A better Thursday

Grit is still licking her wounds after last Thursday's drama of five acts drawn out over three hours, titled Let's get ready for gym and trampoline lessons, and is not surprisingly keen to avoid a rerun, so wisely dumps lessons today, and loads the kids in the car headed for Stockwood Discovery Centre.

Perhaps I should feel guilty that we're skipping lessons, but I don't. Because I can cover myself with this lovely and convenient educational theory that all us home educators use; the one that says it doesn't matter what you do, nor where you do it, because the kids will learn something anyhow.

I might try standing Shark on her head in a tub of marmalade to test that theory, but we'll say it works for us today in the newly opened Stockwood. We learn a lot about life in Luton and environs. We learn that Luton is not just an airport or a light industrial zone where you can pick up a second hand Vauxhall car. It is also an ancient seabed swum over by long-necked reptiles, a land of buried flints and axeheads, rolling hills where Celts once settled and where Romans kicked them out, built villas, and buried a lot of gold coins, and a place of deathly knells where many folk were buried, possibly after being slaughtered in unpleasant battle.

We have an argument over a drawer of rocks and a bicycle, but otherwise the day passes with no small contentment from the gritlets, partly because there is a lot to learn here, some videos to watch and buttons to press, and partly because everyone is bribed with a bucket of a fruit salad when we return home as a reward for good behaviour.

And if you are good enough to read this far, here are the pictures from today, an altogether better Thursday.

Squirrel dressing up as a Victorian child
and seizing the reins of a plastic horse.

Shark deciding what to buy at the medieval market stall.

Grit, offering to carry everything including coats,
drinks, picnic hamper, leaflets, and bits of plastic junk
Squirrel has foolishly brought out from the car.

A reconstructed head from the Five Knells at Dunstable Downs.
You see? It's educational round here.
You just can't stop learning things, can you?

Shark being taught a thing or two about suspension by Tiger,
and possibly feeling slightly sick.