NotSheep

YAWWWWWNNNNNNNNN

Sorry about that. I was out for more than twelve hours yesterday and drove well over 200 miles. Not the ideal thing to be doing at a time when driving three miles to spend five minutes in a small shop is usually enough to leave you tired - but for a good cause. Barney had the first portion of his French GCSE exam - the “speaking” component. We stopped by the home of friends who live (relatively) locally to the school first, where Barney had a snack and then he and I drove to the school. He was a little bit nervous, but okay. The teacher who has arranged all of this has been amazingly supportive - talking with Barney and telling him what he needed to work on, sending me text-messages to remind me of the date for the exam etc - and he greeted us in French and set about putting Barney at ease. He explained to both of us exactly what format the test would have, exactly how it would be conducted etc. Then Barney was given information about which role-play situation etc had been selected for him, and left for a few minutes to prepare.

Barney feels it all went well. There are three separate sections to the speaking test - a conversation on several topics, a role-play scenario, and a presentation on a subject of the candidate’s choice, which is followed by a discussion during which the examiner asks questions on the presentation material. Barney did his presentation on the book “Stormbreaker”; I’ve put up what he wrote and presented here - I think he hit all the requirements for using different tenses and a variety of sentence structures etc He felt he might have lost a mark or two because he hesitated once or twice in the conversation part - this would be his normal speaking-style, but could be interpreted by an examiner as due to uncertainty about French vocabulary or structure. But overall, he was happy with how he’d done, and glad to have it over.

So there’s another milestone: he’ll never have the first bit of his first GCSE exam ever again.

Since Barney was the final candidate of the day, the teacher chatted with us for a while afterwards - just general conversation, not about the exam itself or how Barney had done. I don’t think he’d have been allowed to give us any idea of how Barney had done anyway, and had mentioned to Barney that if the teacher didn’t offer any information about it, he shouldn’t ask. The examiners from the Board can always adjust marks anyway - the whole thing is recorded. We were planning to go pick up some fast food, then come back for my friends’ sons who are pupils at the school, but by the time we were ready to leave, it was only fifteen minutes before they were due to finish, so we thought we’d better just wait. The teacher, on hearing we were taking them home, offered to go and get them out early though, so he did that, and they didn’t object very strongly, and we all headed back to their house, where the boys played and talked for a few hours before we had to leave for home.

The next component is the “listening” bit, which consists of a tape-recording being played and the candidates writing the answers to the questions on the exam paper. I’m not at all concerned about this bit - Barney’s French is well above the standard required, and every time we’ve done a past-paper for this bit, he’s achieved full marks. We’ve a full month before that paper, so we’re going to take a break from studying for a few days now. After the listening component, we have another week, then two papers in one day: reading and writing. Reading is basically comprehension - they get a text in French and questions on the paper and they write the answers to the questions. The writing bit will be the challenge for Barney, because he writes very slowly, and also because it requires more organisation - he’ll need to go in, make a fast-but-good plan of what he’s going to write, and then get it all down on the paper in the time allowed.

There has been other stuff going on here in the last few days, of course - it’s just that the exam has been very much in our minds. On Saturday, we acquired a new set of bunk-beds from Freecycle - the kind with a double on the bottom and a single on the top. The idea was that Toby might sleep on the bottom - being wider, he’s less likely to fall off, plus if one of us ends up in with him, it won’t be so cramped. So far, that’s gone well: he’s started off in that bed on four nights and has stayed for the whole night twice. I’m not bothered about him coming in to us during the night at all, it’s just that when he insists on being in the middle of my bed (rather than in the bedside-cot), I do wonder if he’s going to flatten the new baby

Since that has replaced one of our sets of standard bunk-beds (i.e. two singles), I put them on Freecycle, and got a reply from someone I know through the home-ed group - very glad to hand them over to her!

On Monday we went to a birthday part for one of Jack’s best friends. It was very nice to be greeted at the door by this six-year-old spotting us and yelling “YES!” Barney stayed at home to revise, but the other boys all had a great time, and we arrived home hot and tired. Toby had slept in the car, so bounced about a bit longer than the others; I did laugh when Scratchy said to him, “Are you going to sleep or what!” and Toby replied, “What!”

And finally…for those who follow me on twitter and were wondering why I was chuckling at a billboard ad for the zoo - our local zoo has a monkey with a reputation for escaping. Their new billboard ads feature a big close-up of the monkey and the words, “Are you coming to see me, or do I have to go and see you?” Well it made me laugh. Maybe I don’t get out enough

Starting from Monday - only a four-day catch-up this time, so maybe it will be shorter than the sidebar for once

On Monday night, Freddy had ju-jitsu and Barney had Air Cadets. Freddy complained of a headache and feeling dizzy when he got home; apparently he’d been feeling unwell enough during the class that he sat out for part of it. I put him to bed in the hope that he wouldn’t fall prey to whatever it was that struck Barney last week, but he seemed better by Tuesday morning.

Barney wants to go to an Air Cadets camp in the summer. It’s quite a bit longer than he’s ever done with Scouts - nine days - and it’s in England (Shrewsbury, I think, although he’s not entirely sure of the location!) He’s the only Cadet from his squadron to volunteer, so he’d be going without knowing anyone else there at all. Scratchy wasn’t very happy with the idea of him going, and while I’m not entirely easy with it, I also don’t want to be the kind of parent who discourages her children from trying new and adventurous things - and I must admit, I’m proud of him for having the confidence to do so, especially when it’s a situation like this, when nobody else he knows is going. When we deregistered him from school (nearly seven years ago!) the head teacher (who had also been his class teacher the previous year) was supportive, but expressed concerns about his social skills - not the usual “but how will he learn to get along with other children?” that all home-educators are used to, but more “he’s not very socially confident, I think that’s something to keep an eye on”. He’d always been a very self-aware child, so her thoughts were no surprise to me - but within weeks of deregistering him, I noticed that he was less bothered about what other people thought, and was acting in a more relaxed way, more to please himself. And here we are, nearly seven years later, and he’s gone off to France on his own for months, and now he wants to head off to England on a boat with a bunch of other Cadets he’s never met, to a camp in a place he’s never been. We don’t know how strict it will be, how much it will differ from Scout camps he’s attended - and neither does he, but he wants to go anyway. I wouldn’t have had that confidence at 13; I’d have needed a mate holding my hand

So we all read as much as we could on-line about Air Cadet camps, and talked it over and decided he can go. The forms went in on Monday night, and Barney came home with a big bag full of the uniform bits he’ll need - and which he’ll have to learn to launder and iron and sew things onto…which means he’s no longer a probationer. I suppose he’ll need proper uniform shoes too - it’ll be the first time in years that he’s had dress-shoes!

Meanwhile we’ve been trying to come up with baby-names. Girls’ names are easy enough, although our list does seem substantially shorter than it has on previous occasions, for some unknown reason. But names for a boy…well, we’ve got five boys, each with three given names - which kind of means we’ve used up nearly everything we like. This could be the first child we’ve had who hasn’t had a name chosen before birth (or before he turns 18…)

On Wednesday, after a rough start to the day when it seemed everyone was bickering with everyone else, and after individual conversations with each of the older three pointing out that their behaviour was affecting each child younger than them, and as a whole it was affecting me, and that not only could they do something about it, but they were in the fortunate position of their doing something actually being much more effective than if their younger brothers did something (does that make sense? it did at the time) - things improved a bit. Barney spent a good portion of the day reviewing French vocabulary, practising his presentation etc. for next week’s speaking test.

George and Freddy finally made it to Cubs on Wednesday evening, and both came home with more badges to be sewn on. Between them, they now have 15 badges waiting to be sewn onto their uniforms. This is not going to be done by me - I’m still waking each morning with a left hand that feels like it’s twice its usual size (it isn’t, but it still feels that way), numbness in the tips of my fingers, and tingling in my hand and shooting pains up my arm each time I do something that involves any kind of repetitive small motor movement. Lotsa fun. Barney made it to Scouts too, and came home with news of yet another camp he wants to attend - only a weekend this time, and it’s quite likely Scratchy will go to this one too.

I was supposed to be running errands this morning, but what I was able to do was limited by the fact that Jack can only find one shoe. I hit the bank and post office, and Freddy ran into the library to return as many books as we could find, and Barney got his hair cut - going from the long-haired-hippy look to a semi-military cut (”I feel a bit cold now” ) - but at least it doesn’t take half an hour to dry after a shower anymore. Must take a photo of him when he lets me

Nothing to report here. Move along.

Well actually no, don’t move along. Not until after you’ve seen just how cool this two-year-old can be:

And this is George and Freddy doing history this morning - they’re learning about medieval castles. This is not a particularly surprising pose for the two of them; I often find them sharing the same space.

Not much else happening here. I got a Little Tykes house from Freecycle yesterday - we have one in Jack and Toby’s bedroom, but someone was giving away a couple that had been outside and I thought they’d have fun with one in the garden. So while everyone else charged about the street on bicycles, I went to collect that and we pressure-washered the algae off it. Toby likes playing outside; at one point yesterday, I heard the front door open and called, “Hello?” No reply. “Who’s there?” No reply. “Toby, is that you?” Toby, obviously figuring he’d been caught in the act of escaping, said “No!”

I’m trying to think of what has happened in the past week, as this blog has been populated almost entirely by twitter updates (I usually have them set so they’re not visible on the front page, but since I’ve been away from the internet so much recently, I changed it on a temporary basis), but for some reason I’m having trouble remembering anything that happened prior to Friday night. Odd, that…

Okay, so let’s resort to the tweets again to aid my failing memory. Monday was spent catching up on things which needed done - like phone-calls to the mortgage people (I can’t believe we’ve been here three years already) and organising mobile phone contract cashback documents. George started to sew on Freddy’s new ju-jitsu badge - why the heck do they need to be so gigantic? They really are unreasonably huge. George wimped out part-way around it and someone else finished - I’m assuming Scratchy, since Barney doesn’t sew unless sat on, and my hands were much too numb to be poking needles through ju-jitsu gis with them. We had Toby’s last speech therapy appointment for a while - the therapist is now off on maternity leave, and in traditional NHS fashion, no replacement has been arranged. She’s pleased with Toby’s progress, however, so he’s down for review in August or September when she returns - although how long it will take her to catch up is anyone’s guess.

In the evening Barney went to Air Cadets and came home with a camp permission form with no dates. I’m told it’s sometime in the summer. Freddy went to ju-jitsu, did his grading, and came home with a brand new shiny green belt - although he did hide it and try to fake me out that he hadn’t qualified, but just as I was about to commiserate and say he’d do better next time, his serious look fell apart

Tuesday - ah, now that I read my tweets for last Tuesday, it all comes flooding back in glorious detail. I’d a slow start, with my body not particularly keen to cooperate with my head’s intentions, but we did manage to pack for the caravan and make it out of the house around lunchtime, when Scratchy brought the car back from work. I left him back, then went to the library to return books, but found the library closed until 2 p.m. - since it was only about noon, I wasn’t waiting. Then I went to the bank, only to discover that the most convenient branch had closed - or, as they euphemistically put it, “transferred”. But I don’t think it counts as a “transfer” when the branch it has transferred to already existed, and I had no intention of fighting the horrendous parking situation around that branch. My next errand involved dropping off a letter which had been delivered to me instead of to the person who needs to deal with it, except that I couldn’t remember her address and couldn’t get hold of her on her mobile. Thwarted again. I stopped to buy fuel for the car, and carefully made my way in beside the pump on a small, busy forecourt - bear in mind that I had four bicycles attached to the back of my car by way of a carrier designed for three - got out of the car to find a sticker over the pump saying it was out of order.

Briefly considered going home and back to bed, but decided to press on. I’d hoped to arrive at the caravan in time for a late lunch, but having wasted so much time on unsuccessful errands, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, so I decided to buy lunch on the way. That, however, required cash - of which I had none (having not been to the bank yet…) so I needed both a cash machine and a food outlet. I found the cash machine and asked George to do something, only for him to say in a rather pathetic voice, “I can’t, I’ve thrown up all over myself.” This led to an exchange on twitter between me and several other parents who were somewhat incredulous that he had not said anything and that I had not noticed. As I pointed out, he was two rows behind me and the only person beside him was Freddy, who was immersed in DS-play so might well have missed the entire episode.

I got George stripped and cleaned up as much as possible by the side of the road, found a clean tee-shirt in his bag and got him back in the car wearing that and nothing else. He was adamant that he was hungry, but it was clear that lunch was going to be a drive-through experience - fast food restaurants might not be very formal, but they’re a little more formal than tee-shirts with naked boy-bits hanging out below them. So drive-through it was.

We made it to the big town near the caravan without further incident and I stopped to buy food supplies for the next few days - and also bought new tee-shirts for me, as none of my old ones cover my bump. I asked where the men’s tee-shirts were and a staff member took me there and tried to help - asking what colour I preferred etc, but frankly the only thing I was bothered about was that they were the largest size available. I spent £8 on four tees - living it up, as usual and then we drove the few miles to the caravan, where I put George in the shower (once I remembered how to turn on the water) and told him to get clean underwear and socks from his bag. “I can’t, I didn’t pack any.”

Deep breath. Several hours earlier, I had stood on the landing, looked George in the eye and said, “Do you have clean underpants and socks in your bag?” - and I’d asked at least three times, because, you see, I know George. And each time, George had replied in a very definite and here-I-am-being-sensible-for-once voice, “Yes.”

So there was George, sockless and commando for the next few days - and wearing the same denim dungarees for the next few days too, as he’d only packed one extra pair of trousers. About five sweaters, but only one pair of trousers…

Why do I do it? Well, here’s a view from the road approaching the village where the caravan lives. See that gorgeous blue sky? See that thin dark blue stripe at the bottom of it? That’s the ocean.

And here’s a view of part of the beach - the busy end. Admit it, you can see the attraction.

The boys spent the rest of the day scooting about the site on their bicycles, playing in the playground, etc - all of which left them very ready to go to sleep when bedtime arrived (and I can’t say I wasn’t grateful!) Mostly. Barney took Toby to my bed to cuddle him to sleep, as he often does in the caravan. Ten minutes later, Toby came trotting back to me at the other end of the van. Investigation showed that Barney was fast asleep. Toby, however, kept bouncing about for another hour…

They didn’t even wake up early on Wednesday morning - it was about 8.30 before anyone started to emerge. It didn’t take Barney long, however, to start being annoyingly pedantic (I can’t think where he gets that from…) so I thought of something we needed from the shop in the village and sent him to get it. I offered him the choice of cycling on his own, or walking with Toby - he chose the latter and the two of them had a lovely outing together. Meanwhile I fixed the sweater I was knitting for the baby (the sleeves weren’t wide enough when it was made according to the pattern), and added a hat to match:

We went down to the beach in the afternoon, well wrapped up in coats and hats, but it was a tad windy down there so we didn’t stay long. Back at the van we had hot chocolate to warm up. The difference in wind-strength between the beach and the van was quite amazing, given what a very short distance it is and that there’s really only one row of buildings between them!

On Thursday morning the making of my breakfast (by Barney) was rudely interrupted when the gas ran out - I tried to move the thingy to a different cylinder, but wasn’t sure it was properly connected (it can be quite difficult to connect at the best of times, and having hands that couldn’t feel much of anything wasn’t helping) or if the second cylinder was also empty. Having checked the forecast before leaving the internet home, I knew that this was to be the dullest part of the week, with the possibility of showers, so had planned to go into the big town. I finally found a bank to go to, and we topped up our supplies (bread and milk - and smoothies, to make up for the fact that I really don’t do fruit) and went to the library, where the boys had a great time exploring a new-to-them library, and borrowed every Doctor Who book they could find, as well as a fair few others.

Back to the caravan for lunch, followed by hunting around the caravan park for the bloke who maintains it - he’s a very pleasant, helpful man (and, according to Barney, looks like Bruce Willis) and when I explained the problem he came straight over to check. Both cylinders were indeed empty, and he put one of them in his white van and went to get me a new one, then attached the new one for me.

At about 4.30, I was feeling a bit shaky, so I asked Barney to watch Toby and went to lie down for a little while. I woke an hour later. This unplanned nap led to a bit of a burst of energy after dinner, and after hearing the weather forecast for the next 24 hours (cold overnight, windy with showers for Friday), I decided to drive home on Thursday night rather than wait until Friday (and have to pack and load the car, including bicycles, with even-number-than-usual-because-it’s-early-in-the-day hands). Barney helped me clear the caravan out, and when the others returned on their bikes, they all helped get everything into the car and get the bikes on the back - I was very impressed that within 45 minutes of the decision being made, we were driving away. Most of the children fell asleep on the way home, although not until after Jack had thoroughly discussed infinity with anyone who’d listen to him - except that he kept calling it “insanity”.

Friday was largely uneventful until 8.33 p.m. when I had what at first appeared to be the world’s strongest Braxton-Hicks contraction but which rapidly turned into sweating, fainting and feeling at least as bad as I did a few years ago when I had septicemia. That whole story is already on the blog, a few posts down from this one (or one post down, if I’ve altered the twitter-feed settings again), so enough said. I spent the weekend taking it easy, peeing on sticks and encouraging Barney in his efforts to polish his presentation for his French GCSE aural. I finished my fingerless gloves, and having been nagged throughout their production by Toby - “Dees too big for me! You make me gloves now?” - I also made him a pair of mittens, shaped like little mice - except that I haven’t a scrap of pink yarn in the house with which to make the knots for the noses, so they’re not quite finished. On Sunday morning I was playing a Mika CD in the living-room when Jack came in looking angry and said, “Can you turn that off, because it’s annoying me!” Erm…hang on, isn’t it supposed to be the parents who say that to the kids?

Early in the evening my neighbour K (the one who was so helpful on Friday night) came in to see how I was; about ten minutes after she arrived, George came into the room to tell me Freddy had swallowed a magnetic rod. He’s supposedly the sensible one… in accordance with advice from the children’s hospital, we’re still waiting for it to re-appear…

Today, I’ve been very tired. I can’t think why…

When it comes to blogging every few days, all I can say is, “Thank goodness for Twitter”. Because my memory is, uh, what was I saying?

Monday morning was spent running from one errand to another, including stopping to see the midwives and get blood taken to check my B12 level - and proving, once again, that I have horrible veins. Neither the midwife nor the student midwife was able to get a cooperative vein, and in the end they called a nurse from the treatment room to have a go. She managed to get blood - and only poked me once with the needle, which is good, but left a great big bruise, which isn’t so good. By the time we were through, I was late for Toby’s speech therapy, but the therapist being in late pregnancy herself, she was understanding. I also took the bicycle with the puncture (the one that was Freddy’s but was about to be given to Jack) to the bike repair shop, but they weren’t able to fix it until Tuesday, which wasn’t a lot of use since we were planning on leaving straight from there for the caravan. So I went back home and collected yet another bicycle - Toby’s smaller one - just in case we weren’t able to get it repaired. We did get it sorted out though, in the same shop that fixed it on Saturday, and they didn’t even charge for fitting the new tube or tyre (because of the running back and forth we’d had to do).

We got to the caravan and spent the afternoon outdoors, as it was sunny and reasonably warm - not tee-shirt weather, but certainly pleasant. On starting dinner, I realised we were out of bread, and then I realised I was out of cash, so I couldn’t even send Barney to the shop - so cheese toasties were out. I also realised we’d left the toothbrushes at home - there’s always something. So Tuesday morning found us driving into the big town, because although there is a chemist’s shop in the village, it’s not exactly large or well-stocked (they didn’t have Band-Aids when I went looking for those). I went armed with a meal-plan for the week and bought everything we needed. Back to the caravan for lunch, then the boys spent the afternoon in and out, as the weather allowed. They made friends with E, a boy about Freddy’s age whose family also have a caravan, and he ended up staying for dinner - he was kind of left hovering on our deck when I called my own children in for food, so I guesstimated how much spag bol there was and figured I’d feed him too, if he wanted. The dinner-time conversation was quite amusing - many home-educators find that people quiz their children to see what they’re learning, but my kids turned the tables and quizzed E instead: things like, “What’s the name for a number multiplied by itself?”

E stayed after dinner too, while they watched the rest of their movie (Spiderman 3 - really, really bad - I was almost praying for it to end!) and finally left about 9.30. I must have twittered quite a bit about the wind and rain, because when I said I thought there was only one other family there, Merry messaged me to ask where we were and ask if it was purgatory I think the answer to that is provided in the replies I got from the boys this morning when I asked when they wanted to go back to the caravan. Toby yelled “Yes!”, two voices said “Soon!” and the remaining two said “As soon as possible!” - so now we’re trying to make plans for the weekend and next week…

I woke on Wednesday morning to a very strange sound: silence. No rain beating on the windows, no blasts of wind…the silence didn’t last long when children started to wake though, especially with George, who was in chittering mode. Not chattering - chittering has a whole extra element of irritating. Never was I more grateful for getting-them-outside weather! I tried and failed to put my watch on - it’s usually quite loose as I wear it quite far up my wrist, but it was too tight, and when I looked at my hands, I realised how swollen they were. I’ve also got tingly fingertips, and I’m hoping it’s not the knitting that’s doing it, because I’m really enjoying knitting again

During the day on Wednesday the staff from the caravan park removed the caravan opposite ours, using a "big digger truck", as Toby put it, and thus provided great entertainment for small boys. We also spent a while down on the beach with bicycles - which Chris disapproved of because of the potential damage to gears and chains, but really, if you had the opportunity to cycle in and out of the Atlantic, wouldn’t you? In the afternoon, Barney asked to be taught to knit - he’s not usually the good-with-his-hands kid, but surprised me in how quickly he picked it up and got quite good at it. He proclaimed it “pretty fun”, and at bedtime was disappointed to be sent to bed because he wanted to stay up and knit (”it’s kind of addictive”).

On Thursday morning I’d a call from a midwife to tell me my B12 was now normal - which leaves me searching for some other explanation for my fatigue We walked to the shop in the morning - which usually takes just a few minutes, but took forever because my pelvis was so sore, and left me exhausted. We expected our friends K & J to be using the caravan from Friday, so planned to leave then, but I decided to leave Friday rather than have to pack up the car in the rain forecast for Friday morning. I spent the rest of the morning tidying and packing what I could, in preparation for leaving in the afternoon, while the boys cycled, skateboarded and playgrounded. I got the bicycles onto the car at about 2.30 - with difficulty, given that I have a big bump in the way of lifting them and that the carrier is designed to carry three bicycles and I had five… The boys played for another hour or so before we left, and Barney knit on the way home in the car. We arrived home at about 5.30 and the first thing I did was put on the water-heater - and oh did that hot bath ever feel good! Shortly after I went to bed, I got a text-message from J to say they weren’t going to be at the caravan this weekend after all - and I’d left the power, water and gas on…probably not a big problem, although the milk I left in the fridge might not be so good by the middle of next week. We could end up back there over the weekend, when the forecast is snow - now that could be an adventure…I promise I’ll take some photos this time if we do.

Last night was windy again, though not nearly as bad as the previous one, and a few more people arrived this morning. An early night last night, however, meant an early start this morning - by 6.40 a.m., Toby was snuggled inside Barney’s sleeping bag in the living-room (with Barney still in there too), “helping” Barney with a book of logic puzzles. At about 7.30 I sent Barney off to the shop on his bicycle to refresh our supply of milk and washing-up liquid, both having been largely used up by the hot chocolate the previous evening. By 9, all were fed and dressed and out racing on their bicycles - Freddy borrowing wheels as and when he could - and I was wondering why energy seems to easy to find when you’re a kid…

Having checked the forecast yesterday evening, I knew to expect rain later today, so sent them all (including Scratchy, who arrived last night) off to the beach in the late morning. Well, I say “all”, but I don’t really mean it. George had decided he was too delicate for such capers and decided to stay here with me and practise his knitting - but didn’t wash his hands, so the scarf he is knitting for his beanie-teddy now consists of stripes of off-white and very-off-white. And about 45 minutes after the others had left, one of the bedroom doors opened and Barney emerged - I’d thought he was on the beach! “Did you know we didn’t know you were in there?” I asked, and he replied, “I kinda thought so!”

After lunch Scratchy took everyone but Barney into the big town to look for a bicycle-repair shop, and a new inner tube was purchased and fitted. Barney stayed here with me and did some French - something he wasn’t very pleased about, but he didn’t want to go to town either, and he needs to keep at the revising if he’s to do well in the GCSE. (Actually that’s probably not really true - even if he did nothing from now until June, he’d probably do well anyway, but if he’s to do the best he can, he needs to revise.) Given my lack of energy and the fact that my pubic bone feels ready to split into pieces at any minute, I spent most of the day trying to get into a comfortable seating position and knitting. I finished my lacy socks and the baby-hat I was making, and made a hat with a skull and crossbones motif for George - all the boys want one of these, but they all want different colours, and George’s was the only one I had all the colours for. I cast on at lunchtime and he was wearing it by 4 p.m., which muchly impressed one of my neighbours I was going to start another hat with dancing skeletons on it for Jack next, but discovered I hadn’t printed out the pattern to bring with me, so had to revert to my current mindless project - a very soft wool/soy mixture scarf for me. I like the yarn so much that I ordered more of it this week; I’m hoping the postman didn’t leave it sitting at the front door in the wind and rain…

Freddy and Toby were the only ones here when dinner was ready, so I asked Freddy to call his brothers. “Barney, George and Freddy!” he yelled at the door, before turning and realising he’d just called himself in At least when I mix up their names I don’t include my own Jack came in anyway, and asked of the pizza, “Is that home…home…caravan-made or bought?”

Yesterday afternoon’s sunny weather was promising, but never fulfilled that promise. The weather changed overnight: we had thunder and lightning, heavy rain and wild winds all night long. I didn’t know you could get sea-sick in a static caravan Several times I thought someone had climbed onto my bed, only to realise it wasn’t the bed that was moving, but the whole van. Slightly worrying! We made it through the night, however, and into the morning. I considered waiting for the weather to brighten before walking to the shop in the town, but when it got wild again, I decided to leave the boys here while I took the car. Since it was such a cold, wet and windy morning, they spent the morning studying - I’m a horrible mother, me. When the weather improved slightly (i.e. the rain stopped, though there were still gales blowing) and I told them to put the books away, I was still a horrible mother, because I made them go out to play - although their resentment didn’t last long when they met up with other children who had been turfed out of their respective caravans by their respective fed-up parents. We discovered that Freddy’s bicycle tyre was flat again, so I’ve had to promise to take him into the big town tomorrow to get a new inner tube. In the meantime, he’s been riding George’s bicycle, which looks like it fits him better than his own, and George has been riding Barney’s, which seems to fit him better than his own…and I’ve realised that Jack fits better on Freddy’s than on his, so it seems we’re ready for the trading-bicycles game again.

I twittered how quiet it was while the boys were at the playground (their voices were only faintly audible over the wind), but spoke too soon, for within minutes Jack had arrived back covered in mud. He got changed into his clean sweater (hah! I told them they needed to pack two sweaters each!) and went back out. A few minutes after that, George came in - to say he was “covered” in mud doesn’t really accurately describe the situation, because it suggests the mud was all on the outside, when in fact it was through every layer right to his skin (and in fact he said later, “I think I even sniffed some mud!” LOL) So he got stripped and re-dressed from his underwear out, and he too went back outside. I know he got muddy falling off the Flying Fox, but I’m not really sure what happened to Jack. Whatever it was, he didn’t learn - he arrived back muddy again, saying “This time only my trousers got muddy, but I’m okay with that”. Right.

Jack’s second sweater was soon muckier than his first, and he couldn’t find his first, so he borrowed one of Freddy’s, with Freddy’s permission - which was okay until Freddy got his own sweater wet and muddy and spent twenty minutes chasing Jack around the park (Freddy on foot, Jack on a bike, so fairly pointless!) yelling, “I want my sweater back!”

The park started to busy up a bit as the afternoon progressed, with the arrival of people who presumably have jobs to go to during the week, though it didn’t get particularly busy. I suspect last night’s gales have put a few people off! By the evening, my lot were more than ready to come in for cups of hot chocolate before bedtime.

A week since I last blogged. You know what that means, of course: missing chunks - though on this occasion there wasn’t much to remember, and much of what I do remember I’d rather forget, so we’ll just gloss over those bits…

I know we went to the Transport Museum on Friday. It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to go - I’d much rather have lazed about the house - but it was the last day of our membership, and since I don’t really expect to be feeling like traipsing around large outdoor museums (the Folk Museum bit) or large indoor museums (the Transport Museum bit) for the next while, I’m going to wait a few months before renewing it. I posted about us going on the local home-ed list at the last minute, having thought about doing so for a couple of days but not actually having made it around to it, so it wasn’t very surprising that there wasn’t a huge crowd. One other family did come though, and it was nice to see them. I took my little camera and let Barney run amok with it, which led to some, er, interesting pics. (I also realised, when uploading these, just how much better photos from my big camera are, so I think I might be handing the small one off to Barney more often in future.)

Toby was fascinated by the model horses attached to the carriages and some of the trams etc - “Mum! Look! Animals!” - as usual - although he was initially a bit wary of standing next to them to have his photo taken. I tried to explain that they weren’t real, that they were like big toys, but in the end I had to agree with his assertion that “Hoss dead!” - well, it wasn’t moving…

After the museum, we went off in search of lunch - initially intending to eat at the Ikea café (nearby and cheap) but I decided that I’d rather do a drive-through to save the energy it would take to get out of the car. (Yes, I do know how pathetic that sounds.) It took ages to find a bank machine and then a drive-through, but it was worth it when, after passing fast-food back to everyone behind me, I was thanked in four different languages (English, French, Japanese and German)!

When we got home I decided to do my fourth B12 injection (still not looking as it pierces the skin!) but I’d have been better to sit down with a cup of tea first, as all the energy expended throughout the day had taken its toll, and immediately after the injection, I felt faint. I lay down on the dining-room floor for a minute, having learned from experience that when feeling that way, it’s better to place myself on the floor than to find myself on the floor. Barney brought me a glass of water and once I was sure I wouldn’t pass out, I disposed of the needles etc and went and fell asleep on the sofa.

On Saturday, I got up and decided to go and buy paint. We’ve been in this house for nearly three years(!) and I’ve never liked the colour of the hall, stairs and landing - it’s a sort of orangey-rust, which I wouldn’t like even if it wasn’t too dark for that area, which it is. Not to mention that with five children and two dogs in the house, it wasn’t exactly clean… I still haven’t decided on a colour, but figured that a first coat of white would help cover up both the dark paint and the dirt, as well as being cheap, so that’s what I bought. I thought maybe I’d get the hall done on Saturday, then tackle the stairs and landing next weekend…but I reckoned without The Team. No sooner had I started than I had a queue of children beside me asking to help - so I phoned Scratchy (who was out doing errands) and told him to bring back more small rollers. I did big-roller bits up as far as I could reach, and various children came behind me filling in the bits around the edges (lots of edges: door-frames, stairway, chair-rail…)

Since we were getting on so well, I kept going - and despite taking a break for an hour or so when a friend came by in the afternoon, we managed to finish everything except the top bit of the wall by the stairs - which I thought best done when there were no small children around, as it required a step-ladder on the stairs themselves…

So now the hall is white(ish) and I need to get on with choosing a final colour. I’m thinking along the taupe spectrum, but things could still change.

And I managed to do it again this morning - second B12 shot, still a bit nervous and feeling sick beforehand, but not nearly as bad as Friday. A midwife came out to sit with me while I did it this morning, but from now on I’m on my own - which I think will actually make it easier, as I’ll have nobody watching me, plus I’ll be able to do it first thing in the morning so I won’t have the waiting-for-someone-to-arrive bit to handle. Up, cup of tea, inject, forget about it until the next one’s due.

Apart from my attempts to puncture myself… The boys have been continuing with their usual work, getting through quite a bit. George had a very good couple of days towards the end of last week, even making it through two entire days without any kind of meltdown - but a late night on Friday, followed by waking early on Saturday, with a 3 a.m. conversation with Freddy in between, resulted in a very shaky weekend for him. This morning didn’t start well when he went into wobbly mode before he got out of his room, but I managed to pull him back from the brink, and while there was still lots of room for improvement, it’s been a better day than the last two. I have to admit to a smile when I heard him getting mad at Barney around lunchtime; Barney was allegedly winding him up, but George’s response to his denial of this was “Barney, I can see the smile playing on your lips!”

Barney had his own tantrum on Thursday evening, storming out of the house and slamming the door behind him. Well, actually, he slammed the door in front of him, because he didn’t like the idea of being out in the dark on his own, so he stayed inside, locked the door, pocketed the key and went and hid in his room. He fooled us too! We gave him a few minutes to cool off, then Scratchy went to find him, while I phoned his mobile to see where he was (assuming he had it with him). When I heard it ringing in his room, I hung up - only to find him standing in front of me seconds later demanding, “What are you ringing me for?!!”

Barney and Scratchy went to a St John Ambulance competition on Saturday morning, leaving me at home with the others. A man came to service our boiler - at no charge. He’d posted on our local Freecycle list about two weeks ago asking for help with getting a website uploaded, and I’d offered to provide that help. He said that if I got it sorted for him, he’d service our boiler for nothing - that’s his business. It turned out his site was written in MS Publisher and it was easier to rewrite it in a different program than to fix the errors, so I did that. It probably took a couple of hours altogether, but he’s very pleased with it - and he spent a couple of hours on my boiler and I’m happy with that, so a good result all around

A bowl of cereal at bedtime yesterday bought me a night without heartburn, for which I was very grateful, as I really needed the sleep. After coping with George, as the others woke up and came into my room to greet Toby, it was like the Waltons in reverse: “Hello Toby!”, “Hello George!”, “Hello Toby!”, “Hello Jack!”, “Hello George!”, “Hello Barney” - well, you get the general idea

You’ll already have read the first bit of this story if you’re a regular here and not one of the people who’s arrived as a result of me crowing about my accomplishments on an email list somewhere - in case you’re one of the latter, however, you can find the sorry beginnings of this tale here

After all that brouhaha, and after being told by a midwife that they were doing me “a big favour” coming out to do the injections at all, I’d had enough. I don’t need or want favours that leave the donors feeling resentful or like they’re owed something. I got so mad I decided that the best thing was to do the injections myself.

The other thing you need to know is that I am needle-phobic, and have been for as long as I remember. I’ve never even been able to watch people getting injected on televison. I remember three injections that I had before puberty, and I managed to pass out at every one of them - sometimes multiple times. After an appendectomy, when a particularly unsympathetic nurse was taking blood from me and I said I felt faint, and she responded, “Don’t be silly, you can’t faint lying flat on your back”, I promptly proved her wrong. When everyone else in my year at school got a vaccine for something (BCG? can’t remember), my mother signed the “no” bit on the form, because she knew what I was like. And so the rest of the class toddled off from Geography to get jabbed, and I and one other person stayed behind. And then we all went to English class, during which the boy seated next to Martin Somebody said “Miss, Martin’s not feeling well” and we all turned to look at Martin and he was green…and I, knowing that the cause of his green-ness involved a needle twenty minutes earlier, fell out of my chair and woke up in the hall.

So yeah, pretty bad about needles. Even working in a hospital lab - even in Blood Bank, even in Pathology, where you really do see some gross things - didn’t help.

Those of you who don’t have any phobias won’t understand this at all; you’ll think it’s daft and unreasonable - and you’d be right. But those who are needle-phobic will understand why this decision was, for me, a huge one.

Of course, never having even watched an injection, I was starting from a fairly, uh, uneducated position.

But google is my friend, as is youtube. And I read lots of websites and forums and watched all the youtube videos of people getting and giving IM injections - at least, all the ones that didn’t involve people getting their jollies from it (and really, what on earth is up with that? I thought the diaper-fetishists were bad enough, but injections? Eh?) And 5.30 this morning found me lying in bed, in the dark (so as not to wake Toby) watching and reading more. And feeling stressed as I realised that in less than five hours a midwife would arrive and I would a) have to have a needle in me one way or another and b) have to try to convince her to let me do it myself.

By 9 o’clock, I was tired enough that I wanted to go back to bed. By 10 o’clock I felt sick. And the midwife was late…

By the time the midwife and a student arrived, at about 11, I wasn’t in a fit state for anything. I had said on the phone yesterday that I wanted to learn to self-inject, but obviously nobody took me seriously, because they were surprised and worried when I said it this morning. The midwife didn’t know if it was legal for me to do it; I asked under what law it would be illegal, and how exceptions were made for women injecting fertility meds, body-builders injecting steroids, etc. I told her I’d read about lots of people self-injecting B12 IM. She accepted that it might be legal for me to do it, but worried that she might not be allowed to teach me. I suggested she sat next to me while I did it and told her what I was doing, so she didn’t have to say or do anything unless I was getting it dangerously wrong. She wasn’t going for it. She said she’d have to speak to her Supervisor, and she’d do the first injection today and come back on Monday and if it was okay she’d teach me then. I pointed out that I’d been working myself up to this and that a weekend of further nervous waiting wasn’t something I was willing to take. She tried to contact her Supervisor but the paging system failed. I phoned the GP (which I needed to do anyway to get a prescription for folate), and he said he was happy for me to self-inject if she was happy to show me - she was still hesitant (the GP, hearing her in the background, said to me, “it sounds like she just doesn’t want to do it”). I suggested we phone the Royal College of Midwives and ask for a professional opinion, but in the end she phoned the local fertility clinic (the irony!) who assured her that yes, it was perfectly permissible for a professional in her position to teach me what to do.

And so she did.

I already had the procedure of actually injecting well-memorised, but wasn’t completely clear on all the preparatory stages - getting the stuff from the vial into the syringe, etc. We got through that without any trouble though, and then I found myself sitting on the sofa, one trouser-leg pulled down past my thigh and a needle attached to a syringe full of cobalamin in my hand…

This was the point I had thought might take an hour - getting pysched enough to actually do it. But a couple of deep breaths and…I did it.

I shut my eyes as I started to push the needle through the skin, but had to open them to pull the plunger back to check for blood (which would have meant the tip of the needle was in a blood vessel rather than the muscle and I’d have to start over). I pushed the plunger in a lot slower than I’ve ever had anyone else do it, but in fact it hurt less that way so I’ll stick with doing that!

I am quite ridiculously proud of myself; I know that for a lot of people this is a minor thing, but for me it was a Very Big Deal Indeed. I still need more syringes and needles and a sharps disposal box, so a midwife will come back on Monday morning with those, and sit with me while I do the second injection, but after that I’m on my own - and I’m quite happy with that! The midwfe and student who were here said I did a good job, and you know, I actually think I did

Apart from my ranty blog of yesterday evening, I haven’t written a proper blog-post in ages, so here is a rundown of the highlights/lowlights/midlights/whatever. I should note that in creating this post, my memory has been greatly aided by Twitter

We returned to the vet on Valentine’s Day so that Andie could also be spayed. We couldn’t book both dogs on the same day, as the practice only does one spay a day - that way they can do it first thing in the morning and keep a close eye on the dog all day in the office. We figured it was no bad thing to spay our two a few days apart anyway, to let us make a fuss of them individually, but both recovered very quickly so it wasn’t really necessary.

While Andie was at the vet, we went off to the shops. We’d a book-token to spend - given to one of the kids so long ago that I couldn’t even remember whose it was - so they shared it. It took a Very Long Time to make a selection, and in the end I spent the last bit of it on a book of my own choice: Michael Morpurgo’s Alone on a Wide Wide Sea. I also bought a long-reach stapler, an item about which I am sadly excited.

We also all had our eyes tested. Barney didn’t need a new prescription, but got new glasses anyway, given the state of his old ones. What the optician doesn’t know is that the new ones will be in just as bad a state as the old ones within a week. In fact in the car on the way home, he asked if his new ones were lopsided - he’s been wearing a lopsided pair for so long that “straight” feels wrong We talked about him getting contact lenses, as he would like to go back to fencing but doesn’t like doing it without his glasses, and you can’t wear glasses with the face-mask. He’s too young for wearing contacts all the time, but if it’s a couple of hours once or twice a week, it could be do-able. None of the others needs glasses, although Jack has a mild astigmatism. I’ve had perfect vision ever since having laser surgery about seven years ago, but now my age is showing, and I’m very slightly long-sighted. No reading-glasses needed yet, but I was pre-warned that I’d probably need them in another two or three years. Just what you need a couple of weeks before your 40th birthday: to be reminded that you’re getting old

Toby added Bananaphone to his repertoire.

And my friend whose heart surgery went all wrong a few weeks ago underwent the second attempt, which appears to have been very successful

On Friday we had someone come and look at the garden, figuring we probably couldn’t afford to pay someone to do it but we might as well ask and find out. We were right the first time. It looks like we’re sorting it out ourselves. Now we just need a few weeks without rain to allow it to dry out enough to dig and roll flat, before putting down turf. Seed would be cheaper, but would take a lot longer to establish, and we’d really like to be able to use it this summer. So Saturday found Scratchy out there in his wellies, accompanied by various children at different times, some of whom were more useful than others.

Monday was a crazy day, but I’ve already written about most of it here, so no real need to go over that again! One amusing moment (rather than hair-pulling-out moment) was when Toby was having lunch - pizza and bananas - and singing, “Hit me baby one more time”.

Toby continued his unbearable cutess on Tuesday morning, sitting on Barney’s lap while he did his French and repeating everything he said. Later he was heard yelling at Jack in the kitchen: “Jack! Open! Bananaaaaa!” Yes, I think he’s definitely turned into a talking child now.

Yesterday was another one of those up-and-out-early days, completely unnecessarily, as recounted here. After leaving the office and sitting in the car shouting and crying down the phone at a friend and Scratchy, I drove back across the city so that Barney could be fitted with contact lenses for fencing. Unfortunately it turns out he can’t put anything in his eyes. In fact, he can’t even open his eyes if he suspects there’s a finger anywhere near his eyelids, so contact lenses are a non-starter, for now at least. He’s going to practise poking himself in the eye for a few months before giving it another try.

While he was at the optician’s, I walked down the main shopping street of the town with the others. Now for this bit, you need a bit of back-story. We used to live in that town, and three of my children were born there. One of the reasons I started considering a homebirth when I was expecting George was that the local maternity unit was so completely, absolutely, dire. The local Supervisor of Midwives actively discourages homebirth - she spent three hours in my home trying to talk me out of it, mostly talking rubbish about the dangers and describing physiological processes that could not actually happen. She lied to the National Childbirth Trust about local homebirth rates, multiplying the true figure by 50 - yes, it’s that bad that it could be multiplied by 50 and still sound low. She tried to intimidate me by threatening to remove care. The local maternity unit, despite having no SCBU and therefore taking no high-risk cases, has a similar c-section rate to the next nearest unit, which takes the highest-risk cases from the entire population. The unit is old, dirty and insecure. I’ve witnessed a baby removed (by a visitor) from the nursery and the fact not even being noticed for more than two hours. Confidentiality is non-existent. And so on…

Yesterday morning it was announced that the unit is to close in about a year. As a result, there was a news journalist and cameraman out on the street, looking for people to give their reactions. Well, when they saw me coming - visibly pregnant and accompanied by four children - they probably thought they were in line for an early finish and a long lunch. Unfortunately my response was not of the “shocked, appalled that they’re taking this service away” kind that they were expecting. Instead it was of the “good riddance, it should have been closed years ago, it’s probably the worst unit in the country” type… Scratchy is well-aware of my feelings on this particular unit (and shares them) and when I phoned him to tell him about being stopped, he roared with laughter

After our errands and meeting up with Barney, we went to our usual all-you-can-eat pizza-and-pasta buffet for lunch, where we always get our money’s worth During the meal, Freddy and George educated me about the different kinds of knights in the Middle Ages and what the various protocols involved. Then they all inspected and discussed the restaurant’s fire safety system. But when Freddy started to pretend to unzip his forehead and announced, “I’m a Slitheen“, I decided that was as far as I was willing to let that particular discussion go

We’d a quick playground visit before collecting Scratchy, then I left everyone at home while I took Cassie back to the vet’s to get her stitches removed. Soon after getting home, I went to bed - but the day wasn’t over for George, who was part of the team at the County Cub Quiz. Our team came third and George arrived home very tired, but happy

I’m hiding in the dining-room; there are eight children here at the minute, several of whom are grumpy (all mine) which cannot be impressing the guest children, though all of them are being very polite about it. A friend had an appointment with one of her clients in this area this afternoon, and since her eldest is on half-term this week, she collected her other children from school and they all came here. My friend then left to go see her client and she will, I hope, be back soon, as dinner is almost ready to hit the table.

We spent most of the morning cleaning the conservatory, which has, for the last few months, been nothing but a holding pen for the dogs when they come in mucky from the garden, which is every time they come in, because the garden is like a field, but not as clean and tidy. To stop them from traipsing mud through the whole of downstairs, we’ve been leaving them in there until the mud dried up and/or fell off them. This has been a reasonably effective technique for keeping it out of the rest of the house, but another consequence was that the entire room - walls, windows, floor, furniture - became covered in a thick layer of mud, loose dirt and dog-hair. Four of us attacked it this morning with mops, large sponges and buckets of soapy water, and about three hours later, it was…well, cleaner. Not really what you’d call clean, but certainly a sight better than it had been. Everything will have to be washed again to get to that it to actually clean. The floor has been mopped seven times and still isn’t clean, but at least the colour is visible again. The vacuum cleaner had a nervous breakdown part-way through the process, but recovered later, and fortunately we’ve a smaller one upstairs, so I was able to use that in the meantime.

Barney spent the morning trying to work out what the tune in his head was; when he hummed it to me, I thought it sounded like the theme-tune to Star Wars, but when he figured it out, it turned out to be David Bowie’s “Starman”.

By lunchtime we were all wet, soapy and mucky, so I sent the boys upstairs to shower in turn in my bathroom (the family bathroom has a bath and a shower attachment but nothing to hang it on on the wall, and no shower-curtain). I went up to have a shower myself once they were done, and discovered that someone had been at bottles of moisturiser and make-up, and moisturised the toilet-seat. Then my shower was interrupted when Barney arrived to tell me he could sing Starman in French: Il y a un homme d’étoile, attendant dans le ciel… Hippy Hothousing Homeschoolers

The midwife rang with my blood-tests results. The good news: my iron-level is great. The bad news: my folate level is low. The good/bad news: my B12 is also low. The reason this is both good and bad news is that it means I have to have B12 injections, which hurt going in and then sting afterwards, but they are very effective and this will probably help my energy-levels a lot. The midwife annoyed me, though, when she said, “So with this, do you still want to go ahead with the homebirth?” - since she knows how I feel about hospital birth, I think this meant she really didn’t understand the results. She phoned the GP, who phoned me and emphasised how important it was that I get these levels up - she wants me in the treatment room at the practice three times a week for injections. When I asked if the community midwives could do it at home (as they did last time this was a problem), she wasn’t keen on the idea - largely, I think, because she doesn’t want to hand over something she sees as medical to the midwifery team. But the practice midwife, who will be the one giving me the injections in the treatment room, is off until next week, which means I won’t get started until then. So: urgent enough to take up a couple of hours of my time, three times a week, but not urgent enough to let the midwives get on with it at home (which would have allowed me to get the first injection tomorrow). And everything I’ve read says that when both B12 and folate are low, it’s important not to supplement folate without supplementing B12, so I won’t get started on that until next week either. Argh, I feel a treadmill slipping under me…

After Wickedly-busy Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were…slow. I can’t handle a day like that without taking a day or two to recover, so there was little more than the necessities done on those days - and even the necessities were largely done by people other than me. Cassie, on the other hand, made a remarkably quick recovery - after being fairly sleepy on Wednesday evening, she was up and raring to go on Thursday. Her crate is in the hall, and when its side door is open at 90 degrees, it blocks the hall - but on Thursday morning when she was on one side of that and I was on the other and she wanted to get to me, she didn’t let it stop her - she leapt right over it. One day maybe she’ll realise it’s on hinges and she can just nudge it with her nose or her paw

She did keep getting painkillers until Friday evening, and was supposed to get antibiotics until this morning, but I forgot to give her yesterday morning’s dose, and by the time I remembered it seemed a bit pointless. Her wound looks great, and she’s leaving her stitches alone, so I decided it was almost certainly fine not to finish the course.

I spent most of the day in the dining-room, tidying it (it was 7/10 on the tip-scale) while the boys dealt with the living-room (which was 9/10 on the tip-scale). Once it was tidy and all the bits of paper were in various piles (”deal with sometime”, “deal with this week”, “deal with soon” and “sort this out now” LOL), the boys sat around the table and did masses of studying. Scratchy took Jack out to get groceries - Jack in his “leather” (actually vinyl - and that kind of very vinyl-y vinyl) jacket, came up to me before they left and asked, “Isn’t this so cool?” - and it was, but it was the pose he struck and his facial expression that made it so, rather than the jacket They brought back dinner - Chinese food, in honour of Chinese New Year (which is a three-week festival in China, I’ll have you know, so were not at all late in celebrating it two days after New Year’s Day). Well - not genuine Chinese-Chinese food, but what we call Canadian-Chinese, although I suppose having lived here for over a decade, we should really be calling it British-Chinese or Euro-Chinese or something. The stuff you get from the take-away, anyway. We can get our mitts on Chinese-Chinese food, but it requires a trip to the Chinese supermarket, which is not somewhere any of us wants to be on a Saturday afternoon, and requires us to cook it ourselves, which neither of us was really up for yesterday. We were pleasantly surprised at how little it all actually cost from the take-away; we think they might have given Scratchy a discount. We know he got a discount when he took the boys to the Chinese New Year celebrations last weekend - they charged him for three people instead of six!

Anyway, our New Years dinner was very tasty, and I actually managed to stay upright long enough to sit at the table with the rest of the family until it was over, which isn’t something that’s been happening too often recently.

Toby was rather bouncy in the evening, having fallen asleep mid-afternoon and slept for two hours. I was ready for sleep long before him, but fought it, knowing that if I went to sleep at 9, I’d pay for it in wakefulness in the early hours. Unfortunately staying awake until later didn’t work, as I was awake from 1.30 until after 5 anyway. The combination of small people kicking me (from both inside and out) didn’t help, and nor did the snoring, but really it was mostly plain old insomnia.

I still managed to be awake at 9.45 this morning and got on with more sifting through the paperwork, getting to-do lists done, etc. I used to use an A5-sized filofax-type organiser thingy, and it kept me much more organised, so I’m going to work towards having everything in there again. I already feel much more organised - I know there’s nothing that needs done in the next week that I haven’t got on a list, and I have a plan for dealing with it all. There are still some more papers to deal with in the next few days, but now that it’s all organised in one place, I know I’ll get to it. I found a letter about an appointment on Wednesday that I’d forgotten about and that I was supposed to confirm, so I’ll do that tomorrow morning - I hope just in time. I also found a £10 voucher that we got from Argos that we got before Christmas - I was vaguely aware that we had it, but only discovered today that it expired on February 14th, so spent some time trying to figure out what we needed from Argos, and finally settled on a watch for Jack for his birthday next month and a pack of six rechargeable batteries. I also found a £25 voucher for Tesco, sent to me as a thank-you from the woman whose two Japanese Scouts we took on along with my own two last summer; I keep forgetting I’ve got it, but maybe now it’s in the front pocket of my organiser, I’ll remember to use it! And I discovered a book token, given to George for his eighth birthday, I believe (remember he’ll be 11 in June!) - I don’t even know if it’s still valid or not, though there’s no expiry date printed on it. And a cheque for £40 which is I’m pretty sure won’t be honoured now, since it’s nearly three years old - and I don’t have any memory at all of receiving it. You see why I want to get all this stuff sorted out?!

Again, I managed to stay upright throughout dinner, and even for a short period afterwards - which is more than poor Toby did. He fell forwards from the mattress of the bedside-cot and did a face-plant onto the side of it, giving himself a nosebleed

Another midwife visit yesterday, for her to take blood. I’ve declined most things but asked for hemoglobin (and other things necessary to calculate true iron level) to be done and also for a B12 check; part of me hopes one of those is abnormally low, as it would mean I could actually do something about the exhaustion. I have horrible veins; it takes an age to find one that looks half-decent and then they usually collapse seconds after the needle goes in. The first attempt yesterday resulted in less than half a millilitre in the bottom of a tube - that’s about one-tenth of a teaspooon. Second attempt didn’t get anything at all. L kept apologising but there was no need; I already know it’s me! She left me a bunch of booklets and leaflets, all of which went straight in the bin after a single glance, since I’d either a) read them before and knew they were useless, or b) opened them to a random page and discovered something which was evidence that they were useless.

I did a couple of very fast errands in the morning before she came, then came home and got the boys settled to some studying. They’ll be doing some more this afternoon; it probably sounds awful to be making them study on weekends, but there are things that work much better when there’s an extra adult around - to keep everyone out of the way when Barney’s doing past papers for GCSE, for example.

When we were at the science centre on Tuesday, a friend filled my car with boxes of things she’d been clearing out in preparation for moving overseas, so I got to those this morning. Books, jigsaw puzzles, toy animals (which led to a look of wonderment and delight on Toby’s face), and a marble-run which has already been packed into a box to be given to someone else. It had been out less than an hour and there had been several fights over it, and when Barney physically attacked Freddy to get him to hand over a marble, I decided enough was enough. Barney did not take well to this decision and stormed off (we don’t care about him, we don’t care about anything he wants…) including taking himself off outside in his (short-sleeved and short-legged) pyjamas. It’s cold enough that he was back indoors less than a minute later. He sulked for a while after that, but cheered up while eating lunch (he forgot he meant to be cross LOL)

Freddy sat down and did a KS2 science sats paper, but got very cross about one of the questions, and claimed it was “impossible to answer the question without breaking the rules!” It turned out that the question asked him to “draw a conclusion”, but there were line for him to write on, so he couldn’t draw anything…

The Toby-induced-smile-of-the-day came when he walked into the room on tiptoe; Barney missed it, so I said to Toby, “”how me how you can stand on your toes” and he did - one foot flat on the floor, the other foot on top of it

It’s been a very long day for Barney and me. I woke up to find that the baby had changed position overnight and that I now look about eight months pregnant, but no time to investigate that - Barney and I had to get out of the house bright and early. We arranged last week that we would go today to visit the school where he’ll be sitting his French GCSE. It’s about 2.5 hours away, so we left the house at 9.20 and after a couple of brief local errands, we were on our way. Barney is fantastically good company on a long drive; we had a wonderful conversation which included (and this is only a partial list): the kinds of careers he’s considering; how he could accomplish the things he thinks about; forensic science; robotics (particularly artificial limbs); what philosophy is about; his disappointment (his word) on hearing about the likely problems of human life on other planets due to differing air pressure, because that means that if there are extra-terrestrials, they won’t be able to land here and we won’t be able to land on their planets; a theory that life on earth is all a huge alien experiment; an alternative ending for the last Harry Potter book (Harry kills Voldemort, then James wakes up and is glad to find it was all a dream and that his son, who is after all only a year old, has not been through all that, then there’s a knock on the door, an evil laugh and a flash of green light…)

We stopped to visit my friend K, who is recovering from an unsuccessful operation on her heart just over a week ago; it’s the school her two oldest children attend that has agreed to let Barney do the exam there. After lunch at her house, we drove to the school and went in to meet with the French teacher and the Exams Officer.

Both were very welcoming and delighted to help. The French teacher spent nearly an hour with us; he looked at the past papers Barney has been doing and is very satisfied with the level of work in those, and repeated what I’ve been telling Barney for the last few weeks about the need to get organised at the beginning, watch the time, make sure he gives the information that’s specifically requested, etc. He spoke in French with Barney too, and again is very satisfied with his French, but says Barney needs to be more forward, more relaxed, and bring a bit of theatre to it. He gave us one extra past paper (the only one he could find in his stash that Barney hadn’t already done) and a couple of textbooks which have practice questions in them, as well as lots of information and hints about the aural exam. Barney also got to meet and chat with their French assistant, who is a French woman who has been in this country for three weeks. We were shown the gym, where he’ll sit the exam, and the seating arrangements for it were explained to us. He also gave us timetables and his email address and told us to contact him if there was anything at all that we needed or had questions about. The Exams Officer presented me with an invoice for the exam: £24, which is exactly what the Examination Board charges. In other words, the school is not asking for any reimbursement for the time the French teacher spent with us today, for the materials they’ve provided, for the time which will be spent on Barney’s aural assessment, or for invigilation.

I think we’ve been amazingly lucky to find them - after emailing and phoning from October to January, I was on the verge of giving up. I haven’t asked about Barney (or the others, when the time comes) sitting other exams there, but I’m hoping that once we’ve been through this one, the school will be willing to cooperate for other subjects too.

We finished at 3.20, which is also school-letting-out time, so we collected K’s sons, C and J, and drove them home. They and Barney then got to spend some time together before we left for the long drive home, during which Barney fell asleep (so it wasn’t nearly as interesting for me as the outward journey!) We just made it back in time for him to go to Air Cadets; fortunately we’d brought the things he needed with us. And we have another busy day tomorrow - not so much driving, but plenty of action, I’m sure - so I think it’s time I went to bed. Maybe I’ll just check on my Scrabulous games first though…

Today was loud. I spent a lot of it muttering about the volume in the house - Jack and Toby seemed to be having a competition to see who could scream loudest, Freddy’s generally loud anyway and George certainly hasn’t been what you’d call calm and quiet recently. And then I went to Beavers, where it was even louder. I’ve started a new tradition there: when I want quiet, I stand quietly with one arm in the air. Gradually the Beavers copy me, looking expectant. The first few times I did this, it took 20 or 30 seconds for them all to catch on, but now if there’s anybody still chattering about seven seconds in, I can almost guarantee there’ll be another Beaver or two nudging them and nodding in my direction to make them notice. Making yourself heard over a small group of Beavers - we only had six in September 2006 - is one thing, but when there are 20 of them, it requires all your energy behind your voice if you want it to be louder than them all put together. Standing there with your arm in the air requires much less energy

(Unfortunately it doesn’t work so well at home, largely because everyone isn’t usually gathered in one room, so I could wave my arm until it fell off and they wouldn’t notice.)

I’ve also been nominated to keep doing the Beaver programming, which I don’t mind. I’m not bad on the planning end, and I don’t find it too onerous. I had programmed from September to the end of January, but didn’t want to just keep going and step on anyone’s toes. Tonight when I arrived (with a programme that could be used, or not, it didn’t matter either way), I asked “So do we have a programme?” and the response was comments like “That’s your department!” and “You’re good at it, you can do it.” The only part of it that has been difficult recently has been the actual getting out and gathering things we need for programmes; a combination of only one car in the family and my lack of energy have complicated that bit - but one of the other leaders has agreed to take care of that as long as I provide her with lists of what’s needed. The other one is finding out the school term dates because we don’t usually meet during school holidays, and I’ll get on with putting together a plan that will take us to June. It’s a good agreement; I get to do the bit that only needs me to sit on my bum in front of a computer, the others get to avoid doing the bits they think are boring, and the Beavers get a damn good programme, if I say so myself

Otherwise…Toby appears to be on the verge of giving up naps. This seems unreasonably soon to me. I feel it would be much better if he would continue to nap early each afternoon for, oh, at least another three years. He has different ideas, it seems. He’s also taken to helping himself to things from kitchen cupboards - any kitchen cupboard, regardless of height or contents. Yesterday he got a teabag(!) and emptied the contents over the landing floor. Actually, now I think of it, he hasn’t been limiting himself to the kitchen.

He’s a long way from being the child who’s the hardest work at the minute though. By 10 o’clock this morning, George, having been even more intense than usual today, had already been informed that he would be going to bed early tonight instead of to SJA Cadets. Barney went though, and has volunteered to take part in a competition of some sort at the end of February. We know the date, but time and location (and what he’s supposed to do) remain a mystery. Freddy and George are taking part in a regional Cub quiz competition on Friday night, so it seems we’re back to the usual busy schedule.

The Big Thing for Barney so far this week, however, has been that he went off to investigate Air Cadets. And came home to tell us that as soon as he takes the forms back and takes some basic training, he could be flying a small aircraft - actually taking the controls - with supervision. I thought I had another four years before I had to worry about him taking control of vehicles, but I was thinking of the kind which have four wheels and stay on the ground - it had never occurred to me to worry about him taking to the skies at 13

Yet again, days pass, and I have no idea how, when or where they went…it’s a bit scary to think that this is my life.

I do know that we spent some time yesterday looking for David Bowie on Youtube. George was most impressed at the wide range of images he’s had (no surprises there). Freddy was most impressed by his eyes - “that must have freaked out his parents when he was born!” - in other words, he considers them very cool. Toby mostly danced - he is very keen on dancing these days - and provided accompaniment with maracas. I’m not sure why we started looking for David Bowie on Youtube; it must have been one of those things that made sense at the time. I know we also also saw heard him when we watched Arthur and the Invisibles, but that was after the Youtubing, so it can’t have been that. We also watched a documentary about a man who has spent the last few years living with a pack of wolves, and that led to much howling at bedtime. I wonder what the dogs thought of that?

I’ve spent most of today in my current favourite place: the corner of the sofa. At least I’ve figured out a class of food that I can manage to eat: spicy. That’s how it was with Barney too - I spent most of the pregnancy subsisting on jalapeno potato wedges that we bought in bulk from Costco. I’m still waiting for that second-trimester energy to arrive though; it’s taking its time, I’m 17 weeks. I suppose I should probably contact the midwife sometime soon, but I’m still thinking about what exactly I’m going to tell her I want. I do know that I want the Community Midwifery Manager to stay completely out of it - I don’t even want her present when my name is mentioned. I suspect that might cause some administrative issues for the midwifery team; if so, that’s too bad.