Friday 11 December 2009

I wish I understood my life

I'm so confused. Everytime I try to find myself - I don't mean in Nepal in a headscarf but simply on my own blogthing in a cardigan and slippers - I end up changing my password and chasing my technological tail around an inscrutable screen for hours. So crap at modern life. Would have been happy sitting outside a nice old hut making little fat ladies or spitting pigment round my hand in a cave. I've been so desperate all week while my internet connection has been non-existent and then (up comes the roller-coaster car) very over-excited when Himself said all the lights on the box were on - then discovered the monkeys had deleted Safari (down goes the car) Alpha Male saves the world with no swearing (loop-the-loop). He's such a man. I wuv him. But then I am left with buttons and wires and my own sorry intellect. I have no idea what the difference is between my username, my password, my e-mail address, my real name, my mother's criminal psuedonym etc And I can't even spell that. Now I've been blinking at a humming soul-sucker for hours of my life I will never see again. And what have I got to say for myself when I finally 'find' me? Blah blah incapable of blah blah useless at blah blah god you're boring...... is this the best I can offer after a week of bubbling frustration at not being able to do my blog?

SO what have I done this week to justify my existence? (Here's the bit where I dazzle you with my grand self-sacrificing efforts in the name of envy-inducing home educating for my over-achieving darlings...ahh bollocks..) You're way ahead of me. We have been busy though. We made it up to the Tower of London on Monday - part of a group of 87 I think - and that was the 2nd group of 'us' to go. There are alot of us about. Himself couldn't cope with the thought of his own offspring loose on a train so we were loaded into the car - which meant extra mascara and a chance to flick through a Tony Robinson book (I only read kids' books) about Kings and Queens. Leopard Boy starts asking questions about the pictures and the next thing he wants me to just read page after page. If I'd taken it upon to 'Listen to this children...' I'd have got the usual raspberries but seen as an illicit activity - the nose twitches. We 'did' the jewels, the armour, the shop (cool chess sets), Raleigh's last place of blog, 'vote for whodidit' in the case of The Princes in... and naturally we 'did' the ice-rink. Well - I 'did' coffee and waving, two small boys 'did' souvenir shop catapulting and battering ramming. Daddy did grimacing and pleading for mercy. Minx did all the swirling and swooshing - in the rain. Happy as a pig in..... We'd lost Leopard Boy by then somewhere near Traitor's Gate. Gone off with his preferred adopted family - as usual. Do we follow all this culture up with related projects? Do we bollocks. But I did buy some postcards to stick in a pile marked 'scrapbook' and (another kids book) Tales from the Tower - which I've left on the coffee table. Got tomato sauce on it already. It's now one of us.

But how these things filter down. The next thing I know I've got a naked Thuglet and Rock Godling playing chess with our posh Lewis set (get us) - and no charged up cameras to catch the surreal scene. Chess. Isn't that what speccy Ask The Family kids do? My kids play chess.

Also this week I've been bullied into scraping the bird poo off the Xmas box and tree and dragging it into the (now re-arranged) grotto. No dead creatures - that's a bonus. No live ones either. Astounding. Just our bulging bags of weird stuff. Every year we make more weird stuff to squeeze into the box. I still don't actually 'get' why we all put a tree INSIDE our houses for a few weeks every year. And ours is sad. It's tinsel - that's fine. But it's brown. That's sad. But it is an extra incentive to completely smother it in weird stuff. And we have.

Also discovered another odd thing. Always knew that the Leopard Boy was allergic to pens but in a moment of educational responsibility I knocked up some pages for the small creatures on the 8 Times Table. We're working our way through at our own pace. Started with the 1 Times Table a few months ago. On a high we tackled the 2 T T. A few weeks later we reached Base Camp 4 T T. While we're on a roll, today was 8 T T. In case you're worrying I crack the whip too hard, we took about 3 years to get our heads round the Alphabet. We were beaming in glory at our eye tests the other day. But back to the pen thing.... the other day I caught the Leopard with a pen in his hand scribbling on the bathroom wall. Mouth open to yell I froze - overcome by the sight of him WITH A PEN IN HIS HAND. So proud. This morning he's voluntarily writing his 8 T T answers on the page, very well too but taking ages to work out each answer - which is kind of odd 'cos he's pretty good at the numbers lark - in his head. Then he gives me the pen. 'You write it down.' And then I couldn't write each answer down as quick as he was shooting them out. In putting down the pen it freed up his mind. Put a bat in his hand and throw a ball at him and it's as natural as picking his nose - but a pen.....

Cavemen didn't catch a mammoth with a pen.

What the bloody hell would I do with a mammoth?

It's time I left.

2 comments:

  1. that tony robinson book on kings and queens has seen us proud. i love it. thanks to that, we have drawn endless pictures of richard II as a christmas tree. see where home education can take us.

    and you can skin a mammoth and put it over your yurt.

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  2. And we could use the horn things for poking LA Inspectors. See how it all links up!

    Tusks. They're called tusks aren't they?

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