Staycation Island Diaries: week 2

This post is mainly photos and diary entries to look back upon later... no deep thinking here...

Day 8 - Friday, 20th March

Our Staycation is a week old! We made rainbows to put in our window, N(5) dreams of flying away on an aeroplane (her creativity is blooming) and after Mr finished work we went to the forest again to throw rocks in the river.

Day 9

Our second weekend in Staycation begins and we decide to drive to a beach we know that's normally pretty much deserted. It certainly wasn't - there was still space enough for social distance but it was definitely the busiest we'd ever seen Sand Bay!

Day 10 - Mother's Day

It's Mothering Sunday. The church is no longer meeting in person, now on Facebook instead. Maybe I wasn't faithlessly overreacting after all? N(5) has drawn me a gorgeous picture and my heart is happy. We all went for a walk into the nature reserve behind the house in the afternoon.

Day 11

Today we dropped little cards into the neighbours houses on our road to see if we could get a bit of mutual community help going. And then we went out again for a bit of scooting near the river and enjoyed the gorgeous weather.

Day 12

Our 7th Anniversary. Not what we had planned!
Instead of quality time as a couple, we spent the day at home (often in the garden in this glorious weather!), with one short scoot along the path. I'm beginning to surrender to the idea that I might have to do some gardening.

Day 13

The weather is glorious, birdsong is loud (even an owl last night!), lots of time spent hanging out in the garden and then we baked a fox cake, just because.
We've decided to let Fred the dog stay at his friend's house (where he normally goes on weekends) so he'll get undivided, loving attention rather than being bothered by the kids all day.

Day 14

Mostly spent eating yesterday's fox cake, excavating worms in the garden, more creativity - now D(3) has discovered his creative side and drew a picture of me with the babies in my tummy (him and his sister) next to Mr. We also had an attempt at cycling which ended in me carrying the bikes while the kids walked - adorably, holding hands...

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Last week, a reporter and cameraman from the BBC visited our house to do a feature about home education. It was great fun, a real adventure for the kids to be interviewed! The team spent 90 minutes at our house, but of course they had to condense that down to a couple of minutes for the feature, and sadly the kids' interviews didn't make the cut. (A transcript article of the feature is here ) I had put my hand up for doing this because the reporter had every intention to make this a positive piece on home education, and so it was; the premise was to try and answer why there had been such an uptick in home education in the past few years. They interviewed two mothers, probably strategically chosen: me as the one who always wanted to home educate, and the other mum as someone who felt she had to due to her son's needs. They interviewed me at length, and of course only a few seconds of that made it to the screen, but inevitably it was the part to do with social skills that th...

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