These things are Good

Staying up until midnight, stifling yawns, indulging in 'girly talk' with teenage daughter. Gorgeous dresses.. bitchy gossip.. music.. and more and much more. Is it just home ed teens, or is there more depth to them all than the stereotype would have us believe? Last night we covered family history and traits, the effect of magazines on mental health, schooling and the consumerist society, then it's back to making clothes, and finds on ebay and 2nd hand markets and blissful, glorious future plans and hopes and ideas. Delicious. :-)

Finding that the taciturn teenage son has so much to say after all: it's a matter of hitting the right trigger. Wow, he thinks deeply too - you need one of these to even get halfway down the depths of his mind.


I could spend my life just talking to them all at the expense of doing anything else, quite happily. They all have their own natural time slots when they open up 1:1, when they've got time to chat and it's worth losing some sleep for the rewards that come from those conversations. New ideas, fresh ways of seeing things, feedback about parenting methods. Who better than our own teenage children to tell us what works well, and what works less well?

Watching an autonomous 4-year old learning through play, all the time, from whatever is to hand.

Sunny Sunday mornings, they're good.

Friends who pop up saying the exact right thing at the exact right time.

Down the Line, Radio 4's new comedy series with Paul Whitehouse, Charlie Higson and others. I think it's a completely new style of comedy: it's very clever - so nearly straight that you keep catching yourself forgetting it's spoof. Or maybe that's just me being dim ;-)