There has been truma - Mary is petrified of school. Jean couldn't wait but Mary...
She has always been clingy. She cried, Alaric was relieved that they didn't have to pry her physically off of him in the end - something that was on the cards. Fortunately I found hello kitty school shoes.
She is very excited about these and agreed to go to school if it meant she could wear them. They have little ears 🙂
She doesn't want to sit still and she want to go climbing, part of her panic was she thought she'd never get to go climbing again. But hello kitty shoes and matching scrunchy and heart buttons on her dress... and a promise that will do dancing when she gets home resulted in reluctant grin.
Of course she does have big sis who was lovely with helping Mary to get ready even with screaming and kicking. It's also Jean's last year of primary school - something that she is not that happy about though she does seem resigned.
I took Jean to a midnight book launch - I debated weather it was appropriate as she is still 9 though will be ten by the weekend.
But it was the last discworld novel and I phoned Waterstones to check and she was desperate to be a feegle - Tiffany Aching was introduced to her last year by me. She was desperate for people like herself in books - she fell in love with the discworld.
Terry Pratchett got given a place next to Neil Gaiman and RL Stien as favourite authors. Then he died.
Jean went as Tiffany to World Book Day. Jean loves books, Jean often stays up far later than she should reading and gets twitchy if she doesn't have a book to hand.
She announced the Waterstones smelt of new books and though tired did say today she wished we'd stayed longer at the launch, last night we left when she said she wanted to go - she thought they should have read more of the book out.
As we queued she read the last book of Tiffany, The Shepherds Crown, it is also the last book of Terry. She would like it known that she is not reading the book in the above photo but was just looking through it at this point.
The beehives made bee noises - she was impressed and someone gave her a crotchet feegle - she loves it and fell asleep with it last night. We were in the newspaper and there will be more write ups on this 🙂
We don't have the sparkly book as Mummy was a cheap skate and got the £10 tickets. I made the right decision in taking her.
Her feegle outfit was cobbled together from a spock outfit and Rincewind had a tricorder. Don't cross the fandoms!
When asked why she was there she replied with "I like books", she is supposed to be asleep now but is reading.
It is that time of year again when there are no school runs and I have no completely free child time - Jean however is almost ten so I can work whilst she is around now. In fact at the moment she is helping me!
So we let Jean plan the first day of the holiday - it was without Mary for most of it as it was a pre-school day and they continue during the holidays.
We constructed a plan based on the sorts of things she wanted to do - namely Home School which she loves and I initially came up with when we were snowed in at The Bakery back in her infant school days.
We started with an American breakfast - Jean's school had done an Independance Day breakfast but the last term we have kept missing dates and time changing and the such like, probably due to my concussion. Jean was quiet upset about this so we investigated the sorts of things Americans eat for breakfast and decided it was a combo of a Canadian and Full English and set about creating our own probably very wrong breakfast!
This of course started with us grubbing up potatoes from the garden - I used the bags we had for moving (from Essex which then got used for lots of things but all had busted zips or handles etc...), to grow potatoes in - I am phasing this out as most of the bags have reached the end of their life, and we now have an allotment!
We were after the "new" white potatoes rather than the bigger potatoes and the pink/red potatoes so Jean kept checking with me she'd gotten the right type until I pointed out I was just grubbing up all useful potatoes as I needed to make a casserole with the turnips and beetroot from the allotment anyway.
We harvested an entire pot of tatties which Jean then selected the ones we wanted for breakfast - we went with sauteed potatoes rather than the chips we'd seen in some of the breakfasts as we just couldn't cope with the idea of chips for breakfast.
She then scrubbed them and chopped them whilst I started on the rest. Once that was done she mixed up the pancake mix, got plates out and general reminded me what I was doing! She also went to the shop to get three missing ingredients.
We used the flat bed sandwich toaster to cook the pancakes, this was the first time either of us had cooked this thicker type of pancake. It was fun and I put the coffee perculator on for me. Jean poured us juice.
She took a stack of ten pancakes so it would look like the photos! And she doesn't normally eat maple syrup but she poured it on. She made up a granola and home made yogurt mix too.
It was a HUGE breakfast - fresh sliced tomato, suateed potatoes, baked beans, 2 rashers bacon, 2 suasages, a fried egg, and 2 slices of toast! She basically ate the bacon and cereal and then nibbled on the pancakes all day. The rest did me and Mary for a meal each. 😀
We then learnt Latin, she did some at a language day at school and come home obsessed. She had a piece of paper she had already made notes on (mainly she observed that the Harry Potter series had used latin for the spells). When I say we learnt Latin, what actually happened was that I found a series on Youtube of which I followed the first lesson and then left her to it, she was on lesson 9 at the end with pages of notes.
I found her on google translate trying to check her own translation before she restated the vid to find out if she was right. Her translation was closer than google translates. I discovered I know random bits of latin - I assume from my Classical Civilization A'level. Later on I corrected Alaric's pronounciation as well coughs.
Then it was time for the first ever Stubby Marathon!
I am still struggling with reading and writing, I am using voice tech or just going really really slowly in short bursts. But it is easier for me to do long hand rather than typing and it is a writing challenge month so I looked around and thought "you know what I have a ream or two of lined paper and lots of pencils that haven't even been sharpened!" - BAM!!!
The idea?
It is a writing marathon that will last at least the summer holidays - me and Jean sit for at least an hour writing trying to wear the lead out in the freshly sharpened pencil. Each day we see who has used their lead the most - we re-sharpen the next day so the points are the same so there is a day to day winner and an over all winner (you can write outside of the allotted time and I can't write for very long at all and have to make coffee in the middle etc...). Jean has written 2 stories and twice as many pages as me so far. I am designing a medal for her 🙂
This summer is our marathon summer but more on that later.
I think we then mixed things up a bit by having our outside time and snack before we started on our hour of art. This was basically us working our way through various kits Jean's had for birthdays etc... WHY OH WHY are the instructions in kids craft kits so dire? I mean they really are bad and I think most people think it's the kids just not getting it but it really isn't - it's the instructions :/
It took me most of the hour and a very bad keyring, to remember some basic stuff that I could do before the concussion and have been doing since before I was Jean's age 🙁 This hour was frustrating for both of us but we decided to see it too the end and not jump kits and she at least made a lovely bracelet though with improvisation and not the technique that the kit was designed for!
She then played outside on the trampoline whilst I rested my brain, she then set herself up with her maths - these are GCSE level maths but with the questions in accessible easy comprehension which were ones my mum had for teaching those who had failed or not sat GCSE's the first time round. Some of them my mum had made herself and some were from packs provided by the college - the course was cut leaving my mum with all the teaching stuff and no one to teach 🙁
Then Al and Mary came home and we wizzed off to pick up some garden fairy lights which the girls put together whilst Daddy made dinner - they are bees and ladybirds and hopefully there will be a blog post on what we've done with the garden soon!
Mary went to bed and then Jean and Alaric played with the electronic kits and only got shouted at once by me for making the radio they'd just built too loud (issue was they couldn't work out how to control the sound level - or so they say!).
We forgot to practice the recorder which Jean was going to attempt at 9:30 but I banned!!!
So I think that was an epic start to the holidays - since I started writing this blog post she has been writing schedules and naming each day - this was Home School Monday. But we have also had:
Tidying Tuesday, Wet Wednesday, Friend Thursday and today which was going to be Allotment Friday but then got turned into Cinema Friday has actually been named Freedom Friday as she decided to go home with her friend for a sleep over instead and pointed out that me and Al (Who has a day off of work) do not have either kid with us today.
Ten years ago today Alaric got to the train station and thought "you know what I don't want to go to work today, my pregnant wife is very sick and in that hospital just there, I'll go and see her instead". This was an unusual thought for him, as it was he mostly worked from home and only went in once a week for meetings.
It was bizar behaviour on his part but something I am so glad he did. He held my hand as I sat on machines that monitored my vitals and then he went to get my breakfast. I think I fell asleep, something was going on, nurses were running past the door, Alaric came and with a nurse helped get me to the breakfast room with it's TV.
He explained a bomb had gone off, we watched the news as it unfolded with a sickening sense of relief, Alaric could have, should have been on that train. Then the panic as we realised that it wasn't one attack but several - that it was hitting routes we knew. I tried to phone my friends and family who worked in London. Unsurprisingly the networks were jammed - in hindsight we should have been leaving the phones for emergency stuff but we weren't thinking we just wanted to check everyone was safe.
Our Drs started to disappear as they left to help or be medical stand by, my parents turned up thinking they were going to have to tell their very ill very pregnant daughter that her husband was missing on one of the blown up routes. They had been trying to phone him, none of the phones were working.
They were angry with him in that way you get angry when a child didn't come when you called, and you imagine the worst. Then he got hugged. And then the maternity ward began to break down. They say there is no stress induced pregnancy but woman after woman came in with blood pressure problems or in labour or both. The ward filled, there were women on trollies in the corridor - we were not on the labour ward but one woman ended up in the advance stages of having her baby in the maternity ward with me. They pulled the curtains round her bed, she was calling for her husband - her parents didn't know where he was, he had not done an Alaric, he was either dead, injuried or stranded in a motionaless London.
There was not enough beds or staff and bloody foot prints appeared and stayed on the floor. I was bewildered.
After much trying we got hold of as many friends and family as we could, checking they were all ok. More than one had had a near miss, were sitting still in London, sitting on steps crying or telling me how eeri it was with all the traffic stopped, with the hush, and with everyone being kind. London is normally a free for all, pushing, rushing, ignoring the press of humanity but that wasn't what was happening. Everyone was milling, quiet and in shock, everyone knew they were the lucky ones.
Everyone had been expecting the attack since 7/11 in the US, in truth London commuters had been being a bit nicer to each other since that point all fearing that this day was coming. If your train was delayed by more than ten minutes and you had no reception but someone else did - they would lend you their phone to phone and say you were alive. This affect multiplied on the day, I did not really register the stories at the time - I was too ill and mainly wanted to know that the people I cared about were fine.
That is not saying that I had no feelings for those who weren't, it was horrific but I needed to know my friends were fine.
When he got home Alaric found we'd been added to shout outs, it was before the days of social media but we did have blogs and mailing lists and everyone was checking that we were ok. People were worried.
My friends and family were lucky, but mum's friend son - not so much. He's alive due to the carriage he got in but bar the shock of the actual explosion and minor injuries he then had to be escorted past the carnage. Last I heard he still hadn't gone back to work, not all the scars were physical ones, not all of them could heal.
Much later on I realised that it had been even more of a close call for our little family, if I had not been ill and in hospital then we could all have been on the train. It's a strange twist of fate and one that wedges inside me, that me almost dying potentially saved all three of our lives. I say potentially because we might have been late or delayed or I might have weed myself on the way to the station or a million other things, but all of those things are nothing but grace as was me being so ill Alaric felt justified in not going to work that morning.
Terrorism is a horrendous thing, life taking for political gain, for power, religion, to make a point, to drive the wedge... murder is the only name for it.
It was muslims that time but it followed a tradition of London bombs. Someone asked me how I could still travel on the tube into London - the answer, "The RIA didn't stop us, oil disputes in the 70's did not stop my mother, hell she even had her bank hijacked, so why let this lot?". They weren't all muslims like the RIA were not all the Irish, the point of the bombings was to divide, to make an us and them, sadly with some people they succeeded and that is sad. Muslims were killed on the trains and buses, muslim doctors came and aided people straight away - before anyone really knew what they were dealing with, weather those drs were putting their own lives at risk or not.
Terrorists don't really care who they kill, who they injure or maim, that's kind of the point of the bombs. Ever wondered why we don't have metal bins anymore?
Anyway that is all besides the point. Today there are people remembering loved ones who should but aren't still here and no amount of photos shown on international TV is going to heal the wholes in those families. Later today I am going to light ten candles - one for each year, for the yawning chasm of pain, for those who were lost and those that still bare the scars.
I mentioned the Geological Society's Bake Off to Jean - this is the result - she's been planning it for weeks!
The girls are seriously proud of this 7 cake monstrocity.
They have certainly enjoyed eating it 🙂
There is a lot of hidden stuff that went into this cake.
One of the themes was mud which is why there is chocolate orange mud flows 🙂
But there were all sorts of challenges and Jeany decided she wanted to try and complete as many as possible.
So within the river valley there is structure for a cross section.
And then she just got plan creative - with the structure of the cake and I believe some youtube research.
These are the marzi-bones fossil human ancestors or related species buried in a cash by volcanic ash - they may or may not have already been dead when this happened some more excavation will have to occur to find out!
The top layer of the Mud Tower is a chocolate gravel lens between a sandy mud and a volcanic ash.
You can see the colour difference really well in this photo.
Here is Jean cutting open mud tower to reveal whats within.
Spoiler... the chocolate gravel lense.
Here's the river valley with birds foot delta - at this stage the volcano is dormant or extinct.
This is the main part of the cake with Mud Tower and the ammonite loaf as zoomed in bits and the past hidden behind the lush "hill".
Of course there is a hidden volcano and... erm Jurassic Park toilet death scene...
The geologist hammer was another challenge - but being Jean it is a geo-thor hammer so is the wrong shape (to be honest she sneaked a time travel train into it so I was amazed there was no tardis). I did the writing.
Within there is an ammonite - this one was completely and utterly Jean's own idea and it worked and she is soooo happy she is taking it into school tomorrow 🙂
This was the tense moment of cutting in and finding out if the idea had worked. It's a bit flatter than intended but we agreed it's had metamorphic stuff happen to it thanks to the volcanos proximity.
The cake did kind of over flow but that's not surprising - here's how it was made...
Did I mention that she called this cake collective - Geologist Despair.
Volcano before lava.
She did try to put structure inside the volcano but it didn't work that well.
The volcano was fun to put together - she remembered Dino-Mountian I'd made her for her 5th? Birthday 🙂
How the river valley was put together...
One time travel train and it's in a tunnel - the tunnel was the challenge 🙂
And before the tunnel, infact she did a lot of icing moderling for this.
Of course Mary pulled her weight too 🙂 Mainly with rolling out icing and smearing chocolate everywhere!
She did most of the Mud Tower by herself 🙂
Mary put chocolate gravel leaking out of an erroded side and some other bits including sticking out marzi-bones 🙂
Mud cracks were a challenge - Jean went with the existing cake cracks and made the lonely tree which was another of the challenges.
Lonely tree... did I mention the lonely tree?
Other general cakey making pics...
Creating the Marzi-Bones...
I really love this idea 🙂
Creating T-Rex...
This has been EPIC - it took 3 days to make the cakes - Alaric is taking Mud Tower into work tomorrow etc... Both girls have enjoyed it so much and of course we used home grown eggs. The cakes themselves range from chocolate orange to mint to vanilla and strawberry in flavour. There are three icings and marzipan involved and some of the cake is me friendly ie gluten free (the volcano) and some is Mary friendly and so on.
Jean was a little sad as she had meant to put Mary Anning in and a geological map too but she forgot and just don't ask her about how atomically correct her loo death scene is ok.
Events and Outings, Jean, Mary | sarah | 
Thu 3rd Sep 2015 8:53 am | 
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