One of my favourite authors is Eva Ibbotson and of her books, Madensky Square is probably my favourite. Always has been. I’ve been avoiding it the last couple of years, unconsciously, but i read it this week. There are 3 or 4 paragraphs that say so clearly how i have felt for the last 2 1/2 years that i thought i would put them here. I’ve been meaning to do it for a couple of days and i’ve got 5 minutes as the girls are trying to avoid bedtime.

The book is one about a woman who gives up a baby born at the wrong time, even though she knew it was the wrong thing to do; she is ill and afraid and everything happens so fast that she seems to have no control over it. The book is set many years after the event and deals with how she has lived her life since. She goes on to have a good life, a successful life, with many friends, a good business she builds herself and people who love her. But the legacy of that moment is threaded through the book and everything that happens to her has the tiniest flicker of a thread back to the child she doesn’t have. It is a very positive story, full of light and blessings, but you’d not have to know me very well to know how strongly the quote below speak out to me.

After this, the waters closed over my head. I don’t know the name for these attacks: depression, despair, panic… I only know there is nothing to be done; they just have to be lived through. I used to curl up under my quilt, trying not to exist, but now i walk. I walk all day through the city and out of it and by the evening the worst of it is over.

‘You should get help,’ Alice said to me when she found me once curled up in a ball in a darkened room. There are so many doctors who understand these things’ [...] That’s true but I don’t want any help. My attacks are not mysterious or causeless afflictions like Job’s boils. I deserve them. They are entirely just.

So I resumed my life. The anguish went on, growling away, sometimes surpressed, sometimes getting me by the throat, but as the months passed I could attend to my work and even my pleasures, except on those black days which even now I have not outgrown.

“[The pain] becomes part of you and if someone offered to take it away… you wouldn’t want them to because the pain is the link with the person you’ve lost…”

And this is why I sometimes walk like a madwoman out of the city. Why too I don’t seek out kind doctors who might help me. I gave away my daughter. Let them cure me of that!

I haven’t lived for you – wasn’t able to – but I’ve lived at you – and for the last time, my darling, I’m sorry, so very sorry, that I wasn’t brave enough.

All 6 of us had a lovely day with friends at the Beans annual themed party. I didn’t take any photos, so you’ll have to do with the costume Maddy made for Chimpbone the Monkey.

She kills me

“Researchers in the US say that they have solved the mystery of why flies are so hard to swat.

They think the fly’s ability to dodge being hit is due to its fast acting brain and an ability to plan ahead.”

Well, thank you. Is it me, or have we ALL known that for years and years and years and years……

We’ve just got Josie around during the day this week as the big three have all been busy doing “Oliver!” When you suddenly find yourself only concerned with parenting one little person (and perhaps this is a specially keen feeling when you HE and perhaps spend a lot of time feeling everything needs to be fully ‘lived’ to make it worthwhile and educational) it is easy to see why people get such joy from grand-parenting.

It is astonishingly easy to be at home with just Josie; she is very self contained but hands out delicious parcels of love and affection and attention. It is very easy to enjoy being around her. Perhaps it is just the simplicity of it, perhaps it is the quietness and slower pace, or perhaps it is her. She is very smart and intelligent, very funny, outrageously full of grumpy personality. She is fun to be around.

Yesterday she, Max and i loafed at home. She supervised Max building a new roof for the rabbit hutch and did lots of Fimo with me, made and ate lunch with us and she and i read “How Babies are Made” and “The Emperors Egg” and did several jigsaws. i endeavoured to fill in the gaps i discovered in her education (which i blame her sisters for); she was hitherto unaware of what a butterfly was, didn’t know they started as caterpillars (no self respecting oldest HE’d child would not know these things at nearly 4!) and most worryingly of all, had no idea how to awaken a magically sleeping princess, demonstrating clearly that she has not been dumped in front of Disney often enough. (Obviously i could put “not been read enough age appropriate stories, but that would lay the blame at my feet).

Today we went with Kate and Madison to Hammerton Zoo; it is a smallish place with a concentration of lemurs, monkeys and birds plus a few larger cats and an interest in breeding programmes, which it seems rather good at. I’ve tended to think it pricey in the past, probably still would, but if you only take 1, it is not too bad and the pace is right for a small person. I like the fact that nothing too big and scary exists (though Josie was scared of several of the odder birds) and that you don’t need to rush to get round it. I liked most of all that i just got to enjoy it through the eyes and at the pace, of my smallest child. I liked not feeling pressured to ‘work it’ – we had the odd conversation about what things might eat (nobody eats Josie’s, though the wallaby with a Joey poking out of her tummy caused some consternation) and where they might live (same place as Dora) but mostly we just oohed and aahed at birds with blue faces and monkeys with dirty bottoms.

She did know that a Cheetah was the fastest animal in the world. Gotta give Dora her dues for that.

We saw a couple of scary things, both of which didn’t have names we could find and neither of which i knew. Nor are they on the website. One was, i assume a carrion or bird of prey; tall like a crane but dressed like a Dickensian lawyer, humped up with black tailcoat and white shirt, no neck to speak of, feather that grew like thinning, mussed up greying hair on his head and an absolutely fearsome triangular beak that must have been a foot long. His wing span was enormous, probably nearly 5ft and he looked like he might not leave you standing if he set about you. I certainly wouldn’t have been wanting to look nearly dead anywhere near him. He flew a bit near the wire (clipped wings but was trying) and scared the pants off Josie; Madison didn’t even notice as she was trying to retrieve her crisp from inside the fence I’d love to know what he was, he was damn ugly, that was for sure.

Edit: Found him, a Marabou Stork – like i say, damn ugly! Undertaker Bird, they call it and it shares the largest wingspan of any land bird with the Andean Condor. Funnily enough, the other girls told me about THAT when we were discribing this bird to them; they’d seen something about it at Twin Lakes.

The other was on the way out; they were across a field but when i first saw them i thought they were some kind of fake entrance decoration. Two HUGE donkey type things; they must have been the size of a full grown horse, with enormous ears, shaggy hair and the most South American Pinata shape to them you’ve ever seen. They really did look like they were the type of donkey made of straw that people bring back from Mexico, brought to life with magic. White noses, white socks and just HUGE! I want to know what they were too.

Collected the girls and then had a hectic few hours which i’ll gloss over but the girls all had a good time with Kate, Summer and Madison while i dashed about like a blue ***** fly. Did i mention i am bored of business ownership?

Tonight we finished The Railway Children and as predicted i blubbed in the way my mum used to do. The girls laughed at me.

“Oh my daddy, my daddy!”

I can comfortably predict i will also sob through the film.

Says it all really. Max has been doing some rather fab bits of Visual Basic with the kids, showing them how to programme a lunar module to land on a moon surface. it uses a booster rocket that you have to tap to stop the mph of the lunar module exceeding 22mph and if you land it safely a succession of penguins, tigers etc come out and walk on the moon. If it doesn’t land safely, it explodes. (ROFL!) It is particularly fun now we can connect pcs to the the tv; in glorious widescreen it all seems so much more real. ( )

I’m not quite sure how much of the programming he let them do (ROFL again!) but the thought was there and they were inspired. I’d be very pleased if anyone passing could give me the links to the programming places their kids have explored (Jax, Tim?)

Josie is back into jigsaws and so everyone else is too; they are littered all over the living room, but that was the idea when we got games and jigsaw cupboards for that room i suppose.

Fran is liking French and seems to have retained a lot from last time we did any, enough for me to buy the GP level 1 book and cd anyway. I keep meaning to do something about Rosetta Stone but it never quite inspires me to part with the cash. There has also been rather a lot of Club Penguin too.

We are nearly at the end of The Railway Children and when we are i thoguht we might try both films. I’ve been wondering about the version of the book i had; i read it quite a lot but i have no recollection at all of the chapter with the barge on fire, nor a lot of the wordier bits. I haven’t found it an easy read-aloud, which is odd, as i loved it as a kid. Fran has been making lists of character and some fimo models of them; she wants to create a railway scene with our “brio-a-like” (which will no doubt mean i bring some of the increasing and rather lovely “compatible with other leading wooden train systems” stuff i stock on PM now. (Did you see what i did there? )

Wondering what to read next to them; toying with Swallows and Amazons or 101 Dalmations or could go for something like When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, given our war interests right now. Nearly cried on Friday when the bloke who runs the workspace BM/PM is in told me his only toy during the war was a knitted pink rabbit.

In the background, for those wondering, some very, very hard talking, some big decisions and perhaps, just perhaps, a little glimmer of hope in the “understanding where each other are coming from” stakes. It is going to take a huge effort of will, but i think just possibly we might be beginning to see where each of us could compromise.

It is a resounding thumbs up for Galore Park here; this is a set of text books created for prep school by teachers sick of the sight of dumbed down National Curriculum tat. From what we’ve used so far, they resemble most closely the books i used in Junior School and the early part of Senior school and seem to manage to be interesting, thought provoking and useful in equal measure. The format is pleasing to the eye, the ideas are captivating in their own right but more than that, they’ve been inspiring further conversation and ideas very naturally. So far we’ve made a conscious effort to use the English and History book but i think we’ll very shortly be getting the Maths (a bit of a departure from Singapore which is pleasing me less these days), French and Science too.

This isn’t about having a curriculum and people sat down at a table more, this is more about having a wider variety of things available for the time we already do relatively formal work. The English in particular has been great; Fran this week has done work on obesity and a snippet of “Oliver Twist” and has had a chance to do some creative work about both those things. Her current affairs interest is spectacularly wide, so having a chance to mull over much of what she has learned through Newsround and put it into thoughtful writing has been excellent. As they are doing an Oliver Twist workshop next week, the timing has been excellent. Each chapter is structured so that there is comprehension, creative writing, further reading suggestions, technical skills, grammar and more woven into it, with a theme to the topic. Taken slowly, you could cheerfully spend a month on the chapter and feel like lots had been achieved within it without it feeling laborious at all. Fran has written diary entries, Maddy had a ball with a Dick King Smith excerpt about a badger; as well as doing dictionary work, writing and comprehension, she had to write the story from the badgers point of view. To help her, i got her to draw the story first in 6 cartoon pieces; i laughed at them so much that i had a nose bleed! Then she dictated her story to me and wrote it out herself.

The 2 history books start similarly with an overview of how to find out about history; this week we used the younger version and talked about sources, evidence, archaeologists and time lines. Conversation diverted into time capsules and today we are going to make a capsule for each of them to open on their 18th birthday. “Archaeologists Dig for Clues” also came out for a second viewing!

Overall i’d say they’ve been a great (small) investment. I’m far happier with a framework and i far prefer to do an easy hit of something meaningful when people are not otherwise occupied. I’d recommend taking a look at the site, there are lots of sample chapters to download.

There has also been lots of maths (Fran has forgotten how to divide ) and lots of music. Plenty of reading (War Horse, Horrible Histories, Fairy Books, Winnie the Pooh) and lots of stories. But more than that, they’ve done a heap of playing out with the 8-10 kids who live round here. It has been like “The Red Hand Gang” that used to be on; every time i look out of the window there is a succession of small children screeching round the corner on bikes. Very sweet.