One word? When seven would do…

Back before Davies hit me with the week long Badger camp I was stressing about Scarlett going on a day trip to Drusillas with Rainbows. I sort of shelved that anxiety but this morning it all came flooding back as we dropped her off at the Guide Hall.

She suddenly looked really tiny, practically newborn and as she grabbed at me for ‘just one more cuddle Mummy’ while I attempted to be all cool about it I was picturing coach crashes, travel sickness, getting lost at Drusillas, being eaten by the meerkats, having a previously unknown and undiagnosed serious allergy to Dairylee triangles given to her for lunch, falling off something high onto something sharp and other such hysterical thoughts as I breathed in her smell of candyfloss, mud, the faintest trace of shampoo and rose petals while getting a mouthful of tangled hair with weetabix in it that is all characteristic of a fiercely given Scarlett-cuddle.

At that point I caught the eye of the Rainbow leader, suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to cry and had to leave immediately before everyone else pointed and laughed at me. Of course all the other parents dropping off have been doing so for at least a year or more at school five mornings a week so whilst they might have experienced all those feelings before (maybe not the tangled hair and weetabix)they’d have gotten over such things by now.

I was already tired (last two nights I’ve not got to bed til 2am, to sleep til 3am and then been awake at 8am), hormonal and also anticipating how dreadful I’ll be and how well I’ll have to hide it when Davies goes to camp so when I got back in the car and Ady asked ‘is she alright?’ to which I replied ‘yes’ and he then asked ‘are you alright?’ I of course had to say ‘NO!’ and shed a small tear 🙁

Then,as if it weren’t bad enough shedding one of my appendages we drove to Brighton to get rid of the other one for three hours. Davies was off to YACs for a proper real archaeological dig. We were slightly early so Ady and Davies went off to walk round a church while I sat in the car and sniffed and distracted myself by re-organising my bag and taking all the keys off my keyring that I couldn’t identify a lock we own for.

I imagine many readers are shaking their heads at me and tsking about my lunacy and indeed you may well do so. I’ve always been adamant I won’t be defined by my children, I won’t be some sad case suffering from empty nest syndrome in the future, unable to let go. I know this is the natural order of things, they are supposed to spread their wings and fly and go off in their own time and be independant and not have me hanging over them all the while. I know I should have enjoyed the unencumbered time with Ady and not tormented myself with harrowing thoughts of all the awful things that could be happening, but I am mostly quite together about most things and I’m sure as this happens more regularly I will get used to it and get over myself. I do know Davies and Scarlett have stayed close way longer than most other kids and I am very comforted and proud that they are now ready to start pulling away but I can’t deny I struggled with it this morning. I wonder if the leaders of Rainbows and YACs were there telling Davies and Scarlett ‘she’s only doing it for your benefit you know, as soon as she gets round the corner she’ll be fine. You’ve got to break the bonds sometime.’ 😆

So, children duly dispatched with people who can’t possibly have looked after them as well as I do but who did manage to return them both to me later in the day fully intact (well Davies did have a cut from some flint but he’d been given a plaster and seems to be fine ;)) and claiming to have only missed me a bit and only then when I insisted they must have done and to have enjoyed themselves Ady and I had some time to ourselves.

We were just round the corner from Brighton Marina so we went there. We parked up and had a wander round Asda to get popcorn, fizzy drinks and sweets for a cinema trip later. We looked round a very sparse market and the Fiery Foods shopwhere we tried some samples of the chili sauces. I really liked the chili chocolate and a couple of the other fairly hot ones but I tried two of the extreme ones – one was called ‘Hotter than Hell’ and it made my eyes water, lips swell and it felt like the top of my head should have flipped open for a cuckoo to come out with steam coming out of it’s ears! 😆

We wandered round some of the shops and I suddenly felt really ill. No idea whether it was a reaction to the chili, hormones, tiredness or all round wobbliness but I had to sit down for a few minutes to recover. How dramatic am I?!

We decided to get a drink and McDonalds was the only place we’d get tea and coffee and change from a tenner so we sat in there and Ady did a fine job of chatting to me and distracting me so I actually calmed down.

Then it was all but time to collect Davies so we drove back to the site and sat in the car for a bit playing with his phone to check brightkite before walking up the hill to see what they’d all found. They’d had a successful dig and Davies had been involved in some of the finds. He absolutely loves YACs and looks really happy and at home there :). He told me later that they’d been chatting about Home Ed and the couple of children near him and several adults were really interested and thought it sounded excellent.I asked him what he’d said about it and he spoke really eloquently about how he gets to learn what he is interested in and asks questions about, all the groups they go to like Badgers and Wildlife Explorers and Magic Lantern and Forest School, how he has lots of friends we see regularly and he does lots of visits to museums etc. I love hearing my children now able to put forward a good case for Home Ed, it somehow sounds more convincing coming from them :).

Back to the Marina and to the cinema to see Coraline for Ady, Davies and I. This was well planned actually as the screening was about 10 minutes after we arrived allowing time to settle in and the film is one Davies and I wanted to see but Scarlett didn’t and Ady got to see a 3d film too which he was keen to do. I was in complete shock at the price though – £23.50 for the 3 of us!!! 😯 Makes dvds at about a tenner seem very good value. I think we must be spoilt by all those free filmeducation screenings we go to!

The film was good, not the best I’ve ever seen. It was very Corpse Bride / Edward Scissorhands -esque I thought and whilst I’d rather see something a bit dark like that over a Disney Princess film any day of the week and would far prefer my kids to be watching that sort of stuff too it was pretty spooky. Scarlett definitely wouldn’t have liked it. The 3D was very good again although I don’t think they’d played with that element of the film as much as had been done in Monsters Vs Aliens.

We came home and had only been home about ten minutes when the phone rang to say the Rainbows had arrived back earlier than planned and were already at the hall waiting. I dashed straight there to collect Scarlett and when we got back Ady headed off to Portsmouth to collect part one of the cupboard from Jan and Jonathan (thank you 🙂 X).

Scarlett enjoyed the day although she didn’t want to hold hands with anyone and was a bit indignant about walking in formation 😆 She said they spent a long time playing in the park area and not enough time looking at the animals. She had an icecream and got a small toy penguin as a souvenier. She said she’d go again but would have prefered it if we’d (mostly Davies I think) been there with her. So it all turned out nicely uneventful in the end with it just being me and my nauseous turn (which I probably only did for attention) the only ill effect of the day ;).

I sorted the kids’ tea and as they were watching You’ve Been Framed and Animals Do Things On Camera That Only Small Children Find Amusing (or whatever it’s called) which are both programmes I would hastily turn off but they love I went and had a bath. Predictably Scarlett got bored of the TV and came and joined me in the bath and then when I got out Davies got in.

I was feeling utterly drained by then, especially as Ady had also arrived home and I suddenly could relax now we were all under the same roof again so I curled up on the sofa and went to sleep while the kids’ watched Simpsons in lieu of a bedtime story (see the rot has already set in! :lol:)

I woke up, they went to bed, Ady cooked a lovely steak dinner and suddenly it’s already tomorrow again.

God I couldn’t do that every day!