This is worthy of a blog instead of the one liner on brightkite. At Gymmies today, Josie not only joined in much more confidently and started having fun much quicker, not only really listened to the people running the activities and got much better with each go and not only climbed to the very top of the wall bars but…

… she let K hold her round the tummy (big deal!) and after a few goes, she decided she was actually quite brave and after Amelie had shown her one, she decided she was gonig to go upside down after all and did a proper (obviously with help!) “circle up” around the bar, going upside down and everything! She was so proud of herself! K very honoured to be the first person ever to be allowed to turn Josie upsidedown!

Such a clever girl!

… we get on with educational pursuits.

The last 2 Thursdays we’ve had really good Brownie sessions – 2 weeks aog i led my first session and we did cress and mustard and bean sprouting, as part of the Seasons badge. This week many of them dressed up in Chinese outfits and we made red envelops (decorated with gold buttons from Restore) and red chinese lanterns and then fed them all chinese takeaway. That was a huge success Josie had to come with me and behaved beautifully, playing with toys in the corner for a while, then joining in games (so long as no hand holding involved!) and then joining Fran’s Six for crafts. She was very happy and highly amusing when she had to fend off the cuddle attempts of the Brownies more used to Amelie being there. “I am not like Amelie. I am shy and i do not cuddle people i don’t love.”

Thursday music lesson not so good and much arsing about from all but Maddy. I was not so amused. We’ve booked an extra for this week and i’ve been paying closer attention to practices. (Can i train Maddy and Amelie out of saying ‘pracksit?’ Nope.)

Can’t entirely think what else went on, more Latin i think and general doing and getting on with stuff.

We had a lovely weekend with dancing lessons fitted in, some playing out with the local kids and a huge amount of watchnig the dvd of the dance show. Fran has been told she can take her Grade 2 ballet a term earlier than the rest of her class as she is good and more than ready, then she’ll get pushed up a bit and put into a class doing more advanced stuff to challenge her a bit more. I feel for her a bit as she is caught in a cleft stick really; she loves her Saturday class as it has 2 very good friends in it (one who she mainly only sees there and at Brownies, which she’ll have to leave at Easter) and she is reluctant to leave them behind but absolutely aching to be doing dance that is more challenging. I don’t know what to advise her really, so am leaving it to her to decide. Trouble is, she is quite good really, she has the knack of looking like a dancer and moving like a dancer even when her technique still needs work, and she is good at mimicking teachers and people she sees, so being with older girls would be good for her. Anyway, we’ll see. Luckily all her dancing exams are the 2 weekends before her op date (27th March) so they won’t get messed up and her music festival is mid March. Not sure how fit she’ll be for the BartBean party or Easter theatre school but we’ll cross that bridge later.

Yesterday i spent all day playing board games to make up for spending Saturday attempting to be political; we played That’s My Fish, The Hungry Caterpillar, Clock Lotto (1 piece missing, argh!) and then a riotous game of The London Game which i loved as a kid and was great fun with them. Obviously we had the dance show on in the background and stopped to watch each dance any of them were in. In the evening we snuggled up on the sofa as a 6 and watched Kung Fu Panda.

Today was enjoyable too; everyone worked and we played too. Maddy is still on her story, which has now become some Arthurian Epic, Fran is heavily into Latin and trying to summon up the attention to detail required for singular and plural verbs and Amelie is continuing in her attempt to go from being right handed to left handed so she can be like me. Having Amelie in the house is like having my own personal cheerleading squad Josie and she made sentences with a game and played maths rods with Madison when she came round. We all oggled the ipod touch belonging to Auntie Kate (i neeeeed one). Fran discovered she can in fact change fractions into percentages if she just engages her brain for more than a nanosecond and spent a lot of time reading The Daring Book for Girls.

We all had our hairs cut, some people did music (Amelie is fighting her fingers which now need to work and don’t appear to be connected to her brain) and we admired the growing bean seeds, planned an Annie montage, adored Madison, drew a bit and well.. oh iu dunno. Everyone was happy anyway

Before i begin, i would like to make 3 things very clear.

1. I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, a politically active home educator. I home educate for my own reasons and in a general sense tend not to get overheated about political changes that perhaps i should care about more. But there is only so often you can have to fill in the same questions on a consultation, questions that take you away from working with your children, before irritation sets in. I’m not immune to that.

2. Because of the above, i have taken my facts and figures in good faith directly from people who i know to be well informed and much more politically aware than i will ever be. These statistics etc are ones i have absorbed directly from sources collected on the UK Home Educators on Facebook page.

3. I have, until such time as Home Education is effectively made illegal, nothing to lose from even the unpleasant possibility of visits and registration becoming compulsory. We’ve been known to the LEA since Fran was 5 and in that time have submitted 4 written reports and had one highly positive home visit. For us, nothing would change if home visits from LEA Education Officers became mandatory, so long as they continued to stick to the law and within the latest guidance for LEAs, thrashed out at public expense for the second time, in October 2008. It would be even better if they had stuck to the non-statutory guidance that was worked out previously in July 2007 with the co-operation of considerable numbers of home educators.

Here is the the DCSF page for full details. The quote to cause the most outrage has been “However, there are concerns that some children are not receiving the education they need. And in some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse.”

Whether or not you think this consultation is a good thing (if you leave aside the fact that we’ve already done it several times!) and there are plenty of people who read this blog who don’t home educate, i think it is a worthwhile exercise to go through that page and on each point, ask if the same could be asked of schools? Do school adequately protect? Do schools adequately educate? Do schooled children avoid being the subjects of abuse at home? When abuse at home is suspected in a schooled child, is it addressed and is the child rescued from it without exception?

I think it is also worth making it very clear that we are talking about several groups of children here:-

*there are schooled children,

*there are home educated children who are known to the LEA through choice of parents, because they have de registered from school and therefore already been known to the LEA or because they have been reported or “found”

*there are home educated children who are NOT known to the LEA

*there are children “missing in education”.

To me, children missing in education suggests they have been lost. This worries me. I’m worried because for the life of me, i don’t understand why a government that collects data on births, deaths, immigration, emigration, who has a school place and who they pay child benefit to can’t contrive to put all that data together and come up with a reasonably accurate list of what children should be in the country and where they are? I’m not sure i actually WANT them to achieve that, because many happily “unfound” HE families would then be found and bothered by them, but i have to say, i do think they ought to be able to achieve it. By the time you add in doctors records, hospital records, health visitors, playgroups and nurseries, Surestart and Social Services the number of children actually completely invisible ought to be relatively small, surely?

Children Missing in Education (ie not in school and not being home educated, either with or without LEA knowledge) are NOT, in my opinion or in the opinion of the law as it stands, the same as children being home educated by interested, caring parents who are exercising their right in law to stay outside the school system. If this distinction was kept clear, i do believe there might be a good deal less anger at this latest consultation from within the HE community.

I think it is also important to make clear that the fight here does not appear to be about whether home education is actually an effective way of providing an education. We tend to get pulled into this argument a lot because it is the easy route to take. From outside, home education seems a strange and unquantifiable thing to many people but while i can provide a link to the BBC Education page with the fair assumption it will provide enough gloom about schools to make you weep, i don’t know of any children who have been HE’d who have failed to learn to read/write/express themselves/contribute meaningfully at their level, nor do i see any evidence at all on the BBC or elsewhere that it doesn’t work. I’m bound to say that if there were some stories that would make good unbiased reading to suggest that HE fails, the government and the tabloids would have found them. The conversations about parents being effective teachers, about exams, effective learning, socialisation and happiness are as old as the hills. We’ve all told our tales a million times.

The allegation we are facing is that home education can be used as a cover for abuse and the agenda appears to be that in order to prove that this is not so, we will have to be inspected, judged and held up for scrutiny. It is my personal understanding that in this country, we live by the democratic premise that we are innocent unless proven guilty. Having to prove i am not a child abuser, despite there being no evidence to say i am, does not feel like the upholding of this democratic principle to me. Is it? Am i guilty unless judged innocent by an Education Welfare Officer, simply because i have chosen to legally educate my child outside the school system?

When a school fails to notice girls suddenly going missing because they have been taken abroad and forced into marriages, when schools fail to notice or act upon families being terrorised by a rapist fathers and when social services fails to remove children who then die at their parents hands, someone launches a polite investigation and some people lose their jobs. But based on some unfounded, unsubstantiated feelings, the Home Education Community may lose their right to freedom of choice and privacy, may even lose their legal right to go unhindered unless there is considerable concern that appropriate education is not being provided -  but that is just fine because it might “save just one life”.

Let’s remember, this consultation specifically mentions home educated children, not children missing in education.

Let’s be quite clear, the NSPCC said they had no evidence to support this concern.

I had a conversation by IM earlier, with an interested party (not a home educator) who has an impartial foot in both home ed and school camps. This person asked me a series of questions (ones asked as often as the “what about socialisation?” one we are so bored of but much more pertinent!), which i answered and which, with permission, i am transcribing the answers to here with a few additions where it makes sense to add a word or two. I have, at the request of the other person, not used their exact words and have paraphrased instead. Questions in bold, my answers in standard text.

The conversation began with a suggestion my poster was very anti-school and that some children find safe-haven from abuse at home in school.

Absolutely true. That doesn’t mean we should have our rights curtailed. I am not anti-school, i am anti the government suggesting that parents who choose to home ed their children, who enjoy spending time with them, should be assumed to be abusive unless they prove otherwise. Children are not safer, or better educated, purely if they are in school. I was bullied senseless at school and no one stopped it even when they knew, so i am unlikely to feel school is a safe haven. My home is a safe haven for my kids and home is a safe haven for many kids driven to despair in school. If school can’t stop abuse, why should my kids be in school in case i am abusing them?

It is obviously not people like you the government are looking for with their checks and there will be good and bad examples on each side. Are you perhaps being too militant though?

If i thought that lumping 50,000+ extra visits a year on social services would either find the people who want to hide, or save a single life, i would agree. But 60 professional visits didn’t save Baby P and until they put their house in order, i do not believe that spending a 4th lot of money on another consultation, using such prejudiced language is right or fair, especially with no evidence. It is being headed up by the same man as the Baby P investigation, which smacks of a hidden agenda to me.

[Later addition] I object strongly to feeling that an investigation into whether my community is ‘adequately controlled’ may turn into one of those “good day to bury bad news’ scenarios. I’ve got a bad feeling that Mr Badman will conclude his investigation into Baby P with an assertion that the new checks and legislation will stop children from being missing in “the system” (isn’t that word generally intended to be about something that works!?!?!?) and that all children must now be registered with their educational provision verified by LEA checks. I will NOT stand by and let myself become a scapegoat for someone else’s failings.

I say this is a shocking waste of resources that would be better spent actually doing the job of child protection. I say that visiting 50,000+ home educated children a year will place intolerable strain on an overworked department and risk more lives than it could possibly save.

It seems your main problem is with social services, not school. Do you have a poster with statistics about them?

Our main problem is that THEY insist on clouding it by saying home educators need to be assessed in terms of social issues because of our educational choice. Why would that be? Either this is an educational issue or a social care issue. If they don’t trust us, they should say they want to send round a social worker and be done with it. Education inspectors are not social workers and can’t do that job. Their premise is that our children are not as safe as schooled children because they are not in school. What else can we fight back with other than reasons why we don’t believe our children would be safer in school?

The reality is they are suggesting that it is odd to wish to take full responsibility for your child and spend a lot of time with them. In a society complaining of unruly, unparented children breaking down acceptable social behaviour boundaries, that seems odd. It seems odd to me to accuse parents of unwholesome motives for wanting to be with their children when we are biologically programmed to do so. Can you imagine the outcry if we turned the same prejudice and suspicion on people who put their children in full time nursery from 4 weeks old because they really don’t want to spend time with them? But no, of course that won’t happen because it doesn’t suit their economic models. Can you imagine the outcry if 4 consultations in 2 years were directed against a religious or skin colour group?

****

I’ll end by exhorting interested parties who haven’t already to go and take a look at the Facebook group and the information being collected there? If you’d like direct links to some reading, spend a little time looking at these.

Ahed Press Release from Home Educators.

The consultation itself, a 6 question one which can be answered by home educators and the public at large. For reasons which have not been made clear, this consultation has been reduced from a standard 12 weeks to 4 weeks, a measure that  “allows for shorter consultation periods in exceptional circumstances, such as where Departments need to respond quickly in the best interest of the public”. To me, this seems like the type of measure that should be used for terrorism or say… hmmm… how about a council where children known to be a risk from their parents are left with them and die at their hands and where this happens not once (a tragic disaster) but more than once?

The 60 questions that LEAs and educational persons can answer, many of which seem to make no sense (how about the one effectively asking “How many Home Educated children don’t you know of in your local area?”) and many of which have no legal basis in law.

Many people do not understand why we home educate, nor do they understand how it works. Perhaps that is fair enough. I don’t really understand how chucking 30 children of the same age but widely differing abilities into an entirely unrealistic environment is supposed to aid education or socialisation, but at least i have tried school and been through it myself. I don’t really understand rushing back to work soon after having a baby, but i do understand about financial pressures, i do understand commitment to a job or love of a job and i did grow up in a house where my mum absolutely loved her career. I have an insight.

Many people think that perhaps forcing a visit on HE families and legislating so they are educated in a way deemed “fit” is perhaps a good idea. I say, visit a child who has been devastated by school and is terrified of being made to go back and you’ll understand the pain it will bring, i say talk to the families who have suffered at the hands of LEA inspectors who only believe in one form of education and i say look closely at our educational system and how badly so many children fail. I say talk to a 16 year old (as i have) who has already lost hope because 11 years in school have failed to teach him to read.

I say remember that diversity is what breeds hope and creativity and i say that we should remember that even in these times where everything in the news seems to be negative and barbaric, most people are still good and kind and thoughtful and caring – most people still want to do what is right.

I say look again at every single case the government would use to say that children missing in education are at risk and are justification for curtailing the freedoms of HE, and you’ll find they might not have been at school, but all of them were known to their local social care system.

I say, before you think that regulating and restricting one of the great freedoms to parent  and educate decently and as you see fit is a good thing, think of the times in history when smaller, minority groups have been the ones to feel the heat of oppression first. Think carefully, because home educated or in school, we the parent are responsible for making sure the education provided is suitable to age, aptitude and ability. We are already a society who can send a parent to jail because their child, perhaps a bored or bullied child, persistently truants; if you send your child to a school that fails to provide a suitable education, in actual fact it is your responsibility, not the schools. How far could that be taken? Think carefully because you might believe you would rather die than home educate, but you never know what is around the corner and the unthinkable can become reality very suddenly.

Before you decide not to answer the consultation as a person who believes in realistic freedom because it does not concern you, ask what might be next, when they finally pin HEers down where they want them. Because, in the words of the great, if you tolerate this, your children will be next.

With thanks to Gill for checking my logic and facts were straight!

Sometimes, it feels like much more than 2 weeks since the cleaners last came. (Damn, giving up cleaners as redundancy reality bites is going to be hard.) Today was definitely one of them, with mess beginning to creep up in the “i can’t face doing anything because it is all so untidy” sort of way. Undeterred, i made myself ignore it this morning and all sorts of meaningful stuff happened.

Fran and i did Latin, which surprisingly feels a lot less dull and dry than it did at school. I think this is because as a voluntary exercise it is more like playing at decoding something and delving into the past as an investigator. We’ve got time to make sure all the points are covered, that words link together and that we’ve made sense of the sentence patterns before we move on and time to delve a bit into some of the things that come up in conversation as we do. Word roots, countries, cultural habits, history – there was a bit of everything today and as an aside we got the verb “to be” sorted as well. Maddy had her ear on us for a lot of it too and chipped in quite a bit on how verbs work in sentences and how “the” or “a” can change a sentence from one meaning to another.

Perhaps the best bit of this week has been the fact that every time Fran has put pen to paper she has produced full sentences, with punctuation and meaning and in nice handwriting. I swear her literacy skills (or at least the ones she is prepared to show anyone) have come on about 3 years in a week. She assures me that this has nothing to do with the fact that i said last week that unless she could read and write like an eleven year old by the time September came i would refuse to send her to school whether she wanted to or not I’m thinking that coercive threats work quite well! She has got more and more confident as the week has progressed, lovely to see the penny drop that actually she CAN do this. I’d have liked to have left the process completely, but she has chosen to force the hand of time and in the current climate i really don’t want her going to school all scrawly and behind and it reflecting badly on me and the others. Doing things in your own time is really only okay if you choose to let time be taken; if she wants to go to school, the playing field changes a bit.

So while Fran wended her way through the tail end of GP Eng1 Chp 2 (that’s my record keeping bit) Maddy was doing the same with her English. On being asked to write her own fairy story on Monday, she dissolved into tears, proclaimed herself unable to write, spell, think of words or know how to write a story. According to my SIL, this is what regularly happens with her Aspergers daughter at school and for the most part she then gets sent home with a blank sheet and “Z opted out of classwork today.” I shudder to think what the result of Maddy melting down in class would be, but i imagine it would be much the same and her confidence would be rock bottom. On Monday, i took Maddy downstairs with me while i cooked lunch, suggested she thought of a first sentence and that i would spell out any words she needed, agreed that no she didn’t HAVE to write it in joined up (too many things to think about) and left her to it. Tears dried, I spelled one word and then moved into my normal “how do YOU think you spell it?” facilitating role and she got on with it. Today, she picked up her writing book, wrote another page on her own while curled up against the radiator, then described the series of books she is planning to write and illustrate using the same characters. Bit of a difference really

Everyone did music, Amelie read, did times tables, handwriting, investigated about 100 things while ostensibly tidying up the books in the study and did something very creative with Josie (as in some craft or other, rather than creatively dangling her out of a window). Josie is insisting on learning to read and write (dang and blast it!) so she did Jolly Phonics writing books, some sounding out with me (tucked up on my bed – it was cold!) and a maths worksheet from here. We all tidied the house very co-operatively and the kids went out to feed the rabbits but ended up also cleaning them out (without being asked!), playing with them and trying to train them to do tricks for food

Somewhere else in the day Fran and i also did square numbers, products and some stuff on Castle Diary (to back up her Norman studies!), Maddy read more Enid Blyton and looked at Orang-utans on the web and did some EC. We’re wireless-less this week, so down to one internetted computer, which does hamper things a little.

Ended up with me cooking tea… no one has yet died of it though.

If i hadn’t had a splitting headache for most of it, today would have been an excellent day. As it was, it was mostly passable with some excellent bits and no awful bits (unless you count the endless “WE BLOODY DO OWN SOCKS, SO GO AND FIND SOME!!!!!!” arguments.)

The big girls are very into Civilisation 2 (the computer version – and i consider this to be an extremely valid educational tool and i’m more than happy for them to spend time playing it. They holed up for the early part of the morning playing a game in a companionable fashion and from the snippets of conversation i heard, learning a lot about the evolution of a race of people. When Max and i first discussed home ed, we talked about the day when Civ 2 would become a relevant learning tool, so it is funny to see it happen. (Damn, i’m going to miss having Fran at home )

Josie was VERY excited about going back to Gymmies, to the point of being almost beside herself, but predictably when we got there, she got very shy and overwhelmed again, not helped by a new little boy running riot in a very unpredictable way. I’m an old enough hand to not be worrying about this unduly but i do think we probably need to give her some help in gaining confidence now; glad to have got passed the “push it till we have a stand off” thing though, i hate seeing kids and parents getting into that. I helped her a bit with the warm up, cajoled a little, moved her limbs a little and just walked over to the box with her to put away the tap sticks when going with the other kids overwhelmed her. There doesn’t seem much point in forcing it. She unthawed gradually and by the time we reached the equipment, she was ready to join in. Josie is definitely Maddy without the Aspergers in character, so  by thinking back but not making too many allowances, she is easy to bolster up. She doesn’t like change, she doesn’t quite know how to let go and join in but she does want to. She DOES NOT like being touched by other adults, unpredictable children or being turned upside down.

What really pleased me was that the 3 gym coaches (who are frankly flipping excellent anyway) are total naturals at following a lead from a parent and that makes such a difference. Having come up against stupid grabby dentists, people who don’t listen and people who think the “get over it and get on with it” approach is the only way to ‘force’ a child to join in over the years, people who are in tune with my “home edder” way of child led fun is a real pleasure. Last week Josie wanted me to hold her hand as well as the coach on the beam; the coach left it to me to suggest that Josie tried with just one hand this week and just led her so naturally into trying new things that it was completely easy. She had fun swinging on the bar and making leg shapes and when it came to the bars where some kids were being swung over and Josie said clearly that she wasn’t gonig to do that, K led her in such tiny steps towards a half way point and left her with such a sense of achievement that i know next week will be even better for her. One of those sets of people you just would give 15 out of 10 to, not a foot wrong, not a boundary overstepped, not a moment where my child lost faith in herself. Brilliant.

Josie was thrilled by getting to ring the bell (a reward thing) 6 whole times and her rather lovely sisters all stood to clap her each time

In the meantime, the other 3 had been working but the boy who was being challenging was about to be removed because he was completely out of control and putting others in danger (like knocking them off the beam). His mum had brought him to try out but was tied down to a smaller boy at the side, also being a handful and she was getting distressed and clearly upset that gym wasn’t working out. The little one kept making a run for it, the older one was bellowing and so i suggested that perhaps my girls could occupy the little one while she tried rescuing the gym session with the big boy. Fran took control of the little one, Maddy and Amelie scrambled and covered the exits so he couldn’t escape – and harmony was restored for the last 20 minutes.

I was SO proud of them; to be adept enough to be able to do that responsibly, to not mind doing it, to want and be happy to help out an adult and to be sensitive enough to see it was all a bit of an emotional meltdown and just normalise it all seem really mature skills to me. They saved the day a bit and i nearly burst with pride. Thinking back to some of my “i’m just such a failure” moments when Fran was clingy and Maddy was doing regular hysterical meltdowns at those ages, i know what that would have meant to me. An hour or so later, listening to how “home educated children can’t possibly learn social skills” on the radio, i thought of it again. I thought they showed a genuineness of spirit that will stand them in good stead as adults. After the class, every single coach came and said something nice to me about my children Burst, burst, burst.

Got home to a call to arms on BrightKite about another Jeremy Vine Radio 2 show on ANOTHER consultation about how on earth to control these possibly child-abusing home educators. I’m not a political person… but really? A fourth consultation in 2 years on the possibility that home education is a cover for child abuse? Being held at the same time as a review of child protection in the light of Baby P? ANOTHER load of flannel to curtail a freedom to parent our children in a way that we see fit? And if you MUST do it, can the NSPCC do no better than go on a Radio Show and say “we are very concerned about this but in fact we have no evidence or statistics to suggest it is a problem at all.” I mean… REALLY!!!!!!

So i rang in, was slightly surprised to actually get through to a researcher and even more surprised when they rang back and said they wanted me to speak about my feelings on this. I’d got as far as making a list of things to say but then got slightly dropped in it by the caller before being of the “it is just wrong to lock kids away to home educate and arrogant to think you can teach them without the 6 *rolls eyes* years training teachers get.” I said my bit in response to that and did okay but do wish i’d been able to address the real issue of being lumped in with people who hurt their children just because it is impossible for some people to get their head around the idea of us actually enjoying being with our children. Grrr.

Rest of the day just kind of went really… the kids all ranted on the home ed thing and went off to make outraged posters, which i liked… and then it was evening!

Josie is well and truly into the “4 years old and THINKING DEEPLY and sometimes WORRYING” phase now. She’s a smart enough little cookie and exposed to far more than her sisters were at her age; she isn’t phased by Doctor Who (which would have terrified Fran even as a 7 year old) and can sit through a film like Spiderwick or Nim’s Island without a problem and will enjoy it and have things to say about it. It never really crosses my mind to censor stuff, or talk any more gently about things if she is around. I know she listens, i know she watches and she will sometimes ask, or comment – often she just lets it wash over her. She’s a composed little soul as a rule and mostly off doing her own thing, so we often don’t notice anyway if something has caused her to take more note than normal.

At about her age, maybe slightly older, Fran got particularly interested in the fact that Max didn’t have a mum and wanted to understand death, the impact it had had on him and what had happened. But it never really seemed to occur to her to worry that this might happen to her; she was compassionate about the affect it had had on him as a boy and even understood that it might affect him now, but she didn’t extrapolate it further. As a rule, unlike me, Fran isn’t a worrier and also unlike me, she doesn’t try to second guess how she will feel or what something will be like. Even faced with another operation, she’s fairly unflappable really – it will come, it will pass. Now me, i take it all right on board, i worry, i fret, i live it through in advance 6 dozen times and try to second guess every outcome.

Today, driving home with just Josie in the car, her quavery little voice piped up.

“Mummy, i don’t think i am going to learn to drive.”

“Oh, why not?”

“Because if i drive i will be a grown up and a big lady and i don’t want to be. I think i will not drive and you should always take me places and i will just stay little.”

“Hm. I think when you are bigger you will like the idea of being able to drive and go places on your own.”

“No, i don’t think so but maybe if you just buy me a car and buy me a house then i can still be little and i won’t have to get married.”

*Starting to find this slightly odd* “Why don’t you want to get married or be big then?”

“Because i really don’t think i want to have babies and if i get big and get married i will have to and i’m frightened.”

*Now really quite worried* “Why Josie? Having babies of your own is lovely, you don’t have to be frightened.”

“I am frightened because i have seen the lady with the black hair have a baby and it looks very hurty and i don’t want to do that or be on my own….”

*mentally curses Hollywood style birth in opening moments of Prince Caspian* “Oh Josie, it isn’t really like that. It is hurty but at the end you have a lovely baby all of your own. It isn’t hurty like on the film, i promise (gulp)”

“If i do grow up and get big and have a baby, will you come with me so i don’t have to do the hurty bit on my own?”

And my heart… broke.