A successful day

One of the great things about home educating is being able to change direction when needed or drop everything to focus completely on a particular area of interest. As a parent, this can take some getting used to but it is well worth learning to let go of the plan sometimes and see where the current takes us.

The plan this morning was to catch up on some table work before going to see my mum. Our formal work looks rather different now to when I last blogged, with Daniel doing sit-down learning 3 or 4 days each week and spending around 2 hours (sometimes more) on various subjects. Even Adam has been quietly getting on with Maths Seeds and turns out to be considerably further on than I had realised, and is now requesting other work too. I fear a Twinkl subscription may be in our near future.

Anyhoo, with Bank Holidays #1 and #2, followed by a moochy and unproductive day yesterday, we all felt ready to get back to the familiar routine. I came down to breakfast, however, to find Daniel and Adam engrossed in an online drawing tutorial video that OH had found. The minute he had finished eating and got dressed, Daniel disappeared with the tutorials on the iPad and a large stack of paper and I didn’t hear a peep out of him for the rest of the morning, so absorbed was he in his drawing. He did emerge briefly to ask for a ‘black marker pen’ so I presented him with my box of Sharpies (usually kept well out of reach and sight of small people), along with solemn promises of disembowellment should he leave them anywhere his brothers could get at them. He thought I was joking...

By the end of the morning he had produced several very decent drawings that he was very proud of and would have carried on even longer if we hadn’t been going out. In the meantime, I and the two smaller ones planted some new bedding plants (I had to borrow Ben’s trowel and he got very shouty, holding out his hand and yelling "Me! Me!") and we brought an old fenced-off planter from Adam’s toddler days back into use with his strawberry plants.

Then they both had a glorious time with watering cans and a bucket of water while I stealthily (and at top speed) washed the kitchen floor.

After lunch with my mum, Daniel was desperate to play a new board game he had invented based on our old set of Explore Europe. Oh, how I wish they still made it! It needs a bit of updating - ours has Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia on it, and Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine and Moldova are conspicuously absent - but the kids love it. Adam wasn’t in the mood for board games so he and my mum went off to the park and Ben was asleep. After a couple of goes at the new version Daniel and I returned to the old Explore Europe and then looked around for something else to play. We ended up with Scrabble, which he had heard about from Gangsta Granny and he actually managed to beat me, stubbornly refusing all help from me (although accepting a little from my mum when she and Adam got back). I must dig around at home and see if we have a set.

Some days home ed just does itself.

Bank Holiday #2

Some days are, frankly, just a bit meh. Bank Holiday Monday this week was one of those for us.

For a start, OH had to work. This isn’t unusual, and is off-set by him being able to be quite flexible about days off for holidays and (with enough notice) for me to go and do work things, but it is hard to remember that when everyone else is having lovely days together as a family and no one wants to come and play with us, leaving me alone with the three children and no groups to go to.

Our plans with friends fell through at the last minute, as sometimes happens, and then Plans B and C also exploded. Somehow it is different having a quiet day at home when you know you just have no plans, to looking forward to a chill-out day with friends and it not happening.

I had also gone to bed far too late the night before (I’ve got in a bit of a rut recently with that) and so I was tired and grumpy. The kids picked up on my mood and were squabbly and moany. In hindsight we should have done some work as normal or baked a massive cake, or just gone out for the day, but I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to muster the energy needed to make a completely new plan. I really wanted to get down to the allotment - it is growing season, after all, and a brief session there by myself on Sunday left me desperate to crack on with getting potatoes in, beds dug over, loganberries tied back and all the other myriad jobs that suddenly need doing last week. The children had been bribed encouraged with the promise of vege hot dogs cooked over the camping stove but the prospect of going down by ourselves overrode the lure of food and they moaned and complained so much that I lost the will to insist.

And so Monday was spent slouching around the house (which is a mess), grumbling at each other and the boys playing far too many computer games. We did manage hot dogs in the garden.

In the evening, buoyed up by my very understanding OH and cheered considerably by a teaching session with some lovely students, I made a plan. I declared Tuesday to be Bank Holiday #2.

We got off to a good start by getting out of the house reasonably early and heading off to collect a bike seat for Ben to go on the back of my newly-acquired bike (I’m still trying to decide whether this acquisition is exciting or solid proof that I am insane). That done, we hit the garden centre for various things for the allotment and the garden, and with the car loaded up with good things we stopped off at Halfords for bike helmets (for me and Ben) before going home for lunch. Then we packed everything into the wheelbarrow and headed off to the plot, dire warnings of lost screen time effectively stifling any complaints from the boys. Possibly not my finest parenting tactic but the allotment is one of the few things we do for me and I felt it was a point that needed to be made.

Three and a half hours later, we had cut the grass, dug over three beds, planted horseradish (yes, I know, my fellow allotmenteers will curse me for that) and sowed beetroot, shallots and two types of potatoes. We were muddy and tired and happy and all agreed that our second attempt at Bank Holiday had been a great success.

Sometimes you just need to remember that tomorrow is another day.