Good news, and bad news

Sorry for the delay in blogging. As you can imagine, its been a bit of a crazy time!

Bad news first: they HAVE written off the car :0(

Insurance pay out falls short of the remaining HP on the car, but we had GAP insurance, which will cover that.

However, it means whilst we still (thank God) have a car (Dad's old skoda I "inherited"), that obviously only takes 5 of us. This means we can't go anywhere as a family any more. No visits. No outings.

I'm just thankful that the Disneyland holiday is a) paid for and b) we are going by train, not car, or we would have had to cancel it.

Not sure what we are going to do now, as we have no funds for another vehicle..

Brighter news: Jonathan is still doing well (though still colicky). Weighed in today at 10lb 9, which means he has gone up from (birth) the 25th centile to just short of the 75th centile, with an average weight gain since birth of 1 1/2- 2 ounces a day!

He has also grown 5cm, and is therefore on 98th centile for his height; just like Samuel was at one month (he went off the chart by 3 months!). This makes him the size of an "average" 3 month old - which explains why the babygrow I put on him last night seemed too small!

I didn't post much about last week, which is a shame, as despite the weather and the car episode, we had a good time.

We visited Rudyard Lake, and of course went on the railway as well. This trip gave us some good starting points for conversations about dams, reservoirs etc.

We also visited Tittesworth reservoir, twice; once in the rain, and once in the dry! I must upload the pictures, when I can find the data stick I took with me, as it was quite funny. We also met another home educator! A lad came running into the park, and we all looked at each other. When the dad came near, we casually asked "not at school then?" to find out that they were local home edders! Great stuff!

The second visit to the place, Roarke wore his trisuit and went for a run whilst I sat feeding Jonathan, and the boys played in the play area.

The other trip of note, was the two onto the moors. Roarke and I have been to Dartmoor and the Dales national parks, but never the Peak District, so it was new for us. We introduced the boys to some lovely sights, history, and geography.

Two highlights were climbing around on the Roaches (with the whole area very waterlogged as this was after the torrential rain), and then meeting a professional dry stone wall builder, who allowed the boys to go over and watch him work, and ask as many questions as they had.

This led to more discussions in the car, particuarly with Joshua, about the role of a national park, economics, decline, farming and preservation.

Home ed in action!

As I said, I'll try to get photos up soon, now that I am slowly trying to get some sort of routine (ha ha!) going with life!