Summer is going on just a bit longer...

A quick post just before Ramadhan and some random pictures from the summer (which is reappearing, much to my tomato and chilli plants delight!)

This is why there are v few safe places to put things inthe kitchen!

A fine harvest(!?) if you consider the plants were practically dried up sticks that somehow managed to come back to life. There are more to come if Hz doesn't get to them first...

Ramadhan Mubarak, may it be beneficial to you all amin!

The Outings!

Foteviken Viking museum: with our Viking guide

Inside the reconstructed Viking houses, partaking in a little pretend feasting...

The boys seemed to want to remove the teeth from these jaw bones, they were unsuccessful.(which was fortunate, see later)

M and Biryani marvel at the sight and feel of fox hides. I couldn't bear to touch them! It was a very hands-on museum.

Viking weapons which you can imagine were highly popular!

Battering some 'silver' left over from coin making.

Teaspoon, desertspoon or just plain greedyspoon?

Some more manly viking activities, chopping wood.

and then a chance to make it in to something, Viking style.

Making flour, a fellow tourist from Ghana said they still use the same equipment there.

Did you notice how many of the pictures involved the kids touching things? Well, I have calmed down now, but the friendly guide told us we can touch as try anything in the museum as long as we don't take it home with us. One other member of staff decided otherwise, and basically made one of my kids cry and I had tears welling, as 'This isn't a playground'. We had moved a few items, shut a few doors, nothing broken, nothing destroyed. Ok, so I'd had to call them down from the roof of a house and advise not to wave swords like a real battle, but here was no harm done. I ended up not saying anything except trying to calmly explain that we'd been told they could touch things. I really felt like having a go after my kid's tears appeared as did DH, but we didn't want to be chucked out as the kids had been enjoying it so much.

And now from wood to plastic as we enter Legoland Billund

only these photos as DH took them and most had the kids in, I stayed behind with the little'uns.

Now it's been back to school, with all 3 big ones in the same school! The season of timetables, homework and routines!

A surprise of sorts..

Probably not a frequent activity amongst home educators, but those of us with schoolkids have to be on the lookout for slips of paper sent home from teachers. Well, I have been relying maybe too heavily on them being delivered into my hands, and so yesterday I needed to use one of the kids' rucksack and what did I find? The school note informing us that school starts the day after tommorrow!! Normally their school goes back a week after the mainstream in the early 20s of August but not this year apparently. This summer holidays has been characterised by the first half trying to get the car sorted and therefore doing things close to home. In between has been hub going off here and there in Europe with plane related things, swimming school, and a final flurry to use to do those activities for which I had free entrance tickets etc. I still have 2 activities planned but they will now have to be postponed to a weekend I suppose, alhamdilillah, But I am hoping that I can go somewhere more than half and hours drive away from home before Winter hits, just to check out the rest of the world is still there...



So here are some close-to-home snippets:







M conquering the climbing wall




Biryani playing with the neighbour's grandchildren's bubbles (always a hit with 3 year olds!)

Hz's favourite area of our park to wander about without being told 'Nooo!' and a big flagpole to try to shake down....

An egg H found (isn't it the wrong time of year, it was too small and round for a chicken's egg).

and the hunters stalk their prey...

The prey

A snippet of conventional education stuff..

I've been doing a bit of English work with the boys: S doing spellings along with word meanings when they come up. I take words from the series of Unforunate events books he's been reading. Last year or maybe it was the year before, these were recommended to me, but he found them too wordy. Now they're about right for him. We've been doing words like 'mischief' 'orphan' 'assume'. M seems to have the greatest difficulty spelling dipthong vowels (like many children I expect) and their various spelling, e.g. 'ow' 'ay'. This ends up being a difficulty with homophones e.g plane, plain.
H is really needing to practice his writing, and I can see the effect that left handedness has on it (ie makes it harder) He's never been keen on putting pen to paper, drawing etc. Funny, he' s just asked me if he can do some drawing, did he read what I was writing from across the room?
Today H has just asked me how cement is made and can we make some! After looking it up, it seems little chance of this being possible as we need a stone crusher, and an oven that goes above 1000C (mine only does 250C) so maybe we'll head out to the sandpit and make some pretend cement.

Just back from the beach..

Today's been a hot one after a long batch of 'showery' weather. So we went down to the local beach this evening. Fun was had flinging stones into the water, a dolly was lost and found and we saw what turned out to be not too serious ambulance and fire engine episode.

With great difficulty I got online..

I’ve been wanting to blog for days now, just things happen and there’s neither time nor energy to document anything. Just barely enough to live it..
We’ve started swimming school, and S’s been having mixed feelings, (tiredness, trepidation..) however the last were positive as his teachers have been pleased with him. As the other children have failed to turn up he’s had 2 personal teachers. M’s group was also scantily attended so there’s one to one teaching.
We went out on another one of my ‘walks’ (kids must wish I had never done Duke of Edinburgh’s award). We took the fishing nets in a hope to do a bit of river dipping. I wish I could show some photos here, but I couldn’t locate the battery charger for the camera. The stream where we normally baffle passing Swedes by playing pooh sticks had almost completely dried up. Either it’s the recent hot weather (although there has been quite a bit of rain recently) or maybe the nearby housing developments are taking it? The flies and mosquitos were bothering S a lot, so we walked on, and did find a bit of stream with enough water to contain some animal life. Some, what I assume were minnows ,seemed uncatchable (I feel there’s a proper word that I could use instead but it escapes me) but they managed to get some insects, dead and alive and plenty of stones. We continued to the man-made playground (as opposed to the natural one of the woods and streams) as the mosquitos were just too much. Biryani ran with me to empty the jar of wildlife into the river as I suddenly remembered the lid was on tight and they might run out of oxygen. (H thought they’d be alright as they had water as well!). As I ran along with her, having left Hz in S’s care, she looked so adorable with a cheeky grin tightly holding my hand. Sandals had been cast aside, as do most of my children nowadays. (Too much Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer having been watched. I keep reminding them that even he had a bath once a week.) On the way back she ran independently, and the easy flow of running showed that she’s now transitioned fully away from toddlerdom.
Today’s been a bit of a Lemony Snicket day as we got most of the series of Unfortunate events Books PLUS the DVD out of the library. S has also just been constructing a grappling hook out of wool and pipe cleaners.
M has just announced Biryani is counting our spoons. I thought I heard them being banged about, so at least a second wash for them is worth it.
Oh no they’ve now just been thrown on the floor and gathered up by M to show me.
They’ve been keeping up with bits of study (Arabic reading, Quran, English) and actually asking to do it. Before you faint, they’re only allowed their computer time if they’ve done something brain-worthy.
Hz’s communication is coming on, he whole hand points, and now says ‘ooh’ for pain, and anything hot and sometimes just for the sake of it.
Car is fixed finally, so hope we can have some excursions inshaAllah.

You know how blogs tend to show..

those dreamy days of summer, plucking cherries from the trees in our park (after over 5 years here I realised how close our PYO really was)

Tree climbing and hugging...

and just getting the chance to go 'wow, mashaAllah' .

and do a bit of arty stuff...

Well, below the contrast of in and outside is shown as if waking from that dream into :

REALITY OF LIVING WITH A ONE YEAR OLD :

The blockades...

The only way to prevent acrobatics from kitchen tables...

aargh..

aaaaaargh!

AAAAAARGH!!

There are things to do round here..

In the local school's yard (ignore the cig butts) the kids can play innebandy (street hockey), skateboard, play footy, and roller blade.

In the house those plastic bricks never seem to lose their appeal...

'It's an I' I am proudly informed and I prepare to be defeated at Jenga.

But oh how I wish our car could get fixed, and we had some money to get out of this place, I'm starting to go a bit nuts... But now and again I get a little solice out on my balcony, with the surviving tomato plants thriving (and they now are a lot larger than in this pic, with a few tomatoes on)

There is a green finger or two on my hands then..

Hz's permeating presence

Hz’s motor skills still continue to expand, as he climbs on everything (stools, tables, beds etc) and even tries to scale the kitchen cupboards/ dishwasher as if he is Spiderman, barely hanging on with his fingertips, toes scraping up the sides of the cabinets. He’s just worked out how to get off the bed too without it being head first. He’s realised that things can be placed in as well as chucked out of containers. I took the time to watch time for a few minutes the other day:
Put brick in box, tipped it out, tried again to put it in, misses. Put box on sofa and puts brick in, this time successfully.
Favourite ‘toys’ are: Computer mouse, dishwasher (buttons and knob), cooker (knobs including ability to twist off the safety device), toilet seat (I was perusing eBay for something to make the doors safe for little fingers and saw toilet seat locks, huh! I thought why on earth would you need one of those- now I know). He’s the first child to think the toilet bowl is another sink to wash in uurrgh!, mop, my plants.
He’s starting to use some consistent ‘words’. So far it’s ‘nana’ for anything edible, including me! And ‘naaaa’ for ‘more’. So more bread would be ‘naaa nana’.
Really it is a difficult, but cute time of life. It is almost impossible to get anything done during his waking hours, and you have to clear the kitchen table pretty quickly as he has a good swiping action. We are minus a few cups and plates as our kitchen floor is tiled, good job I don’t have any posh china.
We’ve finally got the locks on the bathrooms sorted out so you can go to the loo in peace, but now are thinking we need to put locks on the outside of the doors too. And have I mentioned the blockades around the house? The computer is surrounded by cupboards/ boxes which we have to clamber over to access the computer. The kitchen doorway is occasionally blockaded with a big box if DH or myself need to get on with some work on the kitchen table. We should really get a gate (there’s no door so can’t just put a lock on) but I expect the other kids will leave it open and by the time we get round to fitting it he’ll have grown out of this ‘exploratory without fear of consequences’ phase.

Some more notes from the trenches..

S’s questions continue, for which I’m grateful:

‘Why does the moon affect the waves?’
Other diverse topics enquired after are: uranium, invention of pizza

Biryani:
‘H is a gangster, I’m a star’

And on another occasion when she’d been with the boys to Jummah prayer, and her Dad asked her why she didn’t want to wear a hijab like her friend, she said
‘I’m a gangster’ oh dear..

‘Come to my class!’ (the ‘a’ is a short one as in the US pronunciation, again oh dear..!) The she continues to try to write with a broken pencil while sporadically putting up her hand. This was soon after the open day at the boys’ school, so she must have been taking something in.

Biryani sits and waits for the computer to come on, and reads out ‘S-O-N-Y' from the monitor. The alphabet is a bit hit and miss, but ‘S’ is a favourite and she will remind you that it says ‘sss’ like a snake.

She is showing some first signs of feeling remorse. She tore a piece of tissue:
‘I’m sorry to break this piece’

Me ‘What time is it?’ WHY was I asking a 3 year old??
Biryani ‘Ten six hundred’

Some notes about nappies:
Biryani decided the used nappy had to go in the blue bin, NOT the silver one. I had some patience with this apparent illogical behaviour, as I’d observed a friend’s child of a similar age wanting to wear his old nappy, NOT a new one. I think Biryani was also in the same mindset, and fished the old one out the bin so she could wear it. You’d think they were special jewel encrusted nappies. However I think it’s more a power game if you ask me…
　
M- playing dominoes with his brother and me.
‘I have to think good’ (not ‘hard’ then?)

Me ‘Which country did Gladiators come from?’
M ‘Russia?’
Me 'No, Italy’
M ‘Oh let’s not go there!’

Summer hols

It's the 2nd week of the holidays, and there is plenty to do around our area. They give out a brochure of activities, many of them free or not to expensive. The suggestions of sailing, wrestling, doing a spot of archeology and making a time capsule were not met with enthusiasm. They really want to just met their friends and chill out! So I think there is a time to just be, especially when you've been at the desks of schools for a great part of the year.
However the 2 younger ones have been to an indoor ball games camp, and have actually enjoyed this, and they are booked for more swimming lessons, as M especially needs practice. But only 1 and a half weeks in, S actually admitted he's had enough of the hols, and is looking forward to learning about more Swedish kings! (he's already read one book this holiday about 1)

Other things going on: strawberries are being consumed.... (One of the few types of fruit and veg Biryani will eat. At the moment it stands at: Carrot (raw), granny smith apples (skin off), broccoli (v occasionally), avocado, and of course bananas). Actually now I write it down it's not too bad for a 3 year old.

'Someone's eaten them all' - these delicious fruits disappear as quick as sweets, mashaAllah..

and the marbles are out, it must be Hz's nap time

and it naptime must be over as they've headed outside...