Skip to main content

Staycation Island Diaries: Week 5

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


Day 29 - Friday, 10th April 

Starting Week 5 on Good Friday. N(5) enjoyed virtual choir practice, we spent time in the garden, and D(3) has (reasonably enough) decided that there is now no societal imperative for him to be dressed. So after a bit of paddling in the pool this afternoon he took his kit off and refused to put anything else on. I'm ok with that - he's obviously coming after his maternal grandmother who rarely, if ever, wore clothes at home.






Day 30 - Saturday, 11th April 

If the weather stays like this we will be very short on pictures from now on. As the kids now both refuse to wear clothes!

Pics today are from breakfast, when they did wear some clothes... but after lunch that was that. Mr has been reorganising the shed, now that we have an extra one for bicycles.









Day 31 - Sunday, 12th April 

Easter Sunday! Virtual church, garden time, then the kids went out for a cycle with daddy while I created the egg hunt trail at home. Lots of fun and immense amounts of chocolate were had.



 


 
 


 
 


Day 32 - Monday, 13th April 

I only have a single picture to post today... because it was a cloudy, windy day we watched Paddington 2 and Shaun The Sheep. But they did look cool eating their lunch.



Day 33 - Tuesday, 14th April 

Today N woke up with the brightest red cheeks I've ever seen, and a rash on neck and shoulders. She's fine in herself though.

Then we decided to sell our massive play structure, put it on Facebook, and had it dismantled and taken away that same afternoon. (I do love living in the days of the internet!)

We also opened our garden hole as Mr. is finally going to get the soakaway for the extension done, and we found no fewer than five frogs in there!

Breakfast time

 
Meeting a frog
 
Searching for creepy crawlies

Red cheeks!

 
Goodbye play structure


Day 34 - Wednesday, 15th April 

Everything is a glorious mess right now.

Oh and I love calling this the Great Pause. Read that somewhere and thought, I really hope that in years to come this is what people think of this time as.
 
 


Day 35 - Thursday, 16th April 

I did a bit of manual labour sorting Mr.'s hair (whereas Mr. did a LOT of manual labour digging the soakaway hole), the kids seemed a bit off but did have good times as well. We painted our salt dough hands and the kids left us with this roadblock after bedtime..

 

 




Onwards into week 6 we go!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Back to meat after 20 years vegan - 4 years on

Back in 2020, I briefly mentioned in another blog post that we were no longer vegan. I said that shift deserved its own blog post, but here we are at the end of 2024 and I never wrote that. Not that I intended to leave it this long, but it really did take me this long to truly digest the change (pardon the pun) and get enough distance from my previous world view that I could write about it. Paradigm shifts like that don't come quickly, or easily. I've had a few major paradigm shifts in my life - from atheist to Christian , and later to Catholicism - and it's a disorienting thing every time. It starts with the proverbial 'pebble in the shoe' (something niggling that gets harder and harder to ignore) and takes time to even go from subconscious to conscious mind, to a time of discovery and 'why didn't I see this before??', and finally a bewildering sense how I could possibly have thought the old way because I'm now wearing all-new lenses on life. The ...

Thrown into to a new reality, then back to the old

Towards the end of August this year, Mr. and I suddenly faced a very different future to the one we had envisioned: at 42 years old - and he's 55 - I found myself pregnant again. Camping after our summer trip - and I've just found out I'm pregnant As it's been seven years since D(7) was born, we really didn't expect that. We would have loved more kids soon after D, but I just never got pregnant. Seven years on, we were pretty convinced that this was our lot. Two beautiful children, we really can't complain! So we needed a bit of time to digest that. A new baby, with siblings 8 and nearly 10 years older! And Mr. would be 75 when that child was 20... the maths was mind boggling. But hey - if that was our new reality, we were going to run with it! The kids certainly were excited about it, they're old enough to understand and yes, we told them; this is a family matter. I knew there was a chance this pregnancy wouldn't work out, but we felt they had a right t...

Home Ed Questions: what about socialisation?

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...