All a bit complicated

There are a lot of things in this post. Some reasons to chatter and some reasons why I haven’t been doing so much of that too. Sometimes the only way forward is to tumble it out and let anyone who wants to sift the melting pot. There is the large and the small tucked into the folds of these words below.

We’ve worked very hard on more maths this week, with me this time after Max’s excellent telly maths of speed and acceleration last week. Did you hear that *swoosh* over my head? They loved that and got plenty from it. This week we’ve done area and perimeter which my children find impossibly complex and it, I swear, the only thing that gives me any insight into what it is to be mathsy and not understand why I DON”T. GET. IT. Because I have no idea what they find so baffling? It’s easy! But apparently not. Still, we came up with a good project, which I’ll blog, and it is helping I think. But working to a scale, so help me, is going to result in some form of hernia in them or me quite soon.

We had our Latin lesson and went to the library to pick up new books; Maddy is engrossed in I Am Number Four which I may have to read after her. Fran has been deep in the Ingo series and finished off her ballet project too. She worked pretty steadily all week. Maddy worked like a trojan, Amelie may actually have done some stuff and Josie has been revelling in apps for reading and counting and adding up. She and I curl up in bed in the morning and probably do an hour of iPhone Ed. 😆

If you wonder why I’m all quiet, you might find me somewhere new and if you wish to delve a little deeper, the key is no more than the integer equivalent of the title. All welcome. Excuse the covertness, it’s unavoidable just now. I’m all tangled up in stoical grief and moving on and not knowing whether to look forwards or backwards. I’m missing Freddie terribly; the raw tears have gone and they’ve left something new in the place they used to bathe. I dry and irritated patch that I can’t quite sooth, that I can live with, but not ignore. I wondered for a while if I was missing grieving, if I’d been wallowing, but now I know this is just something new? and it is as painful as its predecessor in a way.

We’ve been baffled and then a little scared by the hot water suddenly running brown, which turns out to be a bit of hot water cylinder maintenance we didn’t know to do which now might cost us ??1000. Sigh.

On Friday, sitting on the bed, I opened a letter and found that Fran was being offered the opportunity to accept a place at the senior school she had wanted to go to for year 7. She was sat with me at the time so even if my instinct had been to hide it, I couldn’t. And wouldn’t have anyway. Initially she said “I might go” shortly followed by “But I like home ed, I don’t think I will” followed by “can we talk to them?”

So we did. It’s a school which chooses options for Yr9 and some are full; the year head was (to my astonishment) upbeat about flexibility, about her likely academic strengths, about her joining them in a way that would allow her to acclimatise and keep some home ed benefits and in general, just made me feel exactly the opposite of how I expected to feel after that conversation. After all, I spoke to someone (from a different school) two years ago who said “oh I suppose home educated is like school refusers,; well, we’ll get her in and teach her to read and write…” To speak to someone who assumed she’d be self motivated and able and an achiever as she had been HE, was a big surprise. I suspect he may have looked at her CAT records from when she sat a test there for Yr7 and that also encourages me.

So next week we are going to look round and meet him. I suspect she’ll go, to be honest. It will be a huge change for her and for us but I’m hoping this might be good for her. She’s ready to stretch her wings and be challenged, she’s ready to be more sociable and try out different things and this is a very good academy, with an ethos which, while slightly alien to me, I also quite like in principle. So we’ll see. If I’m really honest, I think I’m ready too; I could get her to GCSE but while the work doesn’t worry me, the hoop jumping of exams does not appeal. The others need me. It’s possible this will start a chain reaction and you know, if it does, I don’t know if I’ll fight it.