How different HE seems when the sun comes out!
We have barely used our official HE room in the last few days (except for M who is still sneaking about making my Mothers’ Day card). Instead we’ve been in the garden: playing, building, chasing, weeding and potion making.
Our builder friend, P was back again on Thursday and M helped him to rearrange the climbing frame to her design. We’ve now got a much roomier frame and a steeper slide!

M also made a ‘potion’ using sand and various herbs around the garden. She adores strong smells and spicy tastes and spent a long time feeling and smelling the plants. In fact, at dinner yesterday she actually ate a whole black peppercorn to found out what it tasted like!
M continued to de-stone our garden to prepare it for planting in a few weeks. We also have some lovely large decorative pebbles which she washed clean too.

Meanwhile, D asked me to build her a den which she sat inside and did some painting on our water mat and chalking on a little chalk board I found at the back of the toy cupboard. She drew a lovely picture of Oberon and Titania – Uranus’ moons! Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of it. D continues to spend hours of her day deep in her imagination. At the moment, the slide is upturned and has become her pirate ship: she can variously be found in the crow’s nest or swabbing the decks…

J also took the day off on Thursday and he took them to the park, out to Wimbledon and chased them endlessly around the garden!
I decided on the spur of the moment to have one of our apple trees felled: we’ll be putting a garage up in the coming months and it would have been a bit too close to it. Sounds a bit callous but the tree had seen better days. So within an hour some tree surgeons had sawn it down. We all had a little cry for our tree, particularly M who took it very hard. However, it will mean that our other little apple tree will now have more chance to flourish.
I asked the tree surgeons to leave us some logs behind so that we can make a log pile house for bugs, bees and butterflies, and perhaps some space at the bottom for a hedgehog.
On Friday, M got started on making newspaper ‘poles’ for her geodesic dome. I offered to do them but she insisted she wants to make it all herself (and then double checked with me that SHE would be the boss of the finished den, not D). We came a bit unstuck with the design of it so we asked our friend Lisa over at An Ordinary Life for some help, and she kindly posted her instructions online yesterday!

So that’s what M will be doing over the next few days. She really loves construction, tinkering, fixing and building: she told me she wants to make a ferris wheel out of cocktail sticks and marshmallows next…
M has wanted to go ice skating for a long time now so we went back to Guildford Spectrum on Friday afternoon. It is an utterly miserable time for poor D and I have to say it seemed a real shame to be going somewhere cold and dark on such a lovely day but M really loves it so I don’t mind going now and then. I read Wonderwise books to keep D happy while M went round the rink – she skated for an hour before getting too tired to carry on! Just to see the look on M’s face made it all worthwhile – she was beaming so widely it brought a tear to my eye!
We’ve only had one minor anger incident over the last 2 days and it didn’t last too long: I set the girls ‘life skills’ to accomplish, which are skills which they choose or skills that I feel they really NEED to learn. D is making progress with hers, which is learning how to fasten her own seatbelt. I haven’t set a task for M for a while so she asked if she could learn about the months of the year. It was going well until there was a bit of melt-down. I think it was a case of trying to take in too much at once. So I just stopped immediately and packed her off for a bath – seemed to do the trick as she was chirpily chatting to D a few minutes later! Phew!
I got an unschooling confidence boost yesterday as it seems D is teaching herself maths. She voluntarily got her Arithmasticks out and wrote out some addition sums for herself to work out! She was also beaming with pride when I wrote some subtractions out for her which she then got right.

After the girls had got out of the bath I strangely started to get a stomach ache which became so bad I had to go to bed! Very odd. Anyway, the girls were gorgeous and were really excited at the prospect of doing all my jobs for me. Adorable.
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