Homeschool home visits.

I think it's just me but any time I particularly need a nice quiet stretch my life goes completely catawamps.

Cassie's supervisor (yes we have those for homeschooler's here) is coming for her home visit on Tuesday. She is a truely lovely Christian lady who thinks Cass' art work is wonderful & loves her school work but I'm sure she thinks we're all quite, quite mad. Last time she visited our house was drowing in tubs of stamps, literally, & Dearest had turned our living room into a workshop for making coasters & place mats out of stamps. Any time the place is likely to stink of turps & thinners & every surface is cluttered with things in various stages of construction that can't possibly be moved. Cass is making minatures & experimenting with clay which has to dry before it can be fired. OK, I can write that off as school work but I thought I would be organized & start cleaning early. I should have known what a mistake that was. The boys have been cutting up concrete & brought bucket loads of stuff inside clinging to their boots & socks & now it is on my living room floor.

Plus I had this bright idea (I so wish I wouldn't get bright ideas!) of making a cookbook as part of our study on Europe. After all both Cass & I ( to say nothing of the concrete cutters) all have a very sweet tooth! We have wasted a lot of time & tonns of paper scouring the net for absolutely mouthwatering recipes. Unfortunately most are far too time consuming to attempt in term time when our schedule is already overloaded but our supervisor has said how wonderful if Cass could prepare one for her visit. AAArgh! I know what that will mean. Cass does NOT get to choose. I have chosen Irish Clannrach (which I can't spell either!) as being the simpliest & something we can make the day before. Cass doesn't mind. It is quite similiar to the raspberry pots we make when we want a fast, rich & yummy desert.

I'm a little spooked. We seem to have done so little this term yet been busier than ever & certainly we have piles of work to show for it. I guess I just seem to spend a lot of time preparing stuff that is completed so quickly in the end it feels like we haven't really done much. Like I get wild that European history always seems to start with the Romans, who really were very dull & not at all innovative; just very good at bossing everyone else around, so I've been hunting up stuff on the barbarians, somewhere I shouldn't go just now because I got sidetracked by the Sythians who are completely fascinating when I started too. Cass will no doubt just roll her eyes some more but she was breastfed to body excavations & facial reconstructions & commentators explaining sex from forearm bones & general health from dental remains.

So long as we stay with the arts & humanities we do well but Cass is about to move into long division, which I actually have never been able to do myself so have put off ordering her book for ages as if the whole horrible thing would dissappear in a puff of smoke. Liddy CAN do it & as she is otherwise unoccupied for the present she has been roped in to deal with it. Ditto chemistry. Cass & I spent a week on the opening chapter. We read the words. We even understood what they meant but the concepts completely eluded us. We are no wiser but have moved on, hopeful things will become a little more self explanatory. What I have found with science, contary to how most scientist want to teach it, is we are great with the natural sciences. That is all about us. We love nature & understand lots simply from living with it but both Cass & I are theorists. Don't ask us to make stuff. Our experiments fail miserably. We don't care about the ins & outs of how certain things go pop! Only why. Artistically we will remember that stars both sing & dance, as the bible said eons ago before scientists reached the same conclusion, but the ins & outs of the nuclear fusion that creates it is likely to bore us silly. I'm considering looking at chesmistry from a totally kitchen perspective. Cooking is all about chemical reactions & while I may not like to cook Cass certainly does ~ & no~one at all will object to the eating.