NotSheep

So having made myself the most unpopular person on the blogring - I’ll blog what we’ve been up to!

We went out to look for shoes for the boys, shoes for me, clothes for me (I think I’m down to two pairs of trousers without holes in them now, and one of those is a pair of sweats). There’s one of those outlet-malls not far from here - mostly it’s shops where the prices are too high for me even when discounted, but anyway… we got shoes for George and Freddy, couldn’t find anything at all in Jack’s size. Seriously, not a single pair! Maybe that “avoid the shops in the weeks before school starts” thing wasn’t completely thought through… how long do you think it takes for them to re-stock after a run like that?

There’s a reasonably good toyshop there - not big, but it often has bits and pieces I haven’t seen elsewhere, and it also often has K’nex things on sale - and an interesting bookstore, as well as a Game outlet, so those are where most of the money went. I think perhaps an order from The Book People and a few Gameboy bits from ebay and we’ll be set

We had fast-food for lunch (so I’ve probably gained back all the weight I’d lost), then went off to collect a baby-gate from someone on Freecycle - so as I type, Toby is standing at the family-room door hanging onto the gate and yelling at his brothers After that we considered stopping somewhere on the way home, but we were all too tired and the weather wasn’t good and so we just headed back.

I realised last night that I never said anything here about Jack being “school-aged” now - he’d have started school last week, if he’d been going. I can’t imagine him in a classroom; he already runs this place, and I don’t expect a teacher and 30ish kids would slow him down! Anyway, what would I do without him to tell me everything about everything?

He’s insisting that he’s requested books from the library: “I’m waiting for a French book, and a fiction book.” - this is because Freddy got a letter from the library to say a book he’d requested was waiting for him. Now he can’t wait to go and collect it, so we might do that tomorrow.

More communication from the French exchange family - they’ve received our file and like the look of us so far They say they know nothing about home-education and have lots of questions. I expected that, to be honest - home-ed isn’t something most people “get” unless they’re doing it or know people who are doing it (and sometimes not even then). I’m hoping we get their file tomorrow too. We were looking at photos of the family today and talking about how different it would be for the boy to be here, with five other boys, when he’s used to having just one sister. George said that maybe we could do an exchange with a girl sometime “so we can find out what it’s like to have a female in the family”. When I pointed out that I’m female and I’m in the family, he replied, “I mean a young female!” - er… digging yourself deeper into that hole there, George!

Must admit to having my doubts about having another child here this morning, when it was Bicker-City! Things improved once we settled down to some work, though we did struggle with Barney’s maths - it was Pythagoras, which he understands and can work with, but he wants to answer the questions without reading them first! George and Freddy did some maths too - operations and using calculators respectively. Freddy learned about word processors (I must be hungry: I wrote that as “food processor” first LOL) and how to move around in them. They all did some handwriting practice and we read about thunder and lightning. Barney and George read from the Usborne Art book and wrote letters in French. Freddy started to write a story about finding a time-capsule which had been created 100 years ago, and that led to him searching on-line for information about Victorian times. We had a chat about today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day - Scratchy phoned me to find out what the URI was because he was telling someone at work about it, I looked it up and said “ooh, today’s is a good one!” and four children promptly descended on me and my laptop. It’s a great site - I’ve used lots of their pics for my desktop at various times (right now it’s this one) and it’s set as the homepage on the kids’ account on one of the desktop computers

Dentist for everyone tomorrow, and we must run by the library too, to collect Freddy’s book and to gather some more reading material for me - I’ve finished The Kitchen God’s Wife (which is definitely a contender for my top-five-ever list!) and am nearly finished with my last library book - though my reading has been slowed down a bit recently while I’ve been distracted with Kakuro… With any luck we’ll come home with a pair of shoes for Jack too!