“I am worried that when I am older and I get married up, i won’t live with Mummy and Daddy!” 

“well you don’t have to live somewhere else, Uncle Neil is married and he still lives in the same house as his Mummy, if you want you can move out or you can stay.”

“but what if i don’t want to be married up”

“you don’t have to get married, only if you meet a boy who you want to get married to, and who wants to get married to you (for the right reasons!)”

“what if i don’t want to get married but the boy who wants to marry me up marries me up, and..”

“that’s what Daddy is for, Daddy will make sure that no one marries you, if you don’t want to”

“Daddy is my make-surer… what about henry?”

“Well mummy is Henry’s make-surer.”

So Daisy is now less worried, I am her make-surer which is taking on all sorts of extra meaning, apparently only the person who is a make-surer should carry the person they are the make-surer for. This means I shouldn’t carry Henry, especially when Daisy wants a carry. 

School is endemic in our culture. Everyone goes. Everyone assumes that Daisy will go. CBeebies devotes hours per week in attempting to brainwash her into wanting to go. No matter how hard I try, the rest of the world is making school sound so utterly appealing, that I’m having some difficulty in getting her to accept being home educated.

Don’t get me wrong - she’s three. She doesn’t have anything like enough information to make an informed choice, and I’m the parent; I’m the one who gets to make the choice, and I have no problem with it being a unilateral decision, particularly in the early years. But it would certainly make my life easier if the whole of modern culture wasn’t preoccupied with trying to make school seem fun.

Most of the children who GO to school, of course, would describe it at “boring”, and not fun at all, but since it is seen as an inevitability, there’s actually a fairly robust conspiracy to keep that information away from three and four year olds. Adding to the confusion is Daisy’s own ideas of what school is like, and what home education would be like; a few times, she’s expressed an unwillingness to have a “home-school” because she perceives that it will necessitate replacing our furniture with school-type furniture, and then where will we sleep, and sit to watch the telly? She doesn’t comprehend, because she’s three, that the purpose of school is concerned with education*, and it’s the education part that we’re interested in addressing at home, and no matter how carefully I try to explain and reassure, I’m fairly confident that her head is full of bizarre and confused assumptions about what it all means. For example, I imagine that any convincing attempt at school-at-home will have to include the taking of a register, in order to be accepted at authentic. Still, that shouldn’t take long: “Daisy?”, “Here.” All done.

Maybe I need to start asking her to think about WHY people go to school, as a route to understanding the concept of education, as distinct from school attendance.

* Actually, whether the purpose of school is education, is wide open to debate, and worthy of it’s own post. Education is the bit of school we’re concerned with, however.

• April got 24 posts, It should have gotten this one but i forgot, still that’s 133 posts for the 1st four months of the year. we also had 17 comments.

• Google Reader says : “From your 189 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 6,784 items, starred 95 items and shared 13 items“

• I’ve Sent 90 emails from home; about two days worth in work. 

• I’ve made 17 facebook status changes

• I got my new camera this month, and i’ve taken 411 piccies so far - best of which is the rabbit, but really that was Ruth - which is a few more than last month. 

• Google says i’ve only searched the internet 494 times in April it’s obviously the internet is getting smaller. 

• I actually finished two books in april. Pies and Prejudice and Eats shoots and leaves. that means i’ve read 7 books this year. not that impressive but i was curious as to just how many I do read. 

At the time, we didn’t anticipate a need for rules in reading the site, largely because no-one we knew read it, and we therefore didn’t really care how the tiny number of readers that we had, chose to go about it.

That was then. Now, almost everyone we know reads the blog (you can’t argue, unless you don’t read it, in which case you’re not reading it, and can’t argue). And this leads to a lot of conversations that start with “We went to X, last week,” and end a split second later with, “Yeah, I know, I read it on your blog.”

And actually, that’s a bit demoralising. It leaves me with not much to talk about. And the potential solutions to this problem are either, 1) stop blogging, in the interests of conversation; or, 2) get you lot on board with conversation part of it.

I like blogging. So I chose 2) - impose my rules on everyone else. So, here goes: it is not appropriate to respond to something I say with “Yeah, I know, you blogged”. If that means letting me bore you with a tirade that you’re already perfectly familiar with, then so be it - everybody needs a place to rant. On the other hand, it is perfectly reasonable to begin a conversation with “I read on your blog that you went to X last week…?” You know, as a conversation starter, rather than a kill-it-dead-in-it’s-tracks thing.

Glad we cleared that up, everyone.

Saturday: Lye-in (for me anyway), swimming, neighbourhood café, lady lever art gallery, port sunlight garden centre and some potting up of plants.

Sunday: Church, more plant potting, trip to B&Q even more plant potting and it’s 4:30pm.

I think a reflection on how stressed we are is that Saturday really began with an argument - we don’t really do arguing, I think it’s a sense of perspective thing, so may things aren’t that important in the world to fall our over; only very occasionally does it all go out the window and we will argue about anything today was one of those days.

We did eventually get everyone into the swimming pool,and I’ve already talked about it, Henry thinks its loads of fun, and Daisy is completely traumatised - it was the break in the day we needed though to get over our morning and go for a nice lunch in neighbourhood. a very very nice café on Woolton Road, they took unusually long to serve us but this just helped us unwind into the day, by reading some random books from the side.

By the time we’d finished dinner* (around 3pm) we still weren’t ready to go home so we paid a visit to the lady lever art gallery in port sunlight, it’s one of the very few of the local museum places we haven’t been to / done to death so it was a nice trip: For a quick review; quite a few pieces of art porn, i.e. porn dressed up as art and some really really old things.

Port sunlight as you may or may not know is where Ruth and I got married, something Daisy was trying to get to grips with (the idea of your parents not being together a bit much for a 3 year old we think).

After the art gallery, still not quite ready so we walked up to the port sunlight garden center; just for a wander now; and spent about £60 on plants, hanging baskets and window boxes, which of course meant that when we did get home we had to start planting all this up in the garden.

Ruth got quite a lot of bedding plants, and I bought some herbs, mainly so I can pretend I am like Jamie Oliver.

We did of course by two much, and yet not enough so we’ve had an extra trip to B&Q today, and now we have three window boxes (two on window bottoms, and one on the floor) which are full of flowers; and some quite upset looking herbs. It’s done nothing but Rain since we went all horticultural which has resulted in the rather strange sight of me watering plants in a torrential downpour.

-

* you will notice how I interchange lunch and dinner, this is because I am not a ‘proper’ northerner being only from Liverpool and all. while many people will tell you dinner is a northern thing, it’s not it’s a lancastrian thing, and liverpool as we all know is not in Lancashire.

So..

Don’t panic, there is no need to rush, I haven’t spoken to Waterstones but I am sure they will have enough copies of my new book, “Look Stupid… Just buy it - the idiots guide to buying without thinking” (£25.99)- there will be more than enough copies to go around, I repeat don’t panic!

We’ve taken Daisy to a number of different swimming pools since, and at every one she’s sat on the steps and refused to get wet passed her navel. It’s been hard to judge just how much of that was down to different pools and how much was down to her fear.

Today we took her to Garston pool, which is the one that Daisy and I have been to loads; if you where to ask Daisy this would be ‘our’ swimming baths. Well today Daisy was a complete shadow of herself compared to the last time we went.

The good thing about Garston is that it has a shallow entrance; you can effectively walk in. Last time we went, which is some time ago, Daisy was jumping in of the side, going to the bit where she had to stand of tip toes, and splashing me quite a lot - this time, just about waded in to not much past her knees.

It’s enough to make you quite angry really - we had a good talk afterwards and Daisy told me she was basically scared because of what happened with the man, and she might go under the water again. I told her that she had Mummy and Daddy looking after her, so it wasn’t going to happen again, but she doesn’t really believe me.

We tried all the things we could think of, letting a little girl play with Daisy’s float, taking henry into the Deeper water, talking about how big girls like water, and how Daisy did loads of stuff when she was a little girl. I for one have ran out of ideas - I have no remaining strategies for getting my daughter who is now petrified of water anywhere near a deep bit of a swimming pool.

I can sit at my nice big desk, with the windows wide open, and almost no disruption. We’ve got a bit of a resourcing issue at work at the moment; namely we have loads to do, and not enough people to do it. So it’s drastic action time as I am coding - hence the whole at homeness of it all.

One thing about working from home is you can get into the zone. I’m sure you all have your different zones, with programming it is said it takes 15 minutes to get into the zone and only 10seconds to get pulled out of it again, So sitting alone is a good way to go if you want to get something done; it’s a lousy way to go if you want to talk to anyone, or not get a bad back.

That’s why today I made sure I took lunch. If I was in work, i reasoned, I would take a break and go for a walk to clear some space in my head. It’s just when you are home it’s a much nicer walk - I went to greenbank park, and I took my camera.

I did get quite a lot of work done too. mainly through the process of ignoring my email. I’m a bit scared to look actually.

Chirk Castle is the last Edward I castle still lived in today (as you will know if you followed the link above).

[Historians look away now!] Edward I was the King who built loads of castles in North Wales - he spent £80,000 on castles in the 1280’s that’s a lot of money. The Main aim of the castles was to keep the Welsh quiet. They didn’t really think England was all tat great thanks, and much preferred the hilliness of snowdonia and the wild coast that was to become scouse-wales. Edward I (who was the fourth King to be called Edward) was recently voted 94th Greatest Briton - maybe because he conquered Wales, or maybe because he did quite a lot of law reforming.

None of that really tells you about Chirk Castle, except why it was built. As it is the only castle of that time still lived in, it doesn’t really resemble a 700 year old Castle it’s more of a stately home squeezed into a castle. It’s still very interesting and warm. unlike those ruined 700 year old castles. the Café is nice, and there where chickens in the car park.

New Camera

Really for us it was an opportunity for me to try out my new camera. The weather wasn’t great, but still we got some good shots. The zoom is cool; We have some fab shots of animals, the type you think you are going to take with your camera, only to discover you have a dot in the middle of a field of grass; well on my camera you get a full picture of the animal.

The Colours are really good to. It’s not until you get a decent camera do you realise just how over saturated some cameras can make photographs - of course this means I will have to start taking pictures of everything again. for one it’s 8 mega pixel which means good shots can be blown up real big and stuck on the wall.

Eats, shoots and Leaves, as I am sure you all know, is a book about punctuation. It’s the ideal book for Ruth; but I’ve been shying away from it, Mainly because I’m pap at spelling never mind punctuation. I also read the first couple of pages a while back; and I didn’t get any of the jokes.

Now, as you can no doubt tell by my liberal use of semi-colons, I have read the book all the way to the end.

It’s a fantastically well written book. I don’t really want to criticise anyone who has managed to get published, but comparing just the writing of this book with Pies and Prejudice, really doesn’t do Stuart Marconi any favours. I think one of the reasons I took so long to read his book was the style and the pace. In contrast Lynne Truss knows how to write, she’s quite funny too.

It also does a really good job of explaining just where all the funny little marks are supposed to go. It’s of course still quite confusing; there are 17 rules for commas, not all of which make sense, or are easy to follow; There are other bits, where even experts can’t make up their minds; and there are several ways of doing the same thing, most of which are wrong at some point.

I’m going to make a concerted effort, at least for this week, to improve my punctuation. but I have to admit to being a little intimidated; because now everybody is looking, they will notice how bad I am at it.

she does at one point despair of illiterate book reviewers, so I’m stopping here.