One word? When seven would do…

Cinema again today. We saw The Wild. Very well animated, very weak storyline, too many similarities to Madagascar to carry it off really. No catchy soundtrack, not much charm, no catchphrases and generally rather forgetable. Davies watched it all but Tarly struggled with it about an hour in and then bumped her chin (ouch) on the arm of the chair where she was wriggling and cried, loudly 🙁 I managed to pacify her and she cheered up again for the ending but really it was a fifteen minute story with unecessarily complicated bits that she struggled to follow. Eddie Izzard’s koala was the redeeming feature for me really 😉 Like Eddie 🙂 Both children agreed they much prefered Curious George out of the two films anyway, but enjoyed the two cinema trips in a week experience lots! Thanks film education 🙂

We just had time to drop a couple of library books in and grab a plastic bag full of toy dinosaurs on the way to home ed group. The only attendees this week were us, Julie and Lucy. As last week was due to be our last week at the venue anyway we totted up the money and realised we’d used up all our funds so have cancelled it for next week and will start meeting at a local park each week instead. Come September if we have sufficient numbers to hire a venue again we will do so, if not we’ll move our get togethers indoors somewhere (soft play?). I like the idea of having *something* we do weekly to refer new people to but can’t be doing with the responsibility of being the one to fix themes and hire venues every week. I’m glad we did it for the four weeks as I’ve met at least four new contacts but as Julie and I (and often Lucy) meet weekly anyway it makes sense to just publicise that locally and refer any new HE folk to that get together as ‘local events for Worthing’. The theme was dinosaurs so they all played with the plastic dinos for a bit and then just ran around really. They found a ball and a hoop which they invented various games for and then Lucy brought in her cd played and a Spanish holiday song cd (birdie song, agadoo etc) so all the children danced to that for a while. Rebecca and Maisie danced together for ages – they are very similar in nature and make cute little friends actually, far more alike than either of them is to Tarly so we ahhhed at them holding hands and quietly dancing together. 🙂

Lucy, Rebecca and Richard came back for coffee afterwards but Rebecca didn’t really want to leave Lucy to play, despite Davies’ constant offers, Richard ignored all the various baby friendly toys we offered and wanted to climb the stairs with a view to falling back down them or play with the coal dust covered companion set on the hearth so Lucy I struggled but just about managed to chat about camping. She’s coming along to Kessingland which will be great and her husband, Colin, has done exactly what I would have done if finances would have allowed and dashed out and spent a fortune on everything with the word ‘camping’ infront of it 😆 Seeing them again tomorrow as we’re going to Drusillas (will be there from 11 Ros if you’re around?).

I did the children’s tea while they played ‘Curious George’ and then tidied up with very thorough micro-management from me 🙄

Looking forward to getting outside tomorrow, we’ve been indoors all week, so rain or not we’ll be out there tomorrow for at least a part of the day.

I fear my muffinicity is over taking me – I need to spend more time focussing on my hard drinking, hell-bitch side quick before I start coveting a sewing machine and looking at getting a pinny!

I’m almost ashamed to note my housewifely doings today but I did five loads of washing and got it all dry (hurrah!), changed our bed, got slow cooker chicken cooking by 9am (it’ll be our third time of eating it Joyce, I reckon you’re good to go with it!), made some almond macaroon things with the leftover egg whites from yesterday’s quiche, ate way too many of them and felt queasy all afternoon, drank about seven cups of tea (resulting in many, many trips to the loo!), constructed a version of a potato gratin thingy and almost finished the library book due back tomorrow. At which point I actually got quite bored and really felt like doing something with the children but they were so absorbed in their games that it would have been cruel to interfere really!

They started off playing with the toy animals this morning and had a long game involving dinosaurs – was impressed with not only how much detail over and above just names of each one Davies had remembered but also how much Tarly knew and that she was asking him to fill in any gaps. That moved onto playing holidays which moved on to teddy bear races down the stairs – they have a bear the same although Tarly’s is evidently two years less loved and were putting them into head over heels position and letting them go at the top to see which won to the bottom – noisy and potentially dangerous I guess but they enjoyed it. 🙂

Then they came and gathered food from the kitchen to take upstairs for a picnic. They’d laid out a blanket, set places for various soft toys and used books as place mats. After about half an hour they came and invited me to join them so I went and read them a couple of books while they ate. They carried that on a while longer and then Davies came and showed me some magic tricks.

Before tea they asked if I’d do some drawing with them. I said I would but I didn’t know what to draw. Davies (no idea where he gets these things from I’m sure!) said I should just ‘get a pen and draw whatever you feel. Not trees or cars or real things like that, just draw like your feelings or your imagination and see what happens…’ I know, deep! 🙂

So we did. We did ‘mindless art’. I started one picture with scribbles which Davies took off me and interpreted into something which led to him drawing an underwater picture. Then I started one with colour schemes and did lots of pinks and purples. That got taken over by Tarly who finished it off beautifully and I finally got to complete one of my own in all shades of yellow and green. Very theraputic and actually quite creative and interesting to look at. Must do similar exercise on decent paper and maybe on a bigger scale. It also reminded me slightly of some monster drawings we did recently. We folded paper into three and each drew a head on the top third, folded it down and passed it to the next person who drew a body, folded it down and passed it on again to draw feet. I like communal works of art. 🙂

And that was probably about it for today really. They carried on drawing while I got their tea and Davies made me an Easter book using loads of Easter stickers combined with drawings. I read Tarly her favourite Dragons book and they both went to bed awake and laid in their beds playing for a while before going to sleep. Oh how they’re growing up…

Tomorrow we’re off to a Film Education showing of The Wild and then back for Home Ed group, themed dinosaurs so that’s dead easy 😉

would really appreciate your answers to the following, email or comments would be fine. Mostly for my own curiosity…

What did you want to ‘be’ when you grew up? (very simplistic phrasing so please don’t pick me up on that, you know what I mean 🙂 )

What single thing are you most proud of yourself for?

Who do you most admire (dead / alive, famous or not, known to you or not) and why?

Happy 8th Birthday Fran Puddle!

Love from Ady, Nic, Davies & Scarlett xxx

Out the house by nine this morning, with minutes to spare 🙂 Couldn’t be doing with all that malarkey every morning though!

We arrived at the Marina with a good half an hour to spare so had a quick look round Asda and used the loo – nice to browse with no money and not see anything I would have bought anyway 🙂

We arrived back at the cinema at the same time as one small school party of 6 children and 2 adults with another two larger school parties milling around nearby. I was quite surprised at how ‘wild’ all the children seemed to be although I actually remember acting similar when on school trips myself looking back. Considering I only had one less child under my control – and they’re mine so theoretically less likely to listen to me somehow (well that’s how it worked with other adults in my day!) I was very proud of how well D&S conducted themselves. 🙂

We bought popcorn and coke – justifiable when the cinema was free I thought 😉 and settled down in the front row. We had about a 20 minute wait before the film started during which time we just chatted and looked around. It was Tarly’s first time in the cinema so she was enthralled with the chairs, the drink holders, the posh curtains (Davies said ‘I bet the Queen has posh drapes like that’ when he pointed out some swags as being very nice. No idea he even knew who the Queen was let alone that she would be bound to have posh stuff – the only time I’ve ever mentioned her to him was when we saw corgis in the street!) and the huge screen. Davies talked about how ‘Adam’s got a big screen in his house but there’s only enough seats for four or five people in the room’ in response to my explanation that it needed to be so big cos there were so many people going to be watching it! (Ros, you might want to get that sorted out 😉 ). Then I attempted to be educational and explain about projectors to Davies but he told me instead :-).

The film was quite good I thought. Nowhere near as clever and catering to adult audiences as well as Shrek, Toy Story etc aside from the fact it seemed to be animated in the style of cartoons from years gone by – not quite so technicolour as today’s usual cartoons and with drawings in the same sort of style as Top Cat, Flintstones and other HB stuff from the 70s, so a bit of a nostalgic feel to it somehow. No slapstick, lots of gentle humour to make the five year olds giggle and some nice moral stuff tucked away in there too. So simple, unsophisicated, quite charming and probably one of the most appropriate films I could think of for a first time for Tarly.

She spent pretty much the whole of the first hour utterly mesmerised – not sure if that was the story, the size of the screen or the hypnotic rhythm of posting popcorn into her own mouth 😉 Davies watched it and whispered to me lots – he likes film watching to be an interactive and sociable experience (Chris, you’d hate sitting next to him 😉 ).

We came home and they did some drawing and then got the sticklebricks out and started playing with them. I made a rhubarb, apple and ginger crumble ready to go in the oven and the pastry cases for quiche for dinner tonight and my Dad came over ready to look after Tarly while I took Davies to Badgers as Ady was working up in London today and wouldn’t be home til late.

Badgers was good, as usual. I gave a brief kiss goodbye and left him to it to wait in the car, I could see him through the window and he appeared to be just fine. Right at the end while they were tidying up he came to the window and waved and blew kisses for a bit but is more than happy with me being out there instead of in the next room. I’ve decided that is fine for now, mainly because I really enjoy the hour sitting in silence in the car reading a book 🙂 They covered where Germany is in relation to England and talked about the currency there. Davies also brought home some sort of abstract piece of collage work with German flag colours and drawings on it. Not sure what they were supposed to be doing (I imagine it was something slightly more structured) but loving his individuality anyway 🙂 I was really pleased to notice as we left that loads of the children were talking to him, calling his name and yelling goodbye. I really like the huge age range there as far from giving space for the ages to seperate it appears to be the great leveller with the older ones enjoying ‘looking after’ the younger ones and them all being taken as individuals.

Dad and Tarly read some books while we were gone and Ady pulled up at the same time as we got home. Ady tidied up while I made the quiches and we’re about to eat and watch BB.

Some of you may have noticed that I recently reappeared on the Early Years Blogring. I left the blog ring with this here blog you are reading quite some while ago for various reasons – I was concerned about too much personal information about me and the children contained in the blog and not enough educational content for it to be sitting under a ‘Home Education’ banner. I very rarely read round the blogring (it’s just sooo big!) but when I did a month or so ago I realised that whilst there are many different approaches out there there is probably noone ‘doing it’ quite like us. I’d already set up a blog (you’re shocked aren’t you :oops:) for the children’s specifically ‘educational achievements’ as this has long since become far more a personal diary and far less a HE record, albeit the personal diary of a family who HE. So it’s there and it documents the things that the children and I cover on a weekly basis in the hopes that it will demonstrate to people who don’t know about this approach as an option and should we ever need to have information regarding what we do in the course of our day to day lives in order to tick someone somewhere’s boxes then it will there, ready and waiting, illustrated, dated and categorised for me to point them at.

A year or so ago every time someone else speculated about whether they were doing enough with their children, whether they should consider school, indeed decided school was the way forward or agonised about education generally it sent me into my own personal whirlpool of doing the same. Equally someone waxing lyrical on the great joys and successes of HE would also have me feeling somehow inferior and challenging and questioning how we were doing. I had my mental list of how old all of everyone else’s children were on a sort of mental timeline with my own two and would – in spite of myself – be comparing and contrasting and weighing up a reading a Bob book there with a writing a name here and raising you one act of self sufficiency for your demonstration of independance there.

All of my worries about the children would be equated with their HE status – can’t wipe his own bum? He’d have to if he was at school, can’t persuade her to have her hair brushed? Well it would be in plaits daily at school, still hasn’t been left alone and is still not at all prepared or ready for that to happen? Ha! Pre school would have taken care of that 2 years ago!

There are still things which raise my concerns and will continue to do so over the years but HE vs School seems a bit of a no brainer for us right now. Similarly the approach we are taking with no structure also seems really rather obvious too.

Over the years I have had concerns about various things which have all proved unfounded and in the main I have learnt to let things happen in their own sweet time wrt the children. Davies was right at the outside edge of ‘normal’ with his walking – at 17 and a half months he still wasn’t and I was fretting like mad. Bet none of you have looked at him and ever thought his walking is any way deficient now. I remember when one of his little friends was saying ‘Dada’ way before him how I fretted – now his vocabulary is one of the widest for a child his age I know. So mobility and communication sorted themselves out.

At this point I am very aware that Davies specifically would be well into the tick boxes and standards of measurement if he were at school and it would be all too easy to still do that within the HE community we move in. So Davies can’t read yet – he’s got the mechanics inasmuch as he knows all the letters and the sounds they make, he knows that you blend them together to make words which means that if he is in the right frame of mind then words like cat, sat, mat and so on are well within his capability. But give him the, you, or are and chances are he’d be a bit stumped. Does this have any impact on his day? None whatsoever. Do I think if it did he’d crack those words in about half an hour? You betcha! Am I suprememly confident that as and when he needs to read – and I’m guessing given how much he loves books and he loves information and learning new things it will probably be sooner rather than later – he will do so? I certainly am. Davies says ‘I can’t read yet’ and if he is considering it something he will be able to do but hasn’t done yet then that’s I consider it to be too. When the time is right I have no doubt he will master it with exactly the same zest and enthusiasm and craving to get it done and get it right that he approaches his other passions.

Today we went to the cinema. Films are totally Davies’ thing – watching them, certainly but far, far more that that. He wants to know about the whole process, the actors, the animators, the scriptwriters, the filming process, the sets and he is recently learning about the marketing and advertising too. I started to explain to him about the projector and the screen while we sat there and he shushed me and explained it to me with a better understanding of it that I possessed myself. He tells me he learnt it from watching the extras bits on a couple of his dvds. When I asked him if he thought he’d probably do something to do with cinemas and films when he grew up he looked at me like I was slightly deranged and said ‘of course’. Which could be anything from the person selling the popcorn, to the star of the film, to the director or scriptwriter or the animator. The opportunity to specialise is one so few schooled children seem to be offered and I would argue that far from limiting a child allowing them the time to truly discover things and fully develop that knowledge is probably the greatest gift we can offer. Who knows what future doors I’d be shutting by dragging him away from his exploring so that he can better perfect his reading to see whether it said push or pull on the front.

Happy Birthday James 🙂

Have a right good day!

A very Sunday sort of Sunday today.

Up at 7ish although Ady had been up for a couple of hours (children had woken him and he couldn’t get back to sleep) so he’d done croissants and tea and then went back to bed.

The children were playing with plasticine and making flowers. Davies did some excellent roses, daisies and dandelions with lots of detail and then they both got caught up in some complicated game so I left them to it.

Ady got back up again and occupied himself hoovering or something while I made a sponge cake for Frazer to take over to my parents for lunch. Which is where we went, taking Fred and Albert with us.

It’s rained pretty much all day today (I’d consider getting plans drawn up for building an ark but due to the drought we’d not have the water to mix the cement 😆 😉 ) so after lunch and between downpours we all trooped outside and Davies ceremoniously released Fred and Albert into Dad’s pond. Hopefully they have already made lots of new friends with the 50 odd fish Dad has in there already and won’t be needing the fish equivalent of a cushion for the emotional trauma of being big fishes in a small bowl to being middle sized fishes in a large pond. He expressed some concern about whether they would be OK with the food Grandad feeds them – we use flakes and he uses pellets so he had a bit of a pep talk with them about that before he let them go, explaining that they needed to try new things and not be scared to swim up to the other fish and say hello – that sort of thing 😆

Then we went up to the aquarium shop and chose two new fish, smaller but in the same style as Fred and Albert, imaginatively christened Fred and Albert 🙂

Dad, Frazer and Ady watched football, I read my book and Mum played with the children and then we came home. I also had Davies come to me for a cuddle at one point and as I happened to be on my laptop we flicked about through my del.icio.us stuff and ended up looking at a load of stuff about the brain. So we talked about that and then did a quiz thing about strokes. Ady’s Dad died of a stroke so we chatted a bit about that and how the various parts of the brain control various functions with various examples.

We came home and I cut Davies’ hair (bit severe but good for the summer), the children had a bath and I read them Earth Story and Life Story by Eric Maddern as Davies has been asking various questions I thought Eric answers better than I do. A particular one being ‘how is water made?’. In Earth story the rivers, lakes and oceans come from millions of years worth of rain and storms as the steam from the big bang falls and the Earth cools down. So he liked that explanation and now wants to do some sort of experiment to see it actually happen. We did some practical stuff about weather a while back but never really carried on with it much so maybe it’s time to do so – I’m fairly sure I’d got various water cycle things planned but never did them so I need to dig back in my blog and see what I come up with, or just google 😉 We also talked about reptiles, fish, mammals, birds, insects and amphibians and I was impressed that Davies could give examples for each and characterising features for them all, following on from our chat about mammals the other night. He then wanted to know exactly how evolution theory worked in terms of us coming from apes, so I did a very brief whizz through of that explaining how each generation or two might have subtle changes until over many, many generations a different species evolves. Think he got it.

Nigella’s ham in coke for dinner whilst watching Dr Who recorded from earlier and then tomorrow me and the small people are off to see Curious George. Nice weekend 🙂

It’s been sooooo windy today!

I had a lie in this morning and after two glasses of medicinal wine last night and an early to bed night I slept well and felt loads better today.

This morning I went off and did food shopping for next week and posted another ebay parcel, Ady did gardening and defrosted the chiller (or chill-eh as we call it here – in the style of Bonn-eh from BB!) – see I’m not the only one prone to muffinicity 😉

We had lunch and then we headed off to Brighton. Ali had very kindly treated Davies and I to join her and Freya in seeing James Campbell perform as part of Brighton Festival. D & S were being the most stereotypical siblings in the world in the back of the car and Ady and I were responding by being the most stereotypical parents in the world in the front so it was a blessed relief to be dropped off with D and only have one child to one parent for a while :-). We’d arranged to meet Ali at the Lush shop and I must confess to purchasing a couple of bars of solid shampoo with the justification that they are just perfect for camping 😉 And of course the mere exhaling of the scent of Lush while breathing in the shop was instantly calming and restorative.

Then we walked down to the area where he was performing and joined the queue. Freya and Davies were on good form together although it felt slightly odd to be there with Tarly really as I’ve only previously seen them as a trio – the show would have been beyond her though and as I had Davies sitting on my lap throughout she’d have been something of a liability too. I thought the routine was very good – he has quite a bit of Eddie Izard about him who I am rather a fan of anyway and I love the risk of stand up so to perform to a room of children quadrupled that gamble and I thought he pulled it off well. Davies and Freya certainly seemed to enjoy it, me and Ali did plenty of laughing out loud. Davies even joined in with some shouting out the answers at one point. We signed up for the mailing list for future Brighton events including a possible stand up workshop for children (and what is wrong with living vicariously through one’s children exactly 😉 ) and then Ali headed off in one direction while we headed off to meet Ady and Tarly in the other. Thanks very much Ali, we really enjoyed it 🙂

We’d arranged to meet them at the mad roundabout infront of the pier. If you know Brighton at all this will imediately make sense to you, if you don’t then infront of Palace Pier there is a roundabout with about 5 exits which is a constant state of utter chaos with the soundtrack of tooting horns and people leaning out of their cars yelling and waving fists at each other. The rule of giving to the right is utterly irrelevant when there are five exits and the whole thing is against a backdrop of all Brighton’s finest hanging out infront of the pier and with the faintest threatening of sunshine there will be hundreds of motorbikes added to the mix too. Love it! 🙂

We watched the sea, which was very very choppy for a bit and the pigeons and seagulls digging in the stones then we started to walk along the prom away from the pier. There was some sort of stage set up with some very funky live band which I would have happily stayed and watched but Davies was running ahead crazily laughing into the wind and hiding behind every object possible to jump out and shout ‘boo!’ at me. There was also some sort of Ferrari gathering with added Lambourginis, must have been about 100 of them all parked or revving up, so we enjoyed walking past them too. Then we met with Ady and Tarly.

They’d had a lovely couple of hours walking round the Marina. They’d been in all the designer clothes and handbag shops trying on silly hats, walked round some market stalls and generally enjoyed each others’ company so that was nice too.

We then went over to my parents to give Frazer his cards and presents – however depsite being there til nearly 7pm he was still in bed recovering from a very heavy night out last night (I guess if you are single and childless you get to celebrate 30 very heavily like that!). The children had tea there and we’re going over there again for lunch tomorrow too.

Tonight we have watched the Prince’s Trust thing, sporting our 3D glasses which Davies of course was very interested in, had a lovely curry and are about to head off to bed. My turn to get up in the morning 🙁

Albert lives!

And the real Albert, not a hastily purchased from Petsmart replacement either! 🙂

For Davies’ fourth birthday among other gifts (hey remember this was way back when we were still extravagent with our spending 😉 ) he got two goldfish. He called them Fred and Albert and for quite some while they lived in his bedroom. Thing is, his bedroom’s fairly dark and Malice (one of our cats) used to drink the water from the fish bowl too. So we moved them to the bathroom which is much lighter and put them on the windowsill out of the cats’ reach.

After about 9 months or so one of them died. Now one of the main reasons for getting him pets and specifically fish was so that he could learn about things dying and also the responsibility of being a pet owner. Which he took very seriously and was very consciencious about. So when one of them died, unexpectedly the day after he’d watched an episode of The Bobinogs about how pet owners have to make sure they look after their pets properly and had been refering back to it for the whole day about how he looked after Fred and Albert carefully and made sure they were fed etc I simply couldn’t bring myself to tell him, knowing the timing couldn’t have been more wrong and he would see it as a reflection of his own pet care. So we did the classic flushing it down the loo and replacing it with a Fred-alike from the pet shop when he wasn’t looking.

Anyway Fred 2 and Albert have thrived, are actually quite beautiful as goldfish go. One (Fred2) has a beautiful long swishy tail and Albert has deveoped white patches koi carp stylee. They are way too big for their bowl now and have been for some time so Davies was persuaded by my parents that once the weather is warm enough they will go and live in their pond and they will replace them with smaller new versions. Davies has been slightly unsure about this but tonight all that changed.

I was putting Davies to bed and Ady – oh master of parental tact and diplomacy suddenly yelled up the stairs from the bath ‘Nic, where’s the other fish?’. Davies imediately alert was only a few paces behind me as I went downstairs again to find him standing up in the bath peering into the really very small bowl as if to suddenly find him ‘oh there he was, behind that piece of erm, water’. He was found, very still, on the floor behind the laundry bin, underneath the window sill.

He looked fairly dead expired to me but upon being bunged back in the bowl and poked a bit he started to thrash about again. Ady then changed their water and de-fluffed him as he was rather liberally coated with dust (oh the shame of my poor housekeeping in the corner by the skirting board behind the dirty laundry bin :oops:). He is still slightly inclined to float on his side and stay near the top but insterspersed with regular bouts of swimming around wildly with a ‘look I’m fine, I’ve been to the outside and made it back to tell the tale’ way about him. Not at all sure he’ll still be around in the morning of course, but fish can be pretty resiliant I believe.

The upside is that Davies has agreed that if Albert is making Finding Nemo style bids for freedom then he really should be relocated to Grandad’s pond – Albert’s ocean. And we’ve promised to go to the pet shop and get two far smaller and better suited to the size of bowl fish to replace them. Not sure what he intends naming them but he’s cool about it all now at least.

Ady has also prepared him for the prospect that Albert may well be floating by the morning and he plans to bury him in the garden with a piece of paper, with a picture of Albert on it and the words ‘Albert. Davies loved him very much’ if such an occurance comes to pass. But he says he hopes it doesn’t.

All of which led to a lengthy discussion about why tadpoles die in such great numbers, which led to discussions about natural selection, why mammals have less offspring per pregnancy than fish for example, why metamorphasis is such a tough thing on bodies (people take years to grow from babies to adults and pretty much still look the same but bigger, frogspawn becomming tadpoles becomming frogs and caterpillars becomming butterflies are far more taxing). We talked about giving birth to live young and feeding with mothers milk being characteristic of mammals, why sometimes lambs and goat kids are bottle fed instead and how this cheats the natural selection slightly.

This moved on to talk about multiple births and the difference between fraternal and identical twins, and how siamese twins happen (he saw some once on a programme), touched on how if a woman is pregnant and ill then the babies inside could become ill also and somehow ended up with him asking how water is made.

Which brought us back to the very beginning, quite literally 🙂 At which point I sent him back to bed with a promise to read a couple of Eric Maddern books to him again tomorrow.

Tarly and I spent ages today playing with this little electronic book thing. We got it from Boots years ago when Davies was about 18 months old and it was a car toy for ages then sat in the bottom of the noisy toys box. It’s got letters, numbers, pictures, shapes etc on it and has five settings for games to play, like spelling words, finding the letters etc. Davies plays with it every so often now but today Tarly found it and we had a lovely half hour or so cuddled up playing with it finding letters and pictures. She’s still remembered the first five letters we covered when we had a couple of 100EL months ago so I really should pick that back up with her again and carry it on.

Anyway worth a mention as it was lovely, educational and completely out of the blue and Tarly-led with her bringing me the book and initiating both the beginnning of it and then getting more interested in something Davies was doing and slipping away to play with him instead.

Had a really crap night’s sleep last night. I was late to bed anyway but trying to stay up until I was ready to fall asleep, while keeping half an eye on the A Team programme and the BB love stories show after that. Around midnight I finally called it a day only to lie there for a good hour or more listening to the wind howling and with a hundred things whirling round my head (which is so not like me).

I had a really disturbed night for no reason other than the wind and the children woke at 6am. Ady was up with them but once awake my nose was running, my cough was coughing and the rest of the people I live with are so bloody noisy it’s pretty impossible to sleep anyway. Yes, I am grumpy today 🙂

Got a batch of bolognaise sauce cooking in the slow cooker and decided I’d chance the weather and cleared the washing basket (wise move – it’s all dried and brought in just before the rain started mid afternoon). The children did some drawing – Davies drew Scooby Doo, then Scooby Doo with skin but no fur and then Scooby Doo’s skeleton, cut them all out and then tasked me with putting them in order (as in skin on top of bones, fur on top of skin) and then in order after he died (as in fur falls off to reveal skin, to reveal bone – I know, very cheery!) – and there was the rest of the blogring all making cute little animated versions of themselves and their children with fairy wings 😉

Then we made some birthday cards for my brother – 30 today HAPPY BIRTHDAY FRAZER! (not that he reads this obviously 😉 ). Scarlett did a sort of random swirling pattern and Davies drew a picture of Frazer all dressed in black (he usually is) with a really splendid birthday cake on a table next to him and the chair knocked over where he’d been so excited about his birthday cake. Really good picture. 🙂 Then he wrote ‘Happy Birthday’ on the front with me just telling him which letter to write next. Then we did inside. Davies wrote ‘To Frazer love Davies’ with me just telling him the letters, Tarly copied ‘To Frazer love Scarlett’ from my writing – very good pen control and she seems to be learning slightly as she goes on the writing. Davies has decided he really likes writing now apparently so that’s nice :-). We cut them out and stuck them onto folded card and then they both lost interest in that and started playing with the circus toys.

I sat and coughed and sniffed and drank tea and read my book and wished I could ring in sick for the afternoon 😉

Luckily Ali and Freya arrived and we managed to chat inbetween dealing with very noisy children who’d found the box of instruments, siblings who both wanted whatever the other one had, a major meltdown from Tarly about something both her and I had forgotten the cause of long before she’d come back out of her room to say sorry and get a cuddle – but I’ve been expecting some sort of fall out from her all week after everything she’s been through so was almost pleased to see it – almost! She’s also had a few bad nights with nightmares and has spent lots of the week sleeping curled up in my arms, refusing even Ady’s cuddles. Doubt very much I was on top form today, but Ali was functioning on even less sleep than I think I’d had so we did some BB first impressions chatter and general gossip and then Ady got home in time for me to run them to the station.

Ady fed the children and then played snakes and ladders with them (D’s current fave) and now one is asleep and the other fairly close. I’ve got experimental wine to try one glass of and see if it perks me up or at the very least helps me to sleep and I’ve not intention of getting up in the morning!

When I undid the washing machine door and soapy, dirty water trickled out over my toes.

NOT MY WASHING MACHINE, ANYTHING BUT THAT!!!!!

But no, Ady, who has a habit of turning the kettle, coffee machine and washing machine which all share a plug point off at the mains when not in use had turned them all off together mid cycle.

The relief! 😀

Get Happy!

You Are 92% Happy

It’s unlikely that you know anyone happier than you. You know how to be happy, no matter what life throws at you.

The A team show is slower than I was expecting it to be, but I do want to see if he can get Mr T!

And sodding weather!

There is clearly some law somewhere that states that if I hang out washing and crow about doing so it will piss down with rain solidly for the following 48 hours. The same law clearly works in even more irritating ways to decree that when the weather forecast is for ‘severe weather’ including heavy rain and gusts of wind making me think ‘aha I will not be caught out in the same way again. I shall not do that pile of washing in the hopes of getting it dry before the weather turns again and end up with all of the metres and metres of washing line full of soppy washing for days’ and therefore not do the washing in a smug manner it will be the most perfect drying day for weeks. The severe weather so far has been no greater than lots of wind in an otherwise sunny day. Ah well, the previous lot is all dried now at least.

So today we’ve done loads of reading aloud. I went and sorted out both the childrens’ bookcases – although I could probably do with further sorting at some not too distant point but at least all the books are in the bookcases the right way round again now. And I found all the library books and have got them all together in one place again now. So we sat and read most of them. In the pile was ‘A diffendoofer day’ which I just adore. I’m sure I’ve linked to it before as it’s so HE suitable – it’s about a school where they don’t teach anything conventional – stuff like laughing and thinking. We also did some messing about with a little kit of plastic meccano-alike stuff I’d got but it was quite fiddly so when it turned into me doing it all and them watching TV over my shoulder we packed that away and turned the TV off! They then played with the geomags and the pretend food. Oh and had several games of Kerplunk too.

I made flapjacks (most of which have gone now :oops:) and we had lunch. After lunch Davies wanted to do some writing so he copied lots of various words and we spelt them out together (don’t get excited, his contribution to the spelling out was minimal 😉 ), they both drew a series of drawings each to tell stories with – Davies’ was very good, logical and had an introducing the characters bit with a bit of background about them both, a middle bit with some plot and then an ending. Scarlett’s was slightly more random and she then filled sheets and sheets of paper with folded flicker pictures, not quite grasped the actual how to do them so they are animated but I’m not correcting her on that yet as she is loving drawing two versions of something so she more than grasps the basic idea. 🙂

Then I remembered a competition I’d got details of with with our Film Education screening details for next week (we’re seeing Curious George on Monday and The Wild on Wednesday – it’ll be Tarly’s first time at the cinema and we’re really looking forward to it. Hope any soundtracks are not too dire as I imagine I’ll be hearing them lots! 😉 Oh and Davies already seems to have achieved movie critic before seeing the film status as off the back of two trailers and a poster for The Wild he’s decided that it is ‘just Madagascar with a different name! 🙂 ) .

So we talked through the rules of the competition and Davies decided he wants to do W&G (I could pretend to be surprised but you wouldn’t believe me 😉 ), Tarly is still thinking. He was slightly fazed by having to write the title out and checked several times if ‘that was the law of the competition’ I agreed it was indeed ‘the law’ and showed him a quick sketch of a poster I’d do for Madagascar – movie title, a made up tagline, some pictures of the main characters and lots of background so the whole page is filled. Explained that was my sketch and I’d then do the proper poster. I can’t find anywhere on the entry form which states a size of entry so we are planning to do one on our big poster sized paper which should be cool.

He started doing the writing first and made some excellent progress with that. We’ll no doubt continue with that over coming weeks. Good project I reckon 🙂

The plan was that Ady would be home for 2.30pm so that I could take Tarly to the docs at 3pm to get her stitches out without Davies. Not sure how strong of stomach D is having never injured himself and always been fairly traumatised by Tarly doing so, and also wanted to focus on her rather than worry about him at the docs. But at 3pm he wasn’t home so I had to take him with us. They went into the waiting room to play with the toys while I tried to check in. Turned out the giddy bloody receptionist (have I ranted before about doctors receptionists? I’m sure I must have done 👿 ) had booked her in for June 1st rather than today. I just stood there with a patient look plastered to my face while she muttered and mumbled and said ‘erm well we’ll have to fit you in somehow’ and got all flustered. I agreed that indeed June 1st might be leaving it a bit late and I hoped she would have healed completely by then so removing stitches at that stage may be a little tricky! We were in within five minutes 😉

The nurse was cautious when she saw Tarly and asked how old she was and looked quite doubtful about how easy a job it might be, but Tarly just asked her if she could keep her stitches to take home in a jar and happily hopped up on the couch and jutted her chin out. Davies climbed up on a chair next to her and was all interested. Don’t think she quite knew what to make of us really! She had to call another nurse in in the end as she was struggling to see the stitches – apparently they were very small – the smallest she’s ever seen. As they are the only one’s I’ve ever seen I can’t really comment either way. 🙂

Anyway, it took ages as they were really embedded in her scab which has healed so well I think they could have come out a day or two ago even. They smeared loads of cream on and told me to keep it moisturised so it doesn’t pull as it heals and finally got them all out and in the little jar.

Tarly laid there, without moving at all, said it ‘tickled’ when I asked her if it hurt and was proclaimed the ‘bravest three year old ever!’ they said it would normally have been a nightmare to get stitches out of the average three year old – guess I always knew Tarly wasn’t average really ;-). So she got a whole sheet of stickers again and the nurse actually put on her notes ‘three very tiny stitches removed from a very brave three year old indeed’ which she said will stay on her record every time it gets pulled up. So when she’s there in X years time having a home birth with no assistance they’ll read that and say ‘ah yes…’ 🙂 She loves her little ‘spider stitches’ in her jar and will no doubt be showing them to everyone we meet along with her scar. The scab has already started to come away a bit and it looks pink but healthy underneath so hopefully it will continue to heal well and she’ll have a minimal scar – picking not withstanding.

Ady was outside the surgery on his phone as we came out, very apologetic that at the last place he’d been to before coming home he’d walked into a crisis to do with million pound customer threatening to stop ordering given the quality of the delivery he’d just receieved. Ady feeling bad that he couldn’t justify his daughter having stitches out as reason enough to leave anyway, but it was fine, Davies was fine and I can think of many instances when neither parent would have been around to take a child so I’m sure neither of them will need counselling about this particular incident 😉

And that was pretty much our day. Some cleaning out of tadpoles (about 50 remaining according to Ady but he said that a week or so ago and has been fishing dead ones out daily so somewhere his maths is wonky – clearly counting them twice as they swim around 😉 ) – they are now in a shallower water with rocks for climbing available. We’ve not made as much of the whole tadpole rearing experience as I’d semi planned to but sometimes that’s the way things go and they have clearly learnt as much as they would have done even if I’d had them drawing life cycles and making lapbooks about it – we’ve fished out dead ones at every stage and had them under microscopes, they’ve held live ones at every stage and gauged ‘wigglyness’, we’ve watched them at length and observed the changes in shape, colour, size and movements and we did read one book right at the beginning detailing how they change at each stage. We also have plastic versions of each stage of development which Davies could already name and order so it’s been cool to have the real life version to watch go through it’s metamorphasis just like we did with the caterpillars last year.

So, tonight, lovely dinner (tacos and fajitas), Big Brother launch night, my cold is feeling better and tomorrow Ali and Freya are coming over, and even better that that IT’LL BE FRIDAY!!! 🙂