Wedding Anniversary

This week we celebrated 16th years of a most marvellous marriage.

I dug out the wedding photos and posted a few on facebook, managing to seriously embarass several people who were there at the time and I've hooked up with on facebook!

Here are two of us from that beautiful day:

We look shockingly young!

To prove how much we have changed, here's a similar pose taken on our anniversary:

Even allowing for the poor quality photo, squashed noses, and the fact that Josh took the picture, I think we are looking a bit the worse for wear :0)

We had a nice day though. A friend from church took me shopping (as we didn't have a car at the time - see next item!), then I came back and packed some snacks to take to the Bromley home ed regular meeting. Roarke met us there half way through and we took the boys to McDonalds for a change. In the evening Mum came over to baby sit Jonathan and William and we got a lift to Bromley so that Josh and Samuel could go to Baseline. It was Samuel's first time and he was nervous and excited. The pastor and the youth leaders kept an eye out for him though and he had a great time.

Whilst they were there (3 hours) Roarke and I went for a tapas meal in Bromley, then onto a pub. We both felt very old watching the goings on in the pub! Actually some of it was shocking, to see that the stuff on the news about binge culture, and girls in particular, is totally real.

Neither Roarke nor I were saints in our teens (he became a Christian in his early twenties, and I calmed down around then too) and I certainly had my fair share of outrageous behaviour, but still this just felt different. Not nice.

Anyway, praise God that through being part of BCC, our lads have the opportunity to be involved in Baseline, and through home education too they are able to have a much more positive teen experience than I fear many of their schooled peers are able to.

I'm in the process of sorting out our new, revamped family website. The old one was very popular, especially the gluten free recipes, so its well overdue for me to get another one up (after loosing the free hosting we used to have for it). That's in my spare time ;0)

We spent the afternoon today in the garden clearing up and getting it ready for autumn. Now we've finally got the housing benefit sorted I think we both feel more that this is home - rather than expecting to be thrown out any minute - which is why we've both felt the need to attack the garden. I dug up the strawberry plants to clear out the bindweed coming under from next door, and took the opportunity to split up lots of new plants before replanting. I also got the chance to replant the crocosmia. Roarke took out two shrubs that were in the way, and we moved a tea rose too that had been covered by the shrubs and was looking very sorry for itself.

All the time a small rodent was runny around that appears to be a mouse that lives in the other neighbour's shed :0(

Roarke is already starting to go into hibernation mode; he's not a winter person and as soon as it starts getting dark of an evening, and cool, he starts to struggle.

Time to dig out all the soup recipes....

This week has been a rollercoaster week. The car broke down on Monday night and we went from thinking it was a small thing to fix it, to being told the car was a right off as it would cost more to fix than it was worth (and than we could afford) to the garage ringing us back saying it was a "miracle" but they'd found some tiny thing that was causing it all and had fixed it for £80! God definately had it all in Hand.

Next week our group is planning a Not Back to School Picnic along with more than 30 other groups across the country, as part of an effort to raise the positive profile of home education. The deadline for the written submissions to the Select Committee Inquiry is also approaching so I've got to get around to sorting my personal submission.

The phone has been very busy with new home ed enquiries, mainly from people who have not been able to get their child into the school that they want and so they are needing to home educate whilst going through the appeal process and/or waiting for a place to come up.