One word? When seven would do…

friends, parties, food, chocolate, games -got ’em all yesterday :).

We managed to get out nearly an hour later than I’d hoped for due to faffing about from everyone except me. I do get fed up about our inability to get out of the house and the lack of foresight from everyone else about things like knowing the postcode for where we’re going, ensuring we have drinks for the kids and so on. It shouldn’t *all* be down to me surely? :rolls:

Anyway, we had a smooth journey to Godmanchester (which never sounds like a proper place name somehow). The kids DS’d and watched dvds and I did some more unpicking. We arrived in time for lunch (although the kids disappeared into the depths of the house and I refused the kind offer of pulse soup on the basis that none of it’s ingredients had ever infact had a pulse ;)). I had an amusing conversation with Rachael Raine when I went to admire the four fantastic birthday cakes. She was in the room alone playing and looked up when I came in:
R: Hello. I didn’t know you were coming here
N: Hello Rachael. How are you? I’ve come to look at the cakes.
R: I can show you those. This is Libby’s, it’s a Barbie, this is Kit’s it’s dinosaurs, this is Jonathans and this is Anna’s. I like the Barbie one best.
N: they’re fab.
R: Where’s Scarlett?
N: she’s off in the house….

R runs off to find Scarlett. They have a very nice friendship which is very reminiscent of their older brothers’ albeit a couple of years later than the Davies / Ben one started (I think D and B were 3 and 4 rather than 5 and 6 like Rachael and Scarlett). It’s definitely the most R has ever talked to me :).

We decamped to the party (Davies held the playmobil cake and I held the Barbie cake in the car. We were both very scared :)) where a great time was had by all. Loads of photos on flickr but highlights included the treasure hunt (although Scarlett most enjoyed the running around and Davies said he most enjoyed the team he was in tricking the team of girls he claims were following them round copying their answers by making one up :lol:), the parachute (which is ours. We’ve had it years but I don’t actually recall ever using it before) and the chocolate game.

I enjoyed seeing friends – The Babs, the Beans, the Fish, Merry. It’s felt odd seeing pictures and reading about Melrose and Elinor’s party and knowing lots of our friends are together and we are not there 🙁 so it was good to catch up with at least a few of them :). Poor Ady still wasn’t feeling 100% and at one point when he was being followed around by a group of small girls poking and prodding him he confided to me ‘I don’t think I’m feeling well enough to be Ady today’ 😆

We went back to Bob and Katy’s for a cup of tea and slice of cake and to entertain ourselves dipping the Barbie recently relieved of her cake skirt into a bowl of jelly along with some playmobil and plastic dinosaurs. We extracted reluctant children and headed for home around 630pm. We had another straight run back and aside from further faffing at Lakeside services (I was desperate for a wee so ran in and the toilets were downstairs. I got back to the car and both children wanted to go and Scarlett had no shoes on so I had to piggyback her and have Davies follow me back into the services, back down the stairs…. you get the idea).

Back home the kids had toasted bagels and went off to bed. Ady wasn’t long after them and I sat up flickring and re-joined facebook which I’ve been meaning to do ever since the consultation which seemed to have a lot of discussion taking place on facebook and made me think perhaps I should be on there if only to keep abreast of stuff like that. I won’t be throwing chickens or other such stuff although I did spend some time today checking my typing speed :).

Today I was woken by Ady telling me the boiler had gone out again. A quick phonecall to the plumber had him promising to come over within the hour and sure enough he was here and replacing the part he’d got the other week before my second cup of tea was finished. My Dad almost followed him in so he stood and chatted to him while he sorted it and was conveniently around to pay half too ;).

Dad stayed for the morning while Davies and Scarlett did some drawings for their library display.I am slightly cross with them about this as I booked the space about a month ago and have been on at them almost daily to do the stuff for the display but predictably they have always put it off til later. I refuse to make them do it as the whole WAA is something they want to do rather than something I have decided they should do and while I’ll happily remind, assist and otherwise facilitate the activities I am neither doing it for them or insisting on them doing it. I do a fair bit of reminding them of things they have committed to do and talking through with them why they should see things through and why they wanted to do them. Scarlett was moaning about it today so I told her she didn’t have to do it at all and could stop now if she wanted. She thought about it and decided to carry on . If we were following a curriculum or workbooks or anything any of us percieved as something they *had* to do though it is clear they’d be in school before you could say SATS tests though! 😆

We’d been invited to Lucy’s for lunch so waved Dad good bye and headed off round there. D and S took their DSs and sat playing them for the first hour or so. Richard went off with Colin for a while and Davies and Rebecca played on the Wii then Scarlett and Rebecca went off to play and Davies sat next to me while I chatted. It was all very friction free and while the kids clearly aren’t delighted to be in each others company they are at least tolerating and being nice to each other rather than at all out war like they were last year :). Whilst I imagine it is frustrating for Rebecca I am very proud of Scarlett’s loyalty to Davies :).

Davies started to complain that his ‘joints hurt’ while we were there and when we got home he continued to wilt until he suddenly dissolved into tears about something minor and confessed he felt really ill :(. We managed to all but finish the display stuff ready to put up sometime tomorrow but Davies went downhill fairly rapidly then and just wanted to sit and snuggle up with me. Scarlett had tea but Davies didn’t want anything (he’d not eaten all his breakfast and none of his lunch and his breath was really sweet smelling which has always been an indication of him being poorly since he was tiny.) and he veered between being okay and giggling and playing DS with Tarly and flopping about all pathetically.

Ady came home, I read a couple of chapters of Humphrey and they both went to bed and were both asleep before 8pm! 😯 Davies roused again crying and I sat with him for a while until he was properly asleep although I am half expecting to be up in the night with him. I’ve no idea if he’s having a relapse of being ill last week as he was the first of us to be ill last Monday, whether a full on weekend at the end of a week of late nights has finally caught up with him or whether he’s managed to go down with something new. I also wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had a good night’s sleep and woke up in the morning feeling fine again! We’re supposed to be at RI in the morning so I’ll have to make a decision based on how he is when we wake up.