In which we catch up, yet again

We have been so busy I can barely remember what we've done so I'm not going to write about all of it. Or indeed much of it!

We went to a brilliant workshop on Egyptian medicine on Monday. It started with a 7 metre long time line, where 1mm represented 1 year and key events in Egyptian history were marked out along it.  It was a very clear visual of both how long ago the Egyptian civilisation flourished and how long it lasted, especially when put in context with the centimeter that represented Hannah's life!

The people running it are storytellers and presented themselves as Egyptian priests as physical cures were always accompanied by spells, which were, in effect, requests for the gods to help and not hinder the patient.

After hearing about Egyptian views on religion and medicine, we proceeded to make cures for burns, cataracts and joint pain. I tried the burn one, with appropriate spell, on the burn on my hand but it hurt a lot worse than without the cure. Maybe it;s because the "hair of a ram" was in fact a white nylon wig and I have a suspicion that the "milk from a mother nursing a newborn boy" may have been the milk of a cow kept in a shed with no calf of either sex.

Finally, we heard a genuine Egyptian story, of which the end was missing from the papyrus so we heard two different possible endings. In both, though, the faithful dog drowned which made Hannah and me cry!

On Tuesday, we got the results of Hannah's guitar exam and she passed with distinction. She is immensely proud of herself and so she should be...she worked really hard.

In which I catch up on the past week

Last Tuesday we went to the Ice Age Art exhibition at the British Museum, which was amazing. It drew parallels with more current artistic developments in a way that was really enlightening and although it was quite a wordy exhibition and we had to work hard to absorb all the info, we were both totally engrossed and neither of us was desperate to hit the shop before the end! We had some really interesting conversations off the back of it as well, especially about the way the female figures which are probably one of the most common form of paleolithic art, changed from the ones I always think of as typical, rounded, big-breasted, saggy-bellied earth mothers, to slender, pert-breasted, nubile young figures by about 14,000 years ago. Sexual objectification of women not a modern phenomenon then!

Afterwards, we got noodles from Wasabi and sat out in Bloomsbury Square to eat...on the grass, without coats! Today it is snowing.....the weather is weird!

Wednesday we went to Ireland to see a cousin I hadn't seen in 24 years. Not just Wednesday obviously...we went Weds am and came back Friday night! We had a fabulous time. We visited a wildlife park and the Cobh Heritage Centre where we learned about the famine of the 1840s, emmigration, transportation to Australia, the Titanic and the sinking of the Lusitania.Hannah also made 2 new friends and swapped addresses with one of them. This was one of those...."and they think home ed children don't socialise" moments as H asked if she could go out to explore the immediate area round my cousin's house, which is on a very quiet housing estate. Ten minutes later she was back with a new friend! I know it's impossible to say whether she would have regained the social confidence that school knocked out of her in those first (and only) two terms, but she's certainly not suffered from not being at school.

Saturday we were up at the crack of dawn to collect our friends and drive to Long Melford in Suffolk for the Kentwell open day. Yes, we have finally applied to do this. I am divided between excited anticipation and sheer terror! But the open day was largely fun and people were lovely and we should find out in a few weeks whether we are going to spend a week of the summer in 1559!

Sunday..not much

Today Hannah took her first guitar exam. We think it went okay, but was a positive experience anyway as she was very nervous going in but came out all smiles because the examiner was really nice! Okay, good....all caught up,,,,,BED

In which we plan a Sylvanian town

Hannah really likes Sylvanians so it seemed like a fun way to do some geography, to create an ideal Sylvanian town using images from catalogues and magazines and thinking about what a town would need to contain.

First she thought about that and made a list which looked like this:

"What facilities?

Theatre
Sports
Schools
Shops
Transport
Businesses
Parks
Houses
Halls
Town Centre
Church
Library
Hospital
Doctor's surgery
Museum
Police station
Bus stops
Train station
Roads
Town Hall
Swimming Pool
Gym
Hairdressers
Hotels
Beach
Camping facilities

We then got all her Sylvanian magazines and picked up lots of catalogues from the Sylvanian shop, then came  cutting out all the images she could find to fit the list, although not all were possible to find. So we did the best we could and cut out every small house, some larger ones and as many of the things on the above list as we could. I stuck 2 sheets of A1 paper together and asked Hannah to pencil in the roads. She created a market square and roads connecting the market and surrounding streets to residential areas, one of smaller terraces on one side of town and larger, detached ones on the other. She made decisions about which buildings to put where.

Right outside the town, she painted a river and we added a towpath and a bridge to allow access to the water and across it to the farms and golf course that made up about 1/3 of the paper. It took ages and I did a fair amount of the painting just because it was fun to work together and also it was occupying the whole of my dining table for about 2 weeks as it was. Gradually we filled in all the details:gardens for the houses; open spaces for play/dog walking; bus stops; car parks; trees and other plants and finally, with Hannah's agreement, I made an open public space with tubs of  flowers and a war memorial. When we finally finished this morning it looked like this.