Health and safety? Pass me the hammer.

It's been a whole 24 hours since I did something dangerous with my children's minds, and I'm feeling the urge to parent badly in that home education way of ours, so I lure the kids out the comfort zone of the house with softly spoken promises of a false spring and how we can help cute little robins and blue tits look for homes.

It works. In fifteen minutes I've imprisoned Shark, Squirrel and Tiger in a community room with a dozen other kids and said you're not going home until you've learned how to make a nest box.

Now I start messing with their minds properly. I say you first have to find the six bits of wood that make up a nest box from the mountain of pine, then work out how to fit the bits of wood together and finally bang in all the nails so the bottom doesn't fall out when the bird sits on it. By the way, don't look at me, because I don't know, and make sure you don't end up in casualty.

Dumping kids in freak out situations like this is excellent material for the abusive parent. But it gets better. Because some little kid has nicked the only sheet of instructions.

Now the only option left for Shark, Squirrel and Tiger is to learn from everyone else how to build a nest box when no-one has a clue. Or they can use past experience (none), guesswork (plenty), and brute force (no shortage of that). Well of course they rise to the challenge, because it's either that or allow blue tits to die homeless.

So now I'll let the pictures tell the story. There is supposed to be a carpenter to help, but he possibly crawled away to die before we got there, driven mad by the banging sounds of hammer blows from fifteen kids smashing their way through planks of wood.

And I promise myself to work out how to transfer video to this blog because you would not believe the volume in this room, but I am now partially deaf in both ears and seeking compensation.






Two hours later, Shark, Squirrel and Tiger emerge victorious, and no doubt the little robins and blue tits will be queuing up with their bags, waiting to move in to these desirable residences straight away.

And by some standards, I guess I am a bad, bad parent, because I take real pleasure in knowing here how the kids don't have any answers, or any teachers come to that. They worked it out, made it up, learned from each other, made guesses, used their wits, hit things with hammers and became downright dangerous and experimental.


And for this am I abusive? You may need to call me so, because the more I can get of this, the better.