One word? When seven would do…

Mostly I’m sure due to being with Ali today when that is normally a ‘Friday thing’.

Forgot to mention yesterday so I’ll mention now that Davies was playing with the xylophone yesterday and picking out the W&G tune he’d learnt on the piano on Sunday including carrying on and learning the next bit. He did that all by himself and it was only when Tarly commented on it I realised it was coming from the next room pretty much note perfect. 🙂

So this morning we played a bit more set and I tried to persuade Davies it was perfectly possible to play alone but he was having none of it! Tarly was playing with some letterland letter flash cards which I had dug out ready to go on ebay and have been played with – having been previously ignored for about 3 years – ever since! I did a few loads of washing which had built up with the rain this week and we were out of the house shortly after 10am.

We had a lovely few hours at Ali’s with much turn taking on the Leapster ;-), some playing with Gears!Gears!Gears!, lots of chatting and some Xboxing for Davies and Freya. The children managed their usual trick of interupting every conversation so all topics were covered in a stop, start manner with us spewing out as much information as we could in short spaces of time. 😆

We managed to leave promptly despite Davies and Scarlett viewing Ali’s house as some sort of library where every item is up for borrowing 😉 and only came away with a Barbie Nutcracker dvd 😆 Ali, I can only assume you are building up to asking for a really big borrow of something at our house in return – Ady perhaps? 😆 He comes with accessories including Ady machine and boots!

We took Malice to the vets for her post-op checkup and came home for a premiere viewing of the Barbie (ack!) film.

We were supposed to be going to a local-ish big park today with Lucy, Richard and Rebecca. But it rained. And it rained. So via text Lucy and I decided it would be A Bad Idea to drive all the way there in the rain and then walk round in the rain and then drive home in the rain. So instead they just came round here for the day.

And it was very nice actually. The children all played really nicely and Lucy and I talked non stop about the widest variety of things I couldn’t even begin to recall now, but it was lovely. 🙂

After lunch when the rowdiness levels got a little two high and the rain had stopped and given way to sunshine again we walked to the local park for a while. Davies rode his bike there and back and around the park a bit in the middle too, doing really well up and down hills, using brakes and being very sensible about the road and appearing to have complete control of the bike using steering and the brakes in a very coordinated manner – which is a big deal considering how inept he was just a couple of weeks ago! Tarly wanted to take her bike but I was not confident enough in their abilities to try and watch them both so she got a piggy back instead!

Once at the park I relented from my usual ‘No Pushing Children On Swings’ rule and Tarly had a small swing before deciding daredevil antics on the climbing frame would be preferable. Davies came running over and I told him I’d keep pushing him for as many pushes as however high he could count. And with really rather minimal assistance he counted to 100!! For the first time ever! 🙂 He needed prompting rather than help with the tens but for the first time grasped the patterns – we talked about what the numbers looked like written down and he grasped that after 29 comes 3 – 0 and then after 39 comes 4 – 0 and so on. So that was rather good 🙂 This week we seem to have managed reading, writing and counting along the way!

We came back from the park and sat in the garden for a while with ice lollies chatting and then Lucy went off home and we came in for the childrens’ tea. I had 3 CVs which had a deadline of tonight and I’d ignored all week so as soon as Ady got home I took myself off upstairs for an hour or so and did those while Ady had bathed the children and put them to bed. I finished them off while Ady did some gardening and we finally sat down around 10pm with dinner and the first of our Tesco DVD rental dvds – War of the Worlds. I admit openly to being a total film-know-nothing. My favoruite films include When Harry Met Sally and Four Weddings and a Funeral (which is where Tarly’s name really comes from, rather than the grander beginnings of Gone With the Wind!), I used to watch lots of horror films in my teens but now can’t bear them, I don’t like violence and I don’t like war films – which sort of limits my viewing choices really! 😆 I’d heard enough about WOTW to know it was based on the story of the cds me and the children listen to in the car and was expecting it to be that story exactly. Infact I’d actually got it with the intention of vetting it first and then letting the children see a visual interpretation of the music they love.

Well, it wasn’t quite that, and I won’t be letting the children see it, but I really enjoyed it. It had me with my hands over my mouth and on my cheeks (Home Alone style) for massive chunks of the film and the obligatory ‘happy ending’ and that’s good enough for me. 🙂 So that was a nice evening.

Tomorrow we’re off to Ali’s and Malice has a post-op check up at the vets. She apppears to be brighter again today and is jumping on and off the sofas very competantly so I am fairly reassured by that. And now, once again it has gotten very late and I really must go to bed.

Jules – have a great day 🙂

Monday
Vet’s first thing to take Malice back. As expected she had to have her eye removed. It was a straightforward procedure and they unwired her jaw at the same time. She now looks very beaten again as she was shaved around the eye, under the chin and on her leg for various tubes and injections and she has stitches in the closed eye. She returned home slightly sorry for herself but in some ways a bit brighter than she’s been (which given the level of infection must have been causing her pain is probably no surprise) with a rather large invoice which my Dad has had to take care of on our behalf.

Malice dropped off the children and I popped into town where I had a couple of things to do including filling some forms in at the bank, which I bribed the children to be good and quiet while I did with the promise of sweets from Woolworths. This is not really a tried and tested method for me and tbh 9 times out of 10 when I do attempt it it doesn’t work anyway! But this time it did 🙂 So they got their sweeties. We also had a quick look in the charity shops and netted a W&G toy rabbit for Davies and a little wooden box complete with pink sparkly bead bracelet and heart shaped ring for Tarly – for the princely sum of 30 pence each. I also picked up a couple of videos. I have embarked upon a weight loss challenge with an online friend for which the only intended effort to succeed is no weekday drinking of alcohol, smaller portion sizes of our usual meals and ‘some’ exercise. My planned exercise is to dance along to patronising teenagers teaching dance routines to Britney, S Club 7 and Kylie songs as taught on ‘Wow! Let’s Dance 6’ purchased for just 50pence and to follow the advertsised ‘fun dance-based routines’ on Anne Diamond’s ‘How I lost four stone’ video – also 50 pence. So if in just ten days you wonder who that svelte willowy woman is showing up on my flickr photostream it might be me (or one of my skinny mates!). 😆

Once home I was generally impatient and ranty, the reason for which became clear later 🙄 but putting that aside Davies did some spelling using some magnetic letters placed on the fireguard. He spelt ‘man’ ‘vets’ and the beginning of ‘went’ which was where I lost my temper so we stopped there. 🙁 We then looked at the last lesson we’d done in 100EL about a year ago and he was reminded that he ‘can’ read, he just needs to put a bit more thought and effort into it than he somehow expects to have to. Anyway, let’s leave that there as it was only a tiny part of the day and was pretty much all me being intolerant rather than him being anything other than a five year old, for which I believe he has adequate excuses! 😉

We had a play with some papier mache but all quickly lost interest in that and then I went and did some more tidying up in the playroom. I now have a good pile of stuff ready for ebaying but as we are away from next Thursday now would be a bad time to start a listing, so it will have to wait til we get back home again.

Then it was time to collect Malice so we went back to the vets and waited for about half an hour in a really busy waiting room. It looked just like a jigsaw puzzle I once had of a vets waiting room with all sorts of shapes and sizes of animals including a tortoise in a carrier, a couple of dogs and various cats, rabbits and so on. I think we have now read every single book in the waiting room, complete with comedy regional accents depending on how busy it is and how much of an audience are also there pretending not to listen.

Once home Davies wanted to play a game so I suggested Set which we’ve had in the house since Jax did the initial co-op buy of them but I’ve never actually played. Davies loves ‘spot the difference’ games so I thought it might be his sort of thing. And it was 🙂 He loved it! Tarly was our dealer, putting more cards out as requested and randomly shouting ‘set!’ for amusement. Davies did really well though, totally got to grips with it and was easily able to explain why sets were sets. So we’ll be playing that again I reckon. Far rather a game like that than monopoly or snakes and ladders!

Today
Ady came home last night and announced he was visiting Reading store today so a quick check with Alison that she was free and we arranged to go and visit her while Ady worked. So up at horrid o’clock this morning and we arrived mid morning with her. The children all went off and played, just coming back for food and drink and to offer lateral thinking questions as and when inbetween playing, leaping about in the paddling pool and watching TV. A lovely day :-).

And now, I really, really, really need to go to bed and catch up on some sleep!

This rather wonderful company sell fab and funky kids clothes. If I get a big enough order they will sell to me at wholesale (which is half price) plus p&p.

Anyone interested in ordering anything? Have a look at the website or even request a catalogue. Julie has loads of their stuff for Jack and Maisie and it washes and wears really well. Chances are I’ll be seeing you or someone who lives near enough to you to pass stuff on at some point or I can post stuff to you.

My Dad’s birthday today. He is 68. That sounds terribly old – even to him, he tells me. I think he had a nice day. We’d wanted to go over to them today really – it’s just so much easier, there is way more room, we get to go home when we want to rather than having to wait for them to leave and there are things like tables to sit and eat at 😆 Dad actually said he’d rather we went over there for a change too.

This morning I was up hideously early. Tarly appeared in our bedroom at just after 5am. She was persuaded into our bed for an hour but she didn’t actually sleep, so neither did I. We got up just after six and I baked a birthday cake for my Dad (not one of my best) and having been tempted by the promise of a chocolate and ginger cake on a forum I frequent and bought the cocoa and ginger in preparation only for it to not be posted I googled and came up with a Nigella recipe instead. My Dad adores chocolate ginger so I’d promised to take it over with us if it turned out ok. It was lovely 🙂 Will post my slightly different interpretation to Nigella’s recipe over on indigestion later.

Davies and Scarlett made birthday cakes for Dad – Davies made an enormous one which he did lovely writing inside and the most fantastic picture with the whole page coloured. Tarly did a fairly interpretive picture but also wrote ‘Grandad, Love Scarlett’ really nicely with lots of kisses.

We’d got Dad a cd and a dvd he’s requested both by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, whom I’d never heard of but Dad enthused over. Having listened to them today whilst not the same I was reminded of The Barron Knights who my parents liked when we were little kids. We even went to see them in concert as a family. Retrospectively I wonder how much of an influence their work has had on me given how much I love to rewrite comedy lyric versions of songs 😆 Wonder whether they are looking for a female youngster to carry on the good work?

Great Granny (Mum’s Mum) arrived and we had a lovely lunch with the birthday cake to finish off. Davies decreed that everyone address Dad as ‘Birthday Man’ all day which was very funny, particularly when we all had to sing Happy Birthday again to get it correct. Granny and I had a bit of a set-to over lunch about a really trivial thing which really put my back up but seemed to blow over quickly enough – unusually it was nothing personal about her or I (she generally has a pop at me about my weight whenever possible) which probably helped.

Then Ady, Mum and I went to the nearby park with the children on their bikes for an hour or so. Davies rode really happily and easily all the way there and back aswell as all around the park. Tarly struggled a bit riding there but having cracked it again whilst in the park and rode all the way home again by herself – considerably slower than Davies but he couldn’t have ridden at all a year ago so she’s still doing pretty well. 🙂 Davies rode way ahead of me, waiting at each junction for me to catch up so we could cross together – I spy easier times ahead for walking to places with him a bit more mobile like that. Might even be persuaded to get a bike of my own from freecycle or a carboot sale!

We came home again for chocolate gingerbread and Ady sat doing a jigsaw with Tarly while Davies and I went and played on the piano for a bit (results of which can be seen below). The Tarly came in and he ‘played’ some music for her to do interpretive dancing to and I talked to them both about handstands and headstands and made a vague promise to show them how when I was more suitably attired and less scared that it is about 25 years since I last did any 😆

Tomorrow Malice is back at the vets first thing where I imagine she will be admitted for an eye removal operation and we have a pile of library books I’d quite like to read and get shipped back to the library – also further playroom sorting if the mood takes us.

Karen B 🙂 Have a great day!

A highly productive day today. 🙂

First thing the plan was to sort out the playroom. It started as one of those mammoth tasks that half an hour in you wish you’d never started as the first task was to go through all the dressing up stuff, bag up anything outgrown ready to be cleaned, photographed and stuck on ebay. The rest had to be matched together into outfits, hung on hangers (and finding child size hanger was enough of a problem – most of Tarly’s clothes are now in a heap at the bottom of her wardrobe!) and put onto a clothes rack. We moved both big units to the same side of the room and cleared some of the unused toys. There’s still plenty to do in going through cupboards and clearing more but for now it looks hugely better, far more like a playroom than a rather large cupboard and a room I go into and smile rather than feel slightly depressed in. It used to be Ady and my bedroom many years ago and as the chiller with the wine and beer lives in the understairs cupboard which is accessed from that room I go there often and used to get really fed up with it being such a tip all the time. Fingers crossed it has moved into a new phase as the children are slightly older.

The kids veered between very helpful, not quite so helpful and downright hindering but when I called them in to try on some of the dressing up clothes so I could work out what did and didn’t fit any more Tarly had us all in hysterics when she insisted on putting on a Mother Christmas outfit and then pulled on a scary Halloween mask and said ‘look, I’m the nightmare before Christmas!’

She chose her outfit for Halloween this year (the one she wore the year before last) and then spent ages flouncing about in a bridesmaid dress that Ros gave us ages ago, teaming it with a red flashing nose, knee high white socks and various comedy hats! She does make me laugh loads that girl 😆 Davies sat and put loads of number puzzles back together in the right order – always makes me smile to see that despite very little in the way of formal number recognition work he manages somehow. Tarly really is ready to learn to read though so somehow I need to combat my utter lazy-bugger-ness and set about doing that with her. I can’t pretend to be autonomous any more if I’m actually ignoring my children even when they beg to learn 😉 !

We had lunch and then headed over to Chris and Julie’s for a couple of hours. Davies was in a fairly boisterous mood and despite Julie and I taking the children off for a walk round some nearby fields he remained such for the rest of the day. I’ve made email enquiries about the ‘under sixes’ football team for him come September. I looked into it last year and it runs to school years so despite the fact he actually hits six two weeks into September he would still fall into the under six team for the coming year. It runs on a Saturday morning at the very nearby school for an hour and Ady and he could go along together for an hour. They don’t play matches but they work on basic practice and aside from good physical activity, the chance to make more friends, learn some sporting skills and spend some time doing something just with Ady I think he is ready for a bit more of the whole rough and tumble type side of being a little boy. He has suddenly grown a bit I think too – I was watching him and Tarly run down the road together yesterday and realised that the gap between their heights which had lessened (to the point they are both wearing some clothes age 3-4 at the moment!) as Tarly had a growth spurt fairly recently seems to have opened out again. Which is just as well – I was starting to worry he must be smoking in his room at night and stunting his own growth! 😆 The gap between them generally has widened again as it does every so often and I realised today that we really only tend to play with younger children that him – must remedy that a bit more from the Autumn and the football may well help.

While we were at C & J’s I mentioned that we were looking for a bike for Davies. We have a bike that our friends gave us (along with Davies’ bed and various other bits and pieces) when they emigrated to NZ four years ago – their daughter is four years older than Davies almost to the day and it was hers – albeit a very unisex multi-coloured design. He’s been riding it but despite having the saddle and handlebars up to the max it is really too small for him. Chris did a bit of a ‘ta dah!’ from a caravan which lives in their garden with all sorts of garden toys and pulled out a car boot sale bargain he’d bought for ‘Jack – one day’ for £4 and is perfect for Davies now. 🙂

So we brought it home, the multi-coloured one officially changed ownership to Tarly and we spent a happy half an hour with them gaining confidence in riding up and down the slight slope on the pavement outside our garden.

Tarly utterly mastered steering although her pedalling is a bit wonky – but then so is the pavement! Davies totally got ‘the bug’ for it and was begging for ‘one more go down the hill’ by the time we came in. I’ve tasked Ady with getting him sorted without stabilisers by the end of the summer and told them they can bring their bikes to my parents tomorrow and ride them on the same path I did as a child round my parents’ house. It’s my Dad’s birthday tomorrow so the plan is to have lunch and then go out for a Downs Walk but I think we may be able to persuade everyone to wander down to the nearby park (the same one we have Home Ed meet up at each week) for some cycling practice instead.

And that’s about it really. Davies went to bed listening to Cat in the Hat on tape following it along with the book, borrowed from the libarary – I’d not realised before that the audio books were FREE. I followed Alison’s links and signed up for free Tescos dvd trials and laughed at myself for struggling to think of any films I’d actually like to watch and am on a total high having been told by Ady to go away for a weekend (my first ever since children) sometime soon and do whatever I want with myself. 🙂 🙂 He’s clearly very trusting of the friend he specifically told me to arrange something with however 😉 – not at all sure that trust is justified! And I have an 8 year plan! Which I will no doubt share at some future point when I have it at a point to put down in a post.

Other than that the sun continues to shine, it looks like there is some slight change in Malice’s eye which is good – we’ve done very well with her eye drops and antibiotics tablets, although I have to say it is infinitely easier to medicate a cat when she can’t see you coming :lol:, it’s been a lovely week with lots of friends packed in and I’m really looking forward to the next couple of weeks with lots more of the same. 🙂

First of all Lucy on her birthday in the park with her cake.

Ben, Beth, Davies and Tarly sitting playing with a magnetic drawing toy. Davies was telling the story and Beth was illustrating it. It kept them amused for ages:

Yesterday at Ali’s Ali made bath bombs with the children. We used the little fizzy red creation with added glitter tonight in their bath – thanks Ali 🙂

Afterwards I had a deal with Davies, Scarlett and Freya that I’d read them two Elmer stories and then they had to go and play for the last half an hour so we could chat. I didn’t take my storytelling quite as seriously as Ali took her science however and was mainly telling it for Ali and my own amusement giving the elephants regional accents as we read. I think all five of us ended up slightly hysterical, albeit for slightly different reasons! 😆 Ali says she has pics so you’ll have to add her to your flickr contacts and obsessively keep refreshing the page until she posts them!

I’ve some pics of today too but I’ll post about that and add them in the relevant places.

A mixed bag of a day really. Last night I noticed that Malice’s very bad eye (the one that had been sewn shut as opposed to the one that simply doesn’t work) which had been a bit discharge-y for about 24 hours had stuck shut with gunk. I bathed it open and realised it was very unpleasant underneath as in pretty much full of pus. Sorry if you’re eating, but I imagine very few people do eat while reading my blog nowadays – frankly if you do then you get everything coming! 😆 So I rang the vets and got an appointment for first thing this morning.

As suspected it is very infected and the nurse we saw pretty much expected it would need to be removed. It is actually more for cosmetic (ha!) reasons that it has been left in really as it is totally non-functional and I guess even a non-working eyeball is preferable to no eye-ball. But given she can’t look in a mirror anymore anyway, is unlikely to need to pull tom-cats by looking gorgeous anytime soon and any guests of ours who are likely to be offended by a one eyed cat would probably also be offended by all sorts of other things in our house first. Anyway I left her there for the vet to look at and make a decision. The decision made was to bring her home again for the weekend with antibiotics and eyedrops to be administered (nightmare!!) and take her back on Monday for another look. I think we all expect her to be kept in to have the eye removed on Monday really but it’s worth a try. And of course that’s another £25 on cat drugs today with potentially hundreds more next week if she needs further operations. 🙁

In other news we’ve been over to Ali’s today. Davies particularly has been in a challenging frame of mind the last week or so and continued in that vein (sorry Ali!), Tarly did the classic sibling thing of being all charming – til we got home of course, when she did something wrong which I flew off the handle over and then she sobbed for ten minutes because she thought I didn’t love her anymore 🙄 But it was lovely to have some chatting time with Ali and I managed to spew out all sorts of things which have been on my mind lately so very cheap therapy with nice tea even if I did have to tolerate soya milk in it! 😉

Back from there to collect Malice from the vets and home to find Ady already there. I had reached the end of a long week’s worth of patience with parenthood so left to go to Sainsburys for an hour and came back in time for bedtime.

Tomorrow we start phase one in Operation Playroom. We have a plot to sort out playroom out, get shot of all the stuff which is outgrown, never played with, never likely to be played with, was bought in one of my indulgent ‘I want my children to play with toys like these’ phases when actually my children have no intention of playing with toys like these or qualifies for the category of ‘nasty plastic tat’. The incentive for all of us is a tidier, more crap-free home for me and Ady without constant reminders of where at least part of our debt has come from and for the children the promise that any money we raise from selling anything saleable goes towards a ‘gaming fund’. Yep, you read that right a gaming fund. We have always been a game free household. Mostly it has to be said because we were a game free household before the children arrived and as such having not been parents for six years yet it hadn’t really seemed essential ‘kit’ as yet. But I am starting to become aware that most of Davies’ peers have such stuff in their homes, as is he and whilst I am not about to change my views on ‘adult’ or ‘violent’ stuff as such I can see a value to the film-related type stuff that he has played on in friends houses. Coupled with the fact it is something he would really like to have and at six I think the reasoning of ‘because’ starts to wear a bit thin really.

So I’m in the market for a bit of gaming advice really. My Mum has said she and Frazer will contribute to the Gaming Fund for Davies’ birthday. Davies initially will be wanting Wallace and Gromit games although it would be a rather expensive indulgence to merely have it for that I don’t anticipate us buying new games very regularly or particularly fretting about having the latest titles. So, Playstation, X box or something like a DS? All views, opinions and advice gratefully recieved, aside of course from anyone who thinks for one minute I will play on whatever we get and will therefore be available to trade turnips with or anything like that! 😉

This morning for some odd and unexplained reason the children played with the Bob the Builder toys. Well actually they didn’t really, the BTB toys (as in the plastic versions of Scoop, Muck and Dizzy and Roly too, Lofty and Wendy join the crew etc.) are in the same box as a set I picked up at a car boot sale ages ago containing a boat, car, motorbike, truck etc all made of chunky plastic components held together with nuts, bolts and screws which can be dismantled and rebuilt by use of some battery powered drills and screwdrivers. A good example of how age guidelines on a toy are totally subjective as these are for age 3 but actually most children would be unlikely to be interested until older, whereas we have other toys here which suggest they are for age 8 plus which are firm favourites even with Tarly.

I put away the towering pile of clean laundry and then gathered library books from every corner of the house and assembled a pile to rival the clean washing of them. We found the children’s Reading Mission cards and they both chose a book from the ‘already read it’ pile of books to enter as their first ones. Davies chose Mog’s Bad Thing which we’d read ages ago and Tarly chose the Charlie and Lola book we’ve read at least seven times. Then Tarly was persuaded to have Monkey Puzzle – by The Gruffalo people as a second one we’d read, we did that the other night when I read them stories in the bath while Ady was away and she’d really enjoyed that, joining in with it lots. Then we quickly chose another one from the ‘not read yet’ pile. Davies chose The Ice Child which was quite a powerful one and followed it up with Knock Knock, who’s there which was rather babyish but made us laugh. Which meant we had to do one more for Tarly which we just had time for and she chose The Glass Heart from the pile which had beautiful illustrations and a somewhat familiar fairy tale line to it. We loaded ourselves and two bagfuls of books into the car and waited for Julie to pull up and follow us to Lucy’s.

Once there we unloaded ourselves and children and walked to the local library arriving just in time for storytelling sessions. Davies was pretty much the oldest and it was very predictable with storytelling, some singing of nursery rhymes and some colouring in at the end, so I didn’t feel at all bad about leaving them to it and browsing the adult reads while Julie and Lucy sat with them and enjoyed clapping along to ‘wind the bobbin up’ and the like (never my strongest area of parenting that really!). Then I whispered Davies out to come and talk to the librarian about his three books. He was fairly reticent about talking about them, which always semi amuses and frustrates me given how able he is to talk to people normally, but he managed it and got a couple of sheets of stickers, some colouring in sheets and a bookmark. He was fascinated with the bookmark, particularly when I demonstrated how it worked and he said ‘but you usually just fold the page down don’t you Mummy?’ infront of the librarian 😳

Then I pulled Tarly out, I was surprised at how well she’d snuggled in between Maisie and Rebecca and looked for all the world like a little girl at nursery actually, but she pulled out her shy act for the one to one of the librarian and actually only nodded and whispered to her about the books we’d read. She still got her stickers and colouring sheets though and was suddenly confident enough to chatter to the librarian again at the end. 🙄

We stayed for another half an hour or so, Tarly played on the kiddie computer and me and Davies pulled various books of their brand new books shelf and read a couple there and borrowed a few more to bring home.

Then back to Lucy’s via a couple of shops for various bits and pieces.

We had a lovely afternoon actually. Lucy and Julie have more than enough in common to not actually need me there for them to chat for hours anyway and infact if it were not for my SIL status with Julie and long historic friendship with Luce I would probably be the odd one out there. We have progressed from general child related chit chat to all sorts of girlie chatter and honest revelations so that was all fun 😉 The children had a whale of a time in different combinations too so it was really nice.

We left and came home where the children were inspired to get out the pretend food and lay out loads of odd meal combinations aswell as getting lots of water from the bathroom and pouring ‘tea’ from toy teapots into various receptacles. They also got out the toy till which has kwizinair (lost interest in attempting to spell it right so am henceforth going to go for twee/cutesy/funky misspellings of that word instead) rods, pretend coinage, n ELC set of scales to balance numbers on and a big chunky ELC calculator. I’d been testing my mental maths trying to work out amended balances due for Nic’s Halloween Camp so it was funny that today was the day Davies asked all about calculators! He started by asking me my mobile phone number and punching in as much of it as he could before the screen ran out of space. I showed him how to do a decimal point so he could do the zero first. Then I wrote him a page of sums to do on it and we did them together. He knows about adding together and taking away but we’d not talked about the more technical terms so we covered that and what the +, -, X and = signs meant with some handwritten examples of ‘times’. Then just as I was expecting to have to explain division he asked about the square root button so we talked about that a bit too. I suspect it was all rather too abstract but he was very interested and I guess we’ll come back to it again sometime. I then showed him number bonds up to 10 on paper and on the calculator. I like the idea that he is proficient with using one but I’d hate to compromise on a basic comprehension of numbers, what they look like and how to manipulate them without such an aid.

They then ate their tea while playing with Davies’ leappad which is enjoying a renewed lease of life again and then Ady arrived home so all the Reading Mission stuff was brought out to show Daddy. Ady read Davies a Wallace and Gromit book we’d fallen on with delight at the library and I read Tarly Thumbelina which I’d spotted and picked out for her as bedtime stories.

Davies didn’t go straight to sleep of course. He appeared back downstairs ages afterwards to show us an ‘experiment I’ve done’ with a magnet, a tin box and a screw. He explained it all very clearly and with obvious understanding of magnets and their properties so we let that one ride 😉

Can’t quite believe it is Friday already tomorrow, but rather glad it is just the same. 🙂

Or is anyone else sniggering slightly that as soon as the schools break up and children can start to enjoy all the lovely weather we’ve been having, it stops! 😆

Yep, it’s the school summer holidays and the school children are out in force everywhere! 😉 Eavesdropped with mild amusement to all the chants, goading and teasing I recall from my own playground 20 odd years ago.

So, a catch up then.

Monday Barbara, who we affectionately know as ‘The Babs’ and family were coming to stay. Babs will be reading this so if anyone wants to wave or say hello feel free to use the comments box 😉 😆 Now Babs will be the first to admit she is not known for her being on time. Therefore I felt perfectly safe heading off to Tescos for last minute bits and pieces, stopping in the M&S next door to try on some bras (never such a great activity with a loud and descriptive audience in a changing room with no soundproofing! :lol:) and coming home to get dinner (spag bol in the slow cooker) sorted and on before they arrived. I got a text while trying on the bras (just to add to the loudness eminating from my changing room! :lol:) to say they were about 1.5 hours away so they actually arrived while I was still chopping onions for dinner and had put a box of Rice Crispies upside down back in their home on top of the microwave and had several bowl fulls tip all over my head and everything underneath the microwave.

So the rest of Monday passed in a haze of chatting, drinking tea leading to drinking wine / beer /cider, playing, running around and rather a lot of not sleeping! 😆

Tuesday Lucy had invited us all round to descend on her for the day which is exactly what we did. Her house is perfect for lots of people with a biggish lounge leading through patio doors straight into a safe, visible and enclosed garden. So the 7 – growing to 8 when Lucy’s nephew arrived – children and 4 – growing to 6 when Colin got home and Lucy’s Mum called in – all fitted very nicely and got on with things for a good part of the day. 🙂

We came home for a planned quiet and early night for the children and did everything ‘right’. They had carb heavy dinner, watching a quiet film, followed by baths and bed. And although it felt like something of a ‘process’ they were indeed all asleep by 9pm. We’ll gloss over how long it was before we were all asleep too but suffice to say it wouldn’t do any good to my reputation! 😉

Today Babs and co were amazingly efficient and were away by 9am. Don’t think we’ve ever had guests leave so early or so on time :lol:. I continued the theme and did bed stripping, washing, drying and re-making, cleared all the backlog of washing, tidied except the playroom – which needs a severe going over at some point, utterly unrelated to guests and but long overdue. Oh and I made a cake! Lucy’s mum let slip yesterday that it is Lucy’s birthday today and as we were seeing her for Home Ed group meet in the park I made her a cake and took along candles, matches and a cake slice.

Lovely to have Babs and co here, lovely chatting about HE and otherwise. We realised that our five children stagger very nicely with a 2,3,4,5 and 6 year old currently and it was lovely to see them find extra friendships besides the Davies and Ben combination. Tarly spent some time with Rachael and I watched Beth and Davies find more in common too. 🙂 Thanks for coming 🙂

The rest of today was spent meeting at the park as previously mentioned. Lucy was there with R and R and Julie came along with Jack and Maisie. It’s a really nice combination of 3 adults and 6 children that seems to work really well. So much so that we’re all getting together again tomorrow for story time at the library. 🙂 We were there for 3 hours or so, the children played, we chatted, we couldn’t light the candles for Lucy’s cake cos it was too windy so she had to mime blowing it out for the camera 😆 and as the weather has changed here we all trekked over to our cars for extra clothing. There are several ditches filled with either sand or dirt and the children had played in them gathering sticks and containers to build all sorts of dirt creations so were filthy.

So I made a deal with D&S that they could have a really deep bath with every single bath toy they own right up until teatime (about 45 minutes) if they didn’t splash and didn’t argue. Which let me make the beds back up, cook their tea and spent some time on the internet aswell as having a cup of tea. 🙂

They were both asleep pretty early tonight, unsurprisingly and I’m about to follow them myself…

We’re listening to Terrible Tudors lots still and have learnt the words to the Henry VIII song that Poppy sang at camp. Except Tarly, who has not had occassion to come into contact with the word eighth before insists it is a song about ‘Henry the Wolf’.

Is doing lots of math-y stuff. Yesterday morning while sitting on the worktop she told me how she had made her marmite on toast with Ady. Daddy cooked it and then I spread the butter all by myself and then I spread the marmite all by myself. And then Daddy cutted (sic) it. Hey, we both did two things. That’s sharing!’ Asked how many things that was altogether and aided by some fingers she deduced it was four. 🙂

At Lucy’s house yesterday she asked me for a drink of water, which I got her. She then added a drink of orange juice to her hoard that Lucy had got for her. ‘Look I’ve got two drinks now Mummy. Water and orange juice. The water is first’ and when prompted as to what the orange juice would be ‘It would be, erm second’. Didn’t know she knew that word. Guess she’s not so far away from eighth after all. 😆

Amused us all last night when I served the children pizza and garlic bread for tea. Davies doesn’t like pizza so he got to be ‘in charge’ of the garlic bread. I told them all to have one slice at a time and then go back for another afterwards rather than pile plates with food. Tarly echoed me with ‘Yeah. Have a bit of pizza, then another bit of pizza. When that’s all gone have a slice of garlic bread. When that’s all gone, go to bed!’ 😆

We were at the park today and there were lots of children there. One of them was calling another; ‘Charlie, Charlie’. Tarly stopped what she was doing and said ‘ someone is calling me Mummy’. ‘No’ said I, ‘They are calling ‘Charlie’, you’re called ‘Tarly’. It does sound the same though’.
‘Oh I see’ she said ‘Like Lola sounds a bit like Lulah?’
I agreed.
‘So Charlie and Lola is a bit like me and Lulah then isn’t it. Tarly and Lulah!’ She seemed very pleased with that. 🙂

For anyone who doesn’t obsessively visit all the links in the side bar of my blog go and check this site out.
I don’t often recommend links and given I was a ‘plus size lady’ even before I had children and OK with that I don’t want anyone to think I am justifying obesity or unhealthy living but it is one of the most honest, frank and refreshing things I have read in a long, long while (and believe me I read a lot! ;-)). Ironically only last week I was bemoaning to a couple of friends that the one area of my body which offends my own eye more than any other is the ‘damage’ done by two pregnancies. This site has shown me that far from that being what I should concern myself with it is that very area of which I should be most proud. Now maybe I should think about the rest…

We’re watching Seawatch and I’ve just volunteered as a volunteer or organiser for our local bit of beach for Beachwatch.

So, anyone want to come stay with us and join in 16 and 17 September? 🙂