(snippets of our normal)

Outside my window the grey sky is a blank slate, fresh from pouring heavy warm rain down upon us only moments ago. The hedge glistens with water droplets. Discarded clothes from the children's games lie damply on the muddy grass - more laundry for me! The contorted willow is finally (and blessedly) coming back into leaf after being heavily eaten by tiny green caterpillars this Summer.

I am thankful for the lightness creeping back, for surviving periods of depression, for that returning feeling that I *will* be OK at some point in the future.

In the kitchen there are stacks of soup bowls from lunch, and baking trays dusty from the scones we made and devoured this afternoon. We haven't had tea yet; rice and mushroom curry from the takeaway is the ultimate comfort-food plan when Martin gets home from helping a friend to shift a new armchair across town.

I am wearing a hippy top that doesn't really fit me all that well any more, dark red with a tiny yellow and magenta floral print. And the orange patchwork skirt. Amber beads. Hair pulled back, as it so often is. I'm thinking about cutting it again, or dyeing it bright red, or *something*.

I am creating gradient dyes, mainly, right now. Some for the shop, and some for the shawl I'll be working on this week. I have averaged almost one small project a day this week.

I am going to an Attachment Parenting family picnic tomorrow. And a birthday party on Sunday. I so want to return to the commune in Liverpool one weekend soon, and keep discovering that somehow I have forgotten other things which I agreed to months ago. (More apologies to the play dates we apparently forgot about this month. My mind is so scattered lately.)

I am reading The Cuckoo's Calling. (Or I will be, when I get chance to do more than pick it up and move it from room to room with me.)

I am hoping... well I would say I am hoping for an early night, but as we still haven't had anything to eat this evening and the children are making elaborate paper collages all over the floor...

One of my favourite things is the smell of rain in Summer. Rich and fresh at the same time.

Around the house:
I actually put away some clean laundry today. It has only been sitting lying around on chairs and dressers for about two weeks. I have strange nightmares about the laundry pile chasing me; I can't pretend that I'm not fully aware what these mean.

There is a doll crib in the living room, tied with large looping bands of thin elastic from my sewing box. A doll appears to have her leg suspended in this cat's cradle of white bows. Earlier this was part of a game of hospitals.

Two playstation controllers trail across the floor - between the game of hospitals and the cutting-of-paper, Jenna and a friend were playing Sonic. Jenna gives characters in video games voices, and keeps up a constant stream of their imagined conversations.

A peek into my day:

   Another Simple Woman's Daybook.
(New Tshirt from Teefury. New Gallifreyan artwork from Chronix Gallery.)

House moving fun (No, not us)!

We helped Ash move to her new place over the weekend. Lots of carrying of boxes and visiting of furniture shops. It was so fun for me to be able to interfere be nosey help out. :)



Yes, um, this is Talia's new thing in the car - falling asleep holding on to her foot. She only does it when she's forward facing (so that we can fit people in all the seats, as her usual rear-facing seat is much wider). Toddlers are weird.



This is the pre-unpacking study. OK, craft room.

While Martin and Ash shifted the new book case from the shop to the flat, I walked the children around a pet shop.



Talia: "What dat frog?"
Me: "It's a bearded dragon."
Talia: "'Kay... Dat baby dwagon."

Jenna: "Look Tali, crickets!"
Talia: "Oh no, 'pider cryin!"

Outside the pet shop, Talia decided she needed to be naked. It's the first time in a while that she has tried to take off all her clothes in public - it used to be a really regular occurance and meant we rarely ventured out of the house unless I had an extra adult. Whilst people tend to be amusedly tolerant of a toddler wearing nothing but a nappy in hot weather, in Winter it's frowned upon (as well as plain inadvisable), and she was fully capable of unpoppering nappies too if the mood took her. Months and months of battling over clothes any time I was brave enough to take them all out on my own. Yeah.



Anyhow as you can see, sympathetic as always, I took a picture as evidence that life with toddlers is sometimes just like this. (I had just told her, "Dress stays on!" hence the cross face! I then distracted her from stripping by showing her the picture, which amused her for long enough to get her back in the car. "Look, pic-cha mee!")

I think I forgot any possible point I was making, so I'll leave it at that! Talia is sitting on my lap as I type, and is admiring the pictures again most sweetly. She just told me, "Taya dress ON." So she obviously remembers that brief afternoon disagreement!

Weird Kid the Fourth

Miss Pickle here brings me the phone almost every day and asks to "phown Gram-ma me" or "phown Ash-ee me". Usually followed by a request for, "Gram-ma take me car?" Already so keen to be off out adventuring without us, hmph.

I love love love this toddler-some business and talking and actually holding conversations with her - albeit really strange ones. I love seeing her blossom into a person I can understand, and watching how her personality reveals itself. She is such a live-wire!


She is extremely attached to all kinds of shoes. Her favourites are her skull-and-crossbones shoes ("Pi-te shoosh!") and her red spotty penguin wellies ("Pengy bootsh!") but really, and shoes are apparently super-exciting. We have more conversations about socks and shoes than almost anything else.

Tilly also loves playing with lego. And the lego box. Especially in the following configuration: empty lego on to nearest floor (bonus points if you can spread it across more than one room), place lego box on head, stretch out hands to prevent running head first in to door post, walk around saying, "da-yek" [Dalek].


She wears most of her clothes inside out at the moment, because she has a case of "me do it SELF!" I'm not sure if people generally think that I'm too distracted to dress her properly, poor little fourth child, or if it's obvious that she dresses herself! That's even when she can be persuaded into clothes. Nine tenths of the time (or more) if we're at home, she's toddling round in the nude - or better yet, naked but wearing boots...

My little Talia, still following along, always trying to keep up with the big ones, adopting their interests, copying their phrases, asserting herself on their space. Littlest sister is very Two. And a very fine Two she is.

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! :)

Some of my Week

At sling meet on Monday I was asked how home education works. I wasn't really sure how to answer such an open-ended question. I rushed out something about living as if school didn't exist, following interests, and not being sure if it's Always Summer Holidays, or Always Education, because we mostly play and muck around with things we like, and live life together, and find learning everywhere.

I tend to worry that either this sounds like no education at all (explaining some of the, "you must be brave," comments), or whether it sounds like I wait for "teachable moments" and pounce with a lesson (explaining the frequent, "I could never be that organised!").

It isn't like it can all be explained and categorised, either. Sometimes I find that they know things that weren't even on my radar as possibilities.

We "just live" and "just play" but really there is no "just" about it.



















Here the girls set about making Fimo beads after a Doctor Who Club craft required just a small amount from the packet. I didn't suggest using the left over bits, but they had clear ideas! One of the pendants they created is apparently "a key that can open any lock". (We also spent an afternoon getting utterly covered in PVA glue making some papier mache, but more about that another day.) And why yes indeed, my children *do* wear dressing up costumes more often than ordinary clothes...


Tree blocks, the day Jacqui and Rye arrived to spend the week. Blissful crafting time while the children played together wonderfully, and introduced Rye to Minecraft. I wish I'd referred to this photograph when trying to work out where in the general mess my other bobbin had got to! Ah well, I tracked it down in time to do lots of spinning the day our lovely guests headed home.


Leaf kicking, and leaf throwing, on the way to the park. Drifts of crisp golden brown. :) On the park the children ran laps of the courts (as usual), inspected the cheerful graffiti art panels, and took a closer look at the work going on to install a bike track. That should be fun, come Summer!


Isn't that just the iconic Autumn picture? Oh my pixie Morgan, there is such a wildness about her sometimes; the way she turns her face to the sun, and that fine windswept hair.


Poorly Morgie-girl! And more Minecraft for big sis who is pretty much alternating her time between that, writing plays, journalling, and playing endless Greek-Mythology-related imaginary games. She also made my very yummy chocolate and peanut butter birthday cake.

Things we learned from Minecraft tangents this week: how to find out how deep a mine is, and from there exploring xy graphs, decimal places, and minus numbers. She also planned and built monuments to the Greek pantheon in creative mode, causing much debate about whether this building material or that is more suitable to honour Hephaestus/Artemis/etc. She worked out that her structures were not identical in size and soon figured out plans for conformity using area and volume calculations I am sure I remember her declaring "too hard" a year ago. I'm not sure if Jenna is aware that she is learning maths by stealth playing this game. She has declared she hates maths since well-meaning relatives tried to coax her to add up and told her she "needs to learn maths". (Morgan, of course, views children's maths text books and workbooks in much the way Jenna does journals and novels.)

Week on the Edge

1. Painting experiments
2. Fireworks
3. Knitting and reading
4. Mantle
5. Tired
6. Sparklers
7. Park

Late, and not one a day, again. The weeks are sort of flying by right now. I'm elated and our days are beautiful. I'm struggling and our days are chaotic. Both statements are equally true.

We are on the cusp of winter. Talia is wearing hats (finally)! We are seeing a lot of our friends. Life feels full, full of activity, full of meaning, full of creativity, full of each other (sometimes maybe even too full).

Some Snippets of late Autumn

1. Arctic expeditions ;)
2. Play dough
3. Sausages
4. A new skirt
5. Autumn sky
6. Park
7. Birthday Versa vest

Ha, yes, very late with the seven days, I know. These are last week's photographs, and not exactly one a day, it's been a bit like that... I'm feeling warm, happy, blessed, busy, creative, and inspired. Life is good. :)

Portraits at the Park

Sisters in the sun, on a peaceful afternoon on the park.







Talia decided to do without clothes, and stripped them all off after a few minutes. I really am often struggling with her strong minded-ness these days. These girls of mine, all pulling and pushing, all determined and strong and brave. Sometimes it scares me, loving them all, trying to be with them - kindly, thoughtfully, joyfully, generously. These ages and stages have their perfect, peaceful, beautiful moments, and their trials! I wouldn't trade it for anything. Except maybe all of this plus a full night's sleep. ;)