Winter Sunshine

It was really sunny today, and I had a chance to wander round the garden and see how everything is doing:

Hollyhocks and sweet peas

Winter peas Meteor in a makeshift cloche

And all the poultry had the chance to sit in the sun and preen. Mary still hangs out with the chicks, or rather, they hang out with her:

They are getting so big!

The bunnies had a run outside too, which meant the guinea pigs had free range of the shed for a leg stretch (not that I can get pictures of them):

There was the most fantastic mushroom up the track, which Amber said looked like a song thrush:

I went and saw Nicky during the children's Latin lesson, and we agreed that we were both a bit short on inspiration at the moment. Hopefully a peruse of the yarn stash will produce results! I have started some mitts to match my raven Erssie Major hat:

It's a Rowan pattern for silk twist but I'm using Debbie Bliss' alpaca silk, which seems to be working better than the cashmerino aran I'd tried before. I've pretty much finished my Christmas collection, although having found the crochet hook that Nicky loaned me, I would like to make something for a friend in the blue and black alpaca yarn I bought but haven't really bonded with! Maybe it was knitting a moss stitch scarf in it that turned me off :-/

Rosie made a Christmas cake at Brownies:

which we will save until Christmas.

Yeah right!!

Amber made biscuits with Laura this morning, and they decided to have a tea party, which roughly translates as lay out plates on a blanket and eat all the biscuits.

Oh and I got my results for my two OU courses that I took this year: Grade 2 for S366 Evolution and Grade 3 for S369 The Geological Record of Environmental Change. I practically gave up in the summer so I'm pleased I did sit the exams. Meanwhile, back to the books for hard rock.....

Blue Belle and Baubles

Yesterday was another lovely autumnal day, and after a much-needed roast dinner and half pint of Black Dog at the Green Man, I pootled over to Nicky's for a CCG meeting. Lots to show and tell and she kindly furnished me with a 6mm crochet hook and some cream DK, among other things. We also started making plans for our CCG Christmas Party :-) I got to work with a reindeer bauble and finished my little mitts that I had started on the train. Oh and I made a little knitted heart tree decoration too:

The children arrived back from their father's and proceeded to spread gloom and arguments over my nice tranquil knitting-during-Countryfile scenario but after bringing the guinea pigs in to the lounge for a bit and then letting the rabbits hop around on the sofa, equilibrium was restored.

It was really chilly last night so I'm pleased I thought to put Maud in with the chicks for some extra insulation. Ida keeps flying out of the pen so I clipped her wings this morning but I'm still letting her and Mary out with Maud and the chicks during the day as they get picked on by the older hens and are a bit young for the full brunt of Henry's er, demands.

Ida the Blue Belle

Rosie started her Ocean Giants maths book this morning (by TickTock books) having finished Dinosaur Dig and we did a few pages of that and looked at my big Ocean book. She then copied a picture of an orca breaching, which I thought was very good in its simplicity:

This afternoon we went to town to try and get Amber some shoes but they were all horrible but I did get her a Pukka Pad for her farming lessons. I have asked her to research different types of livestock and she went on to the DirectGov website and looked up all about poultry. I am going to go over all the various crops and animals and management issues with her and hopefully build up a comprehensive 'textbook' for her to use. I have also been looking at the National Trust's MyFarm which we might enjoy...

London, Gloves and Guineas

I had a tutorial at the London School of Economics today for my Open University geology course, Understanding the Continents. I had to get up at some unearthly hour to get all the animals up - including the children. Having thrown Tristan, Amber and Rosie at my parents with a couple of dozen croissants as a contribution to breakfast, I got to the station, boarded the train and settled myself down with my knitting. The conductor came past and said he was very impressed, and that knitting was 'a lost art' :-) I realised afterwards that my gloves were on my lap, the gloves that I got from Great Dixter last year:

whereas what I was actually knitting was some little mini mittens...I have a nasty feeling he thought I'd knitted my gloves! Oops.

The tutorial was great, and I met Dr Jason Harvey who is about my age and has done a huge number of exciting things but hey, I bet he doesn't own ducks. He went through the basics of geochemistry and ternary phase diagrams and got all excited about peridotite, it was fab. Although I did get a bit lost trying to find the loos before the lecture so frankly I was pleased to make it back to Room 3.21 to be honest. I also met a couple of people I knew from other courses which is always nice. I hadn't seen Steve since we did a Summer School at Malham Tarn and we spent our time freezing out on the moor; he's from Kent so it was a bit disconcerting for us soft Southerners to have snow in May. Anyway, I charged back to London Bridge having elbowed my way through all the Christmas shoppers and got back in daylight, so the poultry had a leg stretch.

I cleaned out all the animals yesterday, so while I was doing the guinea pig hutch, we made up a little run for them to have their first taste of grass:

There was a lot of squeaking but they did have a bit of a nibble on some clover. Rose then brought them in to the lounge for a cuddle, and ended up with a sort of guinea pig neck-warmer. She said they were a bit tickly!

Girls

Well, my daughters do have their moments when they drive me completely crackers, but I must say, they excelled themselves this morning. They said I had to wait upstairs as they wanted to do a surprise for me, so I grabbed my knitting and scooted upstairs faster than a rat up a drainpipe.

I had to come down and retrieve the ducks from nextdoor's garden and so asked the girls if they could put the kettle on for my coffee. The next thing I know, they brought me this:

Ahh! They called me downstairs and they had tidied up the kitchen for me! It was the lounge next so after another few rounds of knitting, I was summoned downstairs again:

And this on the storage heater:

When they're good, they're really good :-)

Powercut

I was pulled up from a deep sleep at 4am by Rosie, who was worried as it was so dark. Ah, forgot to turn the nightlight on, but no, it was a powercut. Again. It had gone off at 1am according to the timer on the immersion heater, so the night storage heaters were cold, as was the water out of the hot tap, and a phone call to the emergency power people said that they didn't know what time it would get fixed. I had genuinely earmarked the day for housework but couldn't do any without hot water and power...such a shame :-) So, after some studying, where I finally sorted out my harzburgite from my lherzolite (mantle peridotites) I picked up my hook and needles and set to with some Christmas decorations.

Having seen Nicky's wonderful creations, I did some mini mitts:

A sprig of crocheted mistletoe:

A tiny Santa hat from a blog called naturalsuburbia:

And a mini Christmas pud decoration from PlanetJune's blog:

It's quite dinky and I really like it.

It hasn't been total neglect on the parenting front; T had a new Conn Iggulden book from Charles for his birthday - Wolf of the Plains, about Genghis Khan - so he stayed in bed for the morning reading that, and Amber unearthed her Usbourne 50 Science Experiments book and played with my iF poetry app, recording herself reading Shakespeare on my iPad. Rose cleaned out the bunny/guinea pig shed and helped Amber with the experiments. We looked at onion DNA, illustrated static electricity with pepper, and of course, made some cornflour gloop:

Ah, I love home-ed!

Sunny Sunday

It was a beautiful autumn morning and I forgot that Tristan and his friends had probably not gone to sleep that early, but Henry the cockerel was in full voice, as were the calls once I let them out.

Joanna watches a plane pass overhead

Maud

Tristan's friends left after the second round of breakfast, one of which was a fry-up and the other was Nigella Lawson's cinnamon buns:

Yum

and after I cleared up all the KFC and crisp wrappers and ketchup-smeared plates I thought Scruff could do with a decent run somewhere without undergrowth for him to disappear in to. The beach was really the only option so I thought the nearest beach with nice memories was Birling Gap, where I went on a Summer School trip a couple of years ago. It was glorious, although we had to go sufficiently far away from the steps for the 'Please Keep Dogs on Leads' sign to become less relevant. I was revelling in the geology, the girls were rock-pooling and Scruff was keeping his stitched ear out of trouble.

Quick update

I don't seem to have taken any pictures as it is always too dark outside! But Maud is well, Scruff is on the mend and I am feeling quite inspired by homeschool since out trip to Arundel. Tristan came down the other day and said he wanted to improve his handwriting so in a panic I looked for the lined paper and frantically unearthed his dictation book before the inspiration left him! We did some practise but he is a typical boy with his writing and all spiky and squashed up but after a while he relaxed a bit and not everything looked like a variation on a 'v'...

Charles and I went to the garden centre today and managed to spend over an hour and well, er, a few pounds there. We got raspberry canes and blueberry bushes for the hens' enclosure and some little clematis which were on offer, as well as lots of 50p packets of seeds as they seem to have topped up the bargain bucket. We came to the conclusion that we are as bad as each other and should probably be chaperoned, as a bored child in tow would have curbed us somewhat. Especially on a double points weekend. Anyway the raspberries are now planted and I will pop the blueberry plants in tomorrow. I have some in my borders that my parents got for me from the Isle of Wight but the hens love them and they are so pretty and quite like my acidic soil. I have planted some seeds for next year as I am missing being in the garden, but I noticed my delphinium is pushing up a flower spike! In November!! Unbelievable.

On the crafting front, I am continuing with the granite stitch scarf and re-knitting the slouchy beanie that I had to undo. I made some carrot soap the other day so that is curing on a rack on the table; I am waiting for someone to take a bite out of one of the blocks. I used some tea tree oil too as I made it primarily for the spotty teeenagers, although it looks pretty all flecked with orange.

Tristan has his chums over for a sleepover tonight and has asked if they can take over the lounge, so I am slightly holed up in my room but thanks to iPlayer and my crochet hook it should be a fairly pleasant evening :-)

Ducks Galore

Charles had a day off today so we took him to Arundel Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, as he'd never been. It's a special place for me as it was where I realised that with so many superb resources around us, the children would benefit from spending their time at places like the WWT reserves rather than stuck in a classroom, and my decision to home-educate was made. It also reminds me of my childhood as we used to visit there when I was little and feed the Hawaiian geese...I think they are probably the same geese as they are very long-lived. Tristan even put down his iPod long enough to feed them:

As did the girls:

I was in duck heaven :-)

It was a beautiful day, unbelievably mild for November:

How anyone spots a bird in that lot is beyond me, let alone fathom whether it is a sedge, reed or Cetti's warbler...

They have electric boats at the reserve and we took a trip, and the guide stopped the boat for us to watch one of the resident water voles in the bankside vegetation. It is such a lovely way to see the wildlife as it is silent and drifts along gently - a bit like a hot air balloon but on the water. The ducks were starting to roost in the reeds as we went past, so it was a great way to round off our visit.

Charles also had a chance to see the guineas:

Milly

Molly

Cute aren't they? All my ducks were fine in our absence, and I had let the big chickens out for a run this morning before we left. While they were in the field I put lots of treats in their run for them to enjoy through the day, but as soon as I went back in the kitchen I heard Henry bok-bokking in the run and he was picking up all the sultanas and corn and showing the girls. Well I tried :-/

More Trips to the Vet...

Yesterday we bathed Maud as she was a bit smelly. She didn't seem to mind too much:

We then blow dried her with the hair-dryer which she really enjoyed. She is looking more spruced up now and has a more tea-tree than farmyard fragrance. We took her to the vet in the afternoon with Willow the bunny as she needed her foot checked from when she was bandaged up a month ago. We also took Scruff who was pertrified, to say the least. He urinated on the vet's shoes and then went and whined in the corner.

The verdict with Maud from the extremely helpful vet was that she was a bit underweight, suffered a bit at the beaks of other hens, had a dodgy leg and given she has only been laying soft-shelled eggs, I would be entitled to take her back to Middle Farm and get her replaced, as usually their hens are very good so she might be a bit of a dud/runt of the litter type hen. Of course, Maud would not be kept if she were returned...so I got her some antibiotics and gave in to my sentimentality. The vet said it was a head vs heart decision and he would be similarly exercised as to which way to go. Bless him, he only charged me £11.56 for the consultation and medication.

I also finished my little green hat which is much less like Smarty and much more like the Rowan Harvest Beanie but well, I like it:

I need to take Scruff to the vet now; as I said to Nicky, might be an idea if we stay in the waiting room and the vet views his wound with binoculars from a distance. Or look - I have a picture! And a webcam! Why can't we have a virtual consultation?

Anyway whilst trawling the internet for a pattern for a knitted periodic table, I came across this which made me chuckle: