Happy Birthday Lilo!

My little blondey turned 6 today. It doesn't seem like yesterday that I was approaching that 21st day overdue and deliberating over what I was to do if that day arrived - and just as it did, so did my little girl - only not so little, weighing in at 9lb 10oz!!

Happy Birthday my little fairy! :D

Wishing I was Wonder-Women

As I sit here tonight, with stuff still to do and feeling so hot I can hardly breath, I am wondering just how some women do it all! It's not been a bad day, but one of those when towards evening I really begin to resent Paul's calling because he has 'committments' that call on his time and energies. School went well again today and the kids definitely like the new system - as do I, but boy is it intense! Can you imagine trying to ensure that all 7 children do each of 12 activities and that each one of them gets to do some stuff with you too - the younger ones more. That's 84 activities a day going on around me!! Couple that with all the ordinary house-hold stuff like making lunch, chivvying kids to do their chores, doing my own chores (Weds = hanging washing out and getting in, endlessly loading dishwasher, hoovering through this rather big house, cleaning down kitchen at the end of day), a million trips to the toilet with a drinking-lots-just-trained toddler, finding the bits of things I forgot to put in the boxes and answering the cry of "Muuuuuum!" to the point of distraction! Even with only 4 help tickets each that's still at least 28 pleas for assistance above and beyond that which I have already assigned them!

And then to boot P is out from 6 on a Weds, so cook tea and clean up after it, put kids to bed after chivvying to shower and tidy rooms (again) before they hit the sack. All this to the whimpers of "It's too hot, I'm too tired, can I do it in the morning?..." (all of which are echoing loudly in my own thoughts as I tell them "no!" - and myself too, knowing that tomorrow is likely to be little different and then there will only be double the workload - never good!).

Now, after blogging, I have to go and stand in a room infested with tiny flies (someone left the window open & light on last night) and think up 84 activities for tomorrow (it's almost midnight now)! I only stood it for a little while last night then felt I was so crawling with flies I gave up, only leaving me even less time this morning to shower and get myself and two small boys dressed etc... (which I eventually managed to do late morning).

I'm thinking that I need to drop to 10 activities a day because, although they are not complaining and the activities are varied enough, some are struggling to complete them all and today they would have been working longer than I really want them to - for my own sanity! I need to think more imaginatively for tiny too - he is so Mummy hungry bless him, but unfortunately so is C. Today I was looking at a book with N, but it was like none of the others could see this; it seemed a grand time to themto ask me a million questions about nothing in particular and it was the moment when E lost all common sense about her own work and when C chose to throw a tantrum about doing a puzzle I knew he could do relatively easily with some thought put into it. Poor N just kept tapping my arm and calling "Muuuum" quite loudly to draw my attention back to him and his book (which he was really trying to enjoy with me). I got quite annoyed with the others tbh, as N really does not get enough time with me and even when I try to make it happen it gets kyboshed and he ends up being a bit sad :( He had a box full of activities to do today, but I only managed to do about 5 of them with him - it was just too hard to concentrate the time on him :( I'm hoping that as E & C get more used to the system they will afford me more time to work with him and he will get used to being part of 'school time' - he is only just 2 afterall.

So - multi-Mums out there - how do you do it all? How do you homeschool several ages, keep a clean and tidy home - not spotless, just respectable - and have happy, thriving-on-your-love kids - and not feel a complete wreck by the end of the day?

Good moments of the day were when E & I realised that she knows all but 3 of the letter sounds of the alphabet now :D & C did a 24 piece puzzle completely unassisted (once he got over the grumbles)! :D

Haircuts & Stuff

Well I guess it might be a Spring thing, but my littlies all needed a mop-chop so here are some B&A’s (click to see bigger).  N&C visited the barbers. Caleb LOVES the barbers and gets really excited. Nat was not so sure and clung to me rather like a limpet to the point where I was rather hairy when we left! E's I did myself - I can do bobs - I had lots of practice in my teens when a friend and I used to cut each others all the time :D

Caleb had a Speech Therapy appointment last week. She said he is doing well, but there is definitely still some delay (which I knew) and she is keeping him on the books for now. He will get another appointment in 3 months time. His basic speech is developing slowly, but he needs to really work on getting grammatical words in his sentences and endings such as ‘ing’ and ‘ed’ added onto his verbs (which considering he had no verbs a year ago is good progress).

We STILL don’t know if we are moving house yet. Understandably the landlord-to-be requested a reference from our current landlord (annoyingly AFTER all other paper work was in), but we have been unable to get it this week as they have been away on holiday. I’m hoping that we will be able to get it all sorted this week and know for sure – and move in a month from now :D THIS is the house  that we have applied for (unfurnished though). It is gorgeous and ticks every box imaginable. I don’t how long we will be able to be there for, or indeed how long we will remain where we are geographically, but whatever it takes to get out of this sardine tin (as that’s how it feels now) I really don’t care!

Back to school tomorrow. Looking forward to it in some ways, not in others. It always seems harder to concentrate when the sun in shining and this holiday has been so relaxed and easy I don’t really want it to end. The routine can feel such a driving force at times. I like getting off now and then, but it’s hard to get back on again. The kids are a bit tired though – LOADS of really late nights and sleep overs with friends (here and there). Normal life might seem a bit boring after all that.

I am looking into a new system of structuring our school-life. Check it out… I’m not sure how it’s going to work out logistically for us yet, but I feel I need something to help me out, after all Caleb will be joining us in September and I really feel I need to put some kind of structure into the littlies education too (not rigid or harsh, but present at least!). Besides the fact that Nat will not be attending Playgroup if we move to that house. It is too far, without a car, to take him everyday to the one we have used since Joel was small :(, and sadly too far really to the village one to do two trips there & back a day without a car (about a mile and a half probably – one way). I know we have a bus…but I still can’t drive! MAYBE this might be the year I learn – who knows! And if I do, Paul might just have to take to his biketo work again, so that I can have the bus in the day times ;) He’s not too enamoured by this idea – he even threatened to learn to ride a motorbike – there’s no way I’m letting him though! We simply can’t afford to run two cars whatever, so the bike might just have to become a reality for him if driving does become a reality for me – which is actually still very unlikely (hehe)!

Lastly... I started a 365 Year In Pictures blog tonight - all followers welcome :D

Time to Blog…

‘Bout time too I hear you say – where have you been? Answer – nowhere really, but I have (re)discovered photography in a big (you may have noticed by recent posts) as is always the way with me, a new love becomes all-absorbing for a while. I’m not planning on this being a fad though, as it’s not the cheapest hobby. That said, once the initial cost of the camera is spent, it’s not that expensive these days of digital photography. The cost of photo-paper is not that high these days (especially if you shop in Aldi), but tbh I don’t print many anyway, so that makes it even cheaper :D

So, what else has been happening here…

Jacob – same old with him. Nothing much changes. He is growing up rapidly and slowly becoming more responsible. Today he walked Caleb to playgroup for me, as I wasn’t feeling very well. It’s nice to have an older child in the house,  but occasionally he does forget that he is the oldest and you wouldn’t know him from his toddler siblings!!! School wise he is doing OK. Plodding on really, not exceptional, not unacceptable. I still feel I am trying to regain time with him, but I fear it is not going to happen and I am going to have to settle with what he is willing to give – which is just about ok! ConquerMaths is going well, but we abandoned Galore Park purely because of the quantity. There was no way he was going to complete that book in a year and he would be working below his capability because of it. CM is a good compromise. It does stretch him and help him to join sections of maths together in a way he hasn’t done before. We both really like it (as much as Jake is ever going to like maths!!). We have added in some ‘real life’ maths books (on The Manor Born’s) recommendation and both boys are doing these a couple of times a week. I think they are great in that they help them to see WHY we need maths at all and how it is useful in the real world. I can always remember thinking that I would never need half the maths I learnt, and tbh I haven’t much, but if someone had given me books like these at least I would have seen the point of it all! As far as literacy goes, Jake is working slowly through SYRWTL English 1 (Galore Park). It is good I think, but none of my children are much enamoured with these books – sadly. So currently i am thinking of enrolling the two boys with Catherine Mooney, not because I have any intention of doing the IGCSE at the end of it, but because the course looks good, it would take some pressure off me and I actually think they might enjoy it more than anything we have done to date. Joel is advanced enough (I think) to cope with it too, so they could do it together and that might be fun for them – I hope!!

Joel – is still at the infuriating, know-it-all, argumentative, too aggressive 10yo phase. I know he will grow out of it, but that doesn’t make it easier just now. Work wise he is doing really well and I don’t have to worry about him there. He is motivated by time and often starts school early in order to get finished before everyone else! Sadly this is not always possible when we are doing ‘together’ stuff in the afternoon – then he gets a bit grumpy! He has started trampolining of Saturday mornings and he is enjoying it very much – and I think he is probably quite good.

Abbie – my beautiful 8yo helper. She is nearly always willing to help out and is a very good girl on the whole: long may it continue :) School wise I never realise how well she is doing until I see what her little friend, who goes to private school and is ‘about average’ there, is doing – she is quite far beyond average then! Ab’s continues to love her ballet and is now dancing in the grade 2 class (not that she took grade 1 exam, but that’s just how it’s worked out atm). She is also doing OK in her swimming and this week passed up to level 7.

Phoebe – now 7 – is still not where I would like her to be school wise. Her maths is coming on nicely now, at last. Over half term and for a couple of weeks after i set her 20 addition and subtraction sums a day, with no total equalling more than 10. She managed to master them to the point of doing 10 addition in 30 seconds and 10 subtraction in a minute. Once she had that down we were able to move on in her maths to addition with ‘borrowing’ (only in our books it’s called regrouping, which is more accurate really) with numbers to 100. That may seem quite a leap, but it’s been fine and the penny seems to have dropped with her. She is still painfully slow, but she does ‘get it’! On the literacy side, her reading is making slow, but steady progress, but is still not ‘fun’ for he I don’t think. And her writing is neat enough, very legible, but she struggles to put it together and word retrieval is a problem too, just as it was/is for Jake.

Ellie – does school when she feels like it! Well that’s how it seems anyhow, but all the same she is on episode twelve of Headsprout and is beginning to be able to read. She has at last mastered he numbers 1-10 with no further teaching from me and is now well on her way to mastering 11-20 (reading and writing) with, again, very little effort on my part. I leave her alone for the best part and she comes when she is in the mood. She is really the victim of my being a bit stretched, but all the same she is learning and is probably on a par with others her age I’d say. I’m happy with where she is at and who she is. I actually really like the autonomy of learning that she is getting by default and it suits her, so I may stick with it – even if they others do moan a little that “Ellie never does any school”. They are getting used to it though and they can see that she is, it’s just different to theirs. Often I spend snippets of time with her on weekends and ‘out of school’ times – just ten minutes here and there – and that seems to be enough. She sits in on ‘together’ stuff when she chooses to and seems to absorb from that too.  Much of the time though she is playing some fairy tale out in her mind and is very involved in her play. She loves to ‘read’ books and the other day I heard her reading a Clarice Bean book to herself. She had obviously memorised the gist of the story, which was basically Clarice seeking out some peace and quiet, and was using her own words to tell it. At that moment I wished I’d had a dictaphone. The language she was using was colourful, well developed, well structured and full of voices and characters. I think one day, if I manage not to crush that creative flow in her, she might write books. She has beautiful way with words and an astonishing understanding of context for a 5yo. I feel like I really need to keep my ‘hands off’’ this one and see what she becomes…

Caleb – currently has an obsession with numbers and can count to 13 quite well :) His pencil co-ordination is very good and he can copy letters and numbers free-hand quite legibly. He is keen to ‘do school’ and so has his own school carry-box with a few pre-school workbooks in which he loves to do, albeit for only about 10 minutes at a time. He seems bright enough and his speech is developing well at last. His new phrase tonight was '”that’s different!” :D

Nathanael – is my lovable, mischief that only toddlehood brings to a house :D I love this age sooooo much. He is my  funny, charming, caring, naughty, and extremely quick show-off. Every day seems to bring a new word to his speech. Ok, so I can understand him and you may not, but he has a lot of words all the same. He copies EVERYTHING and learns very fast. He is persistent in his learning too. Up until now books have never interested him very much, but the other night I decided to read him ‘Dear Zoo’ – it became an instant favourite: being taken to bed and carried in the pushchair to playgroup. He practiced those animal sounds/actions for a week and then he had them all sorted. New favourite of the week - ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar’ – you should hear him trying to count the fruit!! Very sweet. So just now books are very much his thing and that makes me happy, especially as he is no longer trying to destroy them, but actually enjoying learning from them. And new trick of the week – emptying – OH NO!! – clean nappy box, wet wipes, page-a-day loose page desk calendar (hmmm – Jake was not impressed!), drinks bottle bag… It’s not that bad, just a bit of a pain!

So, what else is there to tell…

Last weekend was Mother’s Day of course, so for my treat Paul decided we would take a day in The Lakes (my favourite place in all the world) and do a family hike. So on Saturday, we left at 8.30 and arrived in Grasmere just after 11am. By the time we had all been to the loo and had a snack before we started it was about 11.45. Our walk for the day was to climb Raven’s Crag, across to Megs Gill and down, but we seemed to miss the short path down, so we followed the cairns and ended up going  the long way, over Silver Howe (395m/1296ft) and back into the village. About 4.5 miles I’d say and they all walked the whole way!! You can see a map of our walk HERE, the obvious green line and then right a bit over the ridge (not down into Waithwaite). It was a fabulous day. The walk took us a bit over 4 hours, but the sun shone and the kids enjoyed it – on the whole. There were waterfalls and streams for them to play in, which they always love. I’d hoped the waterfalls at the top would be spectacular, but we didn’t even find them. It actually all seemed pretty dry. As we drove through we noticed that even the river running through Ambleside was very dry. That said, we didn’t look very hard at the top because it was VERY windy up there and the kids just wanted to get down again!!

I’ll post some pictures over on Picasa – follow the usual album link :)

I think that just about get’s us up to date. One and  a bit weeks to the Easter hols – woo hoo – I need a break, my enthusiasm is waning and my printer is complaining!!

2009_03_21 Grasmere Hike

Today's educational activities included the making of this;




Jake wrote the play as part of his GP English and they have spent the weekend learning it. It took about 8 shoots to get it right though! The synch'ing is not quite right because I had to convert it to MP4, otherwise it was a massive file, and the synchronisation got lost in translation!!

Ellie wrote this today too :) Free hand and with only a little help to find middle sounds of cat and pit. She really is getting it and was so pleased with herself (as was I of course) to be able to actually write real words :)

Blog to Blog…

Not blogged for a few day because life's not been that exciting really! Today was not that exciting either, but thought I'd blog anyway J

The day started well and having Mum here for a couple of weeks (her school is on half-term already) means I get an extra 45 minutes in my day when I don't have to collect C, as she does it in the car for me . Everyone seemed to work fairly well today and we got quite a lot done, although somehow I think Jake managed to get away with a couple of bits of incomplete work (hmmm). I spent some time working with E today because I somehow felt there was more time to do so. We began by learning the letter 'n'. Last week we covered 's', 'a' and 't' - which she seems to be remembering ok if she visualises the pictures that went with them - especially the 't'. She apparently knows the letter 'i' (which I didn't realise) and today she actually sounded out s-i-t and read it as 'sit' - her first real read word!! YEAH!! Tomorrow we cover 'i' (which, as I said, she seems to already know), so we might do 'p' as well and put six letters under her belt to practice on over half-term week. These are great letters to springboard reading from too as so many CVC words can be made with them - watch this space.

My other strong desire atm is to have E recognising the numbers 1-10. She has 1-5 down flat - no trouble there, but 6-10 she seems totally stumped on. I'm really not sure why, but she cannot move on with number work in any way really until she can at least verbally label and receptively recognise these numbers. She had done a workbook page on the No.9; writing, drawing objects, colouring, counting were all included in the page, but immediately after the book was shut she had no recollection of what number we had been working on! So I got out the flash cards. I'm not one for 'drill' tactics on the whole - can't think of anything more boring, but the softly, softly is simply not sticking with her and I think that short, sharp shock might work better in this instance. I laid out 6 (as she seems to have almost got this one sorted) and 8 (because she likes the 'train-track' clue on this one) and got her to repeat them over and over. Then I called out a number and she had to point to the right one and say it as she did so. When I thought she had it sorted I added in 6 and then she forgot the lot! After 20 minutes we stopped. By then she was befuddled and we weren't gaining any ground anyway. It was very frustrating, to see her apparently know a number one minute and completely not know it the next. She was tearful too and said it was too hard L ! I don't want her to hate school, so I tried to explain to her as best I could, why it is so important that she try to learn these numbers.

Later in the evening P - with his special-needs skills - had a go at teaching her too. Admittedly he was a whole lot more adept at it than me and seemed to make it more fun for her (she was giggling instead of looking glum - how does he manage that?!), but he didn't actually do anything very different to what I had done (I must have learnt some techniques from him along the years J) and he came across the same hurdles as I did: she came away just as confused by those numbers as she had done earlier. So I think over these next two weeks we are going to have to FLOOD her with 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 - and HOPE that she gets it! Scary to think that she would actually be learning 13-20 right now, were she at school! Bright as she is, she would already be getting left behind - or riding on the backs of her friends' understanding!

She is definitely going to be linguistic I think - and tbh has very little interest in numbers (maybe why she isn't learning them easily). I guess she sees no reason to learn them just yet, whereas she sees a point in learning her letters - she desperately wants to be able to write stuff down. That was her little achievement today; a piece of slightly more than emergent writing. She wrote n - E - i - i - S - e on a piece of paper - really big and a bit giggledy-piggledy, but none the less the letters were all formed correctly and she could tell me what letters she had written when I asked her. She asked me what she had written. Now, I have read Peggy Kaye's 'Games for Writing' and I know this is an important stage - it was her first 'story' - her first real attempt at writing her very own word! I told her she had almost written 'nise' (spelt wrongly I know), but she also like the sound of the 'neeeice' - what's the betting she makes up her own meaning for it too because that's the kind of thing she would do that none of my others would have thought of doing. In fact I don't recall any of my others going through this stage at all - I hope I didn't just fail to notice it L.

The day was rounded off by a game of King Size Uno (only ours is jungle animals). C played this too and He and E really enjoyed it. C won 4 times out of 5 and the last two times I didn't even really help him pick his cards. He could match the colours, and with a little prompting the numbers - he even knew when to play a 'colour pick' card. I was VERY impressed with him. He seemed to understand it almost as fast as E and certainly his concentration was more sustained. E got silly towards the end and stopped really thinking about what she was doing. She did manage to win one game though (phew!). I think that may be coming out again tomorrow J.

On the subject of C - he is learning his numbers too - and may just learn to recognise them before E does at the rate he is going! He knows 1, 2 and 3 consistently already J. C has a real keenness to learn stuff; numbers, letters, colours, shapes - anything! He is asking lots of questions now (including 'why?' !!) and seemingly taking in the answers quite well. So as long as his language can keep up with his inquisitiveness he will be fine!

If any of you are wondering what is happening about us moving - we are making enquiries, but we are not at liberty to reveal any info atm!