{"But the Whale wanted to be free - and it needed a pen in case it wanted to write to us...."}

Hmm, odd title isn't it? But it is a quote from our darling Callum. He decided to "free" his whale bath toy. How? By flushing it down the toilet of course, along with a flannel to wash with, and a pen in case he wants to write to us. Oh dear. Yes, the toilet got blocked and needed to be removed from the wall to un-block it - hence us finding the culprit. Goodness only knows what else has managed to make a break for freedom. I'm mysteriously missing two of my rings - although Callum has denied anything to do with them. Kids are just great aren't they? :oD

So that was a good start to the day. What else did we get up to...erm, oh yes, we did our family read-aloud. Currently we are reading The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban. Thoroughly enjoying it too, although it has been a little sad in parts. After that we all sat and looked through the Usborne Children's Book of Art together. It was very interesting, and I think we all learnt something. The children were full of enthusiasm and ideas afterwards and they went off to draw, armed with oil pastels, chalk pastels, crayons, and pencils. Chelsea did a fabulous self-portrait which I must take a picture of. Tiegan did a very sweet self-portrait too, drawing herself with a princess crown. Interesting to see how she pictures herself ;o) Joseph decided to draw some still life items, and ended up with a picture of a can of coke and a few fruits. Callum drew a picture of his daddy :o)

Whilst they were busily drawing (and later on reading and discussing the World Wars again), I made some changes.

Yep, I'm at it again. Re-organising, changing rooms, or making more of a mess. I'm not sure which category it falls into ;o) I spent the afternoon changing things around. We now have most of the "school" type stuff in the large dining room - a much better use of that space me thinks. By "school" stuff, I mean microscopes, electronic kits, etc etc. I moved the bookshelves from out of the hall (wow, the hall looks huge now!) into the dining room. This was a job in itself, but it did give me the chance to thoroughly clean and dust the shelves and books. Yuk - just how does so much stuff manage to accumulate behind the shelves? The books are now cleaned and placed in some sort of order back on the shelves. I must make labels to make it easy for the children to find what they are looking for. I talked to the children about wall displays, and they want to allocate a wall space per subject. Initially their idea was to have a wall for each child, but after discussing things they decided that too many projects are family ones and it would mean splitting up the work. I think we may have difficulty with the subject walls in that respect too, as most of our projects are also cross-curricular, but we shall have to see how things work. At least we can have posters in the correct wall area anyway. I'm really happy with how it looks. We've got the large dining table in the middle of the room, but have turned it lengthways to suit the room now and give more space near the bookshelves. We have got a desk at the bottom window, which can be used for whatever it's needed for. I've seen it used for reading and computer work so far. The changes have meant that I've lost the desk from out of my craft room, but I'm sure I can work around that somehow. We've still got another table in the craft room which we can use for painting or model making etc - it's great for things that need to be left out to dry.

I'll add pictures soon when it's all done. I do love making changes, and going through the bookshelves so thoroughly has meant we have found lots of books that had been forgotten, so they will keep us busy for a while :o)

{Fathers Day}

Unfortunately, Fathers Day hasn't been very successfully celebrated this year. The children couldn't do their usual breakfast in bed for daddy routine, as my own dad came over at something ridiculous o'clock and got us all out of bed. Why? Because the men are working on our car today. Bless 'em.

I had invited my parents over for dinner, so the morning was spent preparing the roast and vegetables. I then got on and did the 4 baskets of ironing that I had successfully managed to ignore all week. I keep promising myself that I will keep on top of the ever growing piles by doing a little ironing each day, but I never do. Then I am full of regret when I have to spend 2 hours doing it all in one sitting. Ho hum. One day I will learn.

Other than that excitement, we have had a fairly pleasant day. Whilst the men have been out working oh so hard under the car, Tiegan and Callum had reading time with big bro. No, not the channel 4 version I'm afraid, just dear Joe.

I uploaded a door hanger on my craft blog that I had made as part of a blog challenge team I'm a member of. Whilst working on the laptop, I couldn't resist taking these pictures of my little handsome chap - looking rather battered at the moment with an impressive looking battle scar.




and one of Tiegan looking deep in thought...


Of course Fathers Day hasn't been completely forgotten in the household. Yesterday the girls and I (with Callums assistance of course!) baked Chocolate Chip Oat Cookies and Coconut Slices. Both turned out to be rather yummy and we only just managed to save some for the Daddys. I should have taken photos of them, but I forgot, so you will have to make do with the wrapping:

My dad went to pick up my mum just after lunch time, and the afternoon was spent playing games and chatting.

There was lots of giggles and laughter.




and Kira loved the extra attention.




I have started to implement a no TV during the day rule, as I was finding that the children were watching more and more each day. I'm not against TV as such, but got a little frustrated when I noticed that the children weren't bothering to think of what else they could do, but just went and switched on the TV instead. I really think today has benefitted hugely from this new rule, and noticed that Joseph in particular was much more sociable. He will often take himself off to watch the small set in the Dining Room whilst the rest of us are in the living room. I wouldn't mind if he was going to watch something special, but he just sits aimlessly flicking through the channels before checking out what is available to watch on the replay service. Today though was very different, and we all sat together chatting. One of the children suggested we play a game of hangman, which we did and I hugely enjoyed playing along. We had quite a laugh together, it has done me the world of good :o) My mum and dad looked as if they were enjoying it too, and as simple as it was, it was such a special family time.

I captured these pictures of Tiegan today and I just love them.

All smiles here...

We have had a lovely couple of days, so I think I will blog them. Hopefully by the end of the year I will have a positive sounding blog where the good stuff outweighs the the bad.

Yesterday we watched the BBC programme called Pompeii - The Last Day. We had watched it first time around, but it was on BBC4 recently and so was showing on Virgin Catch up TV. The kids showed a greater interest in it this time, and were able to remember snippets from the Dr Who show which made more sense to them after delving into the history. Afterwards we took the dog out for a walk to the local fields and countryside. Kira is fantastic off lead, and I don't have to worry about her once we are away from roads. I sat and threw the ball for her, whilst the kids practised for their "Olympics". They did long jump, sprinting, and javelin yesterday *smile*

When we got home again we had a marathon read-aloud session, which was great, and we all commented at how much we had missed the daily read-alouds. When I was feeling ill, the last thing I wanted to do was to read out loud, in fact, when I tried I found it almost impossible as my throat was so sore and my eyes seemed to strain. Nice to be able to put that behind us now and start our reading routine again.

Today has been fun, with lots of garden playing time. The weather has been so beautiful today. I took all of our workbook resources outside and sat on a rug sorting through them. I made a note of which suited which child, and got rid of those that were filled up or no longer suitable for our working style. The children kept coming over and checking on my progress, and with dh and my dad working on the car, and the dog running around like a loon begging people to throw her ball for her, it made the time quite fun and not at all like the usual humdrum task :o)

Once that was done, I surprised the children by suddenly jumping up on the trampoline, it was such fun! The first (and consequently only) time I went on our trampoline, I felt sick. A sea-sickness type feeling, which was horrid. This time I felt absolutely fine though, and I realised what a fab stress release it would be! At one point there were 5 of us on the trampoline and I was so worried that someone would fall off! Fortunately we were all very sensible though, taking care that the younger ones were away from the edge and we all just bounced lightly. We still had a good laugh.

After lunch we sat on the trampoline, basking in the sunshine, and read 2 chapters of Little Women. Being the classic version, it does have rather long and sometimes complicated words in the text, but Chelsea and Joseph both handled them brilliantly. I liked the fact that they both asked for an explanation if they didn't understand a certain word. Joseph sometimes has the habit of just skimming over things and wanting to get his reading over as quickly as possible, pretending he understands everything.

More trampoline jumping after that, and then I left the kids to it as I set about sorting through some of our other resources and trying to make room for everything. I currently have a craft room, which I adore, but want to somehow incorporate some of the school things into it as well. At the moment most of our school stuff is in the room downstairs which is a fab space, but I do tend to think we don't use it to it's full potential as you can't access it from the house. Often we use the dining room to work in. Our main two bookcases are stored in the shed and we just go out and fetch in what we need. It works well for us and it saves us being surrounded by hundreds (I'm not exaggerating) of books that get very little use, and gives us extra storage space inside the house. We use the library such a lot, so many of our books are redundant really, I just can't bear to let them go as I know they will be of use *someday*. After my re-arranging today, I now have many of the school resources in my "craft room" along with a couple of desks and a table, perfect for working in :o)

Tonight I am hoping for a good sit down and plan type session, with lots of typing, printing, and sorting out to do. I actually enjoy it once I am in full swing, but the thought of getting started fills me with dread and I know I would prefer to just sit and relax and watch the TV! It WILL be done tonight though, of that I am certain (unless the children conspire together and decide otherwise!) I know it will all be done by the time we are starting the new term (the schools are on holiday down here at the moment, and I am not going to start trying to get my lot into their full school-work routine until the girl from nextdoor stops calling for them to play! ;-) )

Chelsea is staying over at my parents house tonight, so I'm not expecting her back until Friday. We are having to make some sad decisions at the moment, concerning Scouts and what Chelsea is experiencing there, but she has made me very proud with the way she is dealing with things.

Joseph is playing on his football game on the Playstation, and Tiegan is doing the Mario Olympics with Callum on the Wii. I'm cooking dinner (roast chicken tonight that smells yum!) whilst I'm blog surfing and forum reading, so I apologise for any errors in this posting but I'm multi-tasking *grin*

Charity Shops :o)

Oh it has been so long! So long since I was able to trundle around charity shops looking for bargains :o) It used to be a regular occurance for me, to coincide with our HE group visits. Since we stopped going to groups, the charity shop visits stopped too. I made up for it yesterday though, and came home with a nice little stash of books and games. We bought a Junior Pictionary game, but it didn't have instructions. A quick looksie on the internet this morning has rectified that problem. We also bought "Pop to the Shops" which the younger ones are very much enjoying. A couple of bargain books including ones about Ancient Greeks, and Vikings. Oh, and "The Silver Sword" which ties in ever so nicely to our ongoing World War 2 theme.

Before we went out in the morning we did our maths, and then read a couple of books, noted here for own record:

- That Rabbit belongs to Emily Brown by Cressida Cowell (we really liked this one, as we could do lots of silly voices *grin*)

- Little Albatross by Michael Morpurgo

We read another chapter of The Earth Giant too.

I'm glad we had done "work" before our shopping spree, as I was hit by a huge migraine attack when we got home. It was the first migraine since being on the medication to quash them, and was the worst I have had for a long long time, with sickness, visuals, light sensitivity, and banging headache. I don't want another one like that for a long time thankyou! The kids were very good though and just played with the pop to the shops game, and entertained themselves. Chelsea was being a little Florence Nightingale looking after me. Very cute.

We have had a really lovely fnd fruitful day today. Started off with bible reading, then maths, then handwriting practice.

We then decided it was far too hot to be stuck inside, so we went and sat on the trampoline to do our reading. We are reading The Earth Giant by Melvin Burgess at the moment as our family chapter book. After reading a chapter of that, and discussing various aspects of it, we did something completely different and went through a road safety workbook together.

After lunch we read a few Ambleside suggestions including stories from the Just So collection, Aesops Fables, An Island Story, and Parables of Nature. After chatting about what we had read I decided it was far too nice to continue with "work" and we all sat, chatted, and bounced around on the trampoline until it was time for dinner.

I have just got back with the kids from going to Lidls to buy a few bits and bobs for a picnic lunch tomorrow. It's not a supermarket we use very often, but we do browse their special offers occasionally. It did make a nice change being able to park easily and not have to fight through the Tesco hoards tis evening though, so maybe we will start going there a little more often.