Who’s Normal Anyway?

Yesterday morning was a typical sort of staying in day. I didn’t want to go out anywhere much because my eye was still bothering me for driving. In the end M did a little bit of maths and then we had a chat about home ed and what things he does and doesn’t like doing and what A and I would like him to practise regularly, mainly some maths and English.

M said he likes the spelling scheme we have so we’re going to get back into that again and base English learning more towards working through that. He likes doing projects and FIAR too, but isn’t keen on narrations (because he finds them tricky) so I’ve said we can do more of the projects and not too many narrations but we’d like him to keep trying with them. Getting to the point or main nub of the information he’s relaying is something he really struggles with (much like his father LOL). We have a couple of FIAR books we haven’t done yet and after that I either need to borrow other books or we can re-row ones we did when he was 4 or 5.

I’ve also bought a pile of Sonlight 1 / 2 books secondhand and I’d like to fit in more time to read together, but fitting it in around L is tricky so we’ll have to see how it goes. We have a big pile of books to work through for bedtime stories at the moment anyway.

Then we looked through the BA Science folder and talked about working towards the First Investigators Gold award vs starting the Young Investigators scheme when he turns 8 next month and he wants to finish the gold award first. We picked out which projects he’d like to try and most of them require me buying something or other towards the equipment (be it cans of baked beans in the right size or reflective strip for clothes). We discussed planning science experiments too - M is still at the stage of thinking science is knowing the answer and just demonstrating it rather than setting up a properly controlled experiment to see what happens in practice. So we can work on that process as he does the different projects he likes the look of.

M said he wanted to have lots of time for playing (reading “on the computer”!) and for Lego and for playing with L. We need to fit in time to get some house jobs done too - never seems to be enough time to fit everything in. M likes me to sit with him as he works but I want to get on with stuff and just check how he’s doing. Maybe he’d get on faster if I sat with him more, I don’t know. Anyway, something I’m thinking about at the moment.

A finished work early because his meeting was cancelled so we went out to pick blueberries. They were really easy to pick, there were loads of them literally falling off the branches of the bushes. A had L in the Ergo and he kept making “another blueberry please” noises and the blueberries kept on dissappearing.

Afterwards we went into town to get some fabric and velcro and we picked up some empty shoe boxes for doing Christmas boxes, though I think some of them are too small. M asked to go in the bookshop and they had 3 for 2 on children’s books so he bought Spy Dog 2 and Astrosaurs 8 and I got a Roman Mysteries book to put away for his birthday. It started raining heavily so we hurried back to the car after that and went to Pizza Hut for tea.

This morning we had a slow start and then did some rearranging and tidying in the bedrooms. We need to put some things up into the loft again but we didn’t get that far. A’s friend K that he used to work with called in to see us for a few hours around lunchtime. She was doing a bit of a motorbike tour of friends over this side of the country and arrived in waterproofs and leathers (she brought the rain with her LOL) and it was lovely to catch up a bit. L took a little while to get used to her but then was doing his charm act getting K to play with him.

This afternoon we’ve made blueberry jelly out of most of the blueberries, which we boiled and strained this morning. We kept a few for the freezer for when we make blueberry muffins. We just had enough empty jars and glasses to put the jelly into and the jelly tastes gorgeous. Now A and M are watching Back to the Future 3 and L is finally napping (far too exciting earlier with K here for him to fall asleep). I’m going to sit here a bit longer and then go and start the chilli for tea I think.

Hope it’s not raining like this up in Yorkshire for Jan and Jonathan’s camping in the field house party! It’s very wet and blowy here.

Edited to add that the post below is passworded because it’s more specifically to do with where we live and I don’t want to put that out on the internet for everyone to read. Same password as last time and anyone who knows us IRL is welcome to email for the password.