Random snippets, ordinary days, unschooling randomness

Yup, my rainbow babies at it again with the random outfits. Talia is totally obsessed with holding hands at the moment, preferably with a sister rather than me!



Things I found in a bag Rowan was carrying around. Any time I empty anyone's pockets around here I find strange collections - recently I bumped against Rowan as we walked along and found that her pocket was surprisingly heavy. It was absolutely *stuffed* with sticks. Plain, ordinary, stubby, heavy, slightly muddy, sticks.

Question: how does the contents of the bookcase end up on the floor Every Single Day? Answer: this little pickle did it, gleefully, and then ran away when I asked her to put them back! :)


When the children had a friend round for the day we did some baking. Ugly, but delicious, macaroons. A first for us! They were fiddly, but worth it. Next time, I'm going to remember not to put them so close together on the baking sheet...


Jenna bean, spinning. At eleven at night.

The time of evening at which she heads to bed is so variable. It's interesting how different they are, and how their needs change as they get older. Rowan has recently started asking to be taken up to bed much earlier than she used to, and Morgan often goes up at the same time. Jenna sometimes reads in bed, especially if Martin and I are watching a film she isn't interested in. Sometimes she needs time without sisters around, especially when they haven't been getting on so well or if she has had a very busy outdoor-type day.

How she spends her evenings surprises me a great deal. She doesn't usually want the computer (which she often uses for long periods during the day) and tends to be very creative in the evening, or pick up a book. Right now she's past halfway in A Series of Unfortunate Events, and just finished re-reading Coraline. We're reading The Deathly Hallows together, and we're so closed to the end, it will be the end of an era when we're done with that series (we might have to start over again)!


Lots of fort/den building has been the order of the day while I've been so so tired (not enough sleep for mama!) and Rowan has been full of beans with lots of ideas she wants to explore and projects she wants help with.






Evidence of the constant Minecrafting - this week Jenna has been looking at ways of mapping contours and representing different biomes in her own sketches, and she's started keeping a square-ruled design notebook for her ideas for block creations. It's entirely normal in my house right now for discussions to quickly skip from programming commands, to grid references, to birthstones, to engineering "floating" structures in real life.



Yep... This is a picture of my children sitting on the shed roof. The neighbours are horrified. Sorry, neighbours. They love to climb.


Museum session creations (and a cheeky grin).


Jenna introducing Talia to The Clangers. Additions to Talia's vocabulary: "Soop Gag-gn" [Soup Dragon], "Canger", and "scary"! (She constantly asks Jenna, "Canger sad? Canger funny? Canger scary?" I think she wants to know what they are saying to each other!)




Almost two weeks of randomness. :) Facilitating the craziness isn't getting any less like juggling, just now. And tiredness is leaving me a little cranky and generally not very up for getting out and about as often as usual. Sleep will happen eventually. In the meantime, I'm trying to go with the flow and let the chaos just happen around me! :)