20 May 2011, 11:22 am
Alongside this website, we’ve kept a family blog for the last 9 years, detailing the ups and downs of our life as a home educating, small business owning family. Our family has grown from 5 people, to 7 people and back to 6 people on that blog as it chronicled not only the pregnancies and births of Amelie, Josie and Freddie, but also Freddie’s short life and death at 11 days old.
The blog is filled with our educational exploits, crafting ideas, the different ways we’ve home educated and lived life and all of that alongside building and running our online business, trying out school, coming back home, moving house more times than is reasonable and finally becoming not a work at home mother family, but a family which relies entirely on the income the business brings in.
This year we’ve been nominated for two MAD Blog Award categories, the Best Family Life Blog and Most Inspiring Blog Award. All of us are thrilled and for me, it is something good to have come out of a truly terrible year; to win one of these awards in Freddie’s memory would mean the world to me.
You can find out more about us on our blog, Patch of Puddles and if you’d be kind enough to take a moment to click through and vote for us, I’d be incredible grateful.
3 March 2011, 6:39 pm
We’ve had a very interesting couple of weeks on Patch of Puddles with masses of interaction from readers giving us ideas on many topics.
We’ve been discussing Books for Kids with masses of ideas for children aged 9-14 to read. This was a follow up to a post from several years ago on Classic Books for Children to Read and it was great to see how much really great material has been written in the time between the two posts.
We’ve been grateful to our reader for ideas on how to shop locally and more thoughtfully, something which our children have developed quite an enthusiasm for over the last couple of years.
Fran, the Pud of this site originally, is now almost 13; still home educated, she is stretching her wings in a big way. This week we’ve been helping her explore the world of business with a small foray into the world of bracelet making.
Finally, I’m putting together a round up page on MuddlePuddle of our art days; we’ve been doing a focused approach to art skills and history with another family for around 9 months now and they’ve been fantastically successful. We’ve used very simple ideas, a few books and ideas from the internet and had an absolute ball. You can see our most recent day, on using perspective in drawing, over at our blog.
5 February 2011, 11:33 pm
We’ve been having a go at some new Chinese New Year based Crafts, over at Patch of Puddles. As is so often the case, it is mainly Fimo and Hama Beads, but nice and creative even so!
I’m gradually updating the Chinese New Year pages over on the right hand menu.
We’ve also put a download of Kandinsky inspired Hama beads over at BeadMerrily. It is completely free for non-commercial use.
30 April 2010, 11:34 pm
After far too long dormant, MuddlePuddle is going to come live again. What started as an early years website, specifically aimed at 0-8’s, is still doing a great job but it got old and tired and we stopped updating it. In that time, the internet has grown and changed into something far more remarkable, with great resources for kids and their parents. I thought it was time to refresh the whole thing, make it easier to edit and, while keeping the best of the old content, replenish it with some new.
Here at MuddlePuddle Central, things have moved on too; Pud, the original MuddlePuddle chick, will shortly be 12, Moo is now 10 and Splat is nearly 8. But we still have a 5 year old, who never managed to get a MuddlePuddle name. Grumps would possibly be appropriate.
We hope you’ll enjoy the new content; our plan is to keep all the Early Years stuff in one place but add some older age group resources too so that it remains relevant to our family.
This rebuild is in memory of our beautiful boy, Freddie 2/4/10-13/4/10, who was due the day after i finished the recreation of this site. Born 2nd April and lived for 11 short days before slipping away from us.
Night night, sweet little son. You were so much wanted.
How the Edit will work.
For now i have moved lots of content on to the new system, just as it was and very roughly, with the associated problems of dead links and mixed up formatting. A great deal needs updating, correcting and perhaps even removing. What i plan to do is work through, adding links from the green bar to pages which are 2010 correct. If the link only appears in the sidebars, it is old content awaiting an update. Hopefully doing it this way will keep it organised and inspire me to add new content too.
22 March 2010, 12:59 pm
For a daily/weekly/fortnightly update on how home education works for the Puddle Family, you can visit us at PatchofPuddles
