NotSheep

It might be tomorrow that officially makes this weekend a long one, but it already feels like it’s been a long weekend to us. We drove to Dublin yesterday for En Famille’s annual Ireland meeting. We met the organisers and a few other families who have done exchanges, as well as one family who are considering an exchange for their daughter. They contacted me after the piece in our regional “family stuff” newspaper, and they have decided to apply. I’m glad we managed to recruit at least one new family (there was another, but they didn’t come to the meeting, and another parent phoned me about exchanges for older kids). There has been a disappointingly low number of applications from English-speaking families this year, and EFI is keen to find more – so if you’re interested, do get in touch with them – the website is here – or you can email me if you want to ask more about it first. The Ireland meeting is over for this year, but there are meetings in North America in the next couple of weeks, and one in England three weeks from now. Filling in an application form, or even attending one of the meetings, doesn’t commit you to anything – you can decide to pull out at any point of the process. Exchanges are for children aged between 9 and 13; I know that sounds very, very young – and I’m still not sure myself that I’d be willing to send my nine-year-old away for six months – and our experience wasn’t completely problem-free, but I’d still encourage anyone who was interested to take the next step and find out more, because I think Barney, and indeed all of us, benefited from it in a variety of ways.

We don’t all fit into either one of our cars, so we had to take two (and if we get an extra child in our home, we’re going to be reviewing vehicles yet again!) – I drove with Louie, Jack and Barney. Louie still doesn’t like being in the car, so we have to schedule journeys around him as much as possible, but Barney is a good help with him – he sits next to him and talks to him and feeds him bits of rice-cake etc and sings him to sleep if he can. Having Jack in the car certainly keeps the journey interesting – he notices all sorts of things, and you can see his brain ticking over, and then sometimes he’ll come out with a question about something that he saw miles back, and I won’t have a baldy notion what he’s on about. Because we had to leave home quite early in the morning, we ate breakfast as we drove – we had packed bits and pieces including some buttered pancakes. Jack asked me, “Why are pancakes so quiet when you bite into them?” and I said I supposed it was because they are so soft. “They’re very quiet,” he commented, “so they’re a good thing to eat when a baby is sleeping.” A bit later he announced, “I know a fact.” When asked what fact he knew, he told me, “Every country has a bin in it.” Er…

We were glad to meet some other families who’ve done exchanges or who are currently involved in one, and it didn’t take long for the parents and children to get to know each other. Jacques, who runs the programme, has concerns about sending George and Freddy abroad, because he feels they are too quiet and don’t talk enough -that’s the first time anyone has ever said that about them! I suspect if the meeting had taken place over two days, as those in France and Germany do, he’d have seen a very different side to them on the second day He thinks maybe they don’t talk much because I talk too much – well, I do, and I was also probably compensating for them being more hesitant than usual, but I really don’t think they are generally shy at all. He also feels that Barney is still too quiet – I know his tendency to sit back and think about things (rather than showing joy/sadness/etc) was a problem while he was in France, because his French family had a very difficult time knowing how he was feeling, and I think Jacques is worried that George and Freddy will do the same. Having met him and the other families, and discussed these things a bit, I think all of us have a lot to think about – about what we did and didn’t do during the exchange between Barney and Henry, and about what we could or should do in the future. It’s possible that there will be no suitable child found for George or Freddy, or that Jacques might decide it’s not the right time for them, or not a good idea for them at all – so we don’t know whether they’ll be involved in exchanges or not, but we should know more sometime in June.

We stayed overnight in a hotel (or “an apartment”, as Jack insists on calling it); we had to book two rooms because the family rooms aren’t big enough. Hm, two cars, two hotel rooms – it doesn’t feel to me like we’re a particularly large family, but clearly we’re more than average Louie didn’t sleep well at all, and I ended up taking him for a walk just after 5 a.m. I was wondering how I was going to get the next couple of hours in before everyone else woke and before the restaurant opened and I could get a cup of tea, when we passed the mini-internet-cafe at the bottom of the stairs. One of the two blokes sitting there made a comment to Louie and we all got chatting – and I spent the next hour or so chatting with a couple of Geordie shop-fitters who’d just come off their night-shift.

The difficult night with Louie left me very tired, and the rest of the family wasn’t too far behind me, so we decided to have breakfast and head home, rather than going somewhere for the day. Toby joined me in my car on the way home, and entertained us all by singing as loudly as he could (which is very loud, considering his size): “There’s a starman waiting in the sky, he’d like to come and meet us, he likes to blow his mind”

Barney received a text from his Saturday youth-group as we drove, telling him they were meeting at 12.30 in a large park near the city-centre – so an hour or two after we got home, he was off out again – but what he hadn’t realised was that the text was sent yesterday, but didn’t arrive until today because his phone hadn’t automatically switched to an available network – so he was home again sooner than he expected!

Apart from our adventurous weekend, it’s been a normal week. I want to say it’s been a busy week, but there’s been nothing unusual going on, so I say normal instead – my brain still hasn’t quite accepted that “busy” is now our “normal”. One of the other parents yesterday, when they heard we home-educate, suggested that “there isn’t the social interaction…although I suppose they interact with each other” – a quick listing of the boys’ weekly activities soon put that idea out of their heads Anyway, this week we’ve had the usual, and George went to the new ju-jitsu class (having missed last week because he was waaaay too tired and wobbly) and he also is very keen, so it looks like they are going to officially change groups. We also found the missing fencing club, so Barney, George and Freddy all went to that. The guy who runs it suggested that Jack should come along too, but I think not – I know how much he waves everything else around (like his fork, during dinner) and I’m really not convinced that handing him a sword would be a good idea