Update.

I have realised that in long neglecting the blog, things have moved on somewhat, and I had better bring people up to date.

Ram is now 14, taller than his mum, and speaks in sarcasm like many teens do. Despite this, he is still like many home educated teens and gets on well with his parents.

We are still home educating, and much of what we do is reading aloud and purposive conversation, but this too has matured. Ram has a great interest in physics, so we have been reading a lot of science books, in fact he says there are only two types of books, non-fiction and physics!

One big change is that Arrow our elderly dog finally died. I had always said that she was so stupid that she would realise that she was supposed to die, and would carry on for years, unlike our other dog that was very cleaver and died at age 10 (of a brain tumour). I was right. Despite being a large dog she managed 15 years, the last however I couldn't really say that she was with us. She was deaf, mostly blind, and just wondered around and slept all the time. We knew it was the right time to let her go when she couldn't recognise the Dxh when he arrived, and we had her put to sleep.

There had been much discussion about what to replace her with. It certainly wasn't going to be another dog, as Ram's Hypermobility Syndrome was causing a lot of trouble (there is a subject for another post all on it's own!) making walking dogs impossible. We toyed with the idea of fish, then reptiles or snakes, but in the end after a visit to a friend we decided on chickens.

At the moment we have five lovely girly girls, producing eggs every day for us. Death is something that we have had to get used to a lot more as the original four rescued hens died pretty quickly. We have two themes running for names, architecture and food. We have been though Veranda, Porch, Kentucky, Tikka and now we have Terrace, Patio, Masala, Nugget and Korma.

Bob also has had his cousin come to visit. Fred arrived in the post one day, having been traveling around the world living in post offices. He heard that Cousin Bob had a nice place to live, and decided to visit, and hasn't actually managed to leave again!

Unlike Bob, Fred is laid back with his straw hat, a little hard of thinking, so we have to explain things to him a lot.

That's enough of an update for now!