Chewing wasps and spitting feathers

Well. We haven’t really done so much of either. But I quite liked it as a title 🙂

Yesterday we started our new HE regime… for however long it lasts. In an attempt to pull together some of what has worked in the past, add a little of what we enjoy and try some things that are new, we all mutually decided to do things a bit differently. One of the things i wanted to explore the most was the possibility of some work all together that would strength skills all round without appearing to have to take anyone over old ground too hard.

On recommendation from a friend, I’ve started doing a morning challenge from Peggy Kaye’s Games for Learning with all of them together. They like it, it is fun to do a group bit of work, they feed of one another and everyone can benefit on some level or other. I’ve bought the writing version too.

We’ve started using our diaries and trying to be a bit more structured in the mornings, knowing that leaves afternoons freer. I think it will take a little doing to get the balance right but hopefully it will come. So far they’ve been warmly received and kept people busy doing a reasonably varied selection of work. I think it will be a better way of sharing the HE load between max and I; despite many variations of trying, none of our kids seem happy if left to themselves, they just are not naturally totally autonomous. They do have times of being very self led and self motivated but the times in between don’t please any of us.

Josie was most put out that I had’nt filled hers in, thinknig that we’d be better using it as a record, not a plan, so she and i have been adding small tasks to hers. She’s really liked her “coloured word book” – tracing over words she’s chosen from her board and then repeating them back, sounding them out and spotting them.

Fran spent this morning writing about her gym week – it is an epic and I’m deeply impressed by a lot of aspects of it, from the length and improvement in her writing style, to the mature fashion she tried to handle the issues while she was there.

I think we’re all ready for some routine, I know I am. I can’t bear to look backwards and I can’t bear to look forwards – focusing on today is the only thing to do.

Other news is that, as I suspected, Amelie has been bumped back down a gym squad and is back in the same one as Fran, but in a new group, from Thursday. I can’t say I’m surprised as something was clearly going very wrong – and I can’t say I’m sorry. The running about will be less, the stress on her will be less and the worry for me will be less. She’s been a very sad little person for a few weeks, not just there but at home and once she started to ask not to go to gym, I knew there was something amiss. So being bumped back came approximately 4 minutes before I was about to ask to have her moved back and that’s fine. She was sad to start with but then rather sensibly said “no one is dead and it’s only a silly cartwheel” and has been a happier and far less screechy little soul today. I hope she’ll get another chance sometime, hopefully when she isn’t 8 with a recently dead brother, but we’ll see. She may not want to. It’s been a rather soul destroying experience for her, which is an awful shame because that was neither what was hoped or anticipated nor really anyone’s fault and certainly not what I expected, given how much I like it there; I guess what you want isn’t always what is right for you.

As for me – well, I had some blood test results which I suspect, unless they’ve been badly affected by remaining pregnancy hormones (which is possible), pretty much spell my baby making days as over. I might get lucky, but I suspect I may not. I think I’ve been praying that I’d get to snuggle another baby to take some of the pain of losing Freddie away but I’m not sure that is going to happen. From here on in, for the next 8 months, I think I’ll always be thinking “this time last year I was x months pregnant.” It is going to be hard. I never expected to find that I’d run out of what I needed to make it happen. I don’t quite know what to do really. I can chill out an hope things settle, but I have a bad feeling in me that perhaps they won’t. I’m going to have to try to get over this one without help. I didn’t expect to be so old at 36 🙁

I guess what you want isn’t always what is going to happen.