Couple of good days here again. The girls have been heavily into the borrowed copy they have of High School Musical and along with them dancing and singing and strutting their stuff, i’m horrified to find i’ve started singing the tunes too Is it me, or does the lad in it look like he ought to be in the original line up of Bucks Fizz?

The reason for this is that F&M (a collective abbreviation, lol) are doing  the show at their Easter Musical Theatre workshop and they wanted to know it beforehand. They’ll be the younger ones there thoguh again, so i doubt even Maddy will be out of the chorus, but no doubt they’ll survive not being the 2 main leads However, they’ve been watching it on the singalong version and it did have an interesting side effect; Maddy came to me with “no” and “know” written on a piece of paper, demanding to know exactly what the meaning of this anomoly was. I was happy to oblige – and even happier knowing she must be reading along well enough to have managed to spot something that didn’t make sense to her. Result

Josie impressed Claire by bringing 3 biscuits into a room, one for her and one for each of us. Apparently this means she’s a mathematical genius (though how Claire would know, i can’t imagine )

Amelie can read P&J 1a and b, perfectly effortlessly from whati  can see. Slightly alarming to see her having absolutely no difficulty with it really, though it just can’t be ‘raspberry’ reading because she doesn’t know enough letters. But the concept, the shapes of words, the pattern of sentences all seem to be there and certainly her recall for the words is rather good. Maybe this is how most kids can learn to read and my eldest 2 have just been unusually uphill and late (i totally know how ridiculous that last sentence is, just humour me!)

Fran finished Charlottes Web the other night and hurtled down the stairs in floods of tears So my girl Apparently it wasn’t the end of Charlotte, so much as the babies flying away that made her cry. She woke up crying about it twice in the night but seems to have overcome it now! She’s now reading The Worst Witch, having not found anything similarly weighty without too small a print size otherwise available on the shelves Afterall, we only have about 8 million books here….

Yesterday she and i did some maths together after she hit a hitch on EC – it involved working out a percentage discount on a price. Going through it, which she got but i’ll find more practise for her, i was amazed (again) by how many mathematical concepts fly around in your head in one simple transaction; fractions, halving, doubling, percentages, decimals and even the weighty issue of reading it all well enough to understand that the answer is the piece you’ve taken away(the discount) and not the more obvious figure of what had been paid. We drew a LOT of diagrams during that

She’s been carrying on with French, i’m trying to take a more active role in Maddy’s guitar lessons (basically fine, slight stress this morning when i pointed out that stopping, lying it flat on your lap and spending 2 minutes finding the 2 notes didn’t in fact constitute having learned a tune well enough to move on!) Mum knows a Suzuki cello teacher who lives fairly nearby and i’m debating that. Will have to discuss it with Sarah!

Emma has done some project work with the girls this last 2 days, putting together some basic Islam stuff. I hate this, get really finicky and want to do it for them, but they find it helpful  and i know it is an approach that works well for them in terms of absorbing and visualising info. BUT i’m going to have to admit defeat and knuckle down to getting some half decent presentation and effort out of them. Fran doesn’t stop to think and it’s basically my fautl for not being prepared to grit my teeth and sit by her to help. ARGH. back to that next week. Still listening in, Emma did a great job covering stuff with them, so all good really.

She also did maps with them yesterday, including looking at a book i borrowed from Helen and covered keys and scales with Maddy. Came in very helpful later over a map of Islamic populations. And then they all finished off with a game of Cadoo while i sorted some stuff out.

Had to get everyone out by 2pm and was unusually ready on the dot; then realised i hadn’t seen my keys for a week. Hunted frantically, to no avail, eventually rang Joe who is up here visiting their Gran ( ) and he went and got Max’s key for me. This meant that i was 2 hours late leaving, except that i never had to wait for Max’s key because immediately Joe retrieved Max’s, i looked across the room, saw a basket of toys and thought “they are gonig to be in there, aren’t they?” And they were :wall: Why? I have absolutely NO way of KNOWING !

Claire arrived at 10am today, about 30 seconds after i had woken up and remembered she was coming to see us! Oh, she brought Charlie too That was approximately the last week saw of the children.

Task of the day was this – i retook my Beedible pictures and i’m REALLY pleased with them. I think they look pretty good.

We had quite a lot of fun naming them all too; take a look

other than that, nothing. Rather unfairly, given we already knew this month was going to be rough on a personal level, we’ve had bad news about a relative today and i’m guessing the next few weeks are going to be very miserable. Ho hum.

Ahem. I hate quizzes with too many appropriate words in them.

You are George Orwell Paranoid and Cynical. You are able to understand society and the human psyche quickly and easily. You are depressed a lot of the time, because you are clever enough to see what is really going on in the world. Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

And no, i don’t mean the bit about understanding society

(Or as Maddy called them, Beads of Pray, which i  rather liked)

Very enjoyable morning, with a house filled with an assortment of people. Mummy Flower was here with Baby Flower, who is beginning to like me and smiles at me now, an infinite improvement on howling with horror. She’s adorably clingy to her mum really, in the way that speaks of a really positive relationship between 2 people; MF and i were discussing it and as she remarked “but she sees lots of people, i just don’t know why…” i thought (again) what a disservice we have done ourselves as a nation to have unpicked close family relations, constant familial contact and a basic confidence in our mothering. How odd (not of MF, of us as a people) that we have so undermined our parenting that people have begun to feel that an 8 month old might be behaving oddly if it just loves to be held and cuddled by its mum. My parenting has changed a lot over the years – i was no attachment parent at all to F or M, but i’ve loved my closer relationship with A and J and it has reflected back very positively on the older ones too. I’m glad that the mummy model they will remember will be one who hugs, cuddles, kisses, loves and is happy to be close all the time. So the conversation with MF was great in lots of ways; lovely to be able to say “you are doing great, it’s normal” as a voice of experience too

Plus i’ve adopted two more people who call me Aunty Merry – bringing the count to a speaking/’not yet speaking but think it 6 girls’ There is SUCH a girl thing in this family!

Emma was here, playing, fielding small children, making lunches, reading with people and generally being about 8 pairs of hands and Sue turned up with Mini-Violet too, so it really was a handful. And actually, i could just about have own all of them, if i’d got pregnant when Josie was about 6 weeks old so it felt a bit of a cautionary tale as to what 6 small children COULD feel like! (No, no, no, no, no! Just SO much mess! So much FOOD! SO MUCH NOISE!!!!)

The most exciting news was the Mini-Violet’s mummy, therefore Mummy Flower’s sister and Sue’s daughter, Max’s cousin and Baby Flower’s Aunty (confused yet? ) has just signed a lease on a riding stables fairly near by Exciting on a million levels; great for her, good for their whole family as they all love to ride and with luck, fabulously good for us too as a place to leanr to ride and get outside doing stuff. Woohoo! (Hannah, it’s in a small town north-east of you )

If anyone local is interested, they are having an open day on Easter Monday, so let me know if you want details

After that, i looked up some stuff on Islamic prayer beads and the girls made fimo beads, then threaded them on. I have to say we ran out  of energy and string before everyone had threaded 100 beads, but it was fun and we tried out using them properly. 99 words for Allah? Eeek, i’d never remember them all. This afternoon we’ve sat and read the Islam section of “What i Believe” and made some more learning plans, talked about Ramadan, Halal food, pilgrimage, Islamic dress (Maddy: “Do Muslims still exist then?” Merry: *batters child over head* ) washing at the Mosque (Maddy: “I remember watching the man washing for us; he sat down and did a poo while he washed his feet!” Merry: “Erm.. no Maddy, he was just sat down on a marble seat” )

Otherwise, normals, playing and nice ordinary stuff. Plus Fran has discovered how to read for fun and last night i caught her still up reading at 11pm!

Max and i have been wondering recently exactly the extent to which some sort of smear campaign is being conducted against HEers, prior to the, perhaps inevitable, legislation to control us all. It seems like a succession of stories come out, radio interviews with LEA officers, articles etc all slanted against these well meaning but deluded ranks of HEers who inadvertently harbour criminal child abusers in our ranks. At best, we have a narrow definition of education, find it hard to keep going after a couple of years, or our children are unlikely to cope with social situations. *yawn* Max said last week he watched something that dragged up a 10 year old case of children abused while HE’ed as a reason for us needing to be kept a tally of and inspected. Conveniently, the story made little effort to point out that these 2 HE’ed children were apparently in foster care and it was the foster mother who kept them locked naked in a room for a year. Presumably that meant they WERE being monitored, but no one noticed

Nevermind that they couldn’t find a more recent or more relevant case.

One wonders then, when we need monitoring as a majority for the sake of a minority who may, or not, exist just exactly how the powers that be can explainclaims like this one, seen today on the BBC.

I probably don’t stand up nearly enough and shout about the injustice of bullying, something i experienced for the majority of my junior schooling. Not just simple taunting, but physical bullying, bullying aimed to humiliate me and exclude me and bullying that simply wasn’t handled well enough by any of the people who were supposed to take care of me.

Bullying, the fear of bullying, was my main reason for keeping Fran out of school; i really didn’t want her to be subjected to the unrelenting campaign that i experienced, intended to make be feel different and worthless and unwanted. I’ve never been good at standing up for myself, though i have got tougher over the years, but it is still a weak spot that people can – and do – exploit. Some people can sniff out that characteristic from a mile away and even now, they can still spot it in me. I wanted to be sure my child was strong enough, that her skin was thick enough, that she had the words and the clarity (quite literally as well as figuratively) to defend herself before she had to deal with it. i wanted to know that she was able to say “and your point is….?” before she had to deal with the idiocy and smallmindedness of others on her own. You might call it hiding her away; i call it good parenting. I learned the hard way that if you are undermined from early enough, you don’t develop a thick skin by default. Some people handle it, some don’t. i didn’t.

So this quote, on the BBC today, fills me with some comfort -

The idea that bullying is in some way character building and simply part of childhood is wrong

We need more people to be making this clear; you do not need to be knocked about and roughed up to learn how to defend yourself; what you need is an inner strength that makes you strong enough to shrug and turn away, unscathed by the comments. Simply being slugged on a daily basis doesn’t teach someone to box; it might teach them to run away fast, but that isn’t necessarily a great character trait either. Being laughed at daily doesn’t turn someone into a comedian unless they were already talented at that; it turns them into a person who believes themselves to be an object of derision – if they are clever, talented, they might well learn to turn it back into humour, but being laughed at daily sure didn’t turn me into Victoria Wood. I’m not a great believer in the “it made me tough/made me funny” hard luck turned good stories; i think those people were always going to come shining through and the kids who hang themselves in despair at daily torture were never going to rise above it, their sense of failure only made greater by feeling they should be able to overcome it.

When i was perhaps 7, my mum held up her hands and said “practise hitting me, then you can hit her back” – but i knew there was no point, i wasn’t capable of doing it, however much i practised. I was too afraid, i knew i would be the one who ended up in trouble, i knew i would just antagonise them enough to get hurt worse. Being in school for 14 years didn’t teach me any of those “learn to deal with it” skills; i learned them as a mum and a woman and really not much before. Even now, i have to step back at times and force myself not to go on the defensive.

When Ffran was 4, a boy laughed at her speech and her chin dropped. 2 years later the Rainbows made her feel uncomfortable and she trusted me enough to tell me and be sure i would sort it out. You can’t sort things out at 6, that is why people have a mummy. Now, at nearly 9, it rarely happens, but when it does she is simply sensible enough to explain once and then if they can’t get over it, she can make a value judgement and decide if she wants to be with that person. I’ve never seen her turn tail from something because someone makes her feel bad, she’s never left a group because she can’t handle the people there. All that progress without a school in sight to toughen her up and teach her ‘real life’.

A while ago, i looked up the name of my bully on Google; she is now a lawyer.  I sincerely hope she works for the good guys.