Posted by Joyce
Well, Hannah survived her Brownie outing, and had a great time, although she was shattered when they got back. So only a couple more swimming and drama lessons to go, and that's it all finished for the year.

We popped down to Glasgow this afternoon, as I decided that actually we couldn't live without curtains in the bedroom after all, no matter how minimalist it looked, so we got a very plain cream pair, with blackout linings for night shifts. Hannah hadn't spent her money on the outing yesterday, and as it was boring a hole in her pocket, she bought a couple of fiddly things. Worry beads (not sure why lol), a dinosaur, and a ball on elastic. She seems happy with them anyway.

And I was happy, as she asked for a book from the Famous People, Famous Lives series (Martin Luther King), and then sat and read it all in the coffee shop. We see the EP next week for the next assessment re her dyslexia, and I feel vaguely hopeful that she will be pleased with her. We do it privately, and my parents help pay for it, as we are really keen not to get involved with the LEA. I'm in two minds about how long to continue for - its 6 months since we last saw her, so it's not overly onerous. I think I'm just too scared that I'm letting it drift too much not to keep it up for a while as at least it provides some sort of marker for us all. The dyslexia programme we use is deadly boring - they must think kids are thick if they think a few stickers and cartoon characters make up for how repetitive and anodyne it is. Hannah and I have a pact though that we give it our all for 20 mins a day, and I fully and openly agree with her that it's deadly boring, and that I would've hated to have to do anything like that, but if it works, then we need to think of it as medicine, and throw it back regularly. And though its efficacy hasn't really been properly proven yet, for good measure, we throw it all the exercises as well, so we play on the wobble board, cross crawl and do lazy eights every day. Which at least has the advantage of being fun. And then play Baroque music while she does it. Bring on the snake oil ;-) And then she is given as much access as we can afford to good books on tape, so that she isn't stuck with thinking that what she can read is all that's available.

Apart for that, really quiet weekend. Tomorrow Hannah is going to drama school for the day, and it happens DH is off, so fingers crossed for a nice day, and we can loll in the garden. (After he's put the curtain pole back up, of course :-))

Posted by Joyce
HE group today. Hannah seemed to hang around the edge a bit, but she said she enjoyed herself OK. The house we were in had a lot of animal hairs in it though, so she was wheezing and itching with streaming eyes by half way through the day. I eventually gave her half a piriton tablet and it worked a bit. Then we both had to strip off in the storm porch when we came home, and chuck everything straight into the washing machine, as bringing it into the house at all would have triggered an even worse reaction in DH. I always rather smugly put DH's allergies down to the fact that his mum gave him mince and potatoes and creamola custard in his bottle from the time he was 14 days old. But I don't knew what my reason is for Hannah, given her extended breastfeeding, no cows milk at all till she was two, etc etc. At least it is only animal hairs and hay fever for her. She doesn't seem to have any other allergies or allergy related conditions.

Otherwise, haven't done much at all today. Hannah did some yoga this morning. She is so supple - not in a double jointed sort of way, its just like her muscles can stretch to almost twice their length. Don't think I was as flexible as that, even at her age. Bob and her went for a run/cycle in the evening, and then she just cuddled up and read for a bit.

DH is on night shift, and when I came upstairs, I found her installed in the big bed, so I guess she's there for the night. It'll be odd when she decides that sleeping with me is not a cool thing to be doing.

Tomorrow she is off to Edinburgh with the Brownies, to visit Dynamic Earth. I'm not a 100% happy about it, as it's a long way, and they are going on public transport, so its an hour on the train to Glasgow, cross Glasgow on foot in holiday weekend traffic to the other station, another hour to Edinburgh, and then a good 30 mins walk to Dynamic Earth. I just feel the potential for something to go wrong is a bit high, and I'd feel much easier if they were going door to door on a coach. I feel a bit coerced into agreeing, but a friend gave me a bit of a telling off about untying the apron strings, and assured me that this would be a normal activity if she were at school, and I shouldn't be so fussy. So I've agreed, but wishing it was safely over. This actually feels harder than camp last weekend, as at least I knew she was fairly close, and not travelling anywhere. Oh well. Must get a life........

Posted by Joyce

I miss my camera!

Otherwise, and oddly satisfying day. Hannah even had another demonstration about peaceful protest :-) A couple of days ago we got electioneering material from the BNP through the door. It really shocked me, and Hannah had read it (loads of pictures) before I saw it, so had loads of questions from her as well. So I explained to her why it gave me a problem, and said I was going to complain. Tried the Royal Mail first, but they said they were obliged to deliver official election mail, and basically there was nothing I could do to stop it being shoved in my door. So phoned CRE, and they said that they'd had several complaints, and advised me to go to the police. Well, we went along with pretty low expectations and filed a complaint. However, the police phoned today to say that they had now had several complaints, and the Chief Constable had decided to refer the matter to the Procurator Fiscal.

Other than that, a bit more gardening. Tried to write an ending for the book competition, but abandoned it. Tried several, but no inspiration. Looked at laptops and dreamed. Convinced myself that a Kodak 6490 was an extravagence too far. Talked about Mary Seacole. Looked at all the HESFES pics on the web. Went to the river for a scooter on my kick bike :-). Had curry. And now (oh the shame!), off to watch Hell's Kitchen.

Posted by Joyce
We all survived Brownie Camp. Hannah came home last night, exhausted, ravenous and filthy, so she seemed to have a good time. I immediately hit the wine, having abstained for 48 hours in case she wanted to come home at any point. She did have a rather torturous time this evening, as she had to write a camp diary for tomorrow, in order to get the camp badge. She had managed to evade doing this at camp, by re-washing all the dishes till there was no time left, but ended up with it as homework. We had the usual carry on of me saying she could choose not to do it, and her insisting that she must, but eventually she managed to pull together half a page this evening, sitting at the garden table in the sun.

Don't know what was up with me this morning. I woke up feeling really low and sorry for myself, and as Hannah was up as well, and DH was away, we found ourselves out in the garden by 6.30. We did a vast amount of weeding, and managed to illegally squeeze it into the bin before the bin men arrived, and then took ourselves off to the garden centre for breakfast, and indulged in a fair bit of retail therapy. I don't usually do bedding type plants at all, and the few I like, such as sweet peas and petunias, I usually grow from seed. However, that didn't happen this year, as I was to busy hallucinating myself dead at around the time I should have been bringing the seeds on, so we bought a load of stuff to plant straight in. Hannah bought snap dragons, marigolds and scarlet lobelia for her patch, and we bought new hanging baskets, and troughs to hang over the fence. The afternoon was spent planting it all out, and it must have been therapeutic, as I do feel a bit better now. And although the garden is a bit twee looking, it does actually look quite pleasant and cheerful, compared to the mess it usually is. Now all we have to remember is to water the damn things. I even weeded between the paving stones on the patio, so I must have been looking for displacement therapy.

I've abandoned all thought of fruit and veg this year. I've got some tub potatoes going, but couldn't be bothered trying anything else. The seagulls crap all over the tomatoes, and something always eats the strawberries before I get a look in,so decided to have a year off. My ubiquitous garden blog has finally been deleted from blogger, thank goodness. I followed a link from MP today to try to track it down, but its gone, so I MAY start another one, or I might just hijack this. Its more of a family blog than anything else anyway. Might change the name as well, as that's been hacking me off lately. Hannah has started her own blog, the pink template being the motivating factor, but not sure how successful it will be.

Well, I'm starting to seize up, so I'm going to have a bath while I can still climb into it.

just testing.....

.....to see if I really can post to blogger by email. My dreams come true if I can.

Posted by Joyce

The week that was........

HESFES!!

Started off in a service station in Carlisle on Thursday evening, where DH and I swapped Hannah, cars, and clothes. Well, not with each other (stifles image of DH in sharp skirt suit and killer heels), rather I changed into camping clothes. Hannah and I then had a good run down to Birmingham, where we spent the night, and arrived at HESFES around lunchtime on Friday. Sarah and Alison were already there, so I threw the tent up, after moving it about three times as I couldn't get the pegs into the rocky ground. Hannah had to be practically tethered to the ground to help me, as she was so desperate to play with the other girls.


Saturday we spent some time at the beach, and I managed to thoroughly burn my scalp in the hour that I was too embarrassed to put my bush hat on. Lesson learned, I didn't part from it till bedtime for the rest of the week. Sarah then kindly fed Hannah while I moved us into the static. The rest of the week I can't really sort into separate days - they all sort of merged into one. However, one of the highlights was Bob phoning on Tuesday night to say that since he was about to start his five day rest-day cycle, he had on impulse checked the internet, and got a £20 flight to Bournemouth the following morning. I left Hannah with Jax, and told her I had to go to pick up a parcel for daddy, that was going to be too big to post. Her face when he arrived was a picture. And selfishly, I was very pleased that it meant I was going to have someone to share the driving with on the way home.

I've no pictures, unfortunately, as my digital camera went on the blink, but it was a good week.

All the things that annoyed me last year, annoyed me this year -the litter, the general mess, the smelly and reluctant-to- flush loos, etc, but it was a good experience, nonetheless. The things that annoyed me, as they say, were "my" process ;-) I really appreciate all the effort so many volunteers must put into bringing it all together. The amount of work that gets done on the basis of good will is phenomenal.

It was lovely to spend some time with people, and get to know them better, it was great to see the kids having so much freedom, and getting on so well together. Hannah fell in love with Simon (well, who wouldn't!!), and Ammi was always good for a cuddle. Hannah is already talking about next year. I think for us HESFES has become one of those unmissable events in the year.

I didn't do so much this year as last, but went to a few of the afternoon sessions, and Hannah loved the children's yoga, the belly dancing and the science talk. Bob thought the children's caberet was great, and loved the English version of Bunny Foo Foo.

Journey home was fine, and not nearly as eventful as last year. Took about 12 hours, with three short stops, so not too bad really.

Hannah is now off to Brownie Camp, and I'm torn between having a couple of (big) glasses of wine, and staying fit to drive in case I get a phone call at 2am. It would just be too embarrassing to have to call a taxi. She went off this morning without a backward glance, and despite the fact that every time the phone rings I go "that'll be Brown Owl", she must be fine. The washing is done, and even dried and put away, as we seem to have brought the HESFES weather home with us, and DH and I have been sitting in the garden for the last couple of hours. We're thinking about taking the tent over to Arran next weekend if it stays as nice as this.

Fortunately my camera was still under warranty from Morgan computers, so I sent it back today, along with the card reader which has never worked, but which I never got round to returning, so hopefully it won't be long. Its one of those things that once you have, you can't live without.

Posted by Joyce

Just a quickie as I don't have my usual connection, as I'm trying to master broadband, so using a pay-as-you go for this. Also very tempted to re-vamp the blog, but will tackle it after HESFES, when I can call on some support ;-), and I amn't paying some ridiculous rate per minute.

Good few days. Hannah continues with her Tudor project, and simultaneously is reading a book on David Livingston, who was born not too far from here. We plan on going to visit it after we come home. She also did some more cooking today, and we messed around in the garden this afternoon.

Bob has been at home for a couple of days, so its been nice to have some grown -up company, and my head is better.

Hannah is thoroughly over-excited about HESFES. I leave here tomorrow morning to go to an overnight meeting in Edinburgh, so rather than drag myself all the way back home, I'll cut across country, and Bob is bringing Hannah down to Carlisle after work on Thursday to hand her over. I'm hoping to see great strides forward in the garden when we get back. And if you fancy decorating the dining room, I want the plain cream wallpaper that we looked at in B&Q. (no pressure, sweetheart!)

I've booked us into a travel lodge in the Midlands, so I hope I can get there by about 10pm on Thursday, and then finish the journey on Friday. The only problem with this plan is that I do of course need to pack tonight, and I seem to be having some difficulty tackling this rather pressing issue. Have got the car MOTed and serviced for the trip though. Which means nothing, as I did exactly the same last year, and was finally delivered home on the back of the AA truck at 3am. I lost my windscreen wiper motor in torrential rain at 5pm on a Friday, in the outside lane at the M5/M6 interchange. I haven't forgotten yet quite how quickly you loose all vision in those circumstances. Scary stuff. Hopefully this year will be less eventful. I doubled Hannah's book tokens to allow her to buy LOTR on tape for the journey. Its the dramatised one, not the cover-to-cover one, which was way out of the budget,even as bribery. But it runs for 15 hours, so I reckoned £25 was not a bad price to pay for almost guaranteed co-operation on the journey.

If everything goes OK, should be about 13 hours driving, split over two days, so won't be too bad, though we need to come back in one for brownie camp.

Anyway, although I'll check my mail from the office tomorrow, probably won't be properly back on line till after HESFES. To everyone who is going - have a safe journey, and looking forward to seeing you. To those who aren't - have a good 10 days or so.

Posted by Joyce
Scream

Now I know why we don't do school. I couldn't cope with homework. Hannah came home from Brownies on Wed with (IMHO) was a completely inappropriate assignment, in that she had to design a poster showing what Brownies would be like in 10 years time.

Given:
a) I don't think they've changed significantly in the last forty years, certainly, and probably the last 90, how likely is it that much will happen in the next ten?
b)the new uniform was introduced only 6 months ago, and BO told me they expected it to be good for about 15 years
c) how many 7 year olds can imagine future life anyway?

Hannah was been in floods of tears all day trying to get it done, and I've told her several times that she doesn't "have" to do it, but she is convinced she does. I'm never sure how much assistance is appropriate, but in the end it was my sanity on the line, so I helped her generate four ideas (ie, I made her sit with me, and I thought aloud till she picked up that I was "telling" her what to do), and then as she was far to upset by that time to consider drawing, we cut pictures out of a magazine, stuck them on a bit of poster paper, and put the damn thing away till Wednesday.

She still has three sheets of colouring in that her letter says she needs to do as well, but I've told her either to decide to do it, and get on with it without further fuss, or decide not to, and we'll tell BO that she doesn't like colouring in, and I'll back her up. I know the school type argument is that she needs to learn to conform, do things she doesn't enjoy etc etc etc, but why??? Is her life really going to be enriched by spending hours on mindless colouring in, unless she actually wants to do it. I know Brownies is run by volunteers, and I know Hannah likes it, but is all this crap really necessary? I just feel this task has invaded our lives for days, as she's been fretting about doing it, and its NOTHING. sigh.

It reminded me in a horrible way of a task that used to be given to student nurses in a ward I worked in in 1980. The ward used yellow plastic bags for lightly contaminated waste, and they arrived packaged flat in a big box, with 144 to a box. The idea was that you could lift a couple of dozen straight out, and hang them on a rail, so it would be easy to peel off the top one if you needed it. For some bizarre perverted reason, the sister used to make the most junior nurse take them all out of the box, and hold EACH one into 5, and place them back in the box. And then every time the rail needed re-filled, she had to take some out, UNFOLD them, and place them one by one over the rail. The old *** made me do it four Sundays in a row, and as we were struggling with this daft project today, the feelings of fury just came flooding back to me. Tasks for the sake of them. yuck. I think I may have unresolved issues here ;-)

Posted by Joyce
A much nicer day than I expected, considering DH has been working 12 hour nightshifts for days. Once you add on travel time etc, he's away for about 14 hours, and spends most of the other 10 trying to sleep while I try to keep the house quiet.

Anyway, this morning, Hannah wanted to make Brownies. We only had milk chocolate, so they ended up a bit peely wally looking, but tasted as expected :-) She was very proud of herself, and I stayed in the background and let her get on with it. I feel incredibly nervous when she is working with the cooker etc, but I feel I need to give her a chance to just do it, and she was chuffed with herself when she brought me a Brownie and a cup of tea, and I resisted all urges to say, "careful, don't burn yourself". I can't decide at all what's a reasonable amount of freedom about things like this. What do others do?

We then got out the Eric Carle Book of Collage, which someone had given her for her birthday, and she made this:


OK, I know its derivative, and is probably stifling her own creative process, but she was so happy with it, and insisted it went on the blog. I was pleased that she had done something she was satisfied enough with to want to keep: she is so reluctant to put anything at all on paper unless she thinks it will look perfect, and on the rare occasions she will try, nine times out of ten she bins them in a temper. So I think this was a success.

We walked into town for drama, and she got invited back to someone's house to play this afternoon, which delighted her - I wish it happened more often (not to get rid of her, just to make her feel popular, I guess), and it sounds as if she had a good time. On the way home from picking her up, we picked up Freaky Friday on DVD, and had a girls night in on the sofa.

She's now gone to bed with the first book in the next series of Rainbow Fairies. Weather Fairies, I think they are called. The publication date was early May, and she been watching Amazon every day since we came home, but they were still only available for pre-order this morning. And then I saw them in Otackers at two for £5, which was almost half the Amazon price.

I'm going to tour the blogs myself now, and then do a couple of hours work.

Posted by Joyce
An exciting week:

Monday: I was hauled out of bed with a demand that we needed to go to the library "now" to find out about the Tudors. 7am, just back from holiday......school seemed tempting LOL. Except of course, wouldn't have been able to go on holiday then. We went and looked at the library's one book on the Tudors and Hannah decided it was "too smelly". It did have a rather suspicious brown smear all over it.....and took ourselves off to the bookshop. We had some Euros left, and so (since they're not really real money, are they?), I agreed that they could be used for getting some stuff, so she bought a Scholastic poster of Tudor life, and a project pack. We did some of that, looked at Merry's Tudor stuff, and then she developed this rather worrying game with the playmobil fairy castle. All the playmobil women were lined up, and the playmobil King ordered their divorcing, beheading or dispatching with some relish. Didn't do much else, except washing all day.

Tuesday: we had the home ed group here, as I'd missed our turn on Friday. I couldn't quite believe the devastation left behind. I can't help feeling that 10 kids ranging from 5 to 14 is too much for one house. However, it went well, it was nice to chat to the other women, and all the kids seemed to enjoy it - though they did scare the neighbours a bit at one point.

Wednesday: apart from my adventures with banging my head, I had this amazing find in the charity shop along from my office. The charity shops here never have anything very nice, but the ones in Edinburgh are a different class ;-), and I got a set of Encyclopaedia Britannica for £3. They are 20 years old, but look as if they've never really been used, and I decided they were definitely worth house room somewhere. The very posh Edinburgh lady behind the counter made me laugh though. They were in a box of books labelled "4 for a £", and there were 11 volumes. And she kept saying to me in an aggrieved tone "well, I can't give you a discount you know. You'll still have to pay £3 even though there are only 11." She couldn't seem to get it that I didn't mind. My arms were rather chimpanzee like by the time I hauled them back to the office.

Thursday: I really should have spent the day in bed, as advised, but I was chairing a conference and I just felt I couldn't cancel at the last minute, so dragged myself to work (even I thought it was unwise to drive, so went by train), and got through the day somehow. Fell into bed almost as soon as I got home, and spent another awful night with a splitting headache.

Friday: HE meet at soft play in the morning, and in the afternoon I was worried that my headache was still so bad, so took myself back to the doctor. He checked me over, said it was still the aftermath of being concussed, but couldn't find anything worrying wrong, and then gave me a major telling off for not resting as instructed. So now I'm in bed with Hannah and the laptop. She's watching a DVD, and I'm........resting;-)

Posted by Joyce

Arrrrgh! Just back from spending the last five hours in A&E after I knocked myself out (only for a few seconds), when I slipped on some diesel at the petrol station. Had to take Hannah with me as DH at work. Finally allowed out, with instructions that I've to be woken every hour all night, and asked things like who the prime minister is. I've got a splitting headache, I feel sick, and apparently I've got a mild concussion. I'm also bruised all over. I'm a liability :-(. More tomorrow. Night all.

Posted by Joyce

Back to freezing cold weather, but had a lovely time. And now I can bore you all with my holiday snaps ;-)

It was one of those holidays where everything went right, from the flights being on time, the hire car being upgraded, and no one got sick (quite a feat on holidays for us). Although we did check out on Ros's recommendation of the hospital at Marbella just in case we needed it.

The day we arrived was Hannah's birthday, so we ate chocolate crepes to celebrate.


The Safari Park was a hit, and the plants were lovely. Loads of Bird of Paradise flowers, and stuff I didn't recognise. I'm going to try to make myself a screensaver with them later. Hannah loved these totem poles, and spent ages drawing them, but I can't get the scanner to work.



Animals were a bit of a theme. This is Hannah at Crocodile Park, with a baby croc (shudder). I was a bit worried about going there, as I hate the whole exploitative thing with animals, but (as far as these places ever are), this seemed OK. Proper breeding and rehab programmes etc:



.... and then petting a ray at the Sealife centre



Finally, she does her own fish impersonation:



Some days she just acted like a total beach babe:



.....and others she made me glad we'd done a dry run to the hospital ;-):



For culture, we visited the Alhambra at Granada:



.......where we even did some HE:



And the gorge at Ronda:



We also went up on this, and just looked at the view.



I looked longingly at Africa from Tarifa - where the Atlantic meets the Med - only 14kms away, so we were very tempted.




But trotting over to Africa with no insurance seemed a bit risky, so we didn't do it in the end. It wasn't the most exciting holiday I've ever had, but given I couldn't get insurance, and so needed to stay in Western Europe, where my E111 would provide adequate cover, it was exactly what was needed. I slept really well, ate really well, drank loads of the local wine, and I haven't felt so rested and relaxed for years. It was an excellent choice, and just a really easy holiday. So a big thanks to the inland revenue for providing that one when we needed it ;-)

And now for HESFES.........