Birthday

It is my daughter's 7th birthday today. So, firstly, a couple of pictures. Her birthday cake, lovingly hand-crafted by me (it's a butterfly of course, just in case you can't tell!):


And the felt cakes I made for her as part of her birthday present (the one with pink icing) and my son as an 'unbirthday' present (the blue icing):

Birthdays are a strange thing - stressful and exciting and unsettling in equal measures, even when the birthday is not your own. Of course, the birthday of a child brings to mind thoughts of the pregnancy with that child and of the day they were born. It reminds us of time passing and of how much the child has changed and learned and developed into their own person.

It also makes me think of how much I have learned as a parent since my daughter (my eldest child) was born, and makes me wonder if I could do it all better if I were to do it all over again. Which I am not going to.

And then there's all the social pressure associated with children's birthdays. I'm lucky, as my children are home educated there hasn't been any peer pressure on them to request big, expensive parties with every person in there class and junk food, party bags and lots of consuming of plastic tat. Or maybe it's just their personalities anyway. Either way, it's been lovely to have a relaxing but fun day with visits by various grandparents, uncles and aunts throughout the day, a homemade cake with all organic ingredients and no colourings, homemade pizza for tea, and fairly low-key presents, such as books and craft kits.

It's just made me wonder why we have to wait for a birthday or special occasion to gather everyone together. Hmm, one to ponder on. How to get all the family together in a similar relaxed fashion more often?

So, now all there is to do is to pop the wrapping paper into the kids' craft box for re-use in art masterpieces, look forward to my son's 5th birthday in 2.5 weeks, and have an evening in a very weird head-space thinking about birth and pregnancy and fertility and the passage of time and parenting skills.

Octopuses and jam!

What an odd week we've had! Well, we've made *much* jam in the last few weeks, here's some of it:

And we've also made octopuses - or should that be octopi? Whatever, we've made them, out of wool of course!
And there has been much time spent in making dens as the weather has started to turn slightly cooler:


And we've had a slight finger-knitting craze. No pictures yet, but my daughter has really taken to it and it's suprisingly relaxing. Let's hope that calmness descends on our house with the autumn weather. I can't wait!

Stuff we've been doing

The last few posts have been rather full of my thoughts, concerns, worries and hopes, so I thought this one should be a quick catch-up on the stuff we've actually been doing just in case I have given the impression of wafting around wringing my hands like Lady MacBeth!
So, houses:

My son's 'work' laid out for Granny to see (this was totally his idea!):



My daughter's work:

And finally, those Houdini caterpillars:

Some of them seem to starting to pupate now. I think a box of chysalises should be easier to look after!
Junk modelling at Home Ed Group today, so it should be interesting getting the results home on the train afterwards!

Spring Equinox

We've been out to a birthday party this morning and played in the sunshine which is a perfect way of celebrating, but yesterday we finished off our spring daffodils. We also made the vases to stand them in and they are now cheering up the children's bedrooms. These are my daughter's daffodils:


And these are my son's:


And I learned a lesson in how limited my thinking still is. For some crazy reason, I assumed we'd make yellow daffodils. After all, if you do this activity in school or nursery you'd put out yellow paper and yellow paint and everyone would do yellow daffodils. But of course, my children wanted to do their own kind of daffodils, which for my son meant red, blue and green daffodils and for my daughter meant mainly yellow, orange, red and pink. And it worked really well. And I felt really silly for literally not thinking of any colour except yellow! It does make me wonder if I'm missing something equally totally obvious in our everyday life because I'm just so used to thinking of things a certain way that I'm not seeing a different way.

Equinox crafts

With the Spring Equinox coming up in the early morning of 20 March, the children and I have been starting our Equinox crafts.

So here is my daughter's Equinox bunnies:


And my son's:


And their sun pictures - my daughter's is at the bottom and is a 'great big summer sun', my son's it at the top and is, according to the artist 'the middle of the sun, swirling with hot gas'!


We have also been making daffodils out of egg boxes (of course!) but they're not finished yet, and we went to the Children's Farm this morning and saw the tiny lambs and little kids (goats, not children) as well as baby rabbits. It was great and lovely weather too.

On another note, am I the only person who regularly has cereal in the cupboard merely in its waxed plastic inner bag as the outer box has ben removed due to urgent craft need?

Hearts, fairies and birthdays

Mysterious adverts appeared all around our house last week (see below) for an upcoming Fairy Dance Event. It was all very serious - the costume, adverts, choreography, music, confetti (for the audience to sprinkle at a pre-arranged moment), and tickets were all organised and created by my daughter. We all enjoyed it very much.


And, after a particularly enjoyable family day, these hearts appeared on the wall by the back door. How sweet.


And my son is having mixed feelings about his upcoming 4th birthday. On the one hand, a special day and presents. On the other, being older, and being the centre of attention for a whole day (he's not too keen on this). We have currently come to an agreement. He agrees to turning 4, but he doesn't want to get any older than that - and certainly not grow up. I've agreed he can turn 4 and see how it goes for a year, and then we'll see how he feels about turning 5.
And in the meantime, I've got a train-shaped cake to make - eek!

Stuff we've made

So, first the crafts. Today we have made treasure maps (aged with tea-bags, not that you can see that very well in the photos). This one was my son's:



And this one is my daughter's:



And a couple of days ago we made Mr Men biscuits with a set of cutters which used to be mine when I was a child and that my mum recently found in a kitchen cuoboard clear-out and brought over. I was quite impressed at how well they came out, but didn't take the 1970s instructions to paint them with vast amounts of food colouring. Mr Sneeze was a bugger to get out without breaking his legs, and my daughter observed that this was probably why there wasn't a Mr Tall cutter. I had to agree.


But this is my question. Do other people find this 'fits and starts' pattern to home ed life? It feels like we do several 'activities' or special craft projects, or workbooks within one or 2 days and then nothing but lego, or playing Spiderman, or listening to audio books, or making huge messes (I mean picnics for their toys out of tissue paper, of course!) for several weeks until I start to worry that we're 'not doing anything' and instigate some more activities and then the whole thing starts all over again.
I mean, obviously I offer ideas and stuff if they can't occupy themselves and we read together every day and often go out to groups and stuff, but I don't want to get in their way when they're obviously flowing in the activities they're planning and carrying out for themselves. Is there an ideal balance? Obviously, they're still quite young, but my daughter's 6th birthday tomorrow is making me wonder if I should be *doing* more in some way?
I was reading an argu... I mean intelligent discussion on one of the HE yahoo lists this morning in which the merits or otherwise of autonomous HE were once again bandied back and forth. And I'm always very aware that true autonomous HE doesn't consist of just leaving your kids to get on with it, but actually requires offering opportunities and ideas and facilitating well when one sticks. We've never even been fully autonomous anyway. I'm not sure what I'm asking really. Any thoughts?

Solstice Crafts & Poetry

We've been doing lots of Solstice art, craft and poetry in between being ill. Here are some of our efforts:






My son decided he was going to illustrate a poem from abook this festival but my daughter has written her own poem as usual:

The Tree Is Pretty

Christmas lights in my room,
To shine out in the gloom.

Baubles sparkle, baubles shine,
I put my lights in a line.

The tinsel sparkles on the tree,
Lots of presents for me to see,
I am so happy.

Samhain activities part 1

So, we have bats made out of toilet rolls:





And masks:

More felt

I'm still gradually making the felt food, but now that I've got a plateful, I thought I'd post a picture of what I've managed so far. It'd make a meal, I suppose!


I've also been toying with the idea of making some felt money for maths purposes. I do have some plastic money from the Early Learning Centre, but it's not very tactile and inviting. We do also sometimes use real money, but inevitably it gets lost. I dont mind when it's only 1ps and 2ps but when it's pound coins that's a different thing! So I was thinking of making some very simple circles (and other shapes for 20ps and 50ps) that are bigger than usual and with just the appropriate numbers on them to simplify using it and to match with the felt food in buying and selling games.

Of course, that does mean I've just given myself another job...

Crafty Mama!

I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, a crafty Mama and yet this last week or two, I've been feeling inspired to at least try my hand and some craft stuff. It's turned out better than I'd dared to hope so I thought I'd share the fruits of my labours!

After the success of our Lammas loaf a couple of weeks back, we tried our hand at a different shape. Not quite as good but still very tasty:












Then I got the idea to do some crafts from felt. Not felting, that sounds altogether hard, but just making things from felt which sounded just my kind of craft - mainly hand-sewing and not needing any seams or anything. So, I tried my hand at some felt food which seems to be all the rage on the net at the moment, and this is how it came out:








Then, of course, my daughter's teeth started being loose which set me on to the issue of what to do about the Tooth Fairy? We don't really 'do' Father Christmas in our house as we didn't want to tell the children that something was true when it wasn't. We do tell stories about him and have him as mythic character but presents are always exchanged between real people, to give the idea of reciprocity and that it is just as exciting to give presents as to receive them. So, in a similar spirit, I didn't want to have a literal Tooth Fairy, but neither did I want to destroy the magic of childhood or let such an important milestone as lost teeth go by unmarked. So I got the idea to make a Tooth Fairy which my daughter can have in her bedroom and for every tooth she loses, she can choose a beautiful bead or button to sew onto the fairy's wings. That way, each tooth is commemorated and at the end of it all, she'll have a personalised Tooth Fairy to remember it all by. And here is the fairy, though it does look rather more like a butterfly: