One word? When seven would do…

Says:

“”I thought we could all make up a spooky story as a group – if you
e-mail me to say you’re interested, I will send you out 2 short
pieces of spooky story text, which will be the start and the end of
your section of the story. You make up a bit of story to go in
between (there will be a word limit and a deadline!). All the
sections will then be put together, and I will read the spooky
story out at the Hallowe’en party, if there is time! I will also
produce some printed copies in booklet form for participants to
keep. If you are interested, please send me an e-mail at
ali@yggdrasil.org.uk as soon as
possible, as the numbers involved will make a
difference to the story form”

So please can you! (BTW she is Ali from where the days go so she’s probably your friend too!)

Best spooky outfit for adult
Best spooky outfit for child
Best non -spooky outfit for adult
Best non – spooky outfit for child
Best home made outfit for adult
Best home – made outfit for child
Best shop bought outfit carried off with panache for adult
Best shop bought outfit carried off with large amounts of cuteness for child
Most original outfit (adult or child)
Least effort made of any party attendee (which is probably going to be a tough fight between my Dad, Chris P and Steve!)

Unsure as to who will be the judges. If anyone comes dressed as Simon Cowell or Sharon Osborne you may well be putting yourself up for the task though 😉

uncovered in Tarly’s room last night.

A pink belt with a flower buckle (she says it’s Poppys)

a small rabbit attired in pink with a hat (she says it’s Lulah’s)

a silver bangle – quite nice actually, not sure who’s that is but we’ve never seen it before!

A bookmark

Pass the parcel – don’t think it needs any explaining – anyone fancy the tedium of wrapping a many layered parcel to bring along?!

Mummy wrap – players divide into pairs with each pair having a toilet roll. The first team to use their toilet roll up by wrapping it around one of the team is the winner. Please can someone volunteer to bring a big value pack of loo rolls for this game!

Pumpkin bowling – empty 2 litre plastic drinks bottles either painted white and with ghost faces drawn on or with paper/cardboard spooky characters taped to the front. Arranged as skittles and knocked down by rolling a pumpkin. Does anyone drink enough drinks from plastic bottles to have a stash of these by next weekend that they could decorate and bring along?

Pumpkin catch – divided into two or more teams with a grown up heading up each team and several children. The grown up has a plastic pumpkin bowl tied round their waist and from a certain distance away children have to throw the popcorn into the pumpkin. The adult can move around as long as they remain behind the distance marker. The team with the most popcorn in the pumpkin at the end is the winner. I’ve got the plastic pumpkins but if someone could bring along the popcorn – or alternative such as packaging foam or similar that would be great

Pumpkin over head under legs relay game – pretty much what it says on the tin. At least 2 teams with at least 4 players per team stand in a row and pass the pumpkin over their head backwards to the person behind who passes it through their legs backwards to the person behind. When the person at the back of the row has the pumpkin they run to the front of the row and the game starts again. When the person who was initially at the front of the row is there again the team sit down. First team sitting is the winning team. I think if everyone coming could bring a pumpkin then we should have more than sufficient for all these games. This will need an adult to supervise so if anyone is up for that role that would be good!

Quite like this one! But wonder if anyone’s children would get too distressed by it! Whatever – we need a few balls of wool or string if someone could offer to bring them along Spider Web Party Game – Variation
Gather all the children round in a large circle and give them all a ball of wool each. Try to use different coloured wool as this makes a much more interesting web. Get each child to tie the end of the wool loosely around their waist. When everyone is done, each person throws their ball of wool to anyone else in the circle, preferably all at the same time. They then put the wool around their waist and throw it to someone else. This carries on until you run out of wool. To add a little spice, they can wrap the wool around legs, arms, etc. At the end what they have created is a massive multi coloured spiders web which they can’t get out of very easily. Hours of fun and entertainment and if you’re really lucky they will spend the next hour trying to free themselves!

Trick or Treat – lots of ‘tricks’ such as things like ‘cackle like a witch’, ‘walk round the room like a zombie’ ‘crawl like a spider’ written on pieces of paper held in a plastic pumpkin with less pieces of paper with ‘treat’ written on them. Children sit in a circle and take it in turns to pick a piece of paper out and either carry out the trick or claim their treat from a seperate pumpkin of treats. Anyone up for making the pieces of paper with tricks on? And leading the game on the day?

Will also do apple bobbing, cauldron lucky dip of icky stuff etc.

If anyone has any other great ideas for stuff to bring along please shout now 🙂

Went to a fundraising fair today held at a localish theatre with exhibitors from various organisations who provide funds / grants / awards for voluntary and community groups. I went with Hayley from our HE group and we attended two of the seminars and spent some time chatting to people on various stands.

We also managed to chat all the way there and back (I drove) and had lunch there so I feel like I know her better now, which is good as I think we both had worries about where the other one was coming from in terms of the group and now we have cleared that up. Which is good as I really can’t be doing with any further misunderstandings 🙁

So the upshot of the day is that there are certainly funds available, we would certainly qualify to apply and there is every chance we would be awarded funds upto about £5K. Which is a very exciting prospect but will entail further time and energy from us in order to write the constitution and application and to manage the funds if we got them. I had been feeling very strongly that now was the time to walk away from the group – I have so much else going on and frankly in its current incarnation the time and energy I invest is totally disproportionate to what the children and I get back from a two hour a week group, particularly when all of the people who attend that we are interested in forming closer friendships with we see at times other than at group anyway.

We talked about it all the way home and I think what we are planning to pitch to the rest of the group this week that with some effort we could probably create something really good with a lot of funded stuff such as music, drama and art teachers, art and craft supplies, some early years educational resources, funds to lay on an annual play or production, some group subscriptions to educational websites and maybe some sort of sports facilities too. But it will involved creating a management structure, writing a constitution and so on. I *think* I can be bothered but I’m certainly not up for doing it alone any more. So we’ll see. Glad I went though as it was very interesting and may be the catalyst for finally sorting the group out or all of us walking away feeling we gave it our best shot but it was never going to happen.

So Dad stayed home with Davies and Scarlett. Not actually all that sure what they did do, I think they watched Wallace and Gromit a few more times though. Feel like we’ve not had any time doing not a lot for ages so that’s my plan for tomorrow. Expect plenty of blogging though as if I’m home all day I anticipate sneaking off to the computer at every available opportunity! 😉

Davies cut himself some cheese. He is more than capable of doing so and I just called out to him to put the knife somewhere high up when he’d finished.

Walked into the lounge and Tarly looked up at me then called out to Davies ‘so me can’t reach it!’. Then she looked back to me and added ‘s’dangerous for me, I’m only small!’

A busy old weekend again chez Goddard.

First thing yesterday I headed off for my basket weaving one day course with Julie. Ady and the children were supposed to be coming over with me and staying with Chris, Jack and Maisie but Davies insisted he felt ill and didn’t want to go. TBH Ady was not hugely bothered about going either and knowing it would be a long day and a late night he was more than happy to spend the day in the house with them pottering and taking it easy.

Collected Julie and drove to the college. I’ve never done an adult education type thing before always considering them the territory of newly divorced people looking to meet new friends and learn new skills in one easy hit, or librarians called Mavis, Doris or Agnes who have little else to do in their spare time so leave their pet cat alone for the day with the radio for company and come along to improve themselves. And actually that was pretty much what it was like! 😉

Julie and I arrived 10 minutes late because she had insisted on hanging her washing out before we left and then we couldn’t find the right room where the course was being held. So we walked in when basket lady was already part way through her ‘hello I’m basket lady, welcome to the course, this is what we’re going to do today’ speech. Which was hard on the other three attendees as it meant they had to sit through it again and what had probably appeared to be ad lib, unscripted little humourous asides in the speech became apparant as practised rehearsed lines which she brings out in the opening speech for every course she ever does!

So we laid out our penknives and sharp secuteurs, our spray bottles filled with water and arranged our damp towels and then we all stood and watched basket lady demonstrate how to select the right willow to start off your basket bases. I won’t go through the day step by step but Julie and I upheld our positions of Course Rebels by going to the nearby pub at lunchtime for a sandwich instead of bringing them in from home in a tupperware container and sitting with the others to chat during the break! 😉

The course was actually really enjoyable. We could pretty much choose to create whatever we wanted and she’d brought along various styles of her own making as examples. I liked her bread basket with finger holes so made a fairly good approximation of that with a few colour and pattern changes of my own:

I’m rather pleased with it although it comprised so many various techniques I certainly couldn’t sit straight down and do it again. We’ve got a frame basket course booked with her next year and I might get some books from the library and buy in some willow and see how I go as I have a few ideas of home made things to fill home made baskets which would make really nice presents at Christmas.

Got home about 5.30pm and we had tandem baths – Scarlett with Ady, Davies with me before getting dressed up to go to a housewarming party of some friends who have moved into the next road. Mum and Dad came with us and it was a very pleasant couple of hours. The children were very well behaved and played with another little girl who was there, Charley, really nicely.

Left there at about 9.30pm and walked home with Dad carrying Tarly and Ady carrying Davies. Me and Mum walked arm in arm, not sure who was holding who up really! Kids went straight to bed and we ordered in an Indian takeaway which I managed to eat this time without decorating the sofa with it. Had a drunken, loud and evangelising spout at my dad about HE. I think I spoke with passion, clarity and put up a convincing argument, carefully constructed examples of why it is such a great decision and blew away all his arguments and concerns. But I had drunk rather a lot and so had he so the chances are we were both talking total bollocks! All stayed amicable though and he does concede that he has changed from opposed to it to feeling there are fors and againsts. Semi result!

This morning we were all up by 8am and the plan was for PJs all day, movie watching (we recorded all the Wallace and Gromit films which were shown on UK Gold yesterday) while I polished off the rest of this weeks CVs which needed to be emailed back today. It worked really well with Ady (bless him) bringing me a constant supply of tea, buttered toast and supportive ‘how’s it going?’ type questions and entertaining the children. They made playdough figures of all the characters (Ady’s first time of making the playdough too, he really enjoyed it and kept coming ack in with another batch!), Davies did some drawing and some writing and it was nice to have occassional cuddles and interactions with the children as I got on with the work.

Finished at about 2.30pm, had also done three loads of washing and got it all dry 🙂 so headed off to Sainsburys to get dinner for tonight and some bits for the rest of the week.

My parents are over for dinner again as they needed to collect their car (left here last night after drinking so they walked home) and I am feeling happy that a bad week ended with such a lovely, productive weekend.

Linguistic thinkers:

* Tend to think in words, and like to use language to express complex ideas.
* Are sensitive to the sounds and rhythms of words as well as their meanings.

Like linguistic thinkers, Leonardo made meticulous descriptions in his journals. He also made an effort to learn Latin – a foreign language
Other Linguistic Thinkers include
William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Anne Frank

Careers which suit Linguistic thinkers include
Journalist, Librarian, Salesperson, Proof-reader, Translator, Poet, Lyricist

Happy Birthday Elijah! 🙂

your card is still a work in progress from Davies.

We finished the workday week on a high note!

Last night was excellent – me, Ady and Frazer went over to Brighton, had dinner in an Italian restuarant and then went to see Richard Herring do his yoghurt routine.

Really nice all round really. Lovely to be out without children, lovely to be spending time with my brother – I hope my two choose to spend time together still when they are adults – and I am currently having something of a love affair with Brighton having been there three times in the last couple of weeks after not having been there at all since we moved home.

Brighton has really changed since I was a child. When I was very small it was very exciting but just another seaside town really. Back then Sussex was still very populated by old and retired folk, parts of Brighton were pretty downmarket and there was probably a bit of a tackiness about the place. In 30 years it has changed to being a fairly cosmopolitan city. House prices have rocketed, it is a capital for all sorts of alternative lifestyles and the whole London By The Sea tag it enjoys seems actually quite justfied. There is a large student element which always makes me feel in turn slightly uneasy and slightly wistful. Having lived in Manchester for a couple of years I really appreciate the difference living in a city makes and as Brighton is our nearest I am hankering after that sort of life a little.

The restaurant had huge comedy value. We were basically ignored for the first ten minutes we stood there and then approached by a pretty much non english speaking waitress who asked ‘you book?’ er no. ‘How many?’ er, quick head count, me, Ady, Frazer that’ll be three – oh and our invisible companion but he won’t be needing a chair – he’s brought his own! and then ‘you wait’. So we did. For a further ten minutes. We were then seated in the smallest squashed up corner of the room, issued with menus and then ignored for a further 10 minutes. We eventually placed our order and then it was with us within about 10 minutes – very curious! Lovely food and very cheap although we had planned to make a statement by not leaving a tip and then realised after we’d left that they add the service charge 10% anyway so we’d already done so!

Anyway Richard Herring was very very funny. Well I thought he was! We sat in the front row, right infront of the mic as sort of think thats the point of stand up – to feel like you are part of the act and that the comedian is bouncing off of the audiences energy. I think I have said before that doing stand up would have been another life, another time sort of dream of mine. Sitting right at the stage (and the theatre doesn’t actually have a stage, the act literally stands, with a mic on a stand, on the floor infront of you, they are not even elevated above you) with the mic in touching distance and the lights beaming down on us made Ady feel really nervous like he could never stand there and do a routine and me feel really excited at the prospect of having 200 people all in the palm of your hand, listening to you and laughing at your words. Ah well…

The routine was, as expected, very boundary pushing. Catholics would have been offended, the magpie routine was done (which I’d read on Warming Up), he did a lengthy bit about wasting sperm and how they should be the size of a trout, which involved totally harassing a poor girl three seats down from me, the yoghurt stuff and his unsucessful application to be the next Pope. Frazer said ‘well it was a night out!’ and Ady said ‘it wasn’t what I expected… but then I don’t actually know what I was expecting!’. They both preferred Harry Hill but I really enjoyed it.

Anyway, today has been equally good. Managed to get out the house to be at Vickie’s for 10.30 ish where she was reassured that the whole Jenny leaving Home Ed group was nothing to do with her (for some reason she had thought it might have been!!). Davies sat and built a train track in the front room which Vic and I chatted while Tarly and her son Andrew played , then having constructed quite an impressive track Davies got bored and headed off to play with them too. We had lunch and then the children headed off to the garden while we continued to chat.

Somewhere during the afternoon the children shed all their clothes (except wellies!) and had a sort of naked, mud smearing, tile smashing garden fest (obviously suited Davies down to the ground with his form!). They came in covered head to foot in very smelly mud so we chucked them all in the bath together and then I brought mine home. Totally what childhood is all about, playing, without inhibitions, climbing trees, hiding in secret places in the garden, taking off clothes in order to get as grubby as you can and generally doing stuff with sticks!

Davies had told me on the way over there that he’s going to be a singer when he grows up. We listened to some James Blunt, You Had a Bad Day several times and then I played them Labi Siffre which they liked. At lunchtime Davies had picked out a Hovis biscuit and asked what it said. I got him to tell me what all the letters were, he worked out by himself that ‘vis’ made a viss noise as it is sort of at the end of his name, then he said that H was a huh noise and O was an orgh – which is correct in some instances. I told him it was a Oh sound in this word and he pretty much got the word from that 🙂 Hurrah!

Did lots of Home Ed chatting with Vic. Explained autonomy to her and gave her some examples of how it works. She has this notion that she wants to be structured but as she has six month old twin boys as well as Andrew who is Davies’ ‘school’ age she is feeling guilty that she is not achieving any structure. Told her about my ‘plan’ for HE and explained that a large part of the reason for it is so that I don’t feel guilt for not sticking to a schedule! 😉 She is always full of praise and admiration for my children, which I always bask in, so I hope I have reassured her that any progress has not been brought to us in association with any workbooks, just normal day to day life!

Left there loads later than intended and got home to find Ady already here. Bless him, he sent me upstairs to get some peace and do some CVs and took over the whole tea and bedtime routine. He let Davies stay up til 8.30pm, he had a bath with him and they played together without Tarly for over an hour which they both really enjoyed 🙂 Lovely.

I got 3 out of the 9 CVs done, an email from CV lady to say the ones sent so far are great and that there are more on the way 🙂 (Ros my plan may come together yet!)

Tomorrow is a mad day. I’m doing a basket weaving day course with Julie and then we are all (including children, Mum and Dad and poss Frazer) going to a housewarming party of some friends who live round the corner now. Ady has called a pj day on Sunday, allowing me to complete the remainder of the CVs and him to have some more ‘quality’ time with the children. Hurrah!

Partially for my own records…

Who will be there?
Nic, Ady, Davies, Scarlett
Mel, Liam, Lily
Lucy, Rebecca, Richard
Rachel, Elliot, Amber
Chris, Julie, Maisie, Jack
Sandra, David
Matt, Clare, Aydan
Hayley, Martin, Ellerin and twin boys
Vickie, Jeff, Andrew, Jonathan and Robert
Ros, Tony, Amelia, Ellie, Adam
Joyce, Bob, Hannah
Barbara, Chris, Beth, Ben, Rachel
Sarah, Steve, Anna, Abbie, Josiah
Dani, Allie, Pearl, Leo
Ali, Jay (?), Freya
Alison, Chris, Poppy, Matilda, Elijah, Tallulah
Layla, Si, Claudia

Right, my house is at 9 Osborne Drive, Sompting, BN15 9UY. It is about 2 miles east of Worthing.

The party will be at Lancing Arts Centre, Penhill Road, Lancing, BN15 8HA and will start officially at 1.00pm.

If anyone wants to arrive somewhere first and get changed (assuming most of you will not want to drive in full fancy dress incase of a car accident, road rage incident or the need to stop at service stations for a wee or to fill up with petrol!) I will be at the Arts Centre from about 11.30am getting it decorated but children arriving there early will probably add to the confusion. Ady will be running a sort of creche (with some adult help I hope!) back at our house which you are welcome to join in with.

I’ll post a list later today of food to bring so you can attach your name to something to ensure we don’t end up with 30 trays of fairy cakes decorated as spiders and 22 plates of hot dogs in rolls dressed as severed fingers! Also will be after some help with both running games and bringing some bits to assist in it, so will post a list of that too later.

For those of you looking for accomodation, Worthing is the nearest big town, there might also be guest houses in Lancing. Sarah has a list of campsites nearby one of which she is going to use and the nearest travelodges are Littlehampton and Brighton. Ros and I both have full to bursting houses but if anyone is really struggling to find somewhere / afford the price of a hotel let me know in email and I’ll see if I can sort anything out for you.

More later 🙂

is what today is likely to be. Morning started badly with The Search for the Mooncup. I will probably blog that but will password it with the password ‘mooncup’ solely because there might be some people who don’t wish to have such mental images, but having laughed myself silly at Richard Herring last night pushing every last boundary of good taste and talking of the unmentionable to, I thought, quite hilarious effect, I am quite tempted to do the same and see if it’s actually funny or just a bit, well, eeww! If you don’t know what a mooncup is then you will definitely want to be googling before just sticking the password in! You have been warned! 😉

Dreadful night last night with Tarly. She woke at 2am and didn’t go back to sleep until 5 🙁 At about 3am I decided I was not really tired anymore anyway so grabbed my lap top and sat in her room with her til she dropped off. If I’m honest the events of last night’s Lost had been haunting my dreams anyway so I wasn’t too devastated to be awake really!

Finally crept back to bed at around 5am by which time I’d been awake for three hours and simply couldn’t switch my mind off (starting to feel real empathy with some of you insomniacs out there!) so tossed and turned until about 6am 🙁 Had about an hours sleep before the kids woke me up by jumping on me!

Exchanged texts with Lucy who we’d semi-planned to meet but she was juggling ill children and doctors appointments so we agreed to give it a miss.

I very probably should have been hugely productive today but I have not really! I did put away the two baskets of clean washing which we have all been tripping over for a couple of days, brought all the dirty washing downstairs and it is at least all now in one place – I’m still crossing fingers for a couple more good outside drying days to get some bedding washed and dried but as the pile reaches mountainous proportions I may have to bite the bullet and start the winter practise of tumble drying and draping over radiators 🙁 Dealt with some paperwork, posted off a very late birthday card to a friend’s son complete with chatty letter to said friend (really really struggled to hand write it – I so need to sort that out, my writing used to be really nice, now its terribly scrawly and it feels so painfully slow after typing!), sent off membership renewals for HEAS and EO (which means its been 2 years since we started the whole HE journey – can’t really remember life before it anymore!), did some WAG maintenance type stuff and pondered on various things.

Children meanwhile did all sorts of autonomous stuff – they played a game about going on holiday, did some stuff with their activity books, held a teddy bears picnic, did drawing, Davies made a robot with felt, tissue paper, glue and matchsticks, Tarly made a matchstick and glue collage (mostly glue actually!), they played a massively involved game with the geomags which Davies continued on his own after Tarly got bored and came to cuddle with me and even let me brush her hair (for a brief time she looked like a real princess with glowing, tumbling, glossy gold looks. She even had clothes on 😉 Didn’t last of course and she is now back to the matted, grubby little minx we all know!). Davies plays role plays using this very strange American accent, which I find by turns amusing and concerning. Tonight he’s used some flower stickers as the centrepiece for a garden picture. He’s drawn grass, stems and leaves for all the flowers (including some thorns for the rose sticker), sky all the way down to the grass (and I didn’t even have to explain why the sky shouldn’t stop a quarter of the way down the page, which took me years to grasp as a child!) and some butterflies flying around – must get a picture actually.

We also popped out – to Boots to get a first birthday present for baby Amber, which we then dropped into her and to the library to return The Grinch dvd and get out a few more books, some of which we’ve read this afternoon too. They were both horrid while we were out and were much shouted at by me in public which elicited a tut from an old woman behind me in the queue at Boots . Grr!

Looking at it all written down we actually did do a fair amount, but depressingly the children have bourne some of the brunt of my slightly dark mood. Ah well, tomorrow will be better!

Right, we’re off out tonight to see Richard Herring with my brother which if its as funny as I hope it will be should lift my mood no end. Need to go and get ready…

Oh, and my plan for tomorrow includes some serious Halloween party organising. People, you have been warned! 😉

Hurrah! Nine CVs arrived in the post this morning. Slightly irritatingly they need to be back for Sunday so they are likely to eat into my weekend a bit but even so if they come at this rate every week theres a chance of getting back on an even keel again. Which’d be nice 🙂

Mad Wednesday with added pressure, head messing and stuff. Never going to be my dream day!

I’m torn between refering to the last couple of days, as lets face it I seem to blog everything else, and being all mature and pretending it all didn’t happen. I’m going for the middle ground by just saying that the phone calls, instant messages, emails and comments have been hugely appreciated and really helped me through what has been a very difficult couple of days. Thank You, all of you. And that will be my last reference to it 🙂

So, Tumble Tots for Tarly first thing, which we were late for due to me faffing about and leaving us with a 20 minute window to all get dressed and out of the house! Tarly did really well but she was slightly hampered by Davies sitting in with us instead of outside in the waiting area as usual. He’d had a nosebleed this morning (he gets them a lot and is normally very matter of fact about them) and wanted to sit on my lap. I am often saying how much I love the fact that my two children are so seldom apart so I was surprised by how torn I felt being needed by Davies and feeling I was neglecting Tarly – and indeed feeling that I was missing out by having that precious hour of just me and her with her too. But as it was a competitive activity this week of going as fast as she could round the courses and really challenging with loads of climbing, jumping, balancing and so on she was loving it anyway 🙂

Left there and headed for Sainsburys. We needed bread, some bits for dinner tonight and supplies for my planned activity for group which was on the theme of Volcanoes. Inspired by The Clarkes TV appearance we did the bicarb and vinegar experiment 😉

Home for lunch where David the Thank You Neighbour caught me and the kids in the garden singing and dancing along to You’ve Had a Bad Day! Ah well, I guess we’ll be getting some sort of floral tribute for our performance 😉

Headed back out to group where we had a very good session actually. I’d taken plasticine so while some of the others set up their activities I led the children in making plasticine volcanoes which we then filled with bicarb and food colouring and the children shook vinegar over their own creations – works like a dream every time!

There was also sticking of craft paper and tissue paper and cotton wool to make volcano scene pictures (as ever Davies astounded me with his aptitude for these sorts of tasks), decorating cookies and some general volcano information type stuff.

Towards the end the children had morphed into a group worthy of hoodies and ASBOs as they marauded the place yelling (quite possibly led by my own little angels!) so while the other grown ups tidied up I rounded them up and we acted out the story of the 3 little pigs and the big bad wolf.

Then off again to Gym Bobs for Davies. He did really well too. I enjoyed about ten minutes of reading my Heat magazine while Tarly entertained herself before she demanded my attention so we went and watched Davies learning to do backwards rolls for a bit then did some drawing.

Got home to find Ady already here, having purchased wine and chocolate to make me feel better and already cooking the kids’ tea and hoovering! Love that man 🙂

Davies and I had long chats at bedtime about the sounds that make up words. One thing I have noticed is that if I spelt out something for him verbally he is pretty much capable of writing every letter now and with a little prompting he can spell stuff out too. So somehow he can almost write without being much further along with reading. I always thought they went hand in hand, and I guess they still do, but I kind of thought progress in each skill would be neck a neck.

And that’s been today. Tomorrow we had semi planned to do Fun Junction with Lucy but I’ve not heard from her yet so will speak to her in the morning and if it’s not to be then will probably enjoy a quiet day at home anyway.

Spent the drive to Brighton this morning listening to some very powerful lyrics which gave me a melanchony feel really. Quite spooky given the way the day panned out really.

Left D & S with my dad enjoying watching a man on a cherry picker changing the light bulb in the street lamp outside our house. He’d seen them watching from the window and been waving to them so that kept them happily distracted as I kissed them goodbye. Dad had also promised a park trip 🙂

Got to Brighton pretty easily, parked with ease and rounded the corner to the seafront to join the back of a queue with about 500 people in it! Within minutes there were as many again queuing behind me!

Got in and realised very quickly that it was a lot of nothing 🙁 No kids clothes really, and what there was was still a tenner a piece for stuff like shorts, skirts and t shirts. Got a pair of lovely purple suede knee high boots for Tarly for a tenner and picked up a selection of ‘may be’ type stuff for myself. Ros arrived then and we went through my maybes and selected a skirt and a dress (we need to organise a garden party somewhere for next summer with cucumber sandwiches and tea in bone china cups so I can wear my floaty Boden dress please!), paid for them and headed off for coffee and hot chocolate.

Then we hit Primark for a cheapo spree – I got lots of lovely stuff for Tarly, a few bits for Davies and some socks for me (oh and maybe a bag to go with my new skirt!), saw Tony and Ros’s children in there and then headed to Lush for general oohing, ahhing, being fawned over by their aproned staff and perhaps a purchase or three!

We then decided to head back here for lunch, Tarly did a fashion show for us in her new clothes, Ros saw me cry and then headed for home herself.

This afternoon has been taken up with all sorts of debate, online stuff and lego with the children. Ady came home, read lots of stuff online I thrust at him, was very lovely and has now brought me wine and peanuts, is running me a bath and cooking me dinner. I have been very very grateful to him , my children and the friends I have for their support in a bit of a crappy day.

It’s mad Wednesday tomorrow with the TT sandwich and WAG Home Ed. Theme is volcanos…..

Hurrah, hurrah and thrice hurrah!

So a rocky start, with a wobbly middle covered in a smooth and creamy milk chocolate!

Ady appeared home just as we were about to leave for the garage so he followed us and brought us home again which saved the walk back from the garage. 🙂

Had only been home about 20 minutes when the garage rang to say they had finished and it had passed!! 🙂 🙂 And slightly curious as last years garage had told me when they MOTd it that it had barely scraped through on the exhaust and it really, really needed sorting. It’s been to Scotland, Manchester at least 3 times, Devon, Dorset and Cornwall on seperate occassions, Suffolk, Birmingham and all the shorter trips to Reading, Hailsham and round and about and seems to have cured itself as this garage didn’t even mention it 😉

Rang Ali to check her progress on the epic journey to our house (about once every six visits or so Ali and Freya make the long trip over here which requires a walk to the station from their house, a change of trains and then a walk to our house from the station, repeated again in reverse on the way home – a good 3 hours travelling for a 3 hour visit. In comparison we drive there to their house in about 20 minutes! She was still on the first leg so we set off for the garage to collect the car.

Scarlett was adamant she wanted to walk and flatly refused to use her pushchair, which as I am trying to wean us all off it I went with. She did pretty well, its about 2 miles and we were well over half way before she wanted carrying. So we compromised on walking a while, then carrying a while. Got to the garage to find the MOT was even cheaper than I had been expecting (I thought MOTs were a standard fixed charge but it was advertised as £44 something at the garage I had first booked it into and they only charged me £40! Hurrah again. But Ady and I did speculate on whether this was due to me carrying Scarlett into the garage which I later realised would have exposed a large amount of my bra. Pondered further whether showing my pants too would have reduced the cost further and actually infact whether I should ring back and offer various states of undress to see if I could earn some cash!). So we drove home.

Tarly has really struggled with being up since 4am, the walk and is still quite snotty so she fell asleep for a brief period of time and was still very grumpy about being woken up by me when Ali and the Book People order arrived together.

Ali and I were also both suffering from lack of sleep (Ali had been going to bed at 4am when I had been woken up), Freya was also not on top form and Davies is still slightly zombie-fied from the weekend so we were not the most animated and lively of company for each other.

Kids played with the plastic animals, Davies did life cycles of caterpillars/butterflies and frogs for Ali, Scarlett impressed us with her dinosaur identifying skills, Freya played upstairs for a bit then spent ages shut in the bathroom (a taste of years to come Ali?!), they ate most of their sandwiches, we ate all of our pesto pasta, we all ate some sweets to try and perk ourselves up artifically!

The game of russian roulade (anyone else watch that?) I had been playing with the children by leaving Alison’s mini beads still on their board designs on the windowsill by threatening them with all sorts of punishments if they touched them instead of just moving them to somewhere safe and out of reach went horribly wrong when Freya got to them before I had the chance to threaten her, sorry, move them 😉

Fortunately we all know each other well enough to just sit and not feel the need to be super scintillating company all the time. Which was just as well!

So they headed off for the return part of their epic journey (I felt as though I probably should have given them a hanky on a stick with a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese), we returned in to pick up the hama beads, tidy up the animals and open the Book People order. Which was a couple of sets for Ady for Christmas, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and some activity books which the children got stuck straight into. Tarly had a princess sticker book and Davies a dinosaur one which he has made an excellent dinosaur picture with.

So it was a fairly low key end to a very stressy day. My parents have arrived now for dinner, so much as my inclination is to bugger off to bed I will have to sparkling, witty and hostessy while cooking dinner 🙁