Ah, yes. The book. Well, my unofficial deadline for MoonSurfing for Teens was the end of January. That, er, didn’t happen. The official deadline is the end of February. That *might* happen if I pull my finger out, but it does mean that not much structured home ed is going on in the mean time. But it will. And we’ve decided that I’m going to go back to doing astrology consultations in person, so we’re going to clear out Emily’s old bedroom (finally!) and turn it into a consulting room.

Anyway. Emily’s happy. Blue’s happy. We’re happy-if-you-don’t-count-the-financial-crisis-which-is-still-dire, and by some miracle we managed to pay the tax bill on time. Which was quite some astounding feat. The cats are happy. The parrot’s happy. Nana and Gramps are happy and both of their health is improving dramatically after a difficult couple of months. Jon’s Dad is not happy and takes every opportunity to point it out, and to attempt to spread his misery, but then that’s nothing new. Basically, we’re all still here, still happy, still writing, still medium-ing, still home edding, still riding and still doing what we do. And I shall attempt to have something more interesting to say next time.

I shall leave you with this delightful photo of Blue surveying a snowy manege yesterday (before the second downpour of heavy snow). He was relieved to have his rug taken off so he could have a good scratch, even if it was freezing. You can almost hear him: “Does by bum look big from this angle?”

And this one, just because he’s gorgeous

Managed to get back to work properly this week, both work work and home ed work. Have been sticking to my resolution of getting up early and taking father in law out for a walk before 9am so that his constant negativity doesn’t wreck the middle of my day and I have a chance to get over it and still have a day left :-/

Emily’s gone back to home ed work with (relative) gusto. We’ve started a new psychology book which is absolutely brilliant and much less “oh-look-pretty-pictures” than previous ones. In fact, there are no pictures whatsoever, which really helps when your child is so turned off by any attempt to prettify a text book. It’s completely black and white, text only – and she loves it! We’re also embarking upon some serious critical thinking work with this A Level General Studies book and this Cambridge University Press one. We’re heading into the abyss in maths with an inexorable journey towards trigonometry and other unspeakables, but doing so remarkably calmly….! We watched a documentary about quantum physics earlier during the week, and spent a pleasant morning trying to eek something understandable out of the incomprehensible, but our main science track at the moment is astronomy related.

Emily’s about to start reading Pride and Prejudice (heaven help her) and has also expressed a desire to read Dickens, so Jon has given her some of his Mum’s very old texts. I must say that Dickens for me was *utterly* ruined by a very unpleasant English teacher forcing us to read Oliver Twist – I hated her and I hated the book, and I’ve never picked up a Dickens novel since. I hope Emily enjoys her foray into the classics, and am trying very hard not to let my own negative English Lit school experiences transmit to her. Although I loved Lord of the Flies at school and adored Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the rest of English Lit was pure torture and put me off going anywhere near “the classics” for decades.

Jon is preparing to do a lot of law with Emily this “term”, and also plenty of American politics now that their presidential race has really kicked off. History is still my sphere and we’re backtracking *yet again* and going back to our Renaissance study, partly because Emily has expressed an interest in art history, and partly because we never seem to finish anything we start in history these days, and it’s about time we did.

I have several ideas which are still bubbling away about major photography projects to inspire Emily with her new camera, which will take care of art and creativity for now. It’s proving next to impossible to fit violin back into our routine, though, which is a huge shame and something I desperately want to fix, but right now I can’t see how Emily’s still riding and caring for Blue every day Monday to Friday, which takes a minimum of two hours out of each day, and because of the way the routine works out at the riding stables it has to be two hours between about 11am and 3pm, so it does tend to cut the day right in half. Still, it’s worth it – would just be so much more convenient if we could go first thing in the morning.

Real life work-wise, I have until the end of January to complete the manuscript for Moon Surfing. Meep. I’ve finished five chapters so far, and have eight more to go. Technically, I promised the publishers the manuscript for the end of Feb, which is definitely do-able, but I’ve got my own deadline of the end of January because if I miss that, the book won’t be published in time to coincide with the goddess camps etc at which I’ll be promoting it, so….

Once that is done, we have some huge plans this year for other work projects and more books, so it looks set to be very, very busy. Jon’s nearly finished writing his mediumship course and in a surprise development last week, was asked by the very lovely Ian Lawman if he would like to share the platform with Ian during a special event in March Super proud of him!

The over-riding theme to our lives right now, as ever, is that there’s a great deal going on and not a lot of time to fit it all into. I’ve got a good feeling about it all, though. I think that possibly, just possibly, 2012 might turn out to be our year

After a lovely New Year’s Eve (the picture of Emily in the green dress was NYE), I spent most of New Year’s Day, as ever, getting things ready for her birthday – mostly cooking, since the theme of her birthday tea was “vintage tea party” (did I mention she’s obsessed with vintage?) and I wanted to do as much home made stuff as possible.

On her birthday itself, Emily was thrilled to bits with her presents and tea, and was a very happy teenager. Her main present from us was this rather nifty camera, which is the modern version of my now eight year old one, and much, much, much better. It was a complete surprise for her, and she spent much of the rest of the day surgically attached to it. Other bits and pieces from us included a (great fun) horseracing game, some more Harry Potter analysis books and a graphology course-in-a-book which she loved and has barely stopped working through. She was generously given money by friends, while Grandad gave her some books and Nana and Gramps gave her a plethora of fun bits and pieces and….drumroll, please…. a beautiful pair of long riding boots. She was very excited with those, as she’s always wanted long ones, but because she has EEEE wide feet, it’s hard to get any to fit. These ones were wide fit and we had high hopes for them, but sadly they didn’t, in the end, fit – but they’ve been returned for a different size, which hopefully will

For the vintage tea party tea we had lovely china and flowers and cherry blossom from the garden, and Emily wore her favourite vintage tea dress. We had tiny saucer crackers, which each contained a trivia question and a posh conversation topic (so funny!), and we had a jug of conversation spoons too, which each had a question, some funny, some thought provoking. I had made strawberry cup cakes, white chocolate shortbread slices, apple and marzipan puffs, three sorts of sandwiches and two types of home made pizza, plus Emily’s marbled chocolate birthday cake in two heart shaped tiers; Gramps made fruit and cherry scones, which we had with jam and fresh cream. The grown ups had wine in their tea cups – it was lovely! And then in the evening, we played plenty of games and enjoyed much laughter. A good way to turn into a teenager, I think, and Emily seemed to think so too.

So here’s the birthday girl in pictures!

Just about squeezed this post in to 2011! Had a lovely Yule and Christmas, after a hectic December. We had a candlelit supper outdoors on Yule, as has become our tradition, although unfortunately we couldn’t use the yule lanterns we made last year, as it was too windy. Christmas was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone, and Emily was thrilled to bits with her presents, particularly a huge Harry Potter: Page to Screen book (it’s enormous!) and beautiful custom made rhythm beads for Blue – you can see Blue’s set close up on the maker’s page over at Angel Horse, and in one of the pics in the gallery you can see him wearing them for the first time when we visited him on Boxing Day. He loves them which is a good thing, since he had a hand in choosing them, when Emily followed the lovely Dawn’s instructions on how to create a psychic link with Blue in order to ask him specifically what type and colour of beads he would like and why.

So, we’re all looking forward very much to 2012. Apart from the financial problems caused by so many lost contracts, 2011 was a very good year. Emily got Blue, of course, which has been a huge thing. I got my publishing contract, and Jon made huge progress in his mediumship and began doing public demonstrations – all very positive things for all of us. During 2012, we have lots of exciting plans, not least of which will be me finishing this flippin’ book – deadline is the end of January and I’ve barely started, eeeep! – lots more horse things, lots more mediumship, more books and a great deal more home ed, as well as various personal and health goals.

We’re having a fabulous New Year’s Eve celebration tonight, and then of course on Monday it’s Emily’s 13th birthday. I have no idea where the years have gone, but I do know that we’re so proud of our ever-so-nearly teenager – she’s the funniest, kindest, cleverest, quirkiest girl, and wonderful company

This is Emily and Gramps’ windscreen wiper project, built from scratch with meccano and then programmed It has on/off, intermittent with adjustable speed, and a wash/wipe function – the green light lights up to show screenwash going on, and then the wipers wipe for a bit before stopping, just like in a real car. It was very impressive, and apparently much fun to do!

It’s been a funny old month, filled with Blue, Blue and more Blue, lately with added tinsel Some “proper” home education did sneak in at times, but more by accident than design, to be honest. Emily’s done lots more work with Gramps during her Monday afternoon sessions, notably a project of several weeks where they built from meccano and then programmed from scratch a working windscreen wiper model – I’ll do a separate post on that impressive achievement! Gramps has been very ill for the past couple of weeks, but is on the road to recovery now, and has been happily teaching Emily some mathematical card tricks ready for Christmas!

Emily has been making lots more Harry Potter art, and has started re-reading the Northern Lights trilogy too. There’s been some maths and some economics at odd moments, and yesterday she completed a mini science assignment finding out about the threat to earth from asteroids and other near earth objects, and about the various Spaceguard projects which are trying to minimise the threat and work on solutions to avoid a catastrophic impact, should we never need to do so. She did very well with that.

Other than that, it has been a fairly quiet month for home ed. Emily hasn’t been all that well and hasn’t been sleeping well, so beyond riding every day we’ve been taking it easy. She’s getting much better now, though, and I have ambitious plans for the new year. It’s so tough to find time to fit in the daily riding AND daily home education AND daily real life earn-money work AND daily care for father in law. There are not enough hours in the day. Somehow, in 2012, I’m determined to organise it all better; I’m just not yet sure how.

The Christmas decorations went up on the 1st December and we’ve done a few Christmassy bits and pieces, including some woodburning/pyrography crafts and some cooking. We made cakes and sausage rolls to take to the spiritualist church’s Christmas prize draw service, which went down very well, and Emily has been delighted to discover various bits and bobs of vintage jewellery in her advent calendar boxes It’s been quite a low key run up to Christmas, though, compared with other years – a combination of us being so busy and Emily being that bit older and not so keen on Christmas crafts and faffing about. We decided early on that this December we’d try to fit in some family games nights for the tree of us, since most of our evenings are taken up with work; we’ve had two so far and absolutely loved them, with a third planned for next week, and then over Christmas, New Year and Emily’s birthday we always have games nights with Nana and Gramps too, so that should work well.

Business-wise, things are up and down. Plenty of new clients are enquiring about astrology, but I’m not managing to convert all the enquiries into contracts, which is annoying. My book, um, hasn’t made much progress since I actually signed the publishing contract, so it’s going to be a mad rush after Christmas to get the damn thing written – sigh. I sort of knew this was going to happen – it always does – but I do work well under pressure and am used to turning things around with a very tight deadline, so I’m crossing my fingers that it will all work out. Jon’s been approached by a church in Louth to do some mediumship demonstrations in the new year, which is exciting, and he continues to do masses of work for the local spiritualist church, and has nearly finished writing their mediumship development course which he will teach in the new year.

And then there’s been the riding. Oh my, the riding. On New Year’s Day, we will have had Blue for exactly six months, and it’s starting to be hard to remember what it was like before we had him! We’ve been to ride him almost every day, Monday to Friday, since then; we’ve missed a handful of days in the last month because of ice or extreme winds, but that’s about all. When we first got Blue he was extremely anxious about going outside the yard without any other horses, because he never went out on his own. We soon got to grips with building up his confidence, though, and now he really enjoys going for miles and miles with Emily riding and either Jon or I walking or biking. A few weeks ago, we tried something new – me driving and Emily riding, so that we could go much further. He was as good as gold that first time, and all I had to do was drive a fair bit ahead and then pull over and wait, rinse and repeat.

The second time we tried the drive’n'hack routine, however, he went slightly potty half way out, and began to back down very steep ditches, spin around and generally go nuts in the middle of the road on a blind bend on a country road that most drivers treat like a racetrack. That was extremely frightening, as he was so hard to get back under control, and even with me abandoning the car and trying to lead him, he wouldn’t play ball. We had to give up in the end as it was simply too dangerous, and we turned back for home rather upset and wondering why he’d suddenly turned against hacking like that.

It turns out, we think, that he just suddenly got really frightened about there not being anybody with him (on foot – obviously Emily was with him!). Slowly and surely we’ve gone back to building up his confidence and he’s now (almost) cottoned on to the idea that he can safely follow the car and that he’s not completely on his own. Still, with the weather now taking a turn for the worse, we’re going to have to scale back the hacks a little anyway, so for now we’ve gone back to walking on the shorter routes. It was a timely reminder to us, though, not to get complacent and think we’ve got this horsey thing cracked! Bless him, he’s being so brave

And so here we are, and in just over a fortnight’s time, Emily will be 13 years old and we’ll have a teenage daughter. I have no idea how that happened – it seems like ten minutes ago that we were leaving the newborn intensive care unit with out tiny bundle. Today, Emily, Nana and Gramps went out for their now traditional pre-Christmas antiques centre hunt at Hemswell. And what did my nearly 13 year old come back with that Nana and Gramps had kindly splashed out on for her? A pair of long, vintage evening gloves, and an expensive teapot to match her favourite tea service, together with an extra cup, saucer and plate for same. And she was so excited! Apparently, she also wanted to buy an antique pocket watch, but they were too expensive…… With her love of all things vintage developing further by the minute, something tells me she’s not going to be your typical teenager!

Jon and Emily attended a book launch on Saturday and were somewhat less than impressed to discover that the author was using a video still of Jon during his author talk to promote his book, and that same still was shown prominently in the book itself – and of course, he had not asked for permission from either Jon or the copyright holder of the video. We were aware of this author’s….unorthodox style….since his previous book had contained information more or less parroted from a website run by a friend of ours, again without permission. To make matters worse, during his talk he was giving out misleading and incorrect information about the circumstances of the video. Jon intervened and corrected him, and he was obviously shaken to find Jon in the audience.

On Monday, we contacted his publishers with an official complaint; they originally came back snottily saying they were perfectly happy that copyright had not been breached. Ha. Yeah. Soon put that one to bed with some strongly worded correspondence. The author himself then resorted to threats against a friend of ours – very professional – and spouted a load of rubbish he clearly doesn’t understand about “public domain” and “fair use”, and claimed that he had made every reasonable effort to trace the copyright holder. It’s all utter bollocks – both we and the copyright holder were perfectly easy to trace, the item was not in the public domain as that term legally applies and nor was it eligible to be used without permission under fair use – but clearly the author thinks we’re stupid and will be dazzled by such official sounding terms.

Anyway. Having refused correspondence with him – the legal responsibility does lie, after all, with the publishers – we continued correspondence with the publishers, who are now taking a far more conciliatory tone. They appear to have the common sense to realise that their legs to stand are rapidly vanishing. We are still awaiting a final outcome to this, but we will take it to court if necessary – it’s absolutely vile and disgusting for this man to be profiting from someone else’s work like this, and his attitude stinks, which makes matters even worse. I somehow suspect further legal action won’t in the end be necessary because his publishers are seeing sense, but if they call our bluff they’ll discover we’re not bluffing after all.

So all that has taken up quite some time.

In between, however, Emily’s done some great history work, starting with discovering how, when, where and why alphabets evolved from pictorial and symbolic scripts, as part of the first GCSE Media Through Time unit. She’s also had a go at – and enjoyed – doing some of these Oxford University Entrance Tests – thinking/critical analysis papers which require candidates to spot supporting evidence, find the flaws in arguments, examine which conclusions are supported by a piece and which are not, and so forth. She sailed through the first twelve questions on the sheet she tried and got 10/12 correct – the two she didn’t get right were more mathematically orientated and to be honest, she didn’t exactly try that hard with those. The critical thinking/logic/rationality ones, however, she found an absolute doddle. Very, very pleased and proud of her at 12 years old to be finding these a cinch – we’ve obviously done a good job working alongside her to help her develop some independent thinking skills as opposed to the sheeple, it-says-so-here-so-it-must-be-true mentality which seems all pervasive these days – including among those who champion particular causes without bothering to actually look critically at either side of the argument.

Riding continues apace. Blue is going to be clipped this week to help him stop being so sweaty under his winter rug; Emily’s slightly sad that his mane will be hogged (cut short, mohican style) at the same time, because she (and I) much prefer his long, natural mane – but his owners prefer his mane to be cut, and they are, after all, the owners, so it’s not up to us. It’s not as if it’s going to bother him, after all, lol – I don’t suppose Blue could care less! Earlier this week I walked six and a half miles (measured it on google maps!) with Emily, discovering a new route the next village along and through some beautiful woods where she and Blue could canter about to their heart’s content. She’s also been out with Blue and Jon on his bike again, which they all love. Not looking forward to the icy weather and how that will affect Emily’s riding (and our mucking out!) – keeping fingers very crossed for a mild winter for a change, much as I normally love winter!

Legally, we were not obliged to provide the local authority with any further information whatsoever beyond their initial contact with us when Emily was first removed from school, aged 5. The local authority has no legal remit to monitor home educated children on an on-going basis; having originally established that a suitable education is being offered they must, in law, assume that the child is still receiving that suitable education, from then onwards, unless and until they are given cause to believe otherwise. We are not obliged to provide them with any further information about Emily and her education – ever.

As I think I’ve said before, we’ve co-operated in the past and written a couple of reports over the last seven years – but we’re too busy now, and I object, on principle, to such an invasion of Emily’s privacy. The education authorities were not remotely interested in the problems she was having when she *was* at school – so I thoroughly resent their apparent interest now. The man who sends through the “assessments” of our written reports has always seemed charming and wholly in favour of what we’re doing, but enough is enough.

This afternoon, I laid out in writing the legal situation of which they seem to be so ignorant – and I have told them that – unless we contact them to ask for their assistance – I do not expect to hear from them again.

Next they looked at Gramps’ vintage adding machine, which was made approximately 50 years ago in what was then East Germany. They also looked at some more slide rules, one about the same age as the adding machine and one made in 1956; they also examined a circular slide rule and how that worked, and logarithmic paper. Finally, they had a look at some fun kinegrams – there are instructions there for how to make your own using illustration software, which Emily hasn’t had a chance to do yet but intends to have a go at.

Phew!