I LOVE cold days...

...dark mornings, wintry (wintery?) afternoons, wet days, icy cold days, blustery leafy days, sunny leafy days, sunny cold days, but the most important thing here is that the summer (hateful hot and make you feel guilty for feeling indoors summer) is over for another year and the lovely, lovely Autumnal days have begun with the smell of bonfires, rustle of leaves underfoot and damp and chill which leaves you feeling all crisp and healthy when outside and cosy cosy indoors with heat and steamy drying washing and baking smells. I love it. And it has made me feel all freshly enthused about home teaching.

I want to blog a bit more about our lives at home. This year we are much more into a routine of 'work' and I feel much, much less guilty about the fact that Oliver may not be covering as much as he 'should' be. I generally feel very relaxed about how much we do in 'schooly' stuff, as I am quite confident in his ability to grow into structured learning if and when need be, but I occasionally feel the squeeze of outside forces in the shape of non home-schooled family and friends. I feel stuck in the middle of state-run institutionalised thinking and free as you like home ed thinking.

This is the room we generally work in:

Boring huh?

And this is our new bookcase (in the same room)

which I am inordinately excited about, as I now have 2 whole shelves for Oliver's learny stuff.

I had the idea of getting a giant pinboard for the wall to showcase pics/work/writing but then I read this today on another home edders's blog - DUH! Why didn't I think of this?! So will be shamelessly copying that one day very soon. Want to do a history timeline on it (also mentioned on the same blog) but I can claim that I have honestly wanted to do this for a long time but has remained on my ever growing list of 'things that I want to do but can't truly be arsed to do anything about at this or any point in the near future'.

And finally...

A couple of my layouts were featured on the Papermaze blog on Saturday, so that's nice. Also went to the Scrapaholix crop on Saturday - did two layouts, a gentle and therapeutic scrapping day...