* brave.

SB now at brownies, and showing off baby rabbits – one of the owls would quite like a rabbit she thinks – that would be good :), we are going to have a chippery tea shortly and then SB has judo. My imigran seems to be doing a good job on migraine and planning an earlier night tonight

Latinetc was brought to you today by:

also edited to add, with the chippery tea we watched the wallace and grommet inventions prog, BB and i played ludo before bed, and SB played with geomags after judo and before bed. I am having an early night i think

And so to today, the girls started off the day with making more christmas cards, they are really beautiful, if not necessarily christmas themed SB has done a fab tree and present one that she spent some time on. BB spent a long time on one with a lizard on the outside, and you open up to a laptop inside. daddybean and i are hoping this isn’t another version of the capri sun ds trick . Lots of humming, singing and chatting as these got done in a very ‘isn’t this lovely’ kind of way.

We did some story of the world 1 - middle egypt this time, and nubia. We do try and do the questions and narrations as per the activity book, but BB often gets carried away by her story telling… BB looked at the realscience for kids chemistry chapter 1, we did the pre-K and then I read the level one but simplified it a bit for her. SB and I just had time for a really good piano practice before she went out to her last bikeability session. A lovely sunny afternoon for it anyway

BB and I read a book and fed and played with rabbits and then watched some starwars prequel 3 before going off to swimming, where i took charge of SB and watched both their lessons before getting home. Here SB looked at her level 2 chemistry whislt sitting snuggled up close to me, and we did the questions at the end together. I think we have got moles and atomic weight and numbers sorted, tho at 9, doesn’t really matter if not. I do like the text book bit of it tho, as nice and straightforward, and being for a ‘classical’ education, has 3 levels of ability to choose from. The ‘lab’ experiment for this first chapter is a bit dull-as-ditchwater, so think can be done at home with own families, and instead we are going to do an element treasure hunt [i think] and make an element window ‘decal’ [concentrating on the first 20] which unfortunately has left me cutting out loads of blobs this eve, and therefore late to blog! I do wish the most common isotope of them had the same number of neutrons as protons, would make life much easier! Have made a list to make the decals easier to do.

we finished with watching a sarah jane on iplayer with the girls and roman mystery for SB. And all evening spent prepping for tomorrow!

It was a rather fabulous day! obviously, having had such a killer migraine yesterday, i did far less planning than i had thought i might, and after all, i was at work [as blogged, woohoo, by daddybean] . I think we were 2 crafts short of an ideal number, tho we did have 1 of them, but at the point ppl were mooching around, i had forgotten about it. An Jax has come up with the fab idea of doing a costume pegdoll at each historyetc, so we should end up with hundreds of them to have a clothes timeline washingline!

We started with the early african crafts, doing tribal designs to make a variety of shakers. All the children seemed to enjoy this, and less mess was made than anticipated the children were also excited by the fact that this also necessitated buying some more pringles which were on a buy one get one free across the road Whilst they did this, i read some stories from these books

We also made little spiders to be Anansi and hung them from the vine – which did look rather fab Lots of giggling and laughing and chatting amonsgst the children. Too many adults had headaches, so we smiled and chatted and drank tea as well as educating, found the oboe to lend out, hopefully still in working order more or less

We had lunch and in the afternoon I explained about this time of the chinese dynasty the story of the empress ‘finding’ silk and then we mde ‘silk’ bags to put jade pictograms in to tell each other’s fortunes. the children pretty much chose loads and loads of hideous fortunes so in the end we adults were not so keen to have our fortunes told any more. We made some papaya fried rice and drank the jasmine tea and ate lots of cake. J and M read us further stories, and that seemed good too.

Jax is staying overnight, so we have a yummy curry and are trying not to hear the kids screeching upstairs whilst we serially blog [or are we in parallel??]

SB has also done some piano prac, been to brownies [and is going to be walking with the flag bearer on remembrance day] and judo. BB and Big have also had great fun on the wii.

Today, orig, i had thought we might go out somewhere, but have instead stayed in, as SB wanted to ‘just spend time with me’ awwwww. SO that is what we did. She has spent a fair bit of time playing with paper dolls. But we also did a long time of recorder duets together – half the book! we would have done viola, but have mislaid the book [again!!] was trying to find a nice starter violin/viola duet book, but can’t. So instead we did clarinet, and yes, it does need a service and the piano. Following that significant amount of music, BB wanted to play bohnanza again with me, having done enough ‘penning‘ [another sign] so we did that and SB started a window mosaic. BB and I then read some of A City Through Time which seems to be currently on amazon at a phenomenal price… and BB very successfully read to me another 1b book [it didn't have 'the' in it! ] before we went out to play in the garden, scrunch leaves and adore baby bunnies! It did start raining even though all else sunny – very weird!

Back indoors we ate ponigramits [bb's] in the conservatory whilst SB did the primary maths challenge. i am quite proud of her. She sat happily and did it for the allotted time, wasn’t stressed or worried and just carried on with it. A bit more stress and she might have concentrated slightly more, as she got 4 questions wrong she could do upside down waving her feet about – and even went doh when i went through them doing a quick check when she got a different [right] answer!! lol! I think she has got 15 tho even with the doh moments, and perhaps we should have done a few practices to get her head into gear, but I am proud of her relaxed and happy approach to it, and the fact that if she had engaged brain [on some of the easiest questions!!] she might have done and giggle ]

SB ate her pomegranate, and BB and I played settlers of catan, which she did quite well at, tho couldn’t see the point so we went back to bohnanza, sb went to playing with paper dolls and then we watched merlin. A very relaxed day indeed. I start my phased return tomorrow, tho actual work on tues. It is right that i get back into it, but very hard.

I just loved this pic of SB. I *love* that girl!

SB joined in the calligraphy, doing a pen drawing and sort of poem first, and then deciding to do a big capital letter on nice writing paper. She didn’t finish tho. BB did lots of writing, then a capital letter and then used the nice writing paper to make a sign. All very happy and chatty. SB and I snuggled and did SoTW 3 with various fightings in america and canada, and the founding of pennsylvania, I found out the origins of the name Philadelphia. SB then did some of her DK project book – she is in the middle section now, on Earth and we had a bit of discussion about the different layers always shown, and how they might come to be there. [I winged it a bit]. Then we all did SoTW 1 about ancient China and had a thought about the realities of rice farming in freezing cold water .

We then did a bit of bunny adoration, and took a couple of pics. We have a definite home for one of the girls – now named Olive, but homes for the other girl and the 2 boys required. Am hoping to have a home for boy + girl, and then rehome boy on own if can. They are all v gorgeous

SB did some piano prac [trudging grad getting there, and thanks G for loan of sightreading book] and then galore park english, and BB did music theory and then explode the code. We felt like we had had a lovely snuggly day alltogether and recharged batteries BB and I then watched the david attenborough first life as recommended by Kirsty, and we enjoyed that. SB had been playing with paper dress dolls, but grad watched more of the DVD. BB did then fall asleep on me – awwwww. Woke up to have her bath tho as totally mucky from the ink! After that BB and i played some Bohnanza before bedtime, and SB carried on her doll game. A really lovely day . Oh, and I love the conservatory!! not sure I will move back into playroom when painted…

Home and SB did some more home ed – maths and galore park history, and then we gave the rabbits a good clean out. BB went off to gym, and SB wrapped her pressies for BB and then made a lovely hamabead card. We then went to gym. Finished the day watching the new BBC shopkeepers in shepton mallet prog. perhaps not good for veggies watching the pig being butchered!!

This morning was completely and utterly devoted to bedroom tidying! It was painful, it was shrieky, it was done!!! phew! After that SB and i did piano prac and then went out to play with rabbits and then find some pretty leaves for our autumn craft. We stuck leaves on into a pleasing pic [BB cat, SB random, me spiral] and then read Keats’ Ode to Autumn, had a bit of a chat about the poem, and then SB and I chose our fav lines and added them to our pictures. Looks good i think! Let me chill after some stressy interweb moments! I love occupational therapy through crafts

Friends arrived for the bonfire and fireworks at our house tonight, and we had a lovely time. The kids had fun playing together, that adults chatted, giggled and chilled. After dinner it was still raining, so we shrugged our shoulders and got on with it! enjoyed the fireworks in the rain, and then raced inside to do birthday cakes, more playing and then a tearful goodbye. we should prob have arranged a sleepover! A very pleasant way to spend an evening

First we had an introduction and heard a bit about various different servants, their jobs and what they would earn. then we were shown around the main house [no pics] which was really good. partic loved the kitchens and all the artwork Was very proud of SB, going round, asking questions and showing things to BB, and to BB for being so well behaved A very interesting tour of a very interesting place. We then went to the second bit, which was looking at a variety of items commonly used by servants in the Victorian times. SB and BB keen to pick some up and show around. Z and i did wonder if t41 would have approved of the ‘that’s a good question’ training.

Lunch time and we were all gasping for a cup of tea and food! unfortunately no chairs to sit on! In fact, it was cold stone slabs!! eek! After eating we went to our first afternoon session which was making fab sculptures out of wire. Unfortunately the session was a bit too short, meaning SB didn’t finish, and BB got stressed until i made the correct [after some trial and error on my part!] design xmas tree for her to hang baubles from. i also had a go, a butterfly on a flower. A really excellent session from a v hands on sculptor. Wish it could have had another half an hour.

The final session was also great, doing some servant chores, tho many reproducible at home All the girls started with polishing saddles and shoes, then using lemon juice to clean copper, the bigger girls then wrote letters, and BB did all the rest and dictated a letter to me. The chap leading was v knowledgeable and it was only that we were flagging at the end of the day and requiring cups of tea that made us want the day to end Children also tired, and BB fell asleep in car on way home [ok and me]. BB recovered at home with some old dr who, SB has had brownies and judo and has done a short piano prac [broken cords and trudging, her worst things still, and she doesn't want to change piece - it will be fine!]