In which we catch up after some busy days

I started off yet another intention to write every day; it was good when I did that. I didn't the purely self-inflicted pressure to write something "interesting". Then it can be just a little ramble through our life, mainly for my own pleasure and if anyone else cares to read....good. You're all welcome.


Anyway, Thursday we went to the Science Museum with a small group of parents and children from my favourite Facebook home ed group, Learning Under the Trees. I'm not very good at recognising faces so apart from Tammie, I had no idea who I was waiting for, but am fairly blessed in being the sort of person who doesn;t find it hard to bounce up to random strangers and start chatting. While I was chatting with Janis, Hannah quickly made friends with her son, Nathan. An animatronic dog playing with an iPad, it transpires, is a really good ice breaker! Once Charlotte and Davinia and their families had arrived, we set off for a leisurely wander through the first gallery en route to the Launchpad. And that was that really.
By the time we got up there, Hannah had acquired another new friend in Abigail, no doubt attracted by a similarly funky sense of style and I was able to relax and chat while she went off and had fun. It was fairly quiet as we seemed to have hit the time when the morning school groups were at lunch and the afternoon groups yet to arrive! After lunch we went back there but by then it was massively crowded so we meandered round some other galleries (never been into that history of medical machines bit before and am so relieved I don;t need to be in an iron lung). Naturally there was shopping and goes on the simulator rides. I really wanted the genetics and DNA kit but at £25, no way! Wonder if Helen can get those in the shop????

There was an interesting incident on the way home. One of Hannah's new acquisitions was a tin of "science putty" and she was playing with it on the tube. As we stopped at a station, a piece of it fell out the door and I could see that Hannah's body instinctively went forward as if she was going to get out after it, but she stopped herself. It was quite fascinating, especially in light of all the work on the brain we've been doing, to see that her cognitive development has got to the point that she has impulse control!


Friday is art class. We managed to fit in some spelling and did some maths and literacy on Education City, then went off to Hertford for her lesson, where they finished off  the work they had been doing on cakes. Sadly not real ones, but a still life painting of small cakes and a large papier mache cupcake. I love this class; she has made some amazing things at it; my personal favourite so far is a terracotta warrior in clay, painted as the originals would have been. Will have to try to source some sort of work to provide her with background now. Afterwards I took her friends home and they had a short time to play, then we came home, ate some dinner.

In the evening we were out again, to see a production of Hairspray at the local senior school she will not be attending! A friend's brother was in it so her parents had got us tickets. Wow! I knew a lot of the cast, either because they go to Hannah's drama school or because they had come from the primary school I used to work at and it added to the excitment.  But it was really really well done and some incredible talents. The girl playing Miss Motormouth was mind-blowing. I absolutely believed that she had had a life full of suffering the indiginities and injustice of segregation and it brought tears to my eyes.

I didn;t know the story before we went which is a shame, it would have been good to do some work before hand on the civil rights movement etc, but Hannah always seems to be more motivated to follow up after the event than prepare before so will do something this week.

Today has been quiet, got up late and we have a friend sleeping over.

In which we go back to work

We've been a bit up in the air since my auntie died, but we are getting back on track now. We have done three trips to the RI this year so far: a schools event on the physics of rollercoasters and fairground rides, a family fun day on the brain and a schools event on maths and magic. Royal Institution, we are so grateful you re-thought your heinous plan to charge home educators four times the school price, because we love your events, we love science and we don't deserve to be penalised for choosing to home ed. (if a school child is sick and the teacher brings 29 kids instead of 30, so what, but if our child is sick, we can't come...which I suppose makes us less "reliable" but it's still not fair!)


Elsewhere, she has made a good start on the Maths Mindstretchers 9-11 book and has set herself the goal of finishing the whole book before she actually is 9. She is getting much more confident working with bigger numbers and she really enjoys it..


We have a few projects on the back burner, still working on one on the brain and now planning one about hiccups! But today we started looking at cave art for the history fair in March (experience has taught me that if we are not organised well in advance we will not be ready at all!). The plan is to do a short presentation on cave art with pictures and then provide a craft activity to go with it.

In which Hannah learns about life and death

Hannah has had some tough ones in recent months, in compassion and empathy and now grief. Since September I have been caring for my aunt who had dementia. Sometimes Hannah came with me and some days it was really hard. It was horrible for her on the days that the loved one she always called Nanna was cranky and snapped at her (those days were heartbreaking for me too), but it was also difficult on the days when her mind was completely absent and she rambled on about stuff that made no sense and somehow we had to find ways to reply to this nonsense without patronising or ridiculing her. Hannah struggled to forgive her for the snappiness, but we learnt a bit about how the brain works (thank you Royal Institution Christmas Lectures...very timely!) and talked about what we thought might be going on in Auntie's brain. We talked about how we would feel when she died and why it was important not to hang on to grudges. We wanted to be able to say afterwards that we had done our best and been at peace with her.

Hannah helped me feed her with gentleness and dignity. She managed not to laugh when Auntie told her the oranges and lemons needed to get back in contact with the gorilla...not in her presence anyway. Even when she was  invited to play with her friend who lived next door, she made a point of running in to say hello and give her Nanna a kiss.

On Saturday night Auntie managed to set some furniture on fire and I took her to hospital. No damage done, according to tests but they agreed to keep her in because of some concern about her kidneys. My mum and Hannah came up to see her, which I didn't want at the time but am glad she did have that last opportunity to see her. On Sunday, she died.

We have cried a lot, looked at photos and mementoes of her life and cried some more. Some people around us find tears and sadness uncomfortable, but I have always wanted Hannah to understand and accept her feelings as part of her, something to be expressed not locked away. The only real way to the other side of grief is through it.


I suspect it will be contraversial that Hannah is not only attending the funeral but giving a part of the eulogy. I firmly believe in in not excluding children from our rites and rituals; of course the rest of the family children will be at school but I could get her looked after by a  friend if I wanted to. But she wants the chance to say goodbye to her Nana. I will be giving the main it of the euology, but I asked her if she wanted to say something and she did. She sat down today and wrote this:

Nana was very kind, loving and friendly and she was just like a Nana to me. I have two of my own but I loved her just as much. She meant so much to me and my mum. She was like a mum to her. When I was a baby, our heating broke, but we went to Nana's house and Nana let us stay over and Nana looked after me. I loved her very much, god rest her soul.

In which Hannah makes a village in winter

Every day I put a different activity/treat/surprise in Hannah's advent calendar. Today she made a village in winter out of card, boxes, paint, glue, glitter (lots and lots of glitter) cotton wool and twigs. It went something like this:

First she painted the boxes to look like buildings.

 I love the details like the doorstep and the tiny stained glass window on the church

The houses remind me of an illustration from a Mr Men book

Next she made roofs out of black card and added some frosty glitter

When the biuldings were dry, she decided where to place them on a piece of cardboard and added a frozen pond made from silver paper.

I helped her collect some twigs, bits of pine tree and evergreen shrubs from the garden and she added some frost (yes, more glitter!) to them to make trees.

 Then she decided where to put the paths and I helped her make them out of black card. When the paths were in place, we coated the rest of the board in glue and covered all the available space in cotton wool snow.

When the village was finished, the Playmobil family and their dogs came out to play.

In which I wax lyrical about Hannah's drama school

This post is not about food (unless you count cake!). It's about Hannah's drama school and if you know me on Facebook, you may have noticed that I go on about it...a lot!

This is why.

To get why RAW is so important to me, you probably have to know Hannah beyond a superficial level as she is in so many ways hugely gregarious and socially confident. She is also a person who endures vast and often negative emotions. Like her father, she is prone to pessimism. Their glass *was* half empty but then someone came and *deliberately* kicked it over. (I daresay they find me with my periennial Tiggerish optimism and joie de vivre just as exasperating as I find their Eeyorish gloom.) Watching her at her riding lessons is often extremely uncomfortable for me; she always looks as though she is being led to her own execution! I offer her to stop any time she wants to but she insists she enjoys it...and I suppose she does, after her own perverse fashion. It is hard to see her slender frame weighed down by this expectation of misery and doom. I want her to find joy wherever possible, to exult in her own existence. She just doesn't.

Except for the day she accidentally went for a trial session at RAW. She wasn't meant to, although I'd always thought drama would be a good activity for her because she does like an audience! I just wasn't looking for it right then. We tried a trial at Perform when she first came out of school but it was way too soon and I am so glad now that that experiment failed. But her best friend was going for a trial and Hannah ended up going to "watch" and got drawn in.

When I came to collect her 2 hours later, she danced out, her eyes shining and declaring loudly that it was the best thing she had ever done (although it was not a huge surprise and very amusing to discover a year later that she had been invited to join in with the dancing and responded with "I don't dance!", then, on being told not to worry it was only a few minutes till singing started, "I don't sing!")

A year on and she still radiates enthusiasm in a way I have never seen before. She practices songs and dances constantly; she works so so hard to improve. This morning she told me that going to drama is like Christmas or birthdays. Every week she feels like that.

She has had so much to deal with over the past few years (the debacle of school, her dad's injury and long recovery) and she *worries* so much and takes everything to heart, so it is priceless to have found something that brings her this much happiness.

So that is why, collectively and as individuals, I love the people who make up RAW so very very much. I love how tolerant Jac and Dan are of her clingy affection, I love how she has great role models in the older students she admires, like Rosie. I love how much they appreciate her as the quirky individual that she is. I love how affectionate Sam is and how well she knows all the children as people. I love that they value effort and hard work as much as talent and I really admire the fact the Nicola has actually enabled her to sing. I love that they facilitate Hannah's friend's emotional needs because Hannah was like that only a short while ago and so many many people and organisations do NOT understand.

I'm sorry if sometimes this love manifests itself in a ridiculous sappiness that makes me look like an over-enthusiastic puppy slobbering on your trousers and I apologise to your waistlines that I so often express it in cake. But I love RAW and this is why!

In which real life provides material for discussion

is something I've seen on a lot of t-shirts and placards at home ed events and it's certainly proving true this week. I'd been trying to shield Hannah from hearing too much about what has been going on because it is challenging enough to get your head round as an adult. But it is all literally close to home. The tube station where Mark Duggan was shot is only about 5 miles from our house. We sometimes shop both at that retail park at Tottenham Hale and at the town centre in Enfield. And there was a shop looted and 3 police officers injured at the top of our road. I sat up half the night listening to sirens and following reports on Facebook while Hannah was sleeping, then tried to get on with normal life when she was awake, but today she became aware of what is going on.

It started on what would otherwise have been an idyllic afternoon. We went for a long walk in Epping Forest with the dog and some friends. Hannah and her friend found a small stream and paddled in it; they climbed trees and ran through grass pretending to be zebras. But away beyond the trees lies Enfield and from the Sony warehouse a thick black plume of smoke had been rising all day. It was unavoidable andmy friend, L, and I had to try to explain to the girls what had been going on. Man, that was difficult. And impossible to keep it from scaring the hell out of her. I explain as best I can, trying to tailor my own complex thoughts about society and state and police and family to the capabilities of a reasonably intelligent 8 year old. But I cannot promise her it won't come near us. It already has. and when we returned from our walk, my husband was watching the rolling news programmes compulsively so she was bombarded with images of shattered glass and fire.

In the end, knowing that there was no way to reassure her, we decided to be part of a solution, to be part of a community pulling together. In another part of the borough, the local MP was organising a Respite Centre for police and volunteers to come and have a cuppa and some cake (a LOT of cake actually..think a lot of people felt as we did, better for contributing something positive). So we went with some tea, coffee and biscuits to donate and offered our (well my) services to man the urn if needed. Tomorrow we are going to go through her wardrobe and her toy storage for things we can donate to a collection for the families made homeless in the first night's rioting in Tottenham.

I don't know how much she will have absorbed of the impromptu politics and history lesson, but she really wants to give things to children who have lost everything so I hope that she is taking away a very important lesson about who she is and her place in society.

In which I regret not being John Hegley

I'm reducing Hesfes to its component parts
By which I mean not only:
Taking down the tent and
Packing away the camping table,
The water containers, the mess tins
And the enamel plates and mugs;
Nor packing *all* the clothes,
Both worn and unworn for washing
Because it was so damp,
But also the bandanas and the copper bowls
And the friendships bracelets
And the friendships. That moment of
Spark as your mind meets another,
Joy explodes in the pleasure of like and like.
I'm taking with me addresses and phone numbers
And promises to see you again next year,
Intentions to do more, see more,
Take more photos, have *even* more fun.
Hannah dancing and still dancing,
Her temper in check, despite interruption,
All the very talented children,
Long conversations over coffee
Being roped to the chair by the dog
And after all that,
A little bit of envy that I am not
In fact John Hegley!