Hey, it's good to be back home again

We all had a lovely church weekend away at the Pioneer Centre, Cleobury Mortimer. Although with small children we didn't get to spend much time in the main sessions, but we had a good time anyway. Amazingly (huh? - this is GOD we are talking about!) the one hour of the one session that I did manage to get to was aimed perfectly at me, reaching me exactly where I am and really helping me move on a few steps. Isabelle's godparents Lana and David were total stars, with Lana getting her to sleep a couple of times and both of them having Isabelle on their lap for a while at several meals so we could actually eat using both hands.

So that's why we didn't get to Hesfes till Monday. For those friends of mine who read this blog and don't know what Hesfes is, it's the Home Educators Seaside Festival - a week-long camp for, erm, home-educators, obviously. It was our first visit, and with a certain notoriety about it, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. And especially as I was going to be spending 5 days in a small caravan with Tamsin and Isabelle but without Bill, I was a bit nervous at how it might go!

We took our usual leisurely time to get organised and on the move on Monday, so didn't arrive in Charmouth until about 6 or 7pm. Sarah had been extremely helpful by saving my electric hook-up pitch by parking her car there - small as the space was, it was better than nothing, which is what I suspect might have happened had she not been so helpful. So we were met by Alison and Sarah, and waved briefly to Jax, Merry, Barbara and maybe others before getting stuck in to getting the caravan set up. Bill left for the 3-hour drive home at about 9pm, and I got the kids to bed and ventured out of the van only to say Hi to my friend Jo who lives in my small town and was there with her 10-year old son. She had a programme which I was able to look through and get some idea of what was going on on-site through the week. I made a mental note to head for the Yoga for Under-5's on Wednesday morning, but nothing much on Tuesday appealed to me. After that I quickly headed for bed, sharing a rather small double bed with 2 children plus hordes of rowdy kids going up and down the road meant a rather disturbed night.
First impressions: a somewhat scruffy campsite absolutely teeming with hordes of strange-looking, unruly kids doing very dangerous things down a steep hill with skateboards, bikes etc.

On Tuesday morning after getting up and ready we wandered out for a look round the site to see what was what. We headed down the hill to the play park and found Alison, Merry and Jax there with their various kids, and I was pleased to note that on the whole Tamsin felt confident enough to go off and play on the equipment on her own instead of wanting me to follow her round and hold her hand all the time. So I was able to sit and have a bit of chatting time with the adults, which was nice. Later on we went up the hill from our caravan to find out where the marquees were that held the workshops and events, and had a general wander round. In the afternoon I needed a couple of things from the site shop, so wandered down only to find it shut, so we carried on out of the site to check out the beach. Had a lovely 45 minutes or so down there but were unprepared with no suncream or anything so we all got a little bit too much of the sun on our faces and didn't notice due to the stiff breeze. Went back up to the campsite and joined the gang of Puddlers sitting chatting. It was nice to meet Joyce and Barbara again, having only passed a few words with both of them at Kessingland last year, and later on I also met Nic, Heather and Alexia. As the afternoon/evening wore on, Tamsin had a lovely time running about and playing with Jax's Small and Barbara's B. In fact, one of the best parts of the week for me was seeing the difference in Tamsin from last year to this. Many might remember that at Kessingland she would barely venture more than a foot or two from me or Bill, and hardly played with any other children at all due to shyness and lack of confidence to go anywhere without us. This year she has run around, played with and talked to children she doesn't know, and generally been a much more confident child.

On Wednesday morning at 9am I remembered about the kids' yoga, so managed to get up to the main marquee in time to participate. It was really yoga for the adults with the hope that the kids would want to join in, which they mostly did, although Tamsin's idea of joining in was mostly running round and round the large marquee pretending to be an aeroplane, which was OK! While there I discovered that the week's programme of events was posted up in the marquee, so that was handy, as otherwise I wouldn't have remembered what else was going on all week. On returning to the campsite area I discovered that several Puddlers were planning on packing up and leaving due to adverse weather reports for the rest of the week, but as I had no car there was no way I could join this general exodus even if I had wanted to. However enough people I knew were sticking around to make it OK. I did phone Bill and arrange for him to pick me up on Friday instead of Saturday, though.

In the afternoon we spent a little more time at the play park before heading down to the beach ready for the labyrinth-building, which according to rumour was supposed to happen from 2-4pm. We arrived at about 2.15 pm to an extremely windy and cold beach, and no sight of any structured activity at all. We hung around for a little while, Tamsin enjoying digging and filling her buckets with sand, but in the end I was too cold and decided to head back to the caravan. Walking back I met everyone walking to the beach, and discovered apparently the labyrinth-building was supposed to start at 3pm, but by then I was too cold and tired to join in, so we carried on back to the campsite.

On both Tuesday and Wednesday Tamsin and I had the following conversation:
T - "I want to go home"
Me - "Why do you want to go home?"
T - "I want to watch Dora"
(very similar to Kessingland last year when every single day of the camp she wanted to go home so she could do 'track', i.e. play with her Brio train set.)

Anyway it was something of a blessing when in conversation with Nic she said she had a Dora the Explorer DVD back at her static caravan, and invited us to go over and view any time. Tamsin was over the moon when I told her, and from then on nagged me senseless until I phoned Nic and arranged to go over. I discovered that Barbara was packing up and planning to spend the night at Nic's, so when I was ready to go I offered to take someone or something with me, and ended up taking B. It was lovely to spend more time with Nic, and later on Barbara, despite her stress levels being a bit high due to some of her kids! I went back to my caravan when Isabelle started getting rather whingey due to being tired. Tamsin was thrilled with her Dora 'fix', though, and it stopped her wanting to go home for the rest of the week!

Thursday was the day when the rain arrived on and off for most of the day. Tamsin and I had a really nice 'girly' start to the morning, snug in our cosy caravan with its lovely fan heater, painting each other's toe-nails and plaiting hair. When we eventually emerged we went up the hill to the main marquee to see what was going on, and came across a belly-dancing session in progress. Tamsin couldn't resist the array of shiny, jingly and sparkly garments and insisted on dressing up a little and joining in, although again she didn't want to attempt any of the 'proper' movements but just ran up and down twirling around instead. After a while I was tired of that so we wandered off for a coffee and cake, and chatted a little with a man who I later discovered was Mike Fortune-Wood. He and Roland Meighan were about to begin setting up for their book-launch (name-dropping, moi?), which although I would have been quite interested to stay for, I knew Tamsin wouldn't have the necessary patience. On attempting to leave she fell flat on her face in lots of sticky mud, which she was quite upset about, so we went back to the caravan for cleaning up and lunch. I was so tired and attempted to have a bit of a nap while Isabelle slept and Tamsin played one of her computer games, but she kept disturbing me and I didn't get much rest. For the rest of the afternoon I felt completely lethargic, so although we went down to the play park again I didn't have the energy for it so just came back to the campsite for a sit and a chat with Sarah, Jax and Joyce, followed by an early bedtime. Actually around dinner-time I started to feel quite sick, and didn't know whether to put it down to the eggs I'd had for lunch brought from home and laid by my own chickens, or to low blood-sugar having not eaten anything else since then. I mentally started planning who I could call to look after my children while I lay in my sick-bed, but thankfully it didn't come to that and I felt better later on, although the nausea came and went for the rest of the evening and the night, and in fact on Friday too.

Friday was going home day, and knowing that Bill was on the way to rescue me from the mud and the children meant I just had to do the packing and clearing up and then wait for him to arrive around 2pm. Tamsin played wall-to-wall computer games but we were all getting a bit tetchy and bored, and the frustration levels rose when Bill phoned firstly to say he was late leaving due to a problem at home, and then later being stuck in traffic rather a lot on the journey down, so he eventually arrived around 4pm. It was lovely to see him and to be taken away from all the mud and noise!

Overall impressions of a Hesfes virgin: not as positive as I would have hoped, sadly. The major memory I am left with is of the really selfish and disrespectful behaviour of the older kids, who were definitely not a good advert for home-education. They didn't care what property they might damage by their behaviour, whether that was Bill's car or Joyce's tent, or how many small children they upset in the playground by hogging the equipment, or how many people they were in danger of hurting by frankly dangerous bike and skate-board riding down the hill. Also, along the lines of Nic's 'retail opportunity' musings, I really did expect to find a range of home-education resources that I could browse through. After all, these aren't things we can find in the shops generally and it would be nice to see some of the curricula, books, computer programs and other resources to have a look at. My good memories are of sitting chatting with on-line friends and hopefully turning them more into real-life friends, and Tamsin playing happily with children she hadn't met before or couldn't remember. Most of the activities or workshops were not suitable for Tamsin, and there was less on offer than I expected although a quick look through some other blogs indicates there were things there that I didn't know about. That in itself is indicative of a certain lack of planning or information-giving. All in all I can't see myself wanting to go next year, or maybe for a few years until Tamsin is likely to get more out of the activities on offer and Isabelle is less likely to be in 'running away toddler'-mode.

Well, that blogging has taken me about 2.5 hours and I still have over 800 e-mails and everybody else's blogs to read, so I'm going to be busy for a while!