I commented on a thread the other day in response to somebody who was staking a claim for the ‘girls like dolls/boys like trucks’ point of view. (Waste of time, I’m sure, but I did it anyway).  I noted the subtle way these tendencies had been produced or reinforced by the staff at the daycare Antonia attended.  Little boys who picked up dolls were ignored, whereas the adults interacted a lot with girls who did the same thing, asking them all kinds of questions about the doll.  All of it completely unconscious.

One way or the other, our children grow up with gendered perspectives, but it isn’t always as straightforward as it seems.  Yesterday, Antonia described and drew for me the transport she wants to own as an adult.  It’s a massive, powerful, monster of a purple motorbike, with a propellor and a retractable raincover.  Batman would be proud of it.  It also has four seats, for her babies and her dear old Mum (me), and a sidecar with nappy changing facilities!

I knew very well that you have to be careful with microwaves and liquids. They can reach temperatures of over 100°C while looking perfectly harmless until you move them. I was busy and I forgot. I picked up my cup of coffee, and it exploded with amazing force all over my hand and high up the kitchen wall, where it ruined this amazingly lifelike portrait of my own dear husband. Luckily for me, it somehow went in that direction, and not all over my face!

So my right hand was completely unusable, and I spent an entire day and night sitting/lying with it in a bucket of cold water. Any time I tried to remove it, I was in agony. Fortunately, my hand was usable the next day, and is almost better now. But in the meantime, I was utterly dependent on my nearest and dearest (see very lifelike portrait above) for sustenance. He was all set to exploit this opportunity to the full and put me on a diet or something! Which I don’t even need… I wouldn’t have thought it possible that anyone would actually refuse his own wife seconds of spaghetti under such circumstances, but he did! So, all in all I consider I have had a very lucky escape. Don’t superheat your coffee, folks!

Antonia is neither very well nor very sick. And it’s manifested itself as full-blown regression, as follows:

• needing to be rocked in Daddy’s arms – except he’s now forgotten the words of the rocking songs, so she had to sing them for him;
• cuddling up to Mummy – except she now reads blog entries and my emails over my shoulder which I’m not totally comfortable with;
• pretending she needed to learn colours, digging out her early childhood blocks and strewing them over the kitchen floor;
• typing random letters on the computer keyboard – except that now she’s too strong and at least one of the keys went flying off;
• having me dig the board books out of the cellar – except this time she seized them and read them to me;
• refusing to answer people’s questions – aaaaaghh! I really don’t need to see that one sneaking back, just a couple of weeks before the homeschool inspection.

Apart from that, it’s kind of cute, and I was happy to go along with it. I even tried to find her a Teletubbies to watch, but no, those are gone right out of our lives. Here are the board books we liked when Antonia was little. Nothing very original, but all nice:

• Moo, Baa, La, La, La by Sandra Boynton
• Peepo and Each Peach Pear Plum by Allen and Janet Ahlberg
• Jamberry by Bruce Degen
• Time For Bed by Mem Fox and Jane Dyer
• Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney
• We’re Going On A Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxbury

The latest carnival of homeschooling is up …. over here.

When my blog disappeared into thin air one day, I was obviously a bit upset. I had posted almost daily for over a year, and I had a neat post all lined up and nowhere to put it. It wasn’t quite the end of the world, but I did wonder what had happened. Had my six-year old somehow accidentally clicked her way through several screens and buttons to delete my blog? It seemed a bit unlikely – she’s known how to operate BrainPop for ages. She screams whenever things go wrong. And it’s quite a lot of screens and buttons. Did I have a secret enemy? Kind of an exciting idea, eh! Some ruthless hacker who cares that much about how I educate aforementioned six-year-old! Or did Blogger mess something up? Possible, possible, … and they didn’t answer my emails begging for help. Hey! maybe I have a secret enemy at Blogger!

After 24 hours of withdrawal symptoms, I discovered one important reason why I have a homeschool blog. I started it to keep records of what we were doing. Actually, it had replaced a previous, private and monthly website, because it was simpler and easier to update. The day after my blog was deleted, I received our convocation for the yearly homeschool inspection. Note that I didn’t know when this would be because it could have been anytime between December and June.

Suddenly, I needed all those blog posts for real! Luckily, I had the photos on my hard drive, and Mike received all my posts as emails, and never deletes anything, so I can get them. It just isn’t as easy as clicking on the Maths label, and copying down everything we did. Now I’ve remembered just how important the record part of my site is to me. I am going to be much more proactive about keeping those records for now on.

When I first started my blog I used it as a place to think aloud. Like most homeschooling parents, I care a lot about what I’m doing, but I’m often in experimental mode. Not specifically experimenting on my child, but I’ll try out various ideas for size, and maybe implement 1% of them. I did that quite a bit in the early days. Then it turned out that a few people discovered my blog and stopped by fairly often. Ooops! I got a bit of stage fright! Did I really want to ramble on about some wild idea that I might not be committed to, and have people associate me with it? Errr… probably not. I really wanted to present the ideas I had fully explored and was committed to. If anyone criticised me, I would at least feel on firm ground. But in retrospect, the blog loses some of its value for me if I can’t try out ideas in it. I’m going to have to think of a way of doing that whilst letting people know whether I really mean things or whether they are thought experiments.

With a few people stopping by, with there being a few blogs I liked to read and sometimes comment on, I inadvertently started to develop a tiny public presence. I suppose I asked for it. Especially when I took over the Evolved Homeschoolers Webring, which had mysteriously disappeared, kind of like my blog. I fully admit that I’m not nearly as proactive as my predecessor. I’m really just a placeholder for something that I felt needed a place. We tend to take evolution for granted in Europe. Outdoors education is another matter. It’s something I can feel militant about, what with kids in France spending most of their lives locked up in institutions. But I didn’t really know I had a peer group. One day I stumbled across the Learning in the Great Outdoors blog carnival, and was surprised to discover I was a contributor! Some nice person must have submitted one of my posts on my behalf. I was pretty excited about the idea of writing posts on purpose for this! Actually, I was planning one on astronomy with younger kids when my original blog disappeared. Now there’s an idea that’s been fully explored in our family!

I suppose homeschool blogs vary. Some give out a clear direction, others are a bit vague and multi-purpose. Mine is probably going to be one of the latter even in its new, better protected incarnation.

Yellow House Homeschool is back! Mike is a genius! I have my own url, top security hosting, responsive customer service, and very, very low fees. Yeay!

What happened to the previous incarnation of Yellow House Homeschool? Nobody knows!