Thursday 24 October 2013

A couple of pics

The swimsuit -come- dress. I'm quite happy with this- I've not done anything with two slippy fabrics before, and most importantly Flower is very happy and wearing it lots. The skirt fabric came in a big bundle of freecycled materials, and I suspect the swimsuit is from when she was 2-3.
Princess is pretty handy with a sling, even with a great big extra long five year old!

A few days


Feeding the animals at Cannon Hall Farm,
Riding lesson,playing in the park are the pics today. There were more but updating by email has limits apparently.
Princess has continued to carve her elves, and keeping going with unprompted reading. She is very selective in what she chooses to read, and we are enjoying her independence.
Flower is enjoying having a selective diet- she's gluten free and doing really well with it. She's really happy with her own Flower-size sweeping brush ( full size cut down to suit her), and swept up loads of leaves outside, and helping inside as well. She's after her own wheelbarrow, but that will probably wait until spring, when we know how tall she is then!
Both girls are attached to old swimming costumes, with Flowers from when she was about 2-3, really far too small. I finally managed to snip off the bottom, add a silky skirt and turn it into a dress. That photo will have to wait for another day though.
Carving- well, that's what dh and Princess do, but dh is a bit busy drystone walling for the next few months- he has a boundary wall to move, when he gets chance.
We have a spindle, and a very large amount of alpaca fleece turned up just at the right moment, so spinning will be another craft to fit in.
Some of the alpaca has found itself needle felted, but that's another one that'll wait for another day.
Time just flies at the moment. I barely have chance to breathe, so this blog seems to be a bit of a photo diary just to remind me of the gist of what we have been up to.
A few people we see occasionally are much less accepting of home Ed, and like others, my mind goes blank when put on the spot. Maybe I could say look at the blog for some things we do, rather than the ' whatever takes our fancy' general answer.
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Wednesday 16 October 2013

Baking for two

Princess has been nut free for years, but we are also trying a fortnight of wheat free to see if that helps Flower ( I'm not that hopeful- I suspect it'll be yeast and sugar she needs to cut out, but 1 step at a time).
Anyway, that meant we needed two baking sessions today, and I had to invent a rice flour biscuit recipe. I hate inventing recipes, it usually is spectacularly aweful, but thankfully, this time it worked.
Cinnamon gingerbread men made with wheat, and vanilla rice flour biscuits made with almonds.
Recent days have had the fire lit purely for toasting marshmallows, and I've managed to block some squares of a blanket I'm working on. I rarely block anything, but it is satisfying to see it making such a difference from raggedy square-ish shapes changing to very regular building blocks for a blanket.
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Sunday 13 October 2013

This week Eureka had some workshops for HE kids. We tried out two. One was, well, rather limited in format ( ask questions and write them down in a time limit) but princess enjoyed the novelty of it. The other had a lot of info about fictional robots, with some real ones as well, and most importantly chance to get hands on with one robot and lots of remote controlled cars.The star centre at Keighley sounds worthy of further investigations.

We've had cold germs this week. Yesterday was my turn to be pathetic, so I wasn't much help when Flower decided to make lots of jigsaws, and the girls made chunky fish fingers without any help from me until the cooking :-)
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Saturday 5 October 2013

Elves

Princess has been busy. DH ran a wood elf carving session last week, and Princess loved it. She's kept going on her own and made a family. She's planning on making some to sell, which might be quite handy as DH has some work next weekend. Thwaite Mills in Leeds ( very handy for motorway access) is having an activity day which will include elf carving, as well as apple pressing, wild food walks and much more. Sadly copying the leaflet here is beyond my technical abilities.
Rainbows pic is almost a selfie. His technical ( and non technical) abilities are coming on with leaps and bounds!
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