Happy times

Otherwise known as the summer holidays! It all started a bit earlier than expected for Ethan who had developed temperatures and a bad cough in the last week of school, but that didn't stop us having fun. We experiemented with white flowers and food dye. We hypothesised that the shorter stems would colour first, but we were wrong. It was the fully open flowers that took up the dye the quickest, and then only in the outer petals. And interestingly the black food dye turned the petals green, and the green food dye barely coloured them at all! He also helped in harvesting the maincrop seed potatoes I had planted in a bag of compost. There were three seed potatoes planted, and although it was a little early to be harvesting them, they seemed to be dying back, probably as they didn't have as much water as they needed, despite me watering them religiously. Ethan enjoyed rummaging through, and picking out the lovely pink Desiree potatoes (whilst dodging the squelchy seed potatoes!) and despite the early harvesting we seemed to have a half decent crop.

Now the summer holidays have started in earnest, with Alec saying goodbye to his teachers at his First School. We can all relax, and pretend school doesn't exist! How lovely to have the time for a decent breakfast in the morning, to just "do" what we want. In the two days we have had already Luke has started writing a novel, Ethan has been building models with megablocks (much harder than lego as it is not as well made and falls to bit at the slightest of touches, but her has perservered), Alec has been doing a little pottery...

... there has been trampolining, football, some game playing on the xbox, late nights, later mornings, experimenting with vacuum whilst drinking a drink through a straw (don't ask!), swimming, and Mummy dragging them around the shops to find uniform for next year (but finding a lovely shop that sells crystals and incense as an added bonus!) We have also collected lots of caterpillars from the nasturtiums and tomatoes, and identified them as various types of "white" butterflies, ie large, small and green veined. As well as playing with long lost toys, that there is not normally time for them to see the light of day.

Writing all that down, I can't believe we have managed to do all that in two days, and it feels like we have been taking things easy! Although it does make me wonder, a couple of times today when out in town, we got the comment "ooh, you've got your hands full", and "ooh, you've still got another 6 weeks". Do people not enjoy their children? It is a priviledge to me to be able to spend such time with my children, and I am just a tad jealous of those home-schooling families that get to do this all the time.