There are neither rights nor wrongs in gardening. Only experiences.

I across this quote this morning as I was searching the internet for how to propagate a fuchsia. (I had a go last year but with no success. I have a few new ideas now.) I visited an old friend yesterday, god-mother to my middle son, and it was great to see her. She has just moved house and their new place has a fantastic, mature garden with loads of places for the children to explore and hide. My wilderness looks pretty sorry to me in comparison and I am often troubled by guilt that I am not making the most of the space I have, either for the children or growing our own veg. I fear that by the time my garden is mature and child-friendly, my children will be too old to want to play out there (maybe the grand-children will!)
I find it hard to be patient with the garden and with myself as a gardener but I find inspiration in the above. I endeavor to stop chalking things up as right or wrong and instead count as gain all my experiences.

Pearls

"I've come to realise that you most probably won't find a pearl if you only
pick oysters once a year.... I'll learn to put up with the bad stuff,
remembering that the more I do of it, the closer I get to coming out with
something good."

I read the above (in Peter Elbow's 'Writing with Power') last night. It specifically refers to writing and, as I stick to my aim of 500 words a day on my writing projects, I am learning to blast through that self-critical, 'this is rubbish' voice and keep writing; trusting that, in the 9,000 words I've written since finishing my writing course, there must be something good.

I also suspect that this is true of Home Ed life and family life in general too. There is plenty of dross, plenty of nagging and complaining and whining, plenty of muddy, dreary moments. But the more time we spend together, the more times I seek to create an interesting, exciting or special time, the more pearls we find together.

Born Survivor

We have been following Bear Grylls' series Born Survivor. We watched a videoed episode yesterday afternoon and I found myself firmly telling the children never, ever to eat poo, or raw snails in the garden, just because they'd seen it on the telly!

Afterwards, my little girl packed her bag and went off to survive in the wilderness that is our garden:

Drawing

Over the half-term break, I asked my children what they would like to do in the time-slots left by completing one of our projects. One of the suggestions was that we all sit and draw together. So, yesterday afternoon, we did.

I got about half-way through a dragon which is even more incentive to do this again. It was just one of those lovely moments.

A New Lens

I am an avid follower of the Bravewriter blog and this post by Julie gave me food for thought. I can find it very frustrating when one of my children is just not interested in doing or learning something which I like or think is important.
I have been having an ongoing and very polite, battle of wills with my eldest over the issue of typing. He hates to type and finds it very slow. He writes prolifically by hand and I spend quite a bit of time typing things up for him. As his ambition is to be an author and he is many pages into his first book, I am unwilling to commit to this arrangement long-term. I want him to learn to type. I assure him that, with time, it will come as quickly and easily as hand-writing. We have tried three different touch-typing programmes. He has patiently endured them, for he has a law-abiding nature, but he finds them 'boring'.
It was his idea to begin to type out the hand-written first draft of his novel. Sentence by sentence it is gradually growing. He is willing to do ten minutes each day and I know that this kind of regular practice will bear fruit. He is pleased with how it looks and I am glad that we found a new lens for looking at typing,

City of London

We had a trip up to London yesterday. Not just the general London area, the kind of place I think of as London but is actually Westminster (like the National Gallery) or South Kensington (like the Museums) but the true City of London, full of expensive boutiques, wine bars and men in smart ties! We were on our way to the Barbican Centre to hear a schools' concert by the London Symphony Orchestra. I have always felt the Barbican to be particularly difficult to reach from our side of London and, after much map pondering, I chose to take the Tube and get off at Mansion House. This was a forty minute journey in itself and the children were overwarm, frazzled and train-sick by the time we surfaced again. However, it was such a treat to walk through these streets of such stunning architecture, ancient and modern. It was my middle son who spotted St Paul's Cathedral peeping at us along a side street: There were plenty more examples of the old and new rubbing shoulders. I lost count of the times we stopped to admire a building.

Thanks to the excellent directions which I had downloaded from their web-site, we found the Barbican with no trouble. After not too long we were instructed to follow the yellow line on the pavement - even I can manage that without getting lost!

We crossed the high walk-way over the water gardens. If you look closely, there is a heron sitting on the wall in the centre of the picture (just to the right of and below the wooden 'house'). I declared it a fake due to its unusual brightness in the sun, but it proved me wrong by flying a short distance to perch somewhere new.

The concert was great and Bartok's Hungarian Dance and Grieg's Morning from Peer Gynt were agreed on as our favourites and it is always a fascinating experience to see a full orchestra including even a double basson, bass clarinet and celeste.

Tired children needed a sit-down on the way back and we purchased a punnet of strawberries and ate them straight from the packet in a little square outside the church were John Milton was baptised.

I thought this guy might be Milton but he is actually Captain John Smith.

CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH

CITIZEN AND CORDWAINER

1580-1631

AMONG THE LEADERS OF THE SETTLEMENT

AT JAMESTOWN VIRGINIA

WHICH BEGAN THE OVERSEAS EXPANSION

OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING PEOPLES

A Cordwainer is a shoemaker, as distinct from a cobbler who repairs shoes. Jimmy Choo trained at the Cordwainer's Technical College in London.
I guess that explains John Smith's fancy boots - no wonder Pocahontas was bowled over!

Sticks

My mother had an operation on her knee on Thursday and I picked her up from hospital and spent a couple of days helping her settle back in at home. My step-father, who is quite a bit older than my mum, had a nasty fall just before Easter which resulted in a hip replacement, so they are not the nimblest pair at the moment. There was an issue with figuring out whose hospital-issued sticks were whose, but we solved this with a pretty bow tied on mum's!I was able to make myself useful by planting some sweet-peas in a tub,

and I did manage to get them both to Bexhill sea-front for an ice-cream.

Get well soon!