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So what do you do when the house is boy free almost ALL weekend?? You get arty and crafty with the girls that what!! We’re on a mission to make some playfood like THIS
DD8 crafted a gift for a little friend, which will hopefully be dispatched this week…
And the smallest person in the house had a mini fuzzy felt thingy made for her from the felt offcuts
I jotted down lots of plans for lots of things last night, some of them crafty, some of them HE , but all exciting ….. lots of projects for me and the kiddies for the coming weeks before the big move…. I was suddenly struck with the desire to “enjoy” my kids company rather than endure it …. so i’m going to embrace childishness for a wee while…
I went out with the intention of being sensible …of buying sensible homeschooling equipment….we were in desperate need of sharpeners, white board markers…a protractor…all the things that make home ed go more ….erm….smoothly?
Well, it didn’t take much to sidetrack me ….it never does! And I ended up coming home with quite a bit of felt…not good felt you understand…but good enough for children!!
i love the crayons so much that they have already been tucked away ready for our trip to Algeria
and pipe cleaners..we couldn’t possibly contemplate crafting without a decent supply of pipe cleaners
Children had great fun with the coloured lolly sticks, whoever thought a lolly stick could be so entertaining huh?
Yes yes…..here’s the sensible schooly thing…..but only one sensible schooly thing ok?? The rest can wait for another day 
After all males were duly dispatched to footie, womenfolk settled down to some of the more civiised passtimes that life has to offer…DD8 is learning how to sew masha’allah and felt is proving to be the perfect medium…
DD4 is also into crafting as you can see, and is using the felt offcuts to make a collage….what an artisitic bunch we are…she didn’t however enjoy the combination of pritt stick on the fingertips combined with felt fluff…..
the finshed badges went down a treat though, and as tomorrow is Jumuah and our day off, I can feel a mega crafting session looming…
One thing is certan in my house, if the womenfolk are content the male folk are safe… 
Which is probably the wrong frame of mind to be in when it comes to home ed, but at the moment I seem to be lurching from one task to the next leaving the one before ever so slightly unfinished, with the result that my home is beginning to resemble something akin to a bomb site… anyway on a optimistic note, apart from doing their lessons with their tutor this morning I managed to get some maths out of two of them, Money and Bar charts respectively, which I feel was quite an accomplishment…
DS10 only did as much as he did, because he was on a vague promise of being able to do the next set of calculations in the book with the calculator, what is it with kids and buttons anyway??
Aside from that I have been marking the work of teens on and off throughout the day, and if they are as sick of GCSE poetry as i am then i feel for them. We call my pen Demon Red…. I’ll leave you to figure out why
I promised DS11 that we would record his bar chart for posterity if he finished it..he did..so i have… a deal’s a deal right?
(whilst editing I realised I had actually written pesterity which I was a bit loathe to change because I felt it had a more truthful ring about it )
Halaqah time today was about the prophet Salih (as) and the Thamud and we found some impressive pictures of what is left of their buildings
day isn’t done yet but there’s no telling if I’ll be in any fit state to string a sentence together later. Dinner still has to be tackled (spanish omlettes cos it’s all my feeble mind can stretch to). And there’s phone calls owing to people, and if i don’t get them out of the way NOW …well there’s no telling what nonsense I might come out with….
Well then I’ve done it, jumped right back into home ed feet first… and though I hate to tempt fate, we’ve had a good couple of days…the children have been so occupied that petty squabbles have been down to the barest minimum and even then have only centered around the rubbers and pencil sharpener, so all in all I’d count that as a victory.
DS11 decided to do a project on Ireland, starting of course with food…what else would it be in my house
Irelands religion, History and symbols
Not to be outdone DS!) then decided to do a project on the history and geography of Algeria,
and so I have been running up and down the stairs all day fielding questions from children who were learning upstairs and children who were learing downstairs. The kitchen looks like a tornado has passed through it and there is wet washing waiting to be hung and dry washing strewn accross my bed waiting to be put away.
However we also managed to cover verbs in our quest for knowledge today, and also a halaqah about Abdullah ibn Abbas which was nice for the boys especially masha’allah. we’re doing Prophets and sahaba on alternate days and after a story and some questions the children are writing a summary and drawing a beautiful pic to illustrate. We did the Propeht Hud yesterday (as) and they’re really enjoying it.
Also managed to squeeze in some tajweed, with me and DS11 and 10 taking it in turns to quiz each other on ahkam of the surat we were reading.. and DD8 did some of Mutaffin with me after we had dispatched the boys off to their karate lesson.
And then with boys safely out of the way DD16 sent DD17 out to the corner shop for two giant slabs of choccy for us to have with our coffee. The girls are still busy slaving over hot pens, revising for GCSE’s next tuesday, so our house is a hotbed of learning at the moment not to mention stress.
Needless to say not alot of crafting has been done, I still have a sleeveless cardi to finish for an impatient four year old and a pile of scrap fabric to do something with before it’s too late!
In some ways having a tutor for the past few month has been a merciful release, and yet I can’t help thinking that sometimes i use it as a convenient excuse not to teach !. We are of course going to Algeria in the summer insha’allah and I try to heal my guilt ridden self by repeating this mantra on a regular basis “We’re going to Algeria to live, It’s better they’re doing lessons in Arabic”. It works up to a point and they’re work load is fairly heavy at the moment without me adding to it, but with the days getting longer and with more time to fill, it feels like I might need to get back into the swing of things insha’allah. So I’m going force myself out of homeschooling hibernation and get something done!
of course life was made much easier today by the cookie baking…. I find a chocolate chip generally does help when things are getting a bit “iffy”. Needless to say they didn’t last very long masha’allah….there is much to be said for a houseful of girls sharing their thoughts over tea and munchies …. if only my boys new the delights we have when they’re out for the day … I daresay male bonding isn’t half as much fun
So apart from all the crochet that’s been leaving my fingertips, I’ve been trying to use up some of my fabric stash before leaving for Algeria. Serious decisions about what we have space to take have made me realise that I need to get rid of as much of my remaining fabric as possible. I’m decluttering with a vengence, there’s nothing like moving to another continent to make you focus on the important things in life.
Anyway, bags were the most imaginative thing I could come up with, I’m feeling pretty unimaginative lately..can you tell?
Even the four year old got a bag!
When there’s a sick child to nurse and your days are spent firmly rooted to the sofa in a “huggle snuggle” what do you do to keep yourself from becoming completely demented?? er…you make a cardigan of course!!
Now, ordinarily this is not what i would be doing with my time in the usual scheme of things, but I have to admit that it’s been pretty addictive and I’ve almost finishe the body of it already..I’ve run out of wool though! So only tomorrow will tell if i can find wool to match what i’ve already started it with or the feverish four year old will be sporting a very strange item of clothing….
I suppose I ought to pay tribute at this point to our in house photographer..the artistic May for her contribution to my post…masha’allah
Here goes then, and you would have gotten this earlier and with pics if i hadn’t been so caught up with learning (unsucessfully!!!) how to do filet crochet. I have a pattern from HELL thats driving me nuts and I may very well just eat the ball of yarn instead of crocheting with it….anyhow, this is my spice butternut squash soup insha’allah ….
- 1 medium onion, chopped
- 1 clove of garlic, crushed
- 2 large[ish] squashes
- 1 tsp of ground cumin
- 1 tsp of ground corriander
- a 2 inch piece of fresly grated ginger
I sweated off the onion and garlic with the spices and garlic, then added the squash (which I wish I had roasted first now!) with enough water to cover, then just cooked it till it was tender and blitzed the whole lot with a big splosh of milk (yes! milk) at the end.
The children loved it masha’allah and if I’d had some corriander (fresf) I would have thrown that in at the end too. A luverly winter warmer. if I’m not in super lazy or manic crochet mode I’ll post the pics tomorrow along with the recipe for whatever it was that I cooked earlier in the week..what was it??? I cant remember!!
ah yes, the courgette cake!
Excuse my mood, between the new hukm I learnt today in tajweed and the murky world of crochet (and it IS only murky when I cant figure out how to do something) my brain has officially turned to fudge! The good news of the week is that I went thrifting on Tuesday and found some er, vintage(70’s bleugh!!) patterns in the thrift shop and felt so inspired I whipped up a pair of trousers for the 8 year old, and she’s mighty please with them. bad news of the week is that i botched a dress i was making for myself…yeah what DID happen with that pledge I made NEVER to make clothes for myself again!
Anyway I’m off to attack my crochet again insha’allah…
Ok so not even the fact that I can express myself in different colours can make me feel better about the fact that I nearly killed my computer. Apparently it’s internal organs were struggling to cope with the weight of the dust that was settling on them. Anyway a bro has managed to fix the problem and we’re back in action masha’allah…lets just make dua it stays that way because I have had a whole weekend of teenage panic because they havent been able to get online to study. Teenage panic is not a good thing to be around this close to exam time, it very nearly got very ugly around here
