NotSheep

Busy busy days – we’ve been getting ready for Xmas, finishing up on skool for 2009 – everyone except for Barney, who has way too many exams in January and way too much studying to fit in before them. All the boys have had some kind of bug which has left each of them shivery and feeling cruddy for a day or two; Louie is still very whiny and clingy, and Jack is using his inhaler a lot this week. I really hope his breathing has settled down by Xmas.

So – day by day:

Last Thursday we had our monthly home-ed group meetup. I hung out in the kitchen, making cookies with those children who were interested, while others worked with my friend A in the main hall to build and decorate a cardboard Xmas tree, which we then left at the community centre as part of their seasonal decorations. We had, I think, about 12 parents and thirty-something kids

On Friday we received an email with details of the next round of EFI exchanges – Freddy has been matched with a German boy. At first I didn’t understand how the tables of names were supposed to be read, and thought he’d been matched with a girl – this did not please Freddy, who refused to even consider the idea. I don’t know if I should be worried about his antipathy towards girls – he doesn’t seem to mind them on an individual basis (well, some of them), but he’s really very negative about them as a species. Anyway, we finally figured out that his exchange match was not a girl, and that made him much happier. He has also decided that he’d better start working hard on his German – we did some basics a while ago, but haven’t done much of it at all in the last few months. If the exchange goes ahead, I think the German boy would arrive with us around the end of February, and if Freddy then went to Germany, he’d be gone from September 2010 until February 2011 – spending Xmas away from us *gulp*

Also on Friday, the floor was unexpectedly washed when we removed the small item that was blocking the washing-machine drain; it’s amazing how much water one tiny bit of cotton can hold back. On Sunday we discovered another puddle on the floor, this time coming from underneath the boiler. I phoned the guy who serviced the boiler a couple of years ago, and he advised us to try some stuff that is designed to seal any leaks when you force it through the system. That seems to have worked, but I think we should probably budget for a new boiler in the new year. If we’re going to have to replace it, I’d rather do it a few months earlier and avoid having to do it in a rush and/or cope with no heating while we wait. We’ve never had any trouble with it before, but it is fifteen years old – the same age as our house. I never have any trouble remembering the age of our house, because its first entry on the Land Registry was the exact day that Barney was born – we didn’t know that until a few months after we moved in, but it seems like a happy coincidence

Friday evening was jujitsu-time for George, Freddy and Jack, all of whom are grading next Saturday. That means that George will miss the last session of the Saturday youth-club; he’s taking this very well, considering that the group is going tubing. I thought last Saturday afternoon would be their last session until January, but no…they’ve also got an Outward Bound course starting in a few weeks, followed by a five-day residential – Barney wants to do this, but it’s on Wednesday evenings, and George is already booked up with Sea Cadets on Wednesdays.

As is usual on weekends, the doorbell rang…and rang…and rang – and always for Jack. Indeed, his friends hang out here so much on the weekends that they have now taken to calling here to find not just Jack, but each other. He took off down to his friend J’s house (just down the street) for a while on Saturday afternoon, and Toby and Louie were out with Scratchy, so I took advantage of the opportunity to wrap some Xmas pressies.

I can’t remember anything about Sunday.

On Monday, Toby pulled down the curtain at the front door whilst wrapping it around himself – to be honest it’s a wonder it didn’t happen sooner, because he’s regularly to be found with it twisted around him, and Jack used to do it, but anyway, Toby did a good job of it and broke the rail too. Barney had the Air Cadets Xmas Party on Monday evening.

On Tuesday, a deluge of Open University course results posted by various friends on Facebook prompted me to check the website for Barney’s course result – he achieved 91% on MU120. We don’t know what the others on the course got, but I think that sounds like a fairly solid result In the evening, Jack went to the Beavers Xmas party and came home with a star to hang on the tree and a package to put under it.

On Wednesday, I went Grocery Shopping. (I think the expedition deserves the capital letters.) Four children went with me, and we spent four hours in the shop. Insane? Yes, I very probably am. Mistake number one: trying to do both a big Xmas shop and a restock-the-pantry-and-chest-freezer shop at the same time – huge list. Mistake number two: arriving shortly before lunch. I thought (inasmuch as I was thinking at all) that buying sandwiches and letting the little ones munch in the cart on the way around the store would work, but then I discovered mistake number three: going shopping with a tired one-year-old. I sent George out to the car to bring in the stroller so that Louie could fall asleep in that, but he still didn’t settle, and so I ended up standing at the back of the store nursing him to sleep before putting him down. That left me with two rapidly-filling-up carts plus a stroller to push – George did his best and managed one reasonably well, but Jack really can’t be let loose with a shopping-cart – he’s a danger to everything and everyone around him – and he couldn’t control the direction of the stroller either, so it took a very long time to move around the store. I started leaving them all standing at the ends of aisles while I raced up and down gathering armfuls of what I needed before returning to drop them in the carts – and by “drop”, I mean I attempted to balance things so they didn’t fall out. When both carts were piled as high as I dared, I gave up on getting the rest of the items on my list and headed for the checkouts, where the conveyor-belt actually stopped working with the weight of all my groceries. The staff were very helpful though, and I was helped out to the car by not just one but two of them. One expressed doubts about fitting it all into my car, but the sight of Gloria reassured her

I was planning to finish the grocery-shopping today, but I had to wait in for the new blinds to be installed, and by the time that was done, it was after 2 p.m., so I decided to leave it until tomorrow and go in the morning, thus avoiding the baby-falling-asleep and driving-home-in-rush-hour issues. I see some local friends have been twittering this evening about snow though…

Yesterday evening George went to the Scouts Xmas party – Scouts is usually on Tuesdays, but for some reason the party was on Wednesday. That worked out okay though, as Sea Cadets, which is usually on Wednesdays, was cancelled this week, to be replaced by the Sea Cadets “formal” dinner this evening – for which George and Freddy needed “proper” shirts and ties. Neither of them owns such a thing, so as well as grocery-shopping yesterday, I had to try to source some. The shirts were okay: I got a two-pack of short-sleeved, pale blue school shirts – George and Freddy are close enough in size that they could both wear the same size. The ties were more difficult. The shops I tried didn’t have ties in children’s sizes, and I didn’t have time to check out lots of other shops, so they’ve had to make do with standard adult-sized ties. Neither of them could tie them either, and when they were trying it all on last night, I tied Freddy’s tie while George copied me – which slowed things down considerably. “Now I know,” said Freddy, “why school-kids have to get up so early in the morning!” They did look good though, and I said that perhaps I should send them to school so they could always look so smart, to which George said, “Noooooooo! We like it here!”

That’s where they are now – dinner and a disco, I’m told. There’s zero chance of Freddy dancing and not much more than that of George doing it, they must be having a reasonably good time because they’re still out. Ah…no, they’ve just arrived home. They left before the disco got going, but I’m getting a blow-by-blow account of everything they ate