Sunday

I slept pretty badly thanks to reading various Home Ed lists last night with varying degrees of horror and then going off to bed thinking about it all. The wind and rain were still howling around the house, which felt both appropriate and annoying…

Which led to a late rising this morning, for me at least. Ady and Scarlett were out in the garden tidying up the mess from the weather, Davies was doing stuff with Paint (as in the Word pro not the messy liquidy stuff ;)). I went out in the garden too to try and gather some twigs and sticks for the first layer of my new super composter but didn’t get very far – we seem to have a lack of sticks in our garden. I’ve a plan to go stick collecting, along with pine cone collecting (currently eco-warrior battle is getting Ady off chemical firelighters and pine cones, small bundles of twigs, tightly rolled newspaper and old lemon rinds are said to be just the thing) some time this week so it will have to wait for then. I put it all together yesterday, remembering just in time that making something that big in the playroom which then needed getting through the hall and kitchen and back door was a bad idea so moving it outside to construct, but now it needs the correct starting layers of material.

I also slipped over in the garden much to Ady’s amuseument 😆

After some discussion with both children we decided to go to the Christmas Market at the Weald and Downland Museum. We joined for the season this summer with the intention of getting along to most of their events and so far we’d only managed the Autumn Show so I was keen to get to this one. Am also intending to do the Boxing Day one. Ady was less keen and the children both wanted to go to the beach in the hopes of seeing some extreme weather but they were easily swayed and so we headed off there.

It’s always slightly further than I think it is and there were big queues to get into the carpark – more due to poor direction than actual parking issues it turned out and the whole place was a bit of a quagmire thanks to very heavy rainfall almost incessantly every day this week. We should have been wearing wellies! I announced a prize to the least muddiest person upon our return to the car, fully expecting to be the one to fall over and disqualify myself. The whole place was very squelchy – if Park Resorts could have seen it they’d have been there, setting up a Sparkies show and turning it into a camping field ;).

The Weald and Downland museum is very charming even when no events are happening – it comprises original and recreation buildings from various ages and has a watermill, a town square style contruction, various houses and cottages from very basic to fairly luxurious, cottage gardens, a maypole, various livestock and heavy horses, open fires and authentic furniture in every building and is just a nice place to spend time. Except when it’s very muddy indeed, it’s packed with hundreds and hundreds of people and all the charming tiny little buildings are host to stalls selling Christmassy stuff.

There were some treasures to be found – Sombrerolatin seem to have a stall at every one of their events and their stuff is fab, there was another stall selling musical instruments including spring drums, thumb pianos and ocarinas which were all fab. If the children hadn’t been so taken with them I may have been able to slip back and buy them one each for Christmas but they kept on about them so much it was impossible. Will have to google for them and find another place to buy though. There was also a stall selling felted items including flowers, candles, tree baubles and holly wreaths all of which were fab. Some inspiration there to make some stuff definitely.

There was also a fair bit of dross there too – no plastic tat but the middle class equivalent of nasty, mass produced wooden toys pretending to be good quality and ethical ;). We’ve been to Christmas Markets in Bruge and in Manchester (which has magical, huge Christmas markets with ice rinks and stuff and is fab) and been utterly taken to Christmas with the sights, smells and sounds, drank alcohol laced hot chocolate, eaten roasted chestnuts and gingerbread and generally felt very festive. This didn’t quite pull that off but was very well attended nonetheless.

Ady tried a quandry in the Tudor kitchen which is a bird,in a bird, in a bird in a bird. We’ve seen it done on Hugh or similar but never tried it. He said it was very nice and is keen to do his own now. We can’t get one cooked bird on the table before 1030pm, four in one dinner is likely to end up as breakfast ;).

We didn’t actually buy anything but on the way out to celebrate no one getting muddy and everyone winning the cleanest Goddard left standing competition we had a ride on the horse and cart. Davies did some very speedy mental maths – 50p for children, £1 for adults, sothat’s £3 then. And then proceeded to work out what a quarter of a pound was too quite quickly. We talked about the crazy horse and cart ride last winter in Bruge as we rode rather sedately round a field in the car drawn by two heavy horses.

Then we headed back homewards. As promised we stopped on the way and had a half an hour or so on the beach. The tide was way, way out and the weather had calmed right down but there was evidence of the storms in the level of stuff washed up. We pranced about between the rock pools, all getting our feet wet until it got too cold.

and no, I’ve not sorted out getting my horizon straight yet! 😉

Back home for baths for the kids to warm up / wash up. I got a roast dinner on but thanks to it being a HUGE joint of pork my timing of getting it on the table for 7pm and Doctor Who was off and it was more like 745pm in the end. Very nice dinner though :).

I didn’t see all of Doctor Who as I was in and out but Davies tells me it was good, Scarlett was too scared to watch most of it but did keep teasing Davies over his glass of water at dinner so clearly got the gist of it while she did some more playing with Paint on my laptop.

We watched X Factor while eating dinner and I tried to explain by translation why I was laughing so much at some very sweary texts I was getting from a friend. Think all of the humour got lost in translation 😆