Time to Chill and Play

We had a lovely trip to a Fire Station today, organised by one of the local Home Ed mums.  Blue Watch showed us inside all the different storage parts of the fire engine, had a chat about fire safety at home, and then *cue much excitement* took us outside where all the children who wanted to had a turn at squirting water through the hose, sitting in the fire engine, and wearing a firefighter's helmet and jacket.  My boys all wanted to, and were suitably thrilled with the opportunity.  Eldest is starting to feel a bit big for those sorts of thing, and wasn't sure if he wanted to join in, but I said if he liked, I'd take a photo of him that he could then edit later at home, and he was very keen on that idea -of course, once he had his turn he thoroughly enjoyed it :)

While we ate lunch we watched our newish Human Body DVD from the Rock n Learn series.  (We've had it a while, but the boys decided they wanted to watch it yesterday & then ran out of time - so lunchtime today it was).  It is American, so many of the spellings/ pronunciations are different, but the boys really enjoyed it, so I'll be looking out for more reduced-price dvds from the same series.  Conveniently for this Human body topic that the boys are all interested in at the moment, there are TV series on both CBeebies (Get Well Soon) and CBBC (Operation Ouch!), so we've been recording those and watched some today as well :)

This afternoon Eldest was back on the computer editing his photos (like mother, like son!), and Middle wanted to cook some shortbread with me that he'd found on the CBeebies website yesterday - here (minus the glace cherries).  It was a simple enough recipe, but as we're used to following 'grown-up' recipes, the quantities made were a bit on the puny side!  Next time I'd double the ingredients.  They were yummy though, so no problems there!

 

 

Other than that, today was another lovely restful & happy day - lots of stories, cuddles and giggles, singing silly songs and experimenting with our voices, games on CBeebies, measuring each other's heads (why are retractable tape measures to irresistible to the male of the species???), watching Deadly 60 and other programmes, playing with money and so on.  And hopefully more laid-back laughter to be had tomorrow.  What was set to be a really busy week has thankfully turned out to be no more busy than normal - and it's lovely having the time just to play & have fun with my boys while my brain reboots from its most recent wobble :) 

 

In fact it's so much fun I am making a philosophy of it: wobbles = time to chill and play.   Just focusing on fun rather than on assessing what they are learning (even in a low-key way).  Trying to measure the immeasurable is so stressful - not to mention guaranteed to be inaccurate!  So I'm not bothering this week.  I doubt I'll be able to stop myself watching out for learning progress on a permanent basis, and I'm not sure that would be healthy anyway - I just need to make sure it's not stressing me out - and more importantly, that it's not stressing the boys out.  We're not in school, we don't have to wait until half-term to have a week off if we need it... have I mentioned lately how much I love this Home Ed life...?!