I’ve lost Thursday, can’t remember it at all. Oh yes, failed to get anyone out the door and stayed home in a heap of general lethargy.

Friday was a bit mental really; Max took the girls to see Nim’s Island at 10am while i went to work, collected me at 1.30pm, R turned up to give the girls a music lesson which we just squeezed in before dancing at 4pm. Girls had all lost all their stuff again, so got bawled out. Amelie got special mention for being good at Tap; she’s the best in her class apparently and she’s a year younger than most of them. Actually, she taps fairly constantly around the kitchen and she’s better than Fran i think. She has the umm… how can i put it… attitude She knows exactly how to plaster on a smile and pull the “showgirl” act required for Tap. Fran doesn’t quite have it because she is naturally more classical and serious but Amelie really DOES have what is required. I love watching her, she really relishes doing it. As an aside, she also got moved up into the Gold group at gym last week too which she was thrilled about.

Dropped the girls at dancing, went back to work, collected them, dashed to post office, dashed home for tea, packed for weekend away and fell into bed.

Saturday we (uncharacteristically) left on time (10am) for The Portico, where the girls were spending the night while we went to Max’s brother’s 40th birthday party. We’d slightly underestimated the effect of half term on the traffic and once we got to the M25 from the A1, we then didn’t go at above 10mph until 10 miles short of our destination, so a 2 1/4 hour trip too 4 1/2 hours. We’d planned to have a leisurely couple of hours settling Josie (first time away with someone other than my parents) as even though we knew that it was the place she was absolutely the MOST likely to be fine, it was still a biggish step for her. Unfortunately we had to nearly hurl them from the car windows without even parking, but she was completely fine and didn’t really give us a backwards look. Obviously the rest, who would probably actually move in there if we gave them the chance, didn’t miss us in the slightest. In fact, Fran said she didn’t really notice it was any different to normal when i am there. Not sure what she actually meant by that

If i had a better nature, i’d gloss over it taking us an hour to get out of the city because Max refused to believe me when i said that following the M4 (East) sign would in fact get us to a place where we could go West just as easily. However, i DON’T really have a better nature and i’m not often right when it comes to directions, so i feel it should go down for posterity

We did have an easy run down to Exeter, found our very nice hotel (used to be The Rougemont where apparently we once had breakfast with my parents and siblings but i don’t remember this!) and then walked through Exeter for an evening of pleasant company. Aside from my family in law, most of the people i don’t know particularly well but have been acquainted for 15 years ish. It’s kind of fascinating only seeing people once every 3 or 4 years and being a ‘supporting cast member only’ to the party, i really enjoyed the people watching, as well as the company. J&L do have a very amiable group of friends, most of whom knew Max when he was a very unpredictable bad boy and i’m still new hearing stories for the first time!!!! Was really nice to get out together in unusual (for us!) circumstances.

Tottered back to the hotel, slept well, got confused by my various gadgets, some of which alter the clock backwards themselves and some of which don’t and woke up remarkably fresh on Sunday. Managed to squeeze in a quick visit to Sarah and Steve and drove back, miraculously avoiding all traffic except for Xmas traffic right at the end, then had a lovely afternoon with The Portico’s and eventually dragged very begrudging children away from each other at the end of the day. Had a completely hellish trip home (Alison and i speculated on whether we would get the ‘everyone asleep within 5 minutes’ or the ‘whinge, whine, bicker and kick seats all the way home’ version of travelling with a car full of tired children… we got the latter ) and it was compounded by a completely horrible M4/M25 with 4 pile ups on the side of the road with associated traffic and people driving like idiots and eventually passing a tight corner, where the A1 inexplicably goes over a woefully inadequate old style bridge, where a lorry had clearly just shed its load of steel girders/concrete blocks all over the inside lane. Made me glad we’d just spent 15 minutes at South Mimms services anyway

Ah well, it says much for the various pockets of company over the weekend that even the hell-on-a-stick journeys were worth it. And thank you again to P1 and P2 for having them

Today we took Max to work, i took the kids to work with me for a couple of hours, paid them for their patience with some craft kit samples which we brought home and they crafted happily for a good bit of the day. (If i’m honest, it wasn’t quite as harmonious as that sounds!) Various bits of normals were done, but nothing dramatic and then in the afternoon we all took a bookcase, or an area of clutter or a pile of something and between the 5 of us we managed to get rid of a lot of rubbish and rehouse plenty of things that have drifted. I sorted the kitchen, my room and the study, Maddy and Amelie did the dining room and Fran did the living room. Josie played in her room, but as that meant she didn’t make more mess anywhere else, it was considered to be helpful!

Yesterday Fran and i had a day out in London together, mainly to see War Horse at the National Theatre but also to do some London bits. We’ve both really looked forward to having a day together and she hasn’t been into London properly before either, mainly due to me being a bit pathetic about it, though i seem to have got over that now.

We arrived by about 10am and headed down to Covent Garden first where we indulged in some street theatre (not particularly good but mildly entertaining), watched a string quartet, went in the Pollocks Toy Shop (loved that, Fran was in heaven) and into the various odds and sods shops, plus the Games Workshop where she fell in love with the LOTR role play game and all the models. We also ignored the snooty assistant in the crystal ornaments shop and cooed at all the Disney crystal. Then we got the tube down to South Kensington and walked through the tunnel to The Science Museum. We had a bit of a false start here as she couldn’t decide what do do so we had lunch and then went into the basement for a while to look at gadgets and stuff.

She makes me laugh because in some ways she is still exactly like she was at 5 years old; she can hardly bear to stop and look at something for a milli-second, she is already on to the next thing. Half the time she still just hits buttons without looking to see what might happen or what it is about and then is off practically before it is half way through. I do wonder how she’ll get on in school because of this, just as i wondered when she was 4. She still seems to have the concentration span of a gnat She is such a fidget still too, the idea of stopping and absorbing something is just an anathema to her. Everything has to be instant and visual and high impact or she is just away again. Funny girl.

We got on better upstairs where the Energy Room, the Materials display, the Plasticity exhibit, ERNIE and the maths stuff and various other things all appealed to her. She adored the huge ring that flashes your name up, spent ages trying (and failing) to get an electric shock from a pole, killed huge numbers of hospital patients by accident and got completely absorbed (tired feet necessitating a sit down) by a video of a car being taken apart.

As a bit of a bonus, the Science of Survival exhibit was free admission and so we went into that too and that made the afternoon really. It was a slightly Animal Crossing like set of games and videos, which remembered your scores by a swipe card and which encouraged you to think about pros and cons of future development of homes and energy etc. At the end you got a look at the city you had created. The games in themselves weren’t brilliant (does make you realise how clever Nintendo are!) but they were good enough and the end result was interesting and pleasing. We both had fun in there.

Came out and walked back, stopping off at The Natural History museum to pay homage to the Cromwell Road road sign and spend 20 minutes looking at dinosaur skeletons and then headed down to the Southbank in plenty of time so we wouldn’t be on the tube at rush hour. I do love how much cleaner and friendly London seems than a few years ago – and with the traffic so reduced you don’t get black snot any more either! Crossed the (Hungerford?) bridge at Embankment and spent a while sightseeing from there and then went to the Giraffe restaurant for tea. Liked it there too; always enjoy seeing drama school graduates waitressing but they were very nice and made a fuss of her. Then we just had time to go and get tickets, sweets, headache pills (i do always get a headache in London) and water before the show.

The show really was fabulous, though completely made by the puppets of the horses; i wouldn’t really have believed that it could be so possible to make them so utterly real when you can see the people operating them so obviously. They must have spent hundreds of hours studying horses and rehearsing to be so good because there really wasn’t a single moment when they didn’t seem real and alive. I think it was the second cast playing Joey, who wasn’t perhaps quite as polished as Topthorn but they were both great. Considering the book is told from the perspective of the horse but in the play the horse doesn’t speak, it was amazing how they managed to make the horse convey so much emotion and character. The musical theme, the other animal puppets, the general teamwork of the actors on stage and the fantastic projection of drawings and “scenery” on to the stage made it incredibly impressive. I loved the fact that even though it had been done with a very Brecht like simplicity (and that theatre lends itself well to that) it still had so much emotion to it. There were some great touches, especially using 3 languages simultaneously at times, which really conveyed the confusion and stupidity of all the nations converging in France, relatively aware of the pointlessness and waste of it all.

The bits that made me cry were the charges of the horses and riders against the machine guns of the Germans. It doesn’t matter how many terrible wars or atrocities i read or hear about, i think the trenches and the carnage of No Man’s Land is always the thing i find the hardest to accept in modern history. The sheer waste, the arrogance of continuing to just sacrifices the lives of people in utter, sheer folly for a war that should never have come to that at all and which ended more with stalemate than a victory of right over wrong, is something that i find utterly horrifying. Incredible that it is nearly 100 years ago now. The action was beautifully, heartbreakingly done and the comradeship of men and animals elegantly portrayed in nothing more than light and movement; in the second half, the flight of Joey from the tanks and the abject misery of an animal caught up in the sudden mechanisation of war was exceptionally moving.

I did think the stage play faltered a bit in the middle, though i could see why they wanted more of Albert’s story in it and i thought it was a shame that they missed out the auction and the end of Emilie’s story; it did seem to peter out a bit at the end and the “he found him… oh no, he’ll lose him again!” end of the book seems to me to be very important; a mirror for the end of the war and the people who lost their lives in the last seconds before the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. But it was a small gripe really, the rest was so excellent In a way it had almost more in common with a ballet or musical than a straight play – and both those styles of theatre can have flimsy plot moments at the best of times!

Fran’s reaction was lovely, she adored it and talked and talked and talked excitedly all the way back, so much so that other theatre leavers were turning and smiling at her. She and i ran for a train, listened to Big Ben strike as we crossed the bridge and managed to get to Kings Cross for 9.25 (35 minutes, not bad!) only to be told the website i had booked my tickets on had lied and we couldn’t use our ticket on any train until the 10.22pm one which was a stopping train that wouldn’t get us home till well after midnight. Fran was flagging by then so i ended up paying for another ticket to get us back earlier. Grrrr.

We had a lovely day though; so glad we did it.

Yesterdays film, The Spiderwick Chronicles, has really inspired the girls. They spent a good bit of yesterday pm designing covers for a book and today carried on the theme. In fact, the day didn’t actually start there; Max was poorly so he was home, i dashed into work and when i got back the girls were all very busily doing stuff. Maddy had made a lovely pumpkin jar (for collecting Halloween sweeties) out of card (it was fab) and i came home to find her carefully guiding Josie through a map of the world with added animals jigsaw. She sounded very much like she was home educating her Josie was lapping it up. It was lovely to hear. Fran was ummmm… not sure actually but she and AMelie very quickly got into making mythical creature sheets from various books and other sources; Fran then spent much of the day creating a world of fairies and other things in her room – loved listening to her as she variously narrated to herslef about her pictures or turned mini story lines into musicals!

Maddy then created a vampire costume for herself, threw a strop when we said she couldn’t punch holes in a mask from a board game (it is 20 years old!) so we suggested she copy it in card – and she did. Must photograph it, it really is great. She is so patient; it was a great copy, with 3 layers of card for different colours and added detail in pencils. After that she also headed into Fantastical Field Journal Land – but she went for the darker side of it and drew and made up story lines for several very evil creatures. The main one also had a poem and an extraordinary name – something like Kin Fu Kella. I printed some nature journal pages out for her and she added them into that, with details written round the side. Amelie and Josie did similar on their own level and Josie spent ages on a picture of pyramids, using the inside of a set square to draw triangles. Thought that was rather good for a not quite 4 girl.

The big three and i spent some time on Animal Crossing and they all went off together to play on that; Amelie is teetering on the edge of independent reading now and i thought this would be a good way to get her going; i know the others will help her and it will be nice for them to collaborate again. Fran and i ended the day by popping out to do errands and had a lovely chat together, mainly me telling tales on the awfulness of my sister when she was little I said that she roughly combined the pickledom of Rowan, Ella and Amelie with a pinch of Josie’s stubborn, wind up merchantness as a child.

Gosh….” said Fran.

And a blog is needed i think.

So, last weekend, or rather the one before last, we went off to my parents to Rowan’s birthday, with some car buying thrown in. As we’d (i use the term we in the loosest possible terms) not hired a car immediately so we could use the courtesy car for as long as possible (36 hours in the event) we had then left it too late to hire a car that would actually fit all of us into it. So Max, Maddy and Amelie went off to view a hopeful car in Derby by hire car (the mentioned girls being the ones who actually wept over the demise of the green one) and Fran, Josie and i took a train. We wanted to go to the birthday anyway but also needed child care the next morning so we could continue to shop if necessary or transfer cars about if not. In the event Max bought the car on the spot, a week to the minute from the accident and the first one he’d seen. Apparently it had been a very stressful experience for him, but i thought it went fairly smoothly, all things considered! The car is a 2007 Citroen C8, dark grey (bit dull after the green) and 7 seats. It is lovely, though it does have a very odd speedometer. I feel very at home in it, though i was glad that due to a bit of phone swapping jiggerypokery, i had an extra 2 week SatNav trial which got me home from Derby while i learned to drive it.

The Nut-Puddle-Hollies clan meeting was very lovely, though it did include without doubt the most excruciatingly embarrassing moment, which i fear my brother’s girlfriend may never forgive me for!!!!! Add to that my brother putting “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” on for evening family viewing with my parents and well…. it was funny…. My sister had another friend there too, who had 2 girls so all 8 children played fantastically well. Heard Fran telling O that i made her “work 6 hours a day” but O still thought being HE’d sounded more appealing than school. Grass is always greener, and all that

Last week was more of a “downtime” week, particularly as i needed to get Fran around some schools to choose between. I took her to our nearest one and we both hated it, Max took her to the “not local enough” Academy which she loved and bounced home from and then to the fairly local comp which has a fairly poor reputation but which she thought was okay and she might like. I kept away; it is impossible for me to be positive about this so i thought it was better she went with Max. In the end we’ve put down the Academy first, as that is the only way she gets any chance at it, with some cleft/hearing/HE/social group due to old neighbourhood and Brownies mitigating circs and the not quite local comp as second. She has probably a less than 1% chance of getting a place at the Academy, which is certainly a decent school, but if she does, she’ll have to be there from 8-5 most days and give up most of the evening stuff she loves. She said she’d prefer to carry on being HE’d than go to the most local one i took her to.

***Wildly Speculative Rant commences***

SO the choice is done; i’m not going to worry about that side of it any more but i’d be lying if i said i wasn’t going to have to spend a lot of time adjusting to it. It will really change life for the rest of us; i’m not happy with either school option really for various reasons, i’m not convinced by her motivation, i don’t think it will improve her quality of life or her opportunities, i don’t think it will improve her educational provision or give her much more of a social life (in fact i think it will reduce it to some extent) and most of all, i just really don’t wish to have to deal with school and the impact it will have. I think the best word i have heard to describe school recently is “unnecessary” – i don’t think she needs it, we certainly don’t, i don’t see how an institution being fed by schools that are failing to get 25-40% of local kids to be able to read and write or add up is something i want to buy into or something we need. I really resent the fact that it has been ushered into our life as a “must try it” but i’d be a hell of a lot happier if she seemed genuinely enthusiastic about it. Worst of all, it has driven the first wedge there has ever been between me and my daughter and i wish that hadn’t happened.

We were fine before all this and now i feel i can’t discuss it with her in case i seem to be influencing her and she doesn’t want to discuss it with either of us. I’m really very angry and sad about that. I’m not sure how to be positive about something she “thinks perhaps she might want to perhaps try because she thinks that maybe it might be possibly good and everyone says it is” when she says, in the same breath, “but i’ll probably go back to being HE because i think that is good too and i’ll miss doing all the stuff i do and seeing all of you and visiting all my friends and going to camps and learning what i want.”

From what i can see, we’re probably all going to lose out just so Fran can go to a “failing-to-poor-beginning to recover” school with few facilities and a low educational expectation. Great. Fab choice. What a brilliant parent i am to her to be letting her do that.

Mentally i need to adjust, which may be no bad thing, to being an HE mum without my eldest at home. HE has always been a bit Fran-centric; about the only plus i see to this is that i’ll have more time with the others. I feel very torn by it all; i have to hope she gets the opportunity for the best school, but if she does, because of where it is and our car/work/life arrangements, we will suddenly have 45 hours a week less of her company. I feel really sad about that. I feel like in a couple of years i won’t know her any more. But maybe in a year or 2 i won’t feel that way; it feels a big hill to climb right now. My children have never done huge chunks of daycare; i have been with Fran 24/7 for 10 years. I am really going to miss her.

***Wildly Speculative Rant ends***

We had a fairly productive weekend; i (nearly) finished the little girl room, slightly hampered by furniture that hasn’t arrived that was due on 18th August but did enough rearranging to make it okay. Pruned clothes, dreamed up punishments for children who put wet pull ups in clothes boxes rather than throw them away and wondered how much i would have to flog them before they stopped putting dirty clothes back in drawers and clean clothes in the washing basket, in apparently random and thought process free fashion Max made lovely dinners, we watched Merlin together, the big girls had a dance show rehearsal and Max, Josie and i unpacked boxes in companionable “here cometh Christmas” silence, while being grateful that this year it is not all over our house. Oh my god, am i glad about that.

This morning, along with every other home educating Twitterer i know, we partook of the free Film Education Week; on offer for us was The Spiderwick Chronicles. I loved the film and was very proud of the younger 2 who were scared, but bravely so. Could never have taken the big two to see that at 6 and 4 years old!!!!! We were first to arrive (and the only home educators) and the schools were held up in a jam somewhere. The manager got me a free drink and made a fuss of us, got Josie a booster seat and sat us on the middle back row so that were were on a little raised platform and had a perfect view. There were 2 schools in, one with about 200 kids and 1 with about 50. Thought the kids were impeccably behaved actually, general happy chatting, no running about, no one out of their seat, not screaming or shrieking – in fact, behaving exactly like kids on a day out who were excited about seeing a film but who knew how to do it right. They certainly made no more noise than a cinema full of adults might and i’m normally quite happy to be critical of herds of school kids. There wasn’t a single thing about it that made me think “FFS!” until one of their teachers stood up and bawled them all out for talking and said they were an embarrassment and a disgrace and they’d be lucky to be ever taken on a trip again. I was GOBSMACKED; i honestly couldn’t see a single thing they had done. All my girls just went silent with alarm and it took me at least 20 seconds to remember i wasn’t actually being told off but when i did, i said loudly to the girls “YOU don’t have to stop having a nice time, those people aren’t in charge of you!!!” I was really horrified. If i’d been a parent helper on that class trip, i would have complained about it, in fact, i actually might write to the school to say that the teacher was the only person to let the school down!!!!! There is definitely a fine line between keeping control and letting kids have their head, but there was just no need for it, i thought it was humiliating – and only made worse by the patronising “Well, W___ Primary School, thankfully you can all now be proud of yourselves for managing to remember your manners for the last 5 minutes” from the silly cow 5 minutes later.

It was enough to make me very sure we won’t look at that school, that’s for sure!

Considering i fell asleep at 12.30am, woke up at 3am and that was all the sleep i got, we had a good Thursday. The music lessons went well again, Fran and Amelie played together again, we fed everyone 2 decent meals with F, M and A sharing making the evening stew and a reasonable amount of work got done too.

Mainly though, the thud of dinosaur feet were heard through the house as they all watched back-to-back Walking With Dinosaurs. Strangely, for a child who was otherwise petrified of all scary, or even slightly scary, things on TV, this was Fran’s favourite programme for most the the time from when she was 3-5 and she watched it endlessly. That was on an old video, which we lost the power to play about 3 years ago but she could still remember bits of it this week from the cheap DVD i picked up. The others have really enjoyed it too, though Maddy is struggling to understand that much of what is said, and all the action, is effectively fiction and guesswork and Amelie and Josie are so taken in by the animation and the “the animators use x technique to bring the Sauropods to life…” type of talk that they won’t believe that they don’t mean literally ‘brought to life’. So now they are trying to convince me that there is a Jurassic Park style place somewhere – and i’m wondering if Jurassic Park would be too scary to show them!

Managed to get the big 2 to Brownies, got invited to stay at Pack Holiday myself but declined so as to give them (F and M) space from me but now turns out they are slightly disappointed i’m not coming!

RIP Big Green Monster Car

The man with the final say decided it wasn’t allowed to be repaired; at least, initially he phoned and said he could but that was when he thought it had only done 50,000 miles whereas in fact it had a previous dashboard console that had done 80,000 miles. So that was that and it’s written off. I have loved that car, i shall be very sorry to see it gone. It did look a bit beaten up by the end, but after a shaky start, it has done us very well for 4 years. We’ve had it since just before Josie was born and i’ve been all over the place, 60,000+ miles in it.

Maddy is inconsolable about it, which is rather sad. Poor old girl. I’m mostly upset that we’ll probably buy a grey car next (all the ones we’ve seen seem to be grey!) and i did love being so bright and noticeable. Max has seen something that he’ll look at on Friday; hopefully it will be okay.

Otherwise; i went to work today. Apparently there was lots of music done but i’m not sure what else. When i got back, there was some courtesy/hire car malarky to do and then we had a lovely afternoon with Michelle and Chloe. The kids mainly played out and we got some talking done, trying mostly not to focus on the dreary prospect of becoming a school mummy

Bah.