March is marching by quicker than a person with 2 and half weeks till their due date ought to reasonably expect. I’m really not quite in the right head place for that

We’ve had a very good start for the month, given we’re aiming to have lots of ‘work’ done by the end of the month and then a month of crafts, day trips and stuff.

So, forgot to add to the end of February that the big two went off to HE group with W, Skye and Poppy and joined in the Stuart day. Zoe also did a fab soap making thing with them one day, which was great.

So – workwise what have we been up to? They are all hugely into maths, which is (to me) frankly baffling but it has been nice to see them enjoying doing it and be so comfortable. They’ve all been revising basic skills at their own level and the effort they’ve put into their table learning has been a big help. Fran and Maddy have finished the challenge and Amelie is still working on it but we’ve been doing table tests and they’ve all been getting them all right.

Amelie started working on comprehension exercises and appears to really like them – and be able to do them really quite well. She’s one of those kids, Amelie, who just doesn’t have any trouble with following instructions. So if you say “do it this way and you’ll get all the marks”… she just does. The same cannot be said of Fran, who is still convinced she will find a comprehension where they forgot to add the answers to the text Or of Maddy, who thinks that words were put on this earth to spite her

There has been loads of reading; Fran finished Carrie’s War and started on Theatre Shoes which was the next suggestion in her GP reading list and went on a Noel Streatfeild binge, has read White Boots and is now on The Growing Summer. Then she diverted to the Drina books but is apparently coming back to Tennis Shoes. Amelie is still busy with Fairy books and is reading something about plants and Maddy is heavily into painters again.

We’ve finished more project work up and they’ve all done a good job on those; Fran and Maddy are working away at Science and History very independently, French together and some Latin and music. Fran and Amelie have worked so hard on their music and their teacher is really pleased with them. Fran has set herself a challenge of being able to enter on piano by next year too. Fran’s got her Grade 2 pieces as well, so she is well on her way to doing that this summer.

Maddy is going through rather a perfectionist phase and won’t do things if she feels it won’t be perfect or if she knows someone else can do it better. Did persuade her to do some drawing again the other day and she drew a Moshi Monster style food.

There has been plenty of being outdoors and cycling, playing with street friends and so on – with the sun coming out it all feels a bit nicer. Amelie is riding her bike now and Josie isn’t too far off, so that is good. Looking forward to being able to get out and do the garden again soon; i’m too lumpy at the moment.

Josie is the star of the show again – sums up to 20 and written numbers all worked out by herself up to 29, lots of reading and word building and a continuing interest in pattern and order and how time and so on works.

She’s a star at the moment, really driven to work out how to access the world. It really is such a privilege to witness it over and over again, emerging it its own way each time. If they were at school we’d just assume school was inputting it i suppose but seeing it happen… well, it awes me every time.

We had a great trip to LeCielRouge this week and did an experiment to show how fat react when washing up liquid disperses it.

And then a bit of marbling for fun too!

Fran had been stressing over her flic, which had ‘disappeared’ so spent most of Monday practising it on the trampoline while the rest of them mostly managed to play and socialise until dancing time. It appears to be back perfectly beautifully now though, along with her baby giant and her vault, so she is happy Amelie is having a great time at gym still, but Maddy is giving up to spend more time on TKD and Rugby.

Wednesday was also a good Latinetc with science in the form of bacteria collection and growth, with antibiotics in a couple of forms added to parts of the petri dishes to see the effect. Also did flute, sewing, French and Latin and all came out pleased, apart from Amelie who was clearly heading into a asthma crisis.

Unfortunately, we got home to a tragedy as something dreadful had occurred in one of our rabbit runs and one rabbit was dead and the other at deaths door. Bit of a tragic accident really and dreadfully upsetting all round; mercy dash to the vets with the survivor was better than i expected and i brought her home again for nursing care which Maddy is helping with lots. She is absolutely distraught, as these were her two rabbits and i don’t think i have ever heard her cry like she did this evening On the upside, the vet felt only the fact that Button as clearly a well cared for rabbit generally had enabled her to survive, which has helped Maddy a bit.

Luckily Button, Maddy’s particular favourite, seems to be recovering; she is in with us and being fed lots of fresh veg and carrots, water and antibiotics and is already perky and filling out again. Nursing her is helping her feel she can do something useful anyway and seeing her eat, drink and poo as normal is a huge relief.

Must admit that lying in bed last night with asthma-y child in my bed, sobbed out Fran on a mat on my floor, Max upstairs with a cold, 2 well bunnies having a precautionary night in in the downstairs loo and a sick bunny having water checks and refilled hot water bottles every two hours in the lounge, i was thinking “this would not be a good time to go into labour!”

In fact, i’m staggered i didn’t.

RIP Smartie, we really are terribly, terribly sorry not to have you any more

Maddy did her first TKD grading today and was awarded her Yellow Belt. She was so determined to get it and not have to do the Yellow Tag one first and worked really hard at learning her pattern all week, not something that comes easily to her. We’re really proud of her

As one of the wives from a favourite film of mine, Apollo 13, says, patting her bump.

Woke up this morning and thought – omg… the baby is due THIS MONTH!!!

I must admit, i’m kind of hoping for a few extra days (maybe not 14 though ) this time as i don’t feel nearly ready to have a baby! Max muttered this morning that maybe this time we’d get an early one and i thought “NOOOOOOO!!!”

It seems to have gone very fast this time; the first 20 weeks were a nightmare and stressful and then the last 16 have flown by – although all the problems at the beginning seem so remote and far away they could be from years back – like that was the end of something else, rather than the beginning of something new.

Wanted to say thanks to all the people who contributed to the baggage post below – i really need to go through and thank people individually but they were a huge help and much appreciated. After a good think i had a long conversation with a doula last night and hopefully we are going to go down that route. It feels the right compromise between needs, wants and costs. Thank you again – everything that was written on and off blog, including the offers to come and be there, were much appreciated.

This time of year always seems to be a bit dull; maybe it is just me but i struggle to bring myself to rush about when it is cold, wet and horrible really. Not that i’m a great rusher anyway, but when you have to be out all evening for gym etc, dashing about in discomfort through the day feels like too much effort!

Forgot to mention in my last round up that i took the girls to see Holiday on Ice – Spirit on a whim one day. It was extremely near by and we’d had a tough few days and was good fun to watch. I laughed the most when the man doing a back somersault (on ice, wearing ice skates while going at 40mph) drew no more than criticism from Fran for technique

The big two girls worked very hard on getting their Egypt projects finished and were both pleased with what they achieved.

Maddy and Amelie have both made it through their maths chapters on multiplication and distinguished themselves, Maddy also working on square numbers. Amelie has also done a chapter on division, mostly using blocks but gradually getting more confident in working out in her head and seeing the relationships between numbers. Fran has been on a chapter using decimals and large thousands and moving on to large numbers where the sum has 3 parts. All of them have got on with learning their tables and we’re doing a weekly tables test to keep them on top of the knowledge. I know lots of schools no longer believe in rote learning, but i have to say that knowing my tables well has stood me in very good stead all my life and it is one of those things i really want to ensure my girls have.

We’re having a concerted attack on doing text booky type stuff while it is horrible, partly so they are finished and we can have a relaxed summer. Maddy restarted her English book, using a computer this time as written work stresses her so much, with a much greater success. Amelie was extremely reluctant to start GP1 English but sat beside me for the first comprehension and seemed to really enjoy it. She certainly did it very well; she has quite a logical, analytical mind and unlike the older two, is better at retaining instructions and so she stuck at it well and did it right.

Josie has been the real star of the fortnight, reading her way through several early Peter and Jane books and spending lots of time playing with letters.

She is really loving the whole reading thing at the moment and is proving to me that 4 children doesn’t mean you’ve seen all versions of learning to read. Fran and Maddy were reluctant to be taught, but needed teaching, but came to it gradually by 8ish. Amelie taught herself and was reading easily by 6ish, having used computer resources to learn. Josie appears to be very focused indeed on acquiring the skill, but wants to do it with me and wants me to guide her. I wonder which version (or new version) Titch will be?

She is also loving patterns…

…jigsaws…

(She does far more complex ones than this but notably, this was the first time i had seen her do this one where she used the number sequence to start it, rather than the picture)…

MoshiMonsters (so long as a big sister will help her learn the puzzles)…

…and Club Penguin.

The other massive thing she has been doing is sums – all she wants is pages of sums. I’ve been writing out 20 at a time, adding up to 20 and she can do them all. I’ve barely marked a single one wrong in the entire time. She does forget number 13 though, so whether working out n her head or with blocks, she tends to shout “what’s that number after 12?” which amuses me

I’m charged with buying her a maths book. Honestly, i tried so hard to teach the older two things at this age and then the younger ones beg me for knowledge when i want them to have a slow start and a longer play based childhood!

Fran’s started a new English Chapter – we’ll gloss over some of her notions of how a comprehension is supposed to be done. Suffice to say that her comprehension of the word comprehension was a little slim She did very well in the end, though she isn’t a child who feels reading the question is an important part of the process

Maddy has been doing science, Amelie has been reading something educational voraciously (can’t think what) and also more fairy books, Fran has finally moved off Tudor books and on to something else. She loves the GP reading lists that come with the chapters, so has started Theatre Shoes alongside Carrie’s War and a couple of others. (ROLLS EYES AGAIN!) Maddy has been back into the Celts and Romans.

After a particularly over emotional day the other day, e all sat and read a chapter on Eastern Civilisations together, which everyone got plenty from.

Big girls have been playing networked games of Civilisation II (sorry Ali!) with us.

Amelie has been doing loads of French Knitting following a trip to Hobbycraft. Fran doing more machine sewing and all doing Hama Beads.

We had a good science and French session where the bean experiential followed nicely from Fran’s GP chapter on experiment controls. French pleased all of them by stretching them after a journey where M,A and J tried to play a whole imaginative game in French, with reasonable success.

Very long conversational ed about sex, HIV, medical drug families, illegal drugs, risks and social effects of drug taking etc etc – all at dinner table. Was exhausted by the end of it!

Maddy loving Taekwondo.

Grading next week. She adores it and rugby is also going well.

Josie finally allowed someone to turn her upside down (Fran) in a supported flic and showed the gym coach.

Fran managed a baby giant at Thursday gym (woot!) and Amelie got Gymnast of the Month. She was thrilled

Really, despite lots of minor irritations, a good month with plenty achieved.

I write to you regarding your shameful coverage of the Khyra Ishaq case on the Jeremy Vine Show on Friday. While the interview was conducted by Fern, it was done in the name of JV and quite honestly, you should both be ashamed.

Fern, to be a journalist is many things; there is, without doubt, a pressure to provide a story from one’s employers – and no doubt from those who employ your employers. There is certainly a need to provide readers or listeners with something to make them think. There is an adage that one should never let the facts get in the way of a good story. But there is also a duty to investigate, to look at your story impartially and with open eyes. To regurgitate pap is not journalism, or certainly not the sort the BBC should expect. It is the stuff of Bella Magazine to simply follow a hysterical mantra spouted by an agency with more to gain from the hysteria than it has to gain from the truth.

Fern, throughout your career you have marketed yourself as a champion of people, of families and i suspect, you believe that you are someone who allows the voices of women and children to be heard. It may be, while you hosted a conversation yesterday about the desperate case of Khyra Ishaq,that you believed you were doing so.

I believe you let down many more women, children and families than you championed yesterday. I believe you let down Khyra, her siblings, other children in her position and every last home educated child and home educating family in the country. And i would like to tell you why.

If a community knows itself to be at fault, it tends to clam up and hide the evidence. You might ask yourself therefore, why the home educating community are not silent about Khyra Ishaq, or indeed about Eunice Spry and her children?

I can tell you why. We are not silent because we are furious on behalf of those children, furious they were abused and furious they were let down. But we know they were not let down because they were home educated, even if those words are applied to the position they were in. There is a significant difference between Elective Home Education and Children Missing Education, one you should educate yourself on.

Those two families, the only ones the government can bring to the table in defence of their persecution of home education, were NOT hidden, unsupported, abandoned home educated children who would have been saved had they been in school or inspected more frequently. Khyra was in school; her teachers knew she was at risk and begged for help, the teachers at her siblings schools knew they needed help. Social Services knew they needed help and they visited – and the sum total of their efforts was seeing the child on the doorstep and concluding she was fine, despite plenty of other people categorically saying she was neither fine nor safe. Her mother did remove her from school yes, a devious mother who knew how to play the system to hide the worsening truth. But the truth was already in the domain of Social Services – who abandoned her.

And Eunice Spry was also known to Social Services, not just because there were some concerns about children in her care but also because she was an approved FOSTER MOTHER who continued to have children placed with her and left in her care despite those concerns. Yes, they were not in school, i agree. But if regular visits from Social Services concluded she was a fit parent to continue fostering, how exactly was the fact that she was supposedly home educating to blame?

I think, Fern, you have been duped – by a government and a Secretary of State who would like to divert attention from the fact that his Social Services network failed children in its care. Now, why would he prefer to pass the buck on to home educators?

The only cases the government can find where “home education was a factor” are ones where the authorities were already significantly involved in the family and did nothing to help those children. They did not use the powers they had to help them, powers which would have been entirely sufficient to save them, had they been used properly.

Fern, you asked “Should home-educators be required to follow the same rules as the rest of us?” I would like to ask you what rules you mean?

Do you mean “should home educators be handing their children into state care daily and asking permission to spend time with them at non-government approved times?”

Do you mean “Should home educators only spend the hours after 4pm and weekends with their children?”

I have to tell you Fern, those are not rules. They are norms, but they are not rules. And i am free to break norms; i am free to choose to be with my children, to be responsible for them, to educate them as i see fit. I am free to aspire to bring them up in a way that allows them to contribute to a better world.

What rules do you mean Fern?

Do you mean “should home educators have to feed, clothe, love, care, nurture, respect, provide for, worry about, taxi-drive, spend money on their children like you do? ”

Do you mean “should home educators have to make sure their children have friends, go places, see things, do things, interact with people, socialise, join Brownies/Gym/Taekwondo/Dancing/Rugby/Youth Club/Drama Club like you make sure your children do?”

Because Fern, we do. Home educators are a committed bunch of people, with their children’s best interests at heart, who live in the same world as you do, with the same clubs, the same National Trust, the same Alton Towers, the same shopping centres, the same swimming pools. We can make use of all those things to – and we do – cheaply and at off-peak times quite often, allowing many of us to use them more often than schoolers because we can afford to do so.

Or do you mean this rule, Fern? Do you mean “Home Educating families should have to prove yearly that they are innocent of any wrong doing, without cause to believe they are guilty of anything when the inspection took place, by allowing people into their homes, to speak alone with their children, to be inspected and verified and stamped as a good and wholesome family who are allowed to go about their lawful business for another year?”

Do you live by that rule, Fern? Do you allow someone to do that to you yearly? Would you like it if they did? That is quite a different rule to living by an internal code of right parenting and good community which doesn’t (yet) have to be stamped by an authority.

Khyra Ishaq died because she was failed by the state while she was in school, a state which then did nothing to prevent her disappearing even though they knew she was in danger. So should we begin inspecting the homes of all school children, just in case?

Baby Peter died because he was almost ‘invisible’ due to being under 2 and because 60 professionals to whom he was not so invisible didn’t deal with what was happening to him. Should we inspect, yearly or more often, the homes of all under 2 year olds to check they are not also being abused?

Some children become obese because their parents have poor understanding of nutrition. Some don’t. Shall we send all overweight parents to health and nutrition classes and monitor the meals they provide their slim and fit children because obese parents cannot be trusted to do better for their children than they have done for themselves?

Some children get bullied at school. Shall we inspect all of them to ensure they are not learning to be bullied by bullying parents?

Some children are bullies. Shall we inspect all their homes to check they are not being taught to be bullies by bulling parents?

Some children drink alcohol when they are too young. Shall we inspect all their homes to check if their parents like more than a bottle of wine a week?

Some girls get pregnant under age. Should we fit all 11 year olds with an IUD, just in case?

For 2 cases of children removed from school, Ed Balls and the media and Graham Badman have framed the parents of perhaps 80,000 children as possible child abusers who need to be monitored. No one has done an impact assessment on those children to see how this has affected them.

I can tell you. My happy, healthy, fulfilled, loved and home educated children are furious. Hurt, furious, bewildered and confused. They do not understand why they, and their lifestyle, has been singled out like this. My children, who know how to behave in groups and in public, who regularly have to wait for the schooled kids to settle and behave at clubs, who have friends who hate school and learn nothing there, cannot understand why they are being scapegoated.

My children fully understand that their parents are under attack – and it is hurting them. I’m big enough to take it – but it is hurting my children.

You might say there is no smoke without fire, Fern.

I say the BNP might say that about black skinned people.
I say Hitler might have said that about Jewish people.
I say some might still say that about people who are gay.

It doesn’t make any of them right. It doesn’t make Ed Balls right.

I might say all journalists are idiots who cannot think for themselves because the Daily Mirror and Bella Magazine exists.

But i’m disappointed to have to think that about Fern Britton and the BBC.

Khyra Ishaq was NOT home educated. There is no record of her being deregistered. She was taken out of school when there were already considerable concerns about her, concerns which her being in school were not actually addressing. The authorities knew about her and tried to visit her home and did vist on more than one occasion; when they got no answer at the door, they walked away and didn’t go back. Mr Badman, quoting his discredited stats here AGAIN, admitted there was no evidence for HE being used for a cover for child abuse in his review. BBC & Labour, Do NOT use a dead child, one who the authorities knew ALL ABOUT, to try and create a story about us. That is shameful.

The Channel 4 reporting is more accurate.

If social services are brushing cases like this aside now, how much worse will it be when the same people are trying to fit in 50,000 lots of visits of 16 hours a year per child to families doing NOTHING WRONG AT ALL.

Baby P died at home when he was under 2. Does that one case, or even the many others like it, mean that all 2 year olds have 16 hours of visits by Social Services a year? And would it save any of them if they did?

There are ALREADY perfectly good laws in place which allow Social Services to muscle in on a child if there are safeguarding concerns. Hiding behind “the rules on home schooling are very weak” is just an attempt to justify why they didn’t do anything with the powers they had. They walked away. They knew, they were aware and they had full child protection powers. They didn’t use them. THEY DIDN’T USE THE POWERS THEY HAD. They let her stay at risk and therefore, they let her die.

And you have to ask, why? Why walk away, knowing full well she was a child protection case? Why? Did someone ask them to? Were they short on budget and knew they could pass the buck on to HE. Did someone know they’d be thanked for providing a convenient case of HE child abuse? Why did they walk away from that door?

In effect, this child was in almost exactly the position that the government say will save HE children from abuse. She left school, the authorities were notified. The authorities visited. They were even trained to deal with child abuse and knew that was a concern in this case. And she was left to die at the hands of her mother and her boyfriend. It didn’t save her to be known to the authorities. It didn’t save her to be on a list.

Forget it. The law on lawful home education may indeed currently mean that people about whom there are no concerns should not be under suspicion, but the law on a family where there are welfare concerns is extremely clear. Social Services have powers. End of.

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