And the moral of the story is...

Yesterday we all had a great time at Cobtree. Seven families managed to turn up - with 14 children between the ages of 2 and 12. So rewarding to see such a wide range of ages all getting on. Some new friendships were made, and old ones reaffirmed - both amongst the children and the adults.

The Sainsbury equipment was a hit, with all of it getting played with. We've registered with Tescos now for their scheme, and we hope to get far more, larger equpiment for the future.

All in all an incredibly good time - shame that it turned out so humid and hot that a number of the little kids- and the adults! - found it too much. Still, we spent almost 3 hours there in total.

As for today, it has definately one of those days..

This morning Roarke locked himself out of his bus. Serves me right for laughing at him - an hour later I locked myself out of the car!

Worse thing was, the engine was running...

I'm sure I'm not the only one to do it - pull up next to the letter box, jump out the car, post the letters, drive off... only problem was that as I got out of the car in some way that I still can't work out, I managed (it would appear) to knock the central locking switch. Wind blew, car door slammed - and I was left outside!

Fortunately, it is an automatic, and was in park with the hand brake on. What worried me was I knew I only had an eighth of a tank of fuel and you aren't meant to run deisels dry.. I also had my mobile and my purse in the car.

Now this was only 500 yards away from the house, and fortunately I saw a neighbour walking by. He offered to stay with the car whilst I ran home to phone Roarke (who, give him credit, didn't call me any names!). Work kindly let him go and he had to get a cab (£10 down the drain) over with the keys. My biggest fear was the fact that a police car could have come past and done me under any number of minor traffic violations - not least of which the place in which I was "parked"..

Ho hum, said Pooh. At least whilst waiting for Roarke to arrive, with Joshua to keep me company, I was able to use the episode to cover some quite serious topics. I was honest to Joshua about just what I had done wrong, and drew some parallels. We talked about traffic laws, general morals, and also used it to higlight some spiritual lessons.

I guess that sort of transparancy is one of the (many) good things about home ed.

This morning boys had been working on their maths - mainly online. They used the BBC (or rather Samuel did), Count On, Maths Is Fun, and Murderous Maths.

I worked through one of William's sticker learning books with him - numbers and letters - and then they all also watched some Class TV.

In the afternoon I had to take William for his "preschool" boosters. The kid was amazing - didn't cry, flinch, and just said "ouch" at the second one (which does sting)! The nurse was one I hadn't met before and she asked lots of very positive questions about home education.

I've had a vicious headache all day, due to the weather. Ever since being a little girl I've developed headaches whenever we've been due a storm. The past 2 nights we've had thunderstorms during the night, and today was very humid all day. The rain started half an hour ago and the first thunder just as I'm typing this.

Roarke is off collecting some top soil I agreed to take from Freecycle this evening (poor guy, he'd only been in an hour) - shame about the torrential rain....