We humans, we like it to change. And then we want it back the way it was.

Here we are, educating teens at home. (Or rather, in HesFes week, in a field in Suffolk.)

Sometimes, negotiating this teen home ed lark, it's tricky. Things change so fast. Sometimes, when you're not looking.

I can count these tricky bits on my fingers.

1. Children change. Shark, Tiger, and Squirrel. They changed. The stuff they liked last year, they don't like this year (fish, horses, copper beating, Shakespeare and cake excepted).

2. Teen language, attitudes, ideas and values change. It's not the same as in 1973, is it? I have trouble keeping up.

3. I changed. Thank someone's lord that I am no longer required to lay flat out pretending I'm a rowing boat. Neither am I needed at the 10+ Social Club in case of a punch up over the lemonade. At their age 14, now my attention can wander. I need only to maintain a loose affiliation with the bonds of motherhood to satisfy my teens. I can thus dedicate hours of once-maternal-pleasure to stabbing dead cow hide and fondling silkworm poo. I definitely changed.

4. Our home ed activity range changed. Thousands of kids are home educated to age 12! Plenty of optional activities at primary! Then there's the drop-off from age 13. Museum/gallery/science park type workshops (easy to find) are mostly built around primary KSthis and KSthat. Money for old rope, because it comes down to sticking and gluing, poking insects, finding the hidden wotnot, and doing a worksheet. But if you home ed past age 12, you'll find a massive withering-upon-the-vine of the workshops available. Which seems to morph into swotting at home with a text book and curriculum.

5. The friends changed. Once, it was noise and limbs, bramble-clawed legs and chocolate cheeks. Now it's plaited hair and bangles, camomile tea and musing. I watch my teen hippies meet their many-ways-to-skin-a-cat-philosopher friends discuss ambitions in film making, conservation, wolves.

With all this change-this and change-that reflection on living, I am moved to reflect on what we do that stays the same.

Some things don't change (much). Like our annual walk round Framlingham Castle. My routine setting the camera on black and white because I proudly retain the technology skills set of a medieval peasant. And Mr Whippy ice cream in Stowmarket, licked while sat on a bench in the cemetery.

Ah, happy is the repetition.

(Sadly, I do not have a photo of the cemetery.)