One word? When seven would do…

Friday I worked yesterday, all day. It was terribly, terribly boring with an average of one person coming into the library per hour. Julie was with the children in the morning and my Mum in the afternoon. This is a good combination for all concerned as Davies gets to play with Jack, Scarlett gets to play with Maisie and Julie has an excellent no-nonsense approach to dealing with lots of children which D&S respond well to. Then for the first time since I started working, nearly four months ago, despite early promises of all sorts of help, my Mum came over in the afternoon. I’ve no idea what she did with them – I now she fed them chocolate eclairs and lemon mousse and I know she did some sort of ‘learning’ with them (smirk!) because she tried to get Davies to recount ‘what you’ve learnt’ when I got home – he refused! But y’know all very family orientated which is nice. 🙂

I was having wobbles all over the place about work, childcare and various other things by the time Ady got home from work, whereupon I did some classic venus-type wailing and girlieness while Ady did some even more classic Mars-type problem solving rather than just inserting wine and chocolate and cuddling. We ironed it all out including some talking to the children about ‘Mummy working’ and ‘other people looking after them’ which reassured me but did render me incapable of driving over to Brighton in the pouring rain to have an adults meet up of MM home ed group. It’s been something of a rollercoaster week one way and another and I reached Friday evening really just needing to sit and drink wine with my husband. So that’s precisely what I did, while watching Little Miss Sunshine which was in so many ways the antidote to all that ailed me / us 🙂

Today was a one day writing course – my birthday present from Ali 🙂 We joined 6 other students at a teacher’s house to do writing exercises, share ideas, do fluffy stuff like exchange notes with compliments about each other at the end and do some serious, proper, grown up writing type stuff. It was fab 🙂 Really enjoyed what was probably the single most selfish, all about me, thing I’ve done in many years. I probably need to digest and ponder more about what I got from it but I know I got a lot from it and I’m determined to take that and do something with it – if nothing else this will probably mean another blog 😉

Meanwhile back at the ranch Ady and the kids were spending a day in the garden. They did some planting up of various vegetables

and adding to the painting on the garage wall

I got home around 630pm just as the children were getting out of the bath. Ady had done several washes including ironing , tidied up the childrens’ bedrooms with them, changed our bed and was about to get dinner on 🙂 I read the children a few bedtime stories each then had a bath and enjoyed said dinner. We watched Dr Who recorded from earlier and I’m currently watching one of those countdown programmes about the most irritating pop songs ever which I clearly can’t go to bed until I find out what number one is :).

TES

I overslept dramatically today – Davies woke me at 9am (in fairness we had had a bad night with Tarly in our bed from about 3am and I’d not gone to bed much before 1am anyway) but I was in the middle of a lovely dream so I told him to let me finish my dream and I’d be down. I didn’t finish my dream and I was semi awake listening to the children playing downstairs but the next thing I knew it was 10am 😳 and we were supposed to be at Lucy’s house at 1030am!

So I dashed downstairs, fed the children and gave them clothes to get dressed into, cursed at Ady for having left a sink full of washing up so did that, dashed back upstairs to get dressed myself and came back down with just enough time to make a cup of tea and a picnic lunch before heading out dead on time. Except the cat had crapped in a door way, which children had then closed the door over without realising, thus spreading said cat crap across the carpet and smearing it on the underside of the door. Urgh! 🙁 So sorted that out retching and gagging as I did (which made me grateful I’d not had time for a cup of tea as I would have been struggling to keep it down), disinfected the whole area and then made the picnic lunch. I think we did well to be out of the house a mere 45 minutes after I got up with that in mind 🙂 And only about 15 minutes late to Lucy’s house. Davies and Scarlett were making up songs about birds in the car on the way to Lucy’s which they carried on with a little bit after we’d picked Lucy, Rebecca and Richard up but it didn’t last much longer. They were funny though, cramming loads of information into them including Davies’ song about ostriches who can’t fly but are still birds and have long necks to reach food high up from the ground 🙂

We got to Julie’s where there was another woman who has a nearly 2yo son who she is wanting to Home Educate but she doesn’t have any contacts anywhere yet and had loads of questions. It was lovely to sit and talk to her and really feel like we were giving her good information, helpful advice and lots of reassurance. I told her a bit about autonomy which she seemed very interested in the idea of and have promised to follow it all up with some links and online support like Early Years etc. She left in a flurry of toddler past his nap time noise and the children continued to play outside in a mostly harmonious way. 🙂 We left around 3pm as Maisie has ballet on a Thursday afternoon and it started to rain and then hail just as we called the children in from the garden.

We dropped Lucy and co home and came home for tea. Ady arrived not long after us and he sat playing games with Davies on his laptop – I think they’d found some Flushed Away game, while Tarly and I looked at educationcity again. She’s done all of the reception level science so I showed her the maths bit. She did the first 3 games but by question 3 of 6 she was realising it was asking her to do the same thing she’d already gotten right twice before so clicked on quit claiming it was too easy and not worth doing 🙂 – actually it demonstrated to me that both her maths skills and her ability to recognise numbers is better than I’d realised. So I set her up on the year one science which proved just as easy for her with questions about waterproof materials, magnetic things, living and non living things and so on. Again I found the whole making it into a story thing utterly aside from what it was actually asking you to be tedious and annoying and given both of them only seem interested in the science questions which we’ll have done both their actual ‘school year’ and the year above for them both by the time the free trial ends I guess it won’t be something we’ll be paying for :). Glad I looked at it again though, if only to reassure me we’re not missing anything by not having it. I’ve got a couple of question and answer general knowledge books on order from work which I think they’l both enjoy far more being straightforward without all the fannying about with crap animations just to satisfy their testing’ needs ;).

Tonight we’ve watched World Trade Center which I didn’t particularly want to watch but Ady did. Don’t quite know what to say about it really but I bet it shapes my dreams tonight. And now, as I’m off to work all day tomorrow I really should go to bed!

Worked this morning, which all seems rather a blur and a long time ago now. So nice to have a job where having a week off doesn’t mean you walk back into all the things you would have done if you’d been there for that week backed up waiting for you to wade through :). But also a list of my hours for the next couple of weeks over Easter which pose me childcare issues again – will start doing my rounds of asking for help again on that one tomorrow 🙄 I’ve just about got my normal working hours covered now but the three days closing over Easter means we need to make hours up elsewhere and there is no real flexibility on when we do that unfortunately – I’m sure I could be awkward but I’d really rather save that for when it’s a dire emergency.

I got home to find children playing with walkie talkies with delight and doing a variety of other activities including drawing (Tarly) and geomagging (Davies). We had vague ideas of going to a park or the beach to make the most of the sunshine but Richard and Rebecca both fell asleep (Birthdays are tiring work 🙂 ), Scarlett got really into her drawing and Lucy and I got chatting (with helpful asides from Davies on topics such as Education City 🙂 ) and I for one couldn’t be bothered to move actually 🙂 😳

We took Lucy and co home and got back to find Ady hanging about in the garden having gone out without any keys. The children had tea and then Davies and I went to Badgers. I popped to the supermarket for a few bits and came back to sit in the car and read my book (for book group this month we are all reading as many of the nominated long list orange prize books as possible ready for an event coinciding with the winner being announced during the local festival which the library plays an active role in – my first one to read is Poppy Shakespeare which I’m enjoying so far). About 20 minutes before the end of Badgers they all came piling out to play on the grass outside the building – there was about 15 children all playing ‘stuck in the mud’ and I actually out my book down to sit and watch them, laughing out loud at their antics. It sounds crazy to say I was proud of Davies and actually that’s probably the wrong word but I just felt so overjoyed to see him so much part of the group, laughing with the sheer delight of playing a game, being popular and really just enjoying being a child. I never was that child, never was part of a group, simply accepted for who I was and enjoying just being me. I never got any delight from running around or playing physical games and certainly never did anything like Badgers out of school anyway. It is so hard to equate Davies as he is in that group, and indeed as he is when most of the people who read this blog meet him with both my own experience of childhood and with the clingy, shy, unsure of himself and desperate not to be by my side four year old Davies once was. I know I harp on about this but having had such a lovely couple of days watching Davies just enjoying his life so much really reinforces the choices I have made for him and the pace we have taken things too.

He came out with a new baseball cap which he’s been wanting a while to go with his Badger uniform, two badges and certificates (first aid and a bronze badgers award) and a rabbit he’d made and decorated filled with chocolate eggs. Loving the crafty gifts that Beavers and Badgers is supplying – he came home with a sealed Easter card from Beavers on Monday too :).

I’m hoping the lovely weather is going to hold for at least one more day as we’re off to Julie’s tomorrow planning a nice day in her garden, oh and finally in hatchwatch news I’m pretty sure I saw movement inside at least two of the eggs when I candled them tonight – will take photos / video tomorrow when I do them.

I read Gill’s recent post on the difference between autonomy and educational neglect with both interest and a small degree of unrest. I do hold my hands up in the air to being really quite lazy and certainly one of the big reasons why autonomy suits us quite so well is that I would probably start each school term filled with the joys of homeschooling, with neatly sharpened pencils, coloured in timetables and vast quantities of new stationery. This would run smoothly for approximately a week and a half before I lost interest and having removed educational responsibility from my children I would leave us all in the lurch! But I did rather gulp guiltily when Gill cited an adult available at all times to facilitate education at child’s will or a very similar sentence as of course that doesn’t always happen here a great deal more than the colour coded paperclips and brimming shelves of workbooks does. Mostly of course because we are not a family who spend a great deal of time just ‘being’, we are more of the ‘doing’ variety which means in the same was as we wouldn’t have time for normals or scheduled work each morning we also don’t have time to answer all questions as they arise either. So I do, from time to time, for very brief moments wonder whether it mightn’t just be all a bit easier to get some pre-packaged curriculum, or even write my own (and yeah, I do reckon I could lay on a key stage one years worth of stuff based on Mr Blobby if pushed 😉 ) and roll it out to them for an hour or two a day and then relax back into doing not a lot with them. Except of course it does indeed go against everything I (currently 😉 ) believe in so I don’t. I wait and know, in more confident moments, that actually when they decide they ‘want educating’ along they will come with their questions and their demands and their needs. I trust them to ask, me to listen and all of us together with the process to make it happen as we go along. And of course it does :).

This morning while I was putting clean clothes away in Davies’ room he came to chatter to me and tidy his bedroom up a bit at the same time. He has a ‘collection’ of empty loo rolls which he spirits away before the slovenly housekeeper (that’d be me then 🙂 ) chucks them in the recycling. He appeared to be just bunging them in the cardboard box I’d told him to put them all in, but he suddenly stopped with the last one in his hand and said ‘when I get one more I’ll be able to count in twos all the way up then’ I looked at him and he said by way of explanation ‘I’ve got eleven now, when I have twelve I’ll be able to count in twos all the way up’. He’d not actually counted in twos up to ten as when I asked him he got to six confidently and then faltered, but he had put them in in twos so he knew what he was on about. 🙂 He then talked to me about the Mr Men books he was putting back on his bookcase, telling me that (Ros’s) Buzz has the whole collection. I explained that Buzz was starting to read so Davies started talking about reading and I explained that it will really only come with practise. It is up to him but if he wanted to get quicker then I would happily sit with him every day looking at books and practising reading, or get him whatever books he wanted to start with from the library. He pulled some red nose reader books off the shelf and told me that they were good for starting to read and that he often looks at them in bed (which I already knew as I frequently remove them from down the side of his bed and put them back on the bookshelf :lol:) so he brought several of those downstairs and we sat and looked at one together. He got well over half way through it and although I wouldn’t say he was reading as such, and don’t for one minute think he will want to do that every day it did reassure both of us that he can indeed do it when he wants / needs to. Very spookily I was telling him about remembering when I learnt to read and explaining about the Peter and Jane books we used at school. I was sounding out ‘Peter and Jane play with the ball’ for him to demonstrate and Ady arrived home not 20 minutes later having stopped at a charity shop and picked up among other things a Peter and Jane book with mention of that very ball!! 🙂

Scarlett was doing more of her princess annuals / activity books, doing some very tidy colouring in and various bits of writing and pretend writing including starting to write her name in all sorts of places (all allowed places I hasten to add). I don’t recall where the request had come from but Davies had asked to make cakes so I’d told him he could make some all by himself with a tiny bit of help. We got out the ingredients and the scales and I told him how to make sponge cakes by weighing the eggs and then equally that weight with butter, sugar and flour. He weighed two eggs at 5oz so measured out 5oz each of butter and sugar and creamed them (I helped a tiny bit with that), he cracked open and added two eggs (no help at all for that one), then weighed out, sifted and mixed 5ox of flour – again a bit of help with the final stirring. Then he put out 12 paper cake cases and split the mixture between them and I put them in the oven. He and Tarly licked the spoons :). They had lunch while the cakes cooked and I got Davies to keep checking them to see if they were done. He took them out of the oven too. Later on this afternoon I asked him if he remembered how to make cakes and he reeled off the recipe and the terms ‘creamed’ and ‘fizzed’ (what he was calling sieving!). I made buttercream icing and he and Tarly decorated them later this afternoon.

After lunch Ady went off to college and while I was hanging the washing out Davies and Scarlett came out dressed as Mike and Sully (thanks Jan 🙂 ) which made me laugh lots. They looked very cute 🙂

When I came in and looked at the clock to find it was only just gone 1pm and it had been so lovely and sunny outside I suggested that we go to the beach instead of staying home indoors. They didn’t take much persuading so we grabbed a couple of carrier bags for shells and other finds, put on wellies and off we went. We’d only been there 15 minutes or so when Ady rang to say his college course wasn’t running today as it was a study day for revision at home, so I told him where to find us and 20 minutes later he was there with us on the beach. The children got wet, scrambled over rocks, found shells and stones, commented on all the differences between Lancing and Hunstanton beaches, threw stones in the sea and made all sorts of sand creations from pictures and writing in the sand to sandcastles with no buckets or spades. Loads of pics on flickr, I might pop some into this post tomorrow, but it was just a lovely, lovely afternoon. 🙂

I’d promised to consider purchasing ice creams so in the end Ady came home via the supermarket and got ice creams while I took D&S home and ran them a lovely warm bath to wash all the sand off. They had their ice creams then a long bath while I mixed up some butter icing for the cakes. They then decorated them, had their tea and ate cakes and fruit for pudding.

Then my parents arrived for dinner. They had a happy hour or so with them while I got dinner on then the children went to bed, we candled eggs, had dinner and a fairly pleasant evening. Tomorrow I’m back to work in the morning so I really shouldn’t still be sitting here at nearly 1am. So I will be off.

Davies and Scarlett were rediscovering the fun of having each other to play with all the time today. Last week they were rarely spotted in each others’ company and at the weekend they were still shaking down back into not having 12 additional children around them at all times, but today they were back to being bestest friends again.

I laid in bed snoozing while listening to them playing downstairs and agreeing to the occassional request from a visiting child to eat something else out of their party bags from Leo’s party yesterday. When I did come downstairs they were playing with wooden blocks and geomags and being totally lovely to each other. 🙂 I made them some ‘proper’ breakfast which they ate while watching Class TV. It’s funny how sometimes Class TV totally entrances them and other times they don’t seem to register it at all, they both seem very receptive to all sorts of learning-y type stuff at the moment with Scarlett getting really into writing and asking outlandish maths questions like reeling off a load of numbers and then asking what they all are added together. She has no concept of the amounts she is asking about but just delights in seeing me pulling faces trying to work them out and then supplying her with another, even bigger number as the answer. 🙂 Davies is equally experimental with numbers suddenly telling me what various little sums are he’s tasked himself with working out. It’s funny to watch them make a sudden leap in something and start to demand things to do to test themselves. They’d also brought down a load of early reader books from Davies’ bedroom that they’d been looking at too.

Due to the Class TV watching we were slightly later than planned getting round to Lucy’s (although I imagine we were still earlier than she was genuinely expecting us to be with our notoriously bad timekeeping :oops:). Lucy’s SIL and 2 nephews were also there celebrating Richard and Rebecca’s birthdays and the six children all very quickly found things to do, mostly either cooperating or working around each other. One of the new presents given to Richard was a domino truck thing very similar to the domino train that we had a couple of years ago for Christmas so Davies and Scarlett were quite happy to mess about with different pieces of that. And of course shiny new toys are shiny new toys regardless of the fact they were for a two year old so if I secretly wanted to get down on the floor and have a good old look at the new bits of plastic it was no wonder that Davies did too :). I sat and chatted to Lucy’s SIL, we had lunch, the children all disappeared into the garden to make the absolute most of the gorgeous weather and we ended up staying til gone 4pm in the end with Tarly protesting at leaving even then.

We got home and I made the children’s tea and brought in line fulls of clean dry washing. They ate their tea, having tidied up the blocks and geomags with no fuss at all :shock:, then Davies got changed for Beavers and we all walked round there. So lovely to see him call ‘bye then’ at the door and dash in to be part of it all without a backwards glance :). Tarly and I walked home looking at all sorts of plants and insects and then rather than waste the hour without Davies we snuggled up on the sofa and I put Education City back on for her and she worked her way through all the science ones for reception. Such a wide variety of things on there with plenty of answers she gave considered wrong but I would argue over – eg there was a transport one which asked questions like ‘which transport is used to move lots of people between cities’ – Scarlett chose ‘bus’ which is not altogether incorrect but they insisted the answer was ‘train’ when actually it could also have been plane. Another was asking which transport do people use to bring home their shopping with the answer being ‘car’ – again I would have said bicycle, bus, train and car were all correct actually. Then it made me laugh by asking ‘which transport is used to travel to a crime scene?’ – answer is police car but she needed both words in ‘crime scene’ explaining – as I would imagine would most four year olds actually? Then there were others which were just so easy she was getting bored and others still which I’d have not realised she’d know but she breezed through (noteably one about which animals are vegetarian or carnivore – it had animal noises as clues which she didn’t even register, merrily clicking on the right answers and saying ‘cows are vegetarian but cats aren’t’ 😆 It’s funny how her ‘education’ is so much a result of what Davies is doing / saying / learning rather than the ‘early years’ type stuff I seemed to cover as a matter of course with Davies without even thinking about it. The books I read him, the tv shows we watched all led Davies and I to do things in a fairly routine sort of way whereas Scarlett knows loads of things she has learnt alongside her older brother but has the odd gap here and there of things I sat and did with him when he was two but never did with her because we were doing four year old stuff with Davies by then. It’s all swings and roundabouts of course and I don’t think for one minute she’d have gotten to ten without knowing what a crime scene was but it’s offering me a very interesting glimpse into the sorts of things children might learn at school / nursery.

Ady went to collect Davies from Beavers which I think Davies was utterly delighted about. The children went to bed, Davies taking Ady’s laptop so he could do some Education City in bed (Science again, need to sign up for the trial to the next level for him, he’s practically worked his way through it and it seems rather easy for him although I’ve no idea whether he’d consider the literacy and numeracy bits, will ask him tomorrow). Then I popped out to Sainsburys for various bits and pieces including a load of fruit for the kids, who goody bag contents this morning aside are on a more healthy eating kick. They neither are into vegetables which I would be a hypocrite to say much about really but we talked yesterday about the different requirements for a healthy diet and they both love fruit anyway so we’re going to start aiming for their five a day in fruit if not veg.

Both children were still awake when I got home and actually Davies didn’t go to sleep until gone 10pm but the hour difference means that’s all but normal for him anyway – need to work even harder on filling him up with fresh air and wearing him out tomorrow 🙂 And finally in hatchwatch news we went through the eggs candling again tonight and identified 3 which we thought were bad – two were indeed empty but for yolks but one sported evidence of a baby chick in very early development. No idea whether if left alone it would have continued to develop or whether we were right in thinking it had the markings of a bad egg and was one that had already stopped forming but we’ve decided to continue candling daily but only remove eggs we are 100% convinced are not doing anything – so we have 14 eggs left and theoretically they should start hatching this weekend :).

I always consider myself to be a pretty sociable person. I enjoy the company of others and spending time with other people. I love to talk, I love to listen. But I also enjoy my own company, I am equally happy with silence than I am with chatter. Perhaps if I had the chance I might experience loneliness but I don’t ever really get the opportunity. I live in a fairly busy house, with pretty noisy people, we lead an active and sometimes bordering on the frantic life. I’m utterly confident it is the contrast I enjoy but very often my favourite part of the day is the hour or so after everyone else has gone to bed when I turn the tv off and sit in peace and quiet, sometimes I look at blogs, sometimes I look at flickr, sometimes I go back and read my own words from days, weeks, months and years gone by. Equally I love my bath time – I sit, again in silence with my book, or my thoughts and just enjoy not being needed for anything.

I always find that by day 3 or so of living with lots of other people at camps that I am craving a bit of time with noone else around, Davies seems to get similar feelings on camps and is often really flagging by the end of the week (I tend to recover slightly quicker by taking myself off with a book for an hour – he is getting better at recognising and dealing with it and twice last week he happily went off to our room to watch a film and lie on the bed). I didn’t feel it so much last week but on Saturday while we were out shopping I realised how much Ady and the kids were annoying me just by talking to me. I think Ady realised and that was part of the reason he took both the kids back to the car when the meter was running out but of course I bumped into friends so my dazed wandering round Woolworths was interupted.

The clocks going forward invariably cocks up your body clock for a good week or more so today although the kids didn’t wake until 730am old time / 830am new time it still felt all at odds and although now at 11pm it really does feel like 11pm it’s been an odd day with the usual vague idea of what time it is even without checking a clock totally gone to pot. As a result I’m not really sure where the morning went. Persuading the children to get dressed seemed to take forever, which was very wearing. Ady suddenly realised he had 2 almost bald tyres so shot off to get them replaced before his car gets MOT’d tomorrow (fortunately not costing us any money but still a hassle) and the children did some drawing. Scarlett has various annuals she’s been given over the years and is suddenly really into doing all the activities in them. Some she does alone, some need assistance or guidance and some she just makes up her own ideas on, so she’s been doing lots of colouring, dot to dot and copying bits. Davies and I made a birthday card and some wrapping paper for Leo with a dragon card which Davies wrote really nicely on and in with Tarly coming to sign her name. She has learnt to write without any real guidance so some of her letters are quite queerly formed when you actually watch her write – her ‘C’ for example is a straight line with a top and a bottom curve drawn on seperately. So I showed her how I would form each letter and although you wouldn’t really notice any difference in her finished name it appeared to be an easier task for her. Davies then remembered how to write ‘Leo’ by himself so that was good 🙂 but he refused to write on the envelope anyway. As we didn’t have any wrapping paper – and I am always so impressed with Em’s idea of recycling children’s drawings as wrapping paper I got Davies to draw a picture instead for us to use. He says that Leo likes ‘dragons, Star Wars and Doctor Who’ so set about drawing a scene with various characters from those shows – amusing as he’s never actually seen Dr Who and only a brief bit of Star Wars. 😆 but he did a good job.

Mildly entertained by the latest blogring craze of Education City (again! 😉 ) I was trying to recall exactly what it had been that I’d not really liked about it when we’d done a succession of free trials a year or two ago so I signed back up for a free trial for reception, year one and year two to have a nose around. I decided to test run it on a real child so called Davies over to play on a year two Science bit and then gave Tarly a go too. Despite the few bits we did being quite ridiculously easy (they both scored 100% with relative ease on all of the bits they did) they both seemed to enjoy it. I do recall hating the idea that it made it fun to get things wrong by setting some comedy sound effect or happening off which Davies used to try and do rather than answer the question (although I guess you need to know the right answer in order to deliberately click on the wrong one) but they seemed to have forgotten that this time. I think my other big issue with it is that it is basically testing, which I have general issues with, and testing to a level according to age which totally puts my back up, but Davies recently got very into watching Junior Mastermind and I have two ‘questions and answers’ books on order from work to recreate it for him at home and increase his general knowledge so I guess in the spirit of autonomy if a child is after being tested then testing is what I should offer! 🙂 Neither of them had any inclination to do other topics than science and IIRC it was specifically the literacy bits which I didn’t like much last time, along with the repetitiveness of some bits (Tarly was doing a bit where the character is on a desert island and you have to shelf or bin stuff according to whether it requires electricity to work and is therefore of use or not on the island. It really didn’t need 9 or however many examples it went through to hammer this home, she’d gotten the hang of it after 3 and the whole desert island thing seemed rather unnecessary – the year two stuff seemed a bit more sensible though). No idea whether we’ll revisit it, we have so many other computer resources and free online places to go we’d never bother subscribing but we might try and work through the science bits over the next 10 days if the kids show any more interest in doing so, particularly as we can hook them both up at the same time on different laptops.

Ady returned home and we headed off to Leo’s party. The traffic on the way to Brighton can be so changable that we arrived about 20 minutes early and were spotted by Pearl sitting in the car so invited in where we tried to stay out of the way of last minute party preparations. 🙂 It was held where we have MM Home Ed group which was great because D&S are both familiar with the hall and enjoyed showing Ady around. It was a circus skills workshop party with trickswop teaching us how to juggle, tightrope walk, diablo, spin plates, flower stick and loads more. Davies was really into it and despite being an amateur at even basic throwing and catching had a good go with the juggling balls (and having spied Dani being most impressive with her juggling I’m determined to practice that now 🙂 ), the plate spinning and the diablos. He also did some tightrope walking at the end. Pics are on flickr, I’ve family & friended them as they show glimpses of other people’s children (Dani / Allie, not sure if you have a flickr account – if so let me know so I can add you as a friend and you can view them 🙂 ).

Scarlett was being very four, at the end of a very busy week, with Ady around. So she was not at her best and while not particularly badly behaved or disruptive to others she did prevent me & Ady from joining in as much as we’d have liked and indeed having more of a go at some of the stuff ourselves. She did rally towards the end and sat playing with the lego for ages – mostly once I’d persuaded Ady to just leave her alone to get on with something and to go off and do what he wanted instead of watching over her. The trickswop guy mentioned their intention to set up some circus skills workshops for children aged 6 plus to which Davies’ eyes lit up and he insisted I go and put our name down for more details. Actually this is the most enthusiastic I’ve seen him about something like that and as potentially it could be a fairly reasonable cost, not to mention something I’d like to go along to aswell and a pretty cool set of skills to learn I hope something more comes of it 🙂 . So Happy Birthday Leo, thanks for having us along, it was a pretty cool party :).

We came home and having scoffed party food most of the afternoon the kids were not too fussed about anything much for tea so we watched TV before packing them off to bed where neither of them fell asleep until about 9pm, I cooked a very late dinner and am enjoying my hour or so of peace before heading to bed myself.

A fitting birthday tribute I feel 🙂

It’s been bloody freezing here today, I did hang some of the holiday washing out to dry but I suspect it’s more frozen solid than dried. We had to get several birthday presents today for various small people having birthdays this last week or so so we went into town. We found some suitable gifts in Woolworths but wandered around a bit more as we’d got two hours on the parking ticket, so spent some time in Hawkins looking at all the cool stuff and then ages in the Oxfam bookshop where we got a whole pile of books for seven quid including a couple of Ladybird books (one on camping and one on scouting which made us giggle), a copy of politically correct fairy tales and some craft books. Davies got a Dr Seuss we didn’t already have in our collection and Tarly got an old Twinkle album (1983, I’m pretty sure I had the same one actually 🙂 ) and a copy of the Oxford dictionary of cockney rhyming slang for my Dad’s next gift (Fathers Day probably) as rhyming slang has been a source of amusement in my family since I was tiny. We also went to another charity shop and got a book on The Aristocats for Tarly that she’d wanted in Oxfam but I’d refused to pay a quid for for just 20pence and a bargain big box of klikko stuff for £2.50 – hurrah 🙂 By which time we’d run out of time on the meter so Ady took the kids back to the car while I returned to Woollies to get all the stuff we’d seen first. I seemed to wander round for ages trying to track down the last gift on my list and while walking round in a daze suddenly found someone stood infront of me blocking my way with a ‘wakey wakey’ look about them! It was our friend Matt who’s pregnant wife Clare was having a sit down nearby while their son was looking at the toys so I stood and chatted to them for a while, before remembering that Ady was sitting in the car with the children so I hurried back to them all.

We came home for lunch and then decided to head back out again to a localish garden centre with a big camping shop onsite. We’ve been looking at tents on ebay but wanted to look at a few in the canvas to check exactly what our requirements are. We’re really looking forward to camping again with the children already counting down the days to seeing their mates and sleeping in a tent again, although being outside for even a short time today was not condusive to longing for the outdoorsy life :lol:. We stopped for petrol on the way home and Ady left the car door open, prompting me to tell him to ‘shut the bloody door’. Now D&S, particularly D have sussed that ‘bloody’ is a ‘naughty’ word so always tell me off for saying it (little do they know that many of the words I say are naughty ;)) so it had us all in fits when Tarly said ‘yeah, shut the bloody door!’ which of course prompted her to use the word ‘bloody’ as a prefix to everything she could think of for the next ten minutes. Of course we shouldn’t encourage her but it was, erm, bloody funny! 😆

We came home for tea for the kids and then they watched Mr Bean on a sky channel before bed (it was the maths test clip, for anyone who’s ever watched any Mr Bean which delighted the kids as one of his lucky mascots was a bendy Pink Panther, exactly the same as the one I’d been describing that I had as a child to the kids the other week when we were singing the Pink Panther song). Davies is still on NicCamps time and didn’t go to sleep until about 930pm, so the clocks going forward will totally mess him up I suspect 🙄 – surely he will need to catch up on some of that missed sleep soon?

Tonight we’ve candled the eggs – we’re on day 13 of 21 but even the pictures on the internet don’t really assist with knowing what we’re looking for although it seems to be that we should start to actually see chicks moving inside the eggs in the next couple of days which should be easier to identify. One of the eggs had a real smell to it and was very streaky so we bit the bullet and decided it was a bad one and took it out of the incubator. Indeed it was a bad one – I made Ady crack it open to check we hadn’t called time on some nearly born chick and it was indeed just a very rotten, very stinky, non fertile egg (which he promptly spilt some of on the carpet :roll:) so we’re down to 17 now with none of them looking certain by any means. Will start to candle them daily now and hope for some movement soon.

So there you are, happy to be home and still rather tired. Tomorrow we’re off to a birthday party in the afternoon (well the kids are, we’re going to watch 🙂 ) and will probably be spending time mostly trying to work out what the time is, what the *real* time is and whether we should be more or less tired considering.

Monday 30th April 2007.

Adults will be £15, children will be £5 but I need someone with proof of their Home Educating status to contact me so we can send proof to Legoland (EO membership card or similar is fine, my membership lapsed last year). If you can give me some idea of numbers I can contact them and sort out how we go about booking, whether we need to pay in advance and think about booking one of their educational workshops too perhaps.

So, any takers?

We’re back from NicCamps Hunstanton 2007 🙂

Had a lovely week, the hostel was a nice one. It had loads of living space – a proper lounge with comfy chairs, tv and video, a big enough to seat us all at once dining room / conservatory – rather hysterically decorated with displays of lentils, beans and pulses 😆 and even more hysterically an ‘Education Room’, decked out initially with school room style tables and chairs (which Ady and I rearranged before anyone else arrived), educational posters all over the walls and lego, puzzles and board games. The kitchen was easily the worst / smallest YHA one I’ve come across so far though with just one normal sized, not very efficient at cooking even jacket potatoes oven, 12 hob rings (which rather dictated our menu choices) and bugger all worktop space. It did have enough fridge space for a non-meat fridge, freezer space for garlic bread and actually there was another secret fridge in the foyer which would have become the beer and wine fridge if I could have worked out where to turn it on. Oh and we had a hot water on tap boiler machine too which was ace for making copious quantities of tea. 🙂

Bedrooms were fine, most had sinks, ours had sufficient floor space for the kids to take the bottom of each bunk and Ady to fashion a double bed on the floor for us with the top bunk mattresses – so much more convenient when staggering back to one’s room at 3am to just fall asleep on the floor and warm your cold feet on your husband than to have to negotiate climbing into a bunk bed on the other side of the room to him I find. 😆 We had a garden, which the kids made full use of and we were about two minute walk from the beach, and possibly more importantly a five minute stroll from the open til 10pm Tescos (which we did indeed make full use of at 9.30pm on the last night when we realised in true NicCamps fashion we had practically drunk the place dry :lol:).

There was some dissent in the ranks with NicCampers bringing contraband resources for swapping and sharing in the style of Latin books, Maths manuals and the like but I managed to resort to my tried and tested method of ignoring anything potentially mentally damaging to myself by singing Rick Astley songs in my head (and often out loud) to drown out such evils. (For the whole of senior school when they recited the Lords Prayer in assembly each morning to prevent myself from joining in with the words I would sing ‘Never gonna give you up’ to myself instead). Ady was not so lucky and did get caught looking at latin books and even ate bloody cauliflower curry one night but redeemed himself in many other ways, at least one of which was buying a Mr Blobby video and showing it to all the children at least three times a day – bring resources to NicCamps and we will ensure your kids drive you insane with shouting ‘Blobby, Blobby, Blobby!’ at you from the back of the car all the way home again 😆 And if the threatened hooking up laptops and having kids doing Education City starts to happen at the next NicCamps then we will go through with teaching all your offspring ‘I know a song that’ll get on your nerves!’ 😆 😆 😆

Marcus, Ben and Davies ‘enjoyed’ the, erm, attention that being the only 3 boys in an otherwise rather girl heavy camp brought (Jasper was there too of course, but he escaped the bulk of it) by being hand delivered love notes from various of the girls throughout the week, which I know Davies found initially entertaining and maybe slightly flattering but perhaps rather tiring by the end of the week. He did at one point come and ask me to escort him to the toilet as he was struggling to get into there without female accompanyment – when we unlocked the door there was a queue of 3 girls waiting outside :lol:. Being without the older girls changed the dynamic quite a lot and it was odd to see Catie, Fran and Beth as the ‘bigger girls’ this time having first met them as all not much more than toddlers. Scarlett mostly enjoyed the week but as always when Ady is around wasn’t always quite as self sufficient as I know she is capable of being. She was very cute on the Thursday with Rachael though who she appears to have recruited as her own apprentice 😉

It was nice to spend time with a slightly different mixing of friends than normal although I hope noone present will be offended by my confession of missing absent friends dreadfully, particularly the two who should have been there and had to drop out at the last minute :(. When talking to Davies about friends we wished were there too he also mentioned Kit so there were definite gaps in our numbers. I think we’re all looking forward to being a bigger group at Kessingland.

We had a midweek trip to the (very) local Sealife centre which Kath, Mark and Luke came up and joined us for, which was lovely :). Babs, Beth, Rachel, Tarly and I had walked over there the previous day to properly book and make arrangements and been given a complimentary ticket to wander round there and then so we particularly enjoyed going and revisiting it the next day with Tarly very pleased to be a minor expert in what was coming up next. We had a talk and a ‘touchpool’ session with crabs, hermit crabs and starfish with the children (and adults) getting the chance to hold the creatures and ask questions, we also watched feeding time for the penguins. It’s a fairly small and unimpressive centre compared to some I have visited but upon learning that it costs about £3000 a year just to feed the penguins and realising that it acts as more of a sanctuary than a tourist attraction I felt the vastly discounted rates we got were more than value for money and that we were actually assisting in the running of the place rather than just going to see what we could get out of it (Comic Relief sentimentality still affecting me a week on, obviously 😉 ).

Ady, Davies, Scarlett and I had a couple of trips wandering round Hunstanton, perusing the local charity shops and being amused at the odd combinations of shops you get in an almost entirely seasonal town like Hunstanton. On Tuesday Babs, the girls and I had been caught in a really viscious hail storm coming back from the Sea Life centre and indeed on Wednesday when we walked over there it was bitterly cold but on Thursday morning the weather was far less blustery, more calm and mild and the four of us had a lovely long walk along the beach just as the tide was going out. We found jellyfish, starfish and lots of other shellfish and enjoyed poking around in the rock pools and looking at the different colours of pebbles to the beach here at home. I always feel really ashamed of how much people appreciate being so close to the beach and making the most of it when I know we have a really quite nice beach just a ten minute walk from us here so as ever have vowed to spend more time at the beach in future at home. We’d started our week with chips for lunch when we arrived on Monday getting to Hunstanton an hour earlier than planned so we ended it in the same way with chips for lunch again to warm us up after our beach walk on Thursday.

We had some very pleasant evenings, with the viewing of Kirsty and James’ wedding on video, a showing of James Bond, much drunken silliness and vast topics of conversation over wine, beers and home baking. Babs didn’t once take her trousers off but I think it’s safe to say we created a few new in jokes and enjoyed those few hours after (most) children had gone to bed spending time with people who’s lives we catch up on daily in blogland but always manage to learn something new about in real life company.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, (or should than be women?) is what NicCamps is all about 🙂

D woke me before 7am whispering ‘Mummy, it’s your day!’ I agreed that indeed it was and fell asleep again. Ady woke me at 8am with a cup of tea for which I issued grateful thanks and went back to sleep. They all appeared at 9am so I got up 🙂 My Dad arrived shortly afterwards for a lesson on maintaining Hatchwatch in our absence next week.

Both children had made me Mothers Day cards – complete with explained pictures and lovely writing inside 🙂
Davies’

Scarlett’s

I got a box of Thorntons and a flower made by D at Badgers last week

Dad gave me the money for Davies’ swimming lessons due to start weekly after Easter (having been on the waiting list there for the best part of 2 years his name has finally reached the top – hurrah! 🙂 ) and then went home. I made some cards for my Mum and Granny with the children – Davies drew my Granny and Scarlett drew my Mum – I love kid’s interpretations of people, their pictures are just the best caricatures picking out one or two features on someone, I think in every picture my kids draw of me they focus heavily on my orange hair and always dress me in a green top – sort of like a different coloured, female version of Bod :lol:.

We called in to the swimming pool to pay for Davies’ lessons and then went to my parents house. My Mum was in full on hostess mode and insisted I did nothing (my Dad did jest that I probably wouldn’t struggle too much in achieving that :lol:) so I sat on the sofa chatting to my Dad while Ady and Mum cooked, Davies and Scarlett sat in the kitchen drawing and playing shops with my Granny and Frazer. It was great. 🙂 Dad and I spent some time on the internet looking up his relatives on the 1851 and 1901 census online service which was interesting, and checking his premium bonds online too. Dad is perpetually amazed by the internet and how you can just do anything on it.

Mum cooked a really lovely meal and the kids not only ate everything on their plates they ate with wonderful table manners, plenty of compliments for the food and were just so well behaved :). After eating Davies spent some time playing on the nickjr website with various adults watching over his shoulder, Tarly wandered between adults spending some time sitting with me playing online jigsaw puzzles and the rest of us drank tea and enjoyed family in-jokes. It was a lovely day. 🙂

We left there just after 6pm as the children were starting to get tired and I didn’t want the loveliness to be spoilt by an unpleasant last half hour. The kids had a bath (showers only for the rest of the week, but I think that youth hostel showers are ok 😉 ), I packed our bags ready to go in the morning and wrote down routes etc. Kids were asleep pretty early and I think we’re all set for the off tomorrrow morning. 🙂

all you mothers 🙂

It was a lovely day today, can’t quite equate nearly T shirt weather with snow warnings for 48 hours time somehow. We drove along the coast and if time had been in greater supply would have spent some time there today it was that lovely.

I worked all day yesterday. It was very quiet and pretty boring. Ady was at home with D&S so I came home for lunch which I don’t usually do. They had a nice day though, although I’m not actually sure what they did. So coupled with the fact I didn’t actually have a lot to say and the fact that I spent the entire evening weeping my way through the films on Comic Relief I didn’t get here to blog last night. Davies sat up and watched the first hour or so of Comic Relief. We’ve talked a bit before about those less fortunate than us and various issues as tackled last night such as domestic abuse, starvation and famine, third world issues such as disease from sanitation and lack of medicine, child carers and all of the other things that had me sitting with my hand over my mouth and tears streaming down my cheeks for about four hours last night. Who knows how much of it sank in, who knows whether it is right or wrong for a six year old to be excused knowing about how other six year olds around the world suffer in favour of having their own priviledged childhood. I think the overwhelming thing that he and I both got from it is just how bloody lucky we are. And maybe that’s the most important message of all – count your blessings, because through some sort of lottery of birth we live here, in this country, with a family who love us and don’t want to hurt us, we have more than enough of pretty much anything we could ever want and probably the most respect we can show those who don’t have it is to enjoy what we do have I guess. We can’t change the world, we can change how we view it though…

So, today. We did massive amounts of washing (Ady started with several loads and I took over when I got up) and got it all dry again too – hurrah :), Ady emptied out his car ready to be loaded up on Monday morning, we had a fairly lazy morning and then set off to Brighton to call into Asda to get various Mothers Day related bits. Ady and Davies went off to do secret things together, while Tarly stayed with me and we got a few bits for my Mum and some batteries for our maglite torch for candling purposes.

Then we went over to collect the Susumama order and drove for a while along the coast enjoying the lovely weather.

I did some baking (flapjacks, fairy cakes and chocolate rice crispie cakes) for NicCamps and once it was dark we candled the eggs as it is day 6 of hatchwatch. Despite not really knowing what we were looking for we were all really interested in what we could see. It looks to us like we have two definite possibles, perhaps a couple of non starters and a whole load we couldn’t tell about. We’re going to have another go tomorrow and hope that none of the non starters explode while we’re away. We’ll be back with a full week to go before they should start hatching so we should be able to easily indentify which are likely to hatch by the time we get back next Friday.

Looking forward to a nice day tomorrow over at my parent’s. Frazer will be there, as will my Granny so hopefully the children will be on good form and we’ll have a nice family day.

I have this daughter Scarlett. She is small and very funny 🙂

Sometimes she likes to wear her jeans round the wrong way. She always likes to be ‘just like you Mummy’ which extends to allowing her hair to be put up if it is the same style as I am sporting on that day and wearing my shoes pretty much the instant I step out of them.

Oh yeah, you already did! 😉

We went to Arundel today and met up with Julie, Jack and Maisie at Swanbourne Lake. As we were walking round I recalled that it had been somewhere Ady and I had gone on one of our very first days out together as a couple – there is home video footage of us there which is now some 14 years old. We spent a lot of time in Arundel in our early days together actually as it was on the way to lots of Ady’s friends at the time and it is somewhere my parents would often take Frazer and I on Sundays as children to look round the antique shops or have Sunday lunch out at a pub. Arundel is best avoided during the summer and at weekends though as it is so very touristy now so it’s not somewhere we’ve spent much time in the couple of years since we moved home. We did however spend a day there on a visit back to Sussex when we were living in Manchester and there are some self timer shots of us sitting on a bench we walked past today with me pregnant with Tarly and a very young (about 22 months old) Davies wobbling about feeding swans.

Can’t quite believe that photo is nearly five years old 😯 – told the children about visiting there and that there were photos of it and showed them when we got home. Funny to think that we walked round there today with Jack and Maisie who were also still a bump when that photo was taken. How come it all feels like it was only last week?

It was something of a bedlamic morning (not sure if bedlamic is a word? think it should be though if it isn’t already. I like it 🙂 describes our life well at times) with Tarly shrieking for the best part of half an hour because I asked her to get dressed. She pulled the same stunt tonight when asked to put her pjs on actually – it took half an hour, child abuse type levels of sound effects (thank fuck we don’t have neighbours!) and her telling me she hated me before collapsing into my arms telling me over and over again how much she loves me. She was awake in the night and in our bed again last night too. Whatever it was that knocked her out for the last two weeks has regressed her in all sorts of ways, as illness tends to do to young children, so we’ve had a couple of episodes when previously we’ve had months of peace and harmony (well almost 😉 ) – at least this time I know it will blow over and I feel way more condfident in dealing with it (and of course I know Ady is off with me next week too :lol:). We did all have a cuddle before we left the house and agreed to have a good day though and indeed we did.

I can’t recall what we talked about on the way to Arundel but I know it was nice, pleasant conversation. We arrived, parked and went to buy some duck food from the cafe and then set off on a lengthy walk round the lake. Davies, Jack and Maisie all went ahead and did plenty of clambering and scrambling up hills and down ditches, Tarly was less adventurous (see I told you she wasn’t herself :lol:) and mostly walked along holding my hand. Julie and I had a great time, loads of chatting, loads of laughs and loads of surreal speculations about situations that will never happen but gave us plenty to giggle about lending the whole day a slightly hysterical air. We deviated from the path round the lake so we could cross a stile and venture further round a corner (leading to more speculation about whether we’d find our way back before nightfall and may even return having discovered previously unchartered lands and learnt new languages and life skills – but in fairness Julie and I have gone off track on so many of our walks and turned short meanders into miles long hikes, ending up carrying children and practically on our knees with exhaustion it probably wasn’t too ridiculous speculating really :lol:). We found ourselves in something of a valley which we realised might echo well so we all spent about 10 minutes seeing which noises made the best echoes – yodelling works well, as do siren type noises and anything of a low pitch 😆 Very entertaining! We spotted a landmark in the distance so walked on to that before stopping for our picnic lunch.

The children wandered off to play up a hill while Julie and I basked in the sunshine and chatted. We sat watching them for about half an hour playing together, working out some elaborate game involving gathering larger than them sticks and carrying them together up the hill, climbing, delegating, inventing, exploring and learning. We spent happy time telling each other that this, this was what childhood should be about and how school can only hope to replicate a small amount of that in an artificial classroom environment and left to their own devices children cannot help but entertain, enlighten and educate themselves. Twas blissful :). It was also one of those days for counting your blessings and I was feeling particularly sentimental about family. I do so adore having Julie as my sister in law, we’re so different in many ways and Chris and Ady still stumble over a fraternal relationship in many ways, as two different family units we are very, very different but the four children really do adore each other and I just love that they are growing up so close and so part of each others’ lives. I love that the children see each other at least once a week and they all feel so at ease in each others’ company. I’m so glad that Julie and I have developed a bond between us which means all this happens and that I have such a close friend too as a result. See, told you I was schmultzy today 🙂

We then walked back to the stile and continued our path round the lake. This side was more steep up to the side so the children did various levels of clambering up the slopes and tree roots and feeding the ducks along the side of the lake. There are some pictures on flickr but even they don’t capture just how lovely it was. Davies spotted the grey feathers and downiness of the swans and told me that was because as cygnets they were fluffy and grey and that’s how one got confused as an ugly duckling so they mustn’t have totally changed to their graceful white feathers yet :shock:, Scarlett found a caterpillar, several ladybirds and other creepy crawlies and talked about what stage of their life cycles they were at. And then, big excitement, Davies spotted some lizards sunning themselves on the grass. To my shame I had no idea we had lizards in this country and tried to tell him they must be newts to which he insisted they were indeed lizards and Julie confirmed it. Then we spotted several more before moving on with plans to come back again with nets to catch one and look at it more closely. (Julie says she spent many a happy hour as a child catching lizards with nets to observe them – she is an only child though :lol:). We finally worked our way back to the beginning and back to the cars. Davies had been wearing a pair of very old, already mud stained with a hole in one knee jeans that I’ve kept for walks in muddy places but this time due to sliding all the way down a very steep bank on his bum and going ankle deep in the mud they were beyond being worth washing, so he got changed into a spare pair of jeans before I let him in the car and then we came home.

On the way we got to talking about counting in twos – it was because of me telling them about how we’d been to that lake when Davies was nearly 2 and Scarlett hadn’t been born. Then they both wanted to go and look at the castle and I promised I’d take them when they were a bit older and could get enough out of it to justify the very expensive admission charges. I’d been with the school at about 11 or 12 and recall it being very interesting, but very indepth guided tour style which I don’t think they’d get much from just yet. I said maybe when they were 6 and 8 or 8 and 10 which led to ‘when Scarlett is 8, how old will Davies be?’ type questions from me which I kept going up in 2 year increments with. Davies suddenly said – you are missing a number out each time, so I explained I was counting in twos and then they shouted out other numbers to count up in and I did – rather rustily on the 7s and 8s actually 😳 funny how I know don’t rely so much on the times table reciting as just using number bond type stuff with the units instead (eg, adding 7 to 42 I wasn’t going up in my 7 times table, I was adding a 7 to the 2 of the 42) – I guess in day to day life I have more call for knowing that sort of sum that for having to know 8 x 7 etc.

We got home and looked at photos of today and the trip I’d been telling them about, I drank lots of tea and we watched Shaun the Sheep. They had tea and we all snuggled up until Ady got home and then Tarly had her pj moment. 🙄

Tomorrow I’m working all day again and Ady is working from home to be with the children. And then… HOLIDAY 🙂 🙂 🙂

Yesterday. Ah yes, yesterday. Hmmm.

I was on a full day training course at Worthing library about Children’s services. I’d allowed half an hour for driving into town, parking and then walking to the library. I’d thought I’d park in the carpark next to the library but on checking the details of the carpark on the internet the night before I realised it was short stay only (maximum 4 hours) so that was out. I’d also looked at going into town on the train but the course was supposed to end at 430pm which was always going to mean getting home and getting Davies back out again for Badgers at 545pm would be a tall order so I knew the train wouldn’t be any good. So I revised my plan to the slightly further away (about 5 minute fast pace walk) long stay car park instead (bargain at £1.50 for all day). Which meant, by my precision timing I had 15 minutes to drive to the car park, five minutes to park, five minutes to walk to the library and five minutes for composing myself / going to the loo / contingency fund.

The drive took slightly longer than planned, eating a good two minutes into my contingency fund and then I pulled up to the car park behind a man leaning out of his car arguing (quite literally, he was actually shouting at it) with the pay and display machine. Odd set up – you pay as you go in and then display the ticket in your car but there was no barrier. So he started gesticulating to me that the machine wasn’t working and then his reverse lights came on. I duly reversed back out too, then he seemed to change his mind and went in anyway. I didn’t bother with the machine as by now I had used up a further minute of my contingency fund and I thought I’d park near him and see what he was going to do about the broken machine. He was super speedy though and had disappeared down the steps before I’d got out of my car. So I went and checked to see if he’d left a note in his car only to find he’d got a ticket after all and was proudly displaying it on his dashboard. Trickin’ cheatin’ no good man! By now I had seven minutes to get to the library – and I was on floor 6 of the car park. Deciding it would be quicker to run than get back in the car and drive I dashed down the stairs, bunged money in the machine (much to the confusion of people coming in in their cars – clearly the machine brings out the loony in people!) got a ticket and ran back up the stairs again. I now had four minutes to get to the library. So I did that hurrying sort of semi run that people do when they are late but don’t want to / frankly are physically incapable of running. Should probably mention that I was wearing shoes I’ve not worn for ages yesterday. I normally wear boots if I’m wearing a skirt and some flat black shoes if I’m wearing trousers to work, but with the sunnier days on the way I decided to dig out some different footwear and found a pair of cute mary jane style black shoes. They are flat, black with a t-bar style front. Only trouble is they are a little on the narrow side and when my feet get hot and swell slightly bits of flesh poke out of the space either side of the t-bar. They are sitting down in cool conditions type shoes really. Not semi-running in warm weather type shoes.

I got to the library with seconds to spare. I was purple of face, mottled of cleavage, wheezing and panting (forgot my inhaler :roll:) with a feminine glow and puffy bits of my feet poking through the cute bits on my shoes. Clearly my colleagues couldn’t help but be impressed 😆

There were 8 attendees on the course – 2 of whom were on the last one (one of which impressively remembered my name, rather less impressively remembered the wrong name and called me Nikki all day :roll:), a youngish girl with very odd ringletted hair, a girl who sounded exactly like Tara Palmer Tompkinson with a very husky voice but had this weird habit of pulling lots of faces and laughing too long after every sentence she said. A woman who worked at Lancing for the first week or two I was there but then moved to another library, a couple of nice women and then this utter cow of a woman who seems to have been demoted in the recent reshuffle and clearly felt she shouldn’t be there for ‘refresher training’ as she sneeringly refered to it. She was really rude to all the rest of us and clearly felt we were too lowly for her to talk to.

The course was terrible. Really, really boring. Clearly there was a lot of information to impart but it was like attending a lecture and we just sat there being talked at for hours. And hours. In a hot room in the basement with no air and no windows and no natural light. Delivered by people who I’m sure are very nice but had no passion for what they were talking about, no enthusiasm for their jobs, clearly a lot of resentment for the changes and restructuring that’s recently happened throughout the local area and adhered to all the stereotypical ideas of what librarians might be like.

We were talked at about Every Child Matters (oh did that put my back up!) and how our work fits into such government initiatives and ideas. Very at odds with many of my personal beliefs lots of that so I really struggled not to sneer in places and to remain looking interested and nodding in agreement. Then we heard about Bookstart and similar schemes – again something I can see all the reasons and benefit to but delivered in such a way to feel patronising, prescriptive and so bloody contrived – here is what you should be doing with your baby aged 0-1, here are the books to read – it’s like the whole country’s being run by Gina Ford! Things like bookstart are great initiatives but should be rolled out with passion, vigour and a belief in free books and invitations to join the library for everyone in a positive, attractive way rather than the big brother style of ‘every child shall receive these books and be read to by their parent’. Probably not making any sense here but somehow it annoyed me.

We were shown how school project loans are put together from the schools library service library and then we looked at some book selection, which was easily the best part of the day. We all got to look at a load of childrens’ books and decide whether we’d buy them for the library or not. That was fun 🙂 I think I’d like to be a book buyer for a living, well anything that involved shopping really 😆

During the lunch break I wandered down into town. I’ve not been into Worthing for ages and despite it being my home town and having worked in the town centre for several years a while ago I felt like a total stranger. I had really itchy feet yesterday I think (aswell as painful feet from the pokey out bits in the cute shoes 😉 ) and would happily have come home and packed us all up to leave for somewhere else. Just as well we’re on holiday next week I think, I was pretty disillusioned with everything yesterday.

In the afternoon while we were looking at the schools library area the snooty woman managed to knock a metal shelf down that was propped up against the side and I didn’t notice it falling until it landed on my foot – nicely pushing the pokey out bits back in again true, but not doing a great deal for me otherwise. And she didn’t say sorry. Cow 🙁

The course finished early so I was home at 4.30pm, as was Ady having been prewarned that I’d be pushed for time to get home and feed Davies before Badgers. So Dad was let off childcare very early indeed 🙂 and Davies got to eat a proper dinner rather than have sandwiches shoved down his throat while we drove to Badgers. And I got to sit in the car and eat humbugs and listen to the radio for an hour, so that was nice 🙂

Will be back to blog today a bit later.

Scarlett planting her seeds the other week


and then clearing up the soil afterwards with the Davies machine

they’ve not taken long to start rewarding her work 🙂

And here’s Hatchwatch Day Zero 🙂

We’re on day five now, we’ll be candling them on Saturday to check progress so far but I’m not sure how well that’ll photograph.

Well no one seemed to be ill today. Although Davies ended the day with a sticky eye 🙄 and Tarly was demonstrating how quickly she can regress to toddlerdom when the mood takes her. Fortunately along came Ros with a real live toddler and made her look all big and grown up and oversized so that pretty much put paid to that 😆

We watched a load of Class TV this morning, some stuff on Famous People in history which Davies was fascinated by followed by something I’d not seen before with an animated robot getting out and about finding out about things – a bit like Bits and Bobs for the next key stage :lol:. Scarlett painted my toenails and then Ros and co arrived. The boys disappeared with a film, Scarlett stayed mostly in the lounge doing puzzles but was fairly good about letting me and Ros catch up and chat. Ady popped home for lunch and then everyone left again.

Davies wanted to know how long before Shaun the Sheep was on and I replied ‘an hour and three quarters’ to which he asked what that meant. Thinking back to a conversation with Alison last week about maths concepts and autonomy I grabbed the geomags (as we are a maths manipulative free household 😆 – and I read about Lucy using them for a similar purpose) and got him to split 12 rods into half, then showed him quarters, thirds, sixths etc. Then I wrote some of them down and showed him how they work and explained a little about lowest common denominator (although of course I didn’t call it that – just showed him how 2/6 is the same as 1/3 and that we would always write down the smallest possible numbers above and below the line) and that the whole idea of bits of numbers smaller than one whole is called fractions. Then he wrote down a few demonstrating it had totally gone in and made sense to him and then we drew some shapes and drew lines to split them in halves and quarters and shaded in things like 3/8 of the shape etc. We did a square and a circle which brought us back to telling the time where we started. So I explained that one hour can be divided into half and quarters and what 3/4 of an hour would look like. Our big clock in the lounge has roman numerals which although Davies can make sense of is not easy to read at a glance so he was asking for a watch with numbers on it. His Wallace and Gromit one he got for Christmas has lines instead of numbers so I really must get him a cheapy one for learning to tell the time with actual numbers on as he’s asked several times now. We did have one somewhere but I suspect it’s long since gotten lost in one of my clear outs. 😆 We then touched on units, tens and hundreds, again using geomags to demonstrate and writing down numbers but he’d gotten bored by then and wanted to just write numbers with lots of noughts so we called an end to that. I put Cats on that I’d got from work thinking Tarly would like the costumes, make up and songs so we had that on as background for a while.

Scarlett did some drawing and colouring in a princess activity book and Davies did some drawing too, then he watched Shaun the sheep and did some more drawing. He asked for a subject matter so I asked him to draw me things that reminded him of spring. He drew a sunset and a rainbow, a flower, a butterfly, a paddling pool and the sun. Then with fairly minimal help he wrote the word ‘spring’. He was in the right frame of mind for something more so I wrote ‘candle is a black cat’ and he read that, then he asked for a word game where I draw pictures and write the words and he has to draw a line to link them. I did star, triangle, circle and square. He got star and triangle fairly quickly but stumbled over circle (understandably) and then seemed to be working on trying to spell out square despite obviously knowing it had to be that word anyway. Then Ady arrived home.

The kids had dinner, I escaped to Tescos for an hour before coming home to cook dinner for me and A.

One word? when seven would do is brought to you today by the letter C for circle and the numbers 5, 517 and 3/4.

Utterly fed up of us all being ill. Struggling with general apatheticness, not a lot of sympatheticness and a huge amount of general patheticness. I still can’t decide if I am actually ill or just hayfever-y, Scarlett seems to be pretty much back to normal (see how just typing that sentence jinxes her health by tomorrow) and Davies has got a killer cough. And of course you all know how I feel about coughs. Sigh.

I’m tired. Tired of being tired, tired of being grumpy, tired of not having Ady around enough – he didn’t make it back in time for Beavers tonight which meant a last minute dash to get Tarly’s coat and shoes on and drag her round with us to drop Davies off. I just feel generally wrung out and weary. I feel like I’ve taken on too much (although I’d struggle to actually list what it is I’ve taken on, but everything feels like such a mammoth effort) and I just want to go and hide somewhere quiet for two days.

I was thinking earlier about that TV show Cheers. I used to love Cheers – I loved Sam (although when Ted Danson did that awful made for TV film Something About Amelia I was rather put off him – bad, bad role to be typecast in that), I loved Diane and I loved Carla, I loved Coach and I loved Woody, I loved Cliff and Norm and I even loved Rebecca. But most of all I loved the theme tune – where everybody knows your name. I used to drink in a bar like that – I’d walk in and the barmen would chorus ‘Nic’ and a bottle of Red Rock (my poison of choice at that time) would be cracked open and sat at my usual place at the bar before I’d even worked my way round to sit there. It was great. 🙂 But today, just for once I wanted to be living the total opposite to that. I wanted to go where nobody knew my name, where noone gave a shit whether I came, I wanted to be where you could see, people were all the same, and because of that nobody even knew my name (plinky piano music to fade). I consider myself a sociable enough person, a caring wife, an engaged and loving mother, a daughter you can call on in a crisis, but today I really wanted to put my hands over my ears, close my eyes, sing ‘lalalalal I’m not listening’ change my name by deed poll to anything but ‘Nic’ or ‘Mummy’ and go somewhere where coughs, home education, parenting, marriage and who’s turn it is to cook dinner had never been invented.

Of course I didn’t do that. What I did instead was take two small children to a clothes shop, then collect another child and an adult and take everyone to a Home Ed group. Where because it was a nice day lots of the people went outside which meant my children wanted to go outside. Except I don’t let them go outside at that Home Ed group for all sorts of various (legitimate) reasons. So instead I found myself justifying that to my children with an audience then slumping over the counter because there were only two bloody stools to sit on while my children passed the baton of neediness between them while trying to find things to do which required the most parental input until eventually I decided that maybe we should all go outside where I could sit and make a daisy chain in a basket weaving, repetitive, requiring no brain power type manner while the children brought me daisies and STAYED IN MY SIGHT AT ALL TIMES! Did I stress that sufficiently? I think I did, but then I thought I did earlier and clearly I didn’t because within moments both children had indeed left my sight heading towards the rusty barbecue with rancid water in full view of the dinnerladies supervising the children in the playground of the school next door to home ed group. And then Davies found some chalk. Which he drew with until his hands and trousers were all chalky and then he came and sat on my lap in all his chalky glory (and just typing the word chalk is giving me goosebumps) and coughed. Lots.

So that was nice.

We left shortly afterwards, with an uneventful drive home where I secured peace by making the children promise not to talk to me or ask me for anything, preempted all their potential needs by aying out drinks, food and the tv remote, drank three cups of tea back to back and watched Shaun the Sheep with them. In silence. It was good.

And I think that’s all I have to say about that.

I forgot to blog earlier that we have been Victims Of Crime.

When my Dad arrived this morning he couldn’t ring on the doorbell because the bell push was missing!!!

Da da dahhhhh! (as Davies once said 😉 )

We have a wireless doorbell and the bell push was just hooked on by a screw. About 11pm last night I heard the letterbox rattle on the front door but assumed it was Ady (I was in Tarly’s room dealing with her), but when I went in the lounge he was asleep on the sofa but I forgot all about it. Clearly there was someone stealing our door furntiture – lucky they didn’t take the letterbox too probably!

Have spent all day wondering quite why someone would want to nick a bell push really? Was it a dare? Is there a series of similarly random thefts from people’s front doors all along the street? Is there attractive house number pottery plates with squirels or Great British birds missing? Wrought iron effect plastic house numbers awol? An obscure collection of items from around the area right now nestling in someone’s ‘den’? Gromes, traffic cones, our bell push, wing mirrors, milk bottles and gate hinges jostling for space with signs proclaiming ‘DOG BITES FIRST, ASKS QUESTIONS LATER’ and ‘NO FREE PAPERS’ and ‘BEWARE OF THE WIFE’.

We had a spare so we’ve put that up but it is programmed to play the first two lines of ‘Twinkle twinkle little star’ instead of the normal ding dong ding dong ding dong ding dong we had before (which Davies and I have discussed at length as to whether it is Twinkle twinkle or the alphabet song, with me even wondering if Baa baa black sheep would also fit – I’m spying a lack of originality in nursery rhyme music y’know) and of course we have been trying to think up punchlines to the ‘spate of doorbell robberies in the area’ joke (you know, to go with the ‘police are combing the area’ one for hairdressers being burgled and ‘police have nothing to go on’ for the toilet seat factory and of course the classic ‘dogs stolen from pet shop’ being ‘police say they have no leads’) – best we can come up with is that it wouldn’t have been a lone criminal – it must have been a ring of thieves. Ring, doorbell – get it? 😆