One word? When seven would do…

I set the alarm last night for this morning as I had a work friend coming round for coffee. She invited us round for lunch a few weeks back and I’d been meaning to reciprocate so when we bought the van we arranged for her to come over and see it but have had to rearrange twice as we work different days and we are generally busy anyway. I was regretting it being this morning though as we could all have done with a non-alarm morning after a fairly hard core weekend and I’d foolishly said I’d bake cake too.

So I was really cross when I was roused from a deep sleep by a tring-a-ling noise from downstairs. It tring-a-linged six times which was sufficient to wake me properly, give me time to identify it as Ady’s phone, curse Ady and stagger downstairs to try and locate it to turn it off / chuck it at the wall. By the time I arrived downstairs it had stopped tring-a-linging, I couldn’t spot it so went back upstairs again.

Seven minutes later it was off tring-a-linging again :(.
I decided it would only do it six times so it wasn’t worth getting up again but of course I was then counting the tring-a-lings and bracing myself for them. I fell bask asleep and was then woken again by the o’clock Big Ben chime I’d been irritated by all weekend from his phone and asked him to turn off.

Then more tring-a-linging. This time Tarly appeared to complain about being woken up so I told her if she could find the phone I could turn it off. She did, I did but by then I was pretty much awake so got up. She also showed me that a wobbly tooth had come out which she was most delighted about :).

I arrived in the kitchen ready to bake to be confronted by last nights washing up so I cursed Ady some more. It’s worth mentioning that Ady does the washing up pretty much every morning and the reason he wasn’t around to turn his own bloody phone off was that he’d been up and out at work for about an hour so I guess he probably didn’t deserve cursing. But I did it anyway.

I quickly made up some cake batter and got some cupcakes in the oven, supervised (ie yelled instructions from the kitchen) breakfast, teeth cleaning, getting dressed, tidying up while doing the washing up, made some icing while the cakes were cooling then iced them and was sitting down in plenty of time for Sarah arriving, even though she had sent a text asking if she could come early as she needed to leave early to take her daughter to the doctors.

We had a chat, cup of tea and cake, she got the guided tour of the van and then had to head off. Davies and Scarlett did some Simpsons movie making and then played outside while I checked paperwork for various things; filled out the form for all the childrens ages and sent the deposit cheque off for Pennywell, filled out the booking form and sent a deposit cheque for the hall for our Goodbye party, rang the bank to order a new cashpoint card as mine is very battered and I’m worried about it snapping, checked the paperwork for the courses I’d booked the kids on this week and realised we’d never had a written confirmation for Davies’ film making one so rang to check details and was told it was cancelled :(. She said she’d left a message on our answerphone and checked she had the correct number which she did but I never got a message :(.

I made a list of ingredients for Christmas cake as I decided if we were not spending the week driving to and from the film making course we could make Christmas cake and emailed a couple of friends to arrange to meet up now we are unexpectedly free. I also copied out a recipe I’ve owed Tasha for ages (and been reminded of at least twice) and emailed that to her while I was sat infront of the laptop with my recipe notebook out.

Then it was lunchtime. Sorry, that was completely wrong.

And then we had lunch ;).

Then we drove over to a mid-point between us park to meet up with Mel, Liam and Lily. For once we arrived on time and were therefore first (Mel always has a buffer of ten minutes or so when meeting up with me, I have form for being late :oops:) but they were not far behind us. The four kids played well together, I think they were recreating How to train your Dragon, climbing trees, running around and generally enjoying each others company. Mel and I drank two cups of tea / coffee from the coffee shop and caught up with each others news. She’s really excited about our Wandering Wonderers stuff, while she has had a promotion at work and is enjoying new challenges there. We talked about school and learning and literacy for a while. It was very nice in the sunshine but pretty cold in the shade and we were quite chilled when we left just before 5pm.

We were literally round the corner from Tescos so decided it was most sensible to go there on the way home rather than drive miles out of our way. Davies and Scarlett wanted to stay in the car so they did that while I nipped in and grabbed the ingredients for Christmas cake, components for roast dinner for tonight and some bits for other dinners for the next few days. I laughed with the other shopper who was standing next to me in the baking aisle and eyed up my putting loads of dried fruit in my trolley before asking ‘Christmas cake?’ 😆 The checkout operator was cheery and chatty and it was actually quite a pleasant experience, even if I always feel a bit bad about shopping there.

Mel had given the kids some money to buy sweets and they’d carefully shared it out to get a variety of things, finishing with gobstoppers with bubble gum centres. I hate bubble gum and chewing gum and rarely let Davies and Scarlett have it. It just begs being played with and stretched rather than consumed and gone and I think people endlessly chewing just look really gormless. Also I hate listening to it and Davies is a pretty noisy eater anyway. But Davies was really thrilled to master blowing bubbles with bubble gum which must be another of those milestones of childhood.

Sure enough they spent the 20 minutes or so I was in Tescos perfecting bubble blowing and then playing with the gum and stretching it. Back home Davies lit a fire while Scarlett put the chickens away and went all round the house pulling curtains while I got dinner going – roast chicken, roast and mashed potatoes, roasted carrots and parsnips, stuffing, yorkshire puddings, peas, broccolli and sweetcorn. I also weighed out the ingredients for a crumble topping and Scarlett to mix it up while I peeled, cored and chopped some cooking apples we had from Caz and Bid which needed using up.

We had dinner, which was delicious if rather on the late side for Davies and Scarlett and after a ‘letting your dinner go down’ interlude they went off to bed. I’ve sold some more stuff on ebay today and come up with the idea of an Open House Books Sale and invited loads of local Home Ed folk to come over next Monday over the course of the day and buy our books – 50p each or 3 for a £1 which I’m very hopeful will clear the books, raise some cash and see them all go to good homes. Fingers crossed that works well.