One word? When seven would do…

this evening

This tomorrow 🙂

just say the word and we’ll race the birds to Acapulco Bay, yes it’s perfect for a flying honeymoon they say, so come fly with me, let’s fly, let’s fly away (need a musical note smiley, something like :semiquaver:)

Another rough night with Scarlett last night although I think it was more habit than anything actually wrong. We had such a long period of time with her being the amazing non-sleeping toddler that although she is now a pretty good sleeper when she goes off track for any reason it can take a while to get back to normal. And of course her being downstairs doesn’t help because she tends to wake, sit up in bed and just holler rather than coming to find us 🙄 At 6am I got up, told her that while yes, it was indeed morning time now which was what she was yelling there was noone else about to be getting up anytime soon as we’d all had way too little sleep so far and that if she wanted to sit and watch Nick jr she was very welcome but she could sit on her own and do so. Which she took quite agreeably, settled down on the sofa, waited until about two minutes after I’d snuggled back into bed and then started howling for Ady. She ended up in our room wailing for ages before snuggling down next to me and going to sleep. Which woke Davies. Who had a fit about noone being up for getting up with him either and stomped back to bed himself. He then woke hysterical about half an hour later as he’d poked himself in the eye and it hurt. Ady eventually got up with him while I went back to sleep again. They both want Ady in the mornings anyway – this is solely because I think they are old enough to be entertaining themselves now if they want to get up hours earlier than the rest of us, they can operate the tv and dvd player, access all their toys, reach things in the kitchen and so I let them get on with it whereas Ady is normally up with them anyway getting ready to go to work so if he’s in the house they expect it of him whether he needs to actually be up that day or not. A work in progress definitely :).

Davies had indeed done *something* to his eye, it was all bruised round the upper and lower eyelid and watering and weeping a fair bit. The actual eye itself looks fine and he insists it is because he poked himself in his sleep so I don’t suspect an eye infection. I did get him some eye drops but he squealed like I’d poured acid into his eye when I tried to put them in so we didn’t try that again. He did lots of walking round with dampened cotton wool pads looking mournful and occassional bouts of crying and whimpering but it did seem to coincide with Scarlett acting up too so I am slightly dubious at just how painful it is, although it certainly looks quite sore.

My Dad appeared in the morning for an hour or so as he has done the last couple of Sundays, it’s quite nice, I wish he’d come over more. Scarlett had a long bath and hair wash as she was quite stinky from sweating the last couple of days with her fever and I changed her bed, we did loads and loads of washing and we put all the eggs in the incubator. One was cracked so we start with 18 potential little chicks. They need to be ‘candled’one third of the way into incubation according to the manual with the incubator so we will have a look at them next weekend if not before, then we hand them over to Dad to do daily turning of the eggs along with his cat and fish feeding duties while we are at NicCamps, with us coming back for the final week of the 21 days incubation. Excited at the prospect of little chicks, slightly daunted at the idea of breeding some sort of mutants or having no hatchlings at all. Will post further ‘hatchwatch’ updates as they happen :).

I got Tarly and Davies some seeds last week – Davies got a Wallace and Gromit pot and cress seeds and Tarly got a butterfly garden which is a mini greenhouse with 3 different butterfly attracting flower seeds. Tarly and I did hers earlier this week but today we were watering it and Davies and I sowed the cress seeds in his, so we’ve done lots of starting new life type stuff here today. 🙂

Davies did some more playing with his IQ science toy (it’s similar to this one) including dismantling and rebuilding it. It’s funny how children go from having no interest in something like that to loving it almost overnight. I was expecting loads of play with the gears gears gears! stuff but it didn’t really happen, this has been a huge success. I almost wonder if it’s because it isn’t brightly coloured and ‘kiddified’ – Davies has always seemed suspcisious of stuff that is supposed to be played with and gone for the less obvious choices as toys 😆 ( and yeah I am thinking ash and paintbrushes here 😉 ). Bring on the science I guess.

Ady went out to mow the lawn and the children followed for a play in the garden. I had intentions of hiding inside with my laptop and making the most of a brief hour window without a child on my lap – a real rarity this week. But Davies rang the doorbell and invited me out to play his canabalised game of tennis / badminton he’d set up in the garden, stringing a length of net across between two bushes and finding a table tennis bat and a badminton racquet to bash a ball pool ball over. We messed about with that for a while until Ady came along and he and I had a go. Most of the balls ended up in the road though with all four of us helpless with laughter. 😆

We had roast beef while watching Eight Below which I’d got from work but neither of the children were particularly bothered to be watching. It was quite a long film and they both drifted away at various points once they’d finished eating, but they both came back for the ending and we sat snuggled up together watching with me sniffling through the end as they both clarified precisely what had happened several times. We walked round the shop to get ice creams for pudding (wearing no coats – yay!) and then came back to watch the making of dvd extra of the film.

Finally we put on Morph and I got the plasticine out and made a Morph for Davies and a Delilah for Tarly, then they made some bits. Davies made an Ady dressed in Wallace’s clothing and Tarly made a me in the style of a Morph character. Davies then made a dinosaur and a mini Morph while Tarly and I collaborated on a blue cat with pink whiskers. Davies then put on a play for us all to watch with his creations before we packed them off to bed.

My nose has been streaming all day coupled with regular sneezing fits and I am hoping it is merely early hayfever caused by lawn mowing happening all around me rather than yet another phase in The Goddard’s Plague Of Illnesses or indeed an allergic reaction to all the flowers we picked from the garden and brought in the house. Anyway, weird assorted ailments aside it’s been a mostly nice day with Spring well and truly on it’s way. 🙂

After I blogged last night Tarly was up and awake loads, including perking up quite commendably around 11pm and requesting custard with chocolate sprinkles :lol:. She finally went to sleep around midnight but was awake again a couple of times in the night, albeit fairly happy and not in any pain.

By this morning she was in pain again and complaining it hurt when she laughed, coughed and breathed which led us to suspect a pulled muscle but doesn’t really explain the acute pain she seemed to be in last night. She took to her bed around lunchtime having finally been persuaded to take some calpol and had a temperature and specifically pain in her throat and back. Ady was all for calling the doctor but as I said they would tell us to calpol her as a first action anyway and if she was too stroppy to tell us what was the matter with her she would be unlikely to respond to a doctor I’d rather wait until I felt something was concerning enough for proper medical attention and then take her straight to hospital. She has perked up considerably this afternoon, picked at an eclectic mix of food and although she is still awake now (11.30pm) she is in good spirits and this would be more to do with daytime sleeping than anything sinister. I think it probably is more than a pulled muscle – kidney infection? rumbling appendix? something was very wrong with her for a couple of hours last night so we’ll keep a close eye on her and see what develops. I’m a queer mix of mothers instinct mixed with utter faith in modern medicine with no room for homeopathy and little faith in a gp for much more than dispensing prescriptions I’ve already decided I need really. I know in the past my Mum and Ady have been cross with me for not taking the children to the doctors when they’ve felt I should have done but having bowed to pressure and always been either proved right in my diagnosis or simply asked ‘what do you think is wrong with them?’ and ‘are you worried?’ on more than one occassion I feel fairly confident that if something is serious enough to warrant more than a splash of medised I will be able to tell and take appropriate action (I have to say this same attitude does not extend to anyone else who I will always tell to go and see their doctor rather than complain about their ill health to me 😉 ) .

Anyway, in other news. This morning Julie and I went to the NCT nearly new sale, leaving Ady with Davies, Scarlett, Jack and Maisie. They had a good time by all accounts – Scarlett took to her bed (as her name suggests she should every now and then 🙂 ) and Ady led the other three in a rousing game of sound effect bingo before settling them all down infront of cartoons (oh how we corrupt our niece and nephew – he also offered them crisps and flapjacks :lol:). Julie got loads of stuff at the sale, I was more restrained getting a dress and couple of pairs of summer trousers for Tarly, an animal jigsaw, a Morph video and an IQ Science kit thingy for Davies, all of which were very well recieved.

We came back and Julie took the twins off home while I got ready for work. Ady and Davies spent some time playing with the IQ kit which contained various component parts to build a robot type creature using circuit making, cogs and gears and propellers. There was an instruction leaflet discussion kinetic energy and energy transferance but they seemed to rub along just fine without it. When I got home from work they’d built an impressive creation different to the instructions but in full working order and were playing at making it go forwards and backwards together quite happily.

Scarlett had woken mid afternoon and answered the door to me when I got home from work which was nice. I’d had an uneventful afternoon with some training, some pottering and a (fingers crossed) agreement to have the Friday of Kessingland off but I’ll get that confirmed next week. I’ve booked anyway including the Saturday night at the end in case I do have to come back in the middle to go to work so I’m feeling very upbeat about that. 🙂

And that’s probably our day really. Davies is being fantastic at the moment, nothing specific just very patient and mature about all sorts of things – worthy of mention mostly because I blog the gripes too :). Fingers crossed for a better nights’s sleep and not too early a morning – no idea what Scarlett will be up to doing tomorrow but our orginial plan of a whole day out looks fairly unlikely.

Slow start to the morning with a very prolonged breakfasting of the running buffet variety. I got several loads of washing done and pegged out and a mammoth tower of clean stuff put away with assistance in sock matching from Davies :). Scarlett has been in bad humour all day and had plenty of ‘moments’ which unfortunately she continued with pretty much all day. It has culminated in an hours screaming with clutching at her stomach having gulped down two cups of lucozade on a pretty much otherwise empty stomach. I’m putting money on trapped wind and she is now sleeping peacefully but I did have my Mum on standby to sweep in and mind Davies while Ady and I rushed her to hospital at one point 🙁 Hopefully she’ll remain asleep and wake in better form tomorrow. I have been intolerant and impatient with her in equal amounts which retrospectively didn’t actually shape the day as much as I was sighing about earlier as when I sat down to start blogging I recalled all sorts of nice bits inbetween.

Having listened to the Shrek soundtrack pretty much nonstop for the last few days I got a new batch of cds from work yesterday including Disney’s Greatest Hits and The Proclaimers Greatest Hits (as inspired by I’m On My Way from the Shrek soundtrack). We listened to The Proclaimers first with me singing along to all the ones I knew (that’d be 500 miles, Letter from America and On My Way then 🙂 ) and then listening to their version of King Of The Road in utter delight telling the children what a wonderful spin they’d put on such a classic and speculating on what a great job they’d do on other songs. By the time we’d arrived at Ali’s I’d compiled a fantasy cover versions selection for them including Kylie’s I’m Spinning Around, a whole host of the Disney songs we’d been listening to and more. I’ve since decided that what would be totally fantastic would be a whole album full of cover versions of pop songs sung by artists with very strong regional accents although Proclaimers remain my favourites – can you imagine it? Proclaimers sing songs by Steps, Abba, Oasis, Elvis, The Spice Girls, The Beach Boys and Tina Turner. It’d be great :).

We had a nice time at Ali’s although Tarly took some rubbing along with I think it was mostly me that had to deal with that. Davies enjoyed playing a Labyrinth game which looked a bit fab and then X box – the highlight of that being that J was home and sat talking him through lots of it and explaining it to him as he went. There was a point when he was sat between Ali and J on the sofa playing a game when he looked in heaven at the adult attention 🙂 Ady’s xboxing begins and ends with the racing car games and mine was eclipsed by Davies on about week two of us getting it (quite liked the Wii though 😉 ) so he enjoyed getting some coaching by someone other than Elijah who has been his greatest mentor to this point. 🙂

On the way home we played ‘name that film’ with the Disney album, we’re a bit weak on the Princessy films and the Tarzan / Lion King type stuff but Davies was shit hot on the Peter Pan / Toy Story / Monsters Inc stuff getting it within the opening bar most of the time.

We got home and I cooked them some tea then Ady and my Mum both appeared together so we had a nice half an hour or so before Tarly went rapidly downhill. Now I’m about to have a bath followed by a dinner I haven’t cooked (novelty to that these last two weeks!) and a watch of Click, which may or may not live up to it’s hype laden front cover.

I’m feeling better tonight, having spent the whole day feeling faint and weak. I actually had a low level feeling of nausea all day very similar to the early weeks of pregnancy with both D&S (and no, I’m not, and if I am then we are so sueing the hospital who snipped A and the doctors who tested him to say it had worked :lol:). Work was fine, my last hope of swapping shifts for Kessingland said she would but as she is depserately looking for another job at the moment there is every chance she won’t be working there any more by June so she won’t actually agree to swap at the moment but will if she is still there. Hmmm 🙁

Lucy was here this morning and Frazer did Dad’s stint instead this afternoon, arriving shortly after midday which is at least two hours earlier than he normally gets up when he’s not working. He was an absolute model uncle – when I got in at 5.15pm he had Scarlett snuggled up on his lap watching Robin Hood with him and Davies making him geomag models. He’d walked down to the park on the seafront with them, taken them on the train and bought them ice creams and then walked home again. They had worn coats and shoes and he’d walked at their pace and shepherded them along the busy road and appeared to have actually enjoyed it. This is something even my Mum would have struggled to do. They were full of how he’d pushed them on the swings and talked to them. I’m delighted 🙂 🙂 🙂 Physical exercise, fresh air, treats, time with a relative and an adult male and someone other than me actually enjoying my children and delighting in spending time in their company. 🙂 Hurrah for Frazer!

Frazer left, we tidied up and they had an ecclectic selection of foodstuffs for their tea before getting into pjs and watching Masterchef with me before bed. I had a lovely long bath, a nice dinner and have drunk wine so I must be feeling better. Ady rang just as I was sitting down to eat to say his Travelodge has a power cut so noone can check into their rooms, and the restuarant isn’t serving food – sounds like a nightmare 🙁

I just watched ‘My Life As A Child‘ – really good show and found links to this – mustn’t forget to watch it!

Can’t believe it’s only Wednesday actually, it’s already been a long week. We had plans for Monday which we cancelled due to them both being ill and then due to a massive turnaround recovery we resurected. Probably an unwise decision really but Tuesday was a nice day.

We got home at about 6pm last night, both the children were in bed and asleep by 7pm, Ady got home at 8pm and I went to bed at 9.30pm myself and slept the clock round til 9.30 this morning. I can’t decide whether I am going down with something myself or not – I’m sure with every day I don’t go down with whatever Ady and the kids have I am more certain of not getting it and I’m hoping that feeling so bloody tired is just the result of so many broken nights sleep and being patient and caring around ill and frankly rather whingey children. I don’t recall the last time I’ve had so little time sitting down without a child on my lap as the last week.

So today we spent the morning pottering about and generally catching up on just being at home and being up for playing and doing stuff rather than lounging around in pjs. Still lots of needing to come and have a cuddle even more than usual from both of them but they did some puzzles, some tv watching, some cutting up paper and some looking at books. I did several loads of washing but couldn’t find motivation to do any further housework or tidying (even with the reward of a sticker on offer 😉 ) so drank copious amounts of tea including 2 cups of rose (thanks Alison x).

After lunch we popped to the post office to send a parcel on it’s way that a very patient ebay buyer has been waiting way too long for while I’ve not managed to get it sent, check the prices of vapourisers in Boots (we have one somewhere but can’t find it so I thought I’d get a second one but changed my mind when I discovered they cost £22! 😯 might have to look a bit harder for the one we already have!) and get a couple of bits from Sainsburys before meeting up with Julie, Jack and Maisie at Highdown for an official Spring Walk. I even took a picture of D&S infront of a tree in blossom with daffodils underneath it for proof! 😉

The kids enjoyed it, Davies did plenty of running about yelling and waving sticks – lovely to see him a bit animated after his feebleness the last few days. Tarly was slightly more reserved still (she clearly had a worse bout of whatever it was) and so I sent her off with the camera to take pictures of flowers for me instead. She didn’t get any decent flower shots but did get a couple of nice ones of Maisie who was only too happy to pose for her – very cute, wish I had a picture of the two of them doing that :).

They spent some time rolling down the slight slope and laughing so infectiously that we were laughing at them too before D&S suddenly slumped and both wanted to come home. We got home with time for tea and Davies decided he was up for Badgers so he and I went off to that when Ady got home. He looked quite wan when he came out and didn’t have much to talk about in the car there or back but had enjoyed it and been glad he’d gone. Ady had bathed Tarly and she was in bed, practically asleep when we got home so Davies had a bath and took himself off to bed and to sleep fairly early too.

Tomorrow I’m working all day and Ady is away again tomorrow night. 🙁 It looks likely he will have at least one night away every couple of weeks for the next few months until the season ends in June so if anyone wants to come down and stay for a night or two I’d welcome the company even more than usual :).

Davies continues to recognise words and is making ever more educated guesses at what things might say, he continues to be interested in road signs with us looking and talking about loads on the motorways on Monday and Tuesday – they’ve really helped with cracking the tens written down actually, particularly the variable speed limits round Heathrow on the M25 with him commenting on ‘oh it’s gone slower again’ and ‘hurrah we can speed up’ as we went past each sign. He’s also starting to recognise the odd spelt out loud word too, rather than just written down. Not that we’ve ever practised the spelling words out instead of saying them so the children didn’t understand but if we did then we’d have to start thinking up a new secret code now 😆 so I’m sure that’s a leap forward, being able to picture a word without having to see it written down.

we certainly throw ourselves into it. This season we are mostly being home educating hippies 😆

Featuring Nic and Scarlett and their coats of many colours

Our growing collection of DMs

and our garage wall complete with the beginnings of a family effort mural, naturally kicked off with a rainbow 🙂

I’m thinking some dreadlocks, henna tattoos and macrame handicrafts before we move onto Goddards Go 80s Yuppy style when we will be donning pinstripes and carrying briefcases which I’ve scheduled in for the Autumn.

about motivation.

We had the discussion about intellectual stimulation, the comments on Live Otherwise about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards and quite recently at work I went on a training course where I was delighted to discover something about my employers that actually very few employers could claim as an honest truth. They genuinely do value their staff as individuals. Also recent struggles with childcare (which now seem to be resolved, although not holding my breath 😉 ) have got me to thinking about just why I would be upset if I had to stop working again and it’s not just for the few extra quid a week it’s bringing in, or the time away from the children.

Thinking about the various jobs I’ve had (and there have been many) and which I enjoyed most I can see the common thread running through is that the ones I enjoyed the most were not the best paid ones and certainly not the ones where I was ‘just a number’. I’ve just read a really interesting couple of articles as linked to by Bob on Live Otherwise and found myself nodding in approval. My parents have both run their own businesses all my life and I have had many positions with managerial responsibilities where motivating people to do their job and do it well was a daily consideration – the most challenging being having a team of 40 people to keep happy, working and in the job so I didn’t have to go through the time consuming and expensive to the company round of recruitment and training to replace lost employees.

I didn’t like the job I had working as a checkout operator – I felt patronised, both by my employer and the customers. There is a real attitude towards people working in the service industry that I loathe. It seems to be something that doesn’t exist in other countries so much, certainly in America people seem to consider waiting, bar staff etc to be a career with their customers as their audience and their wages doubled and tripled by tips if they perform well, but more than that they actually seem to enjoy and want to do it well. Here we don’t expect, and don’t respond so well if we get, that level of service. I distinctly recall sitting on my checkout and having people bring 3 rolls of wallpaper to me and saying ‘there’s three of those’ as though because I was wearing stupid checked dungarees and a Happy To Help badge I must have certainly has some sort of lobotomy before starting work that afternoon. (My stock response to this was always ‘well I just need to check that, bear with me – one……two…….three. Ok’ which of course meant I was as guilty of offering bad service back really’. Somehow standing behind a desk in a library doesn’t bring out quite such prejudice as selling DIY goods in the public, although you still find yourself the target of someone having a bad day generally :roll:). But I also felt patronised by my employers – the ‘Employee of the month’, the ‘£10 on the spot bonus reward if you were spotted giving ‘good service’, the annual appraisals where you only ever scored 3 or 4 out of 5 for everything – if you were scoring 1 or 2 then you’d have been hauled up long before your appraisal and if you were getting 5s then you’d have been promoted by now, this was fast track retail where there were constant vacancies for people happy to work 60 hours a week for the giddy reward of a job title with ‘Supervisor’ or ‘Manager’ in it and an extra 50 pence an hour (of course that was only for the hours you were paid for – not the 20 odd a week you put in just to keep your job, meaning you actually were paid less than the people below you per hour!). Having worked for a similarly operated big multiple company a few years later albeit in a higher up position (pretty much the one I just described actually with 10 hour days as absolutely standard – at interview I was told hours were 8am to 6pm normally let alone at Christmas and other mad busy periods) I loathed it just as much, felt just as patronised, just as trapped, just as hoodwinked into thinking that the salary and job title justified the hours, the stress and the general all round crap – and that it was all actually a pointless and meaningless too.

I worked in sales but as anyone in sales will tell you you can only sell products or services you believe in. This is mostly because that is the only way you will have a convincing sales pitch but I actually think it is also because otherwise you become utterly disillusioned. Even the most dynamic, bullshit ridden estate agent can’t possibly get as much job satisfaction from confusing someone into thinking a property is their overpriced dream home when it quite clearly isn’t – surely the skill comes from identifying someone’s needs, budget and then matching it as precisely as possible to the houses on the market. When I worked in recruitment the greatest joy was matching the perfect candidate to the perfect job, knowing that they were going to be going to work every day at a job they loved and their boss would be getting a productive employee.

Easily my most satisfying job was the one where I was most valued. The one where I regular dialogue and feedback from my boss, where I felt guided with my potential recognised and my talents and skills developed and used. Where being me was why they employed me, not because I was another body who would put in the hours. In that job I built a team, a dynamic, happy, motivated team. I did it by giving staff the hours they wanted to work and recruiting to fill in the gaps rather than making people work hours that didn’t really suit them. I offered praise certainly, but more importantly I identified what tasks people did well at, excelled at, enjoyed doing and gave them more of them to do. I had staff who were organisational freaks, who loved tidying and making things orderly – they were tasked with doing more of that, I had staff who were creative and artisitic so they were tasked with displays and visual projects. The employer / employee relationship is two way exploitation – or to give it a friendlier term, partnership. Without a good team of workers the boss wouldn’t be making any money, would have no business. Without an employer the workers likely couldn’t exercise their money making talent alone, without every part of the team the others would be adrift, the chain would break down, you can’t be great without the people supporting you. I learnt a valuable lesson when I left that job – I was lured away by more money and the promise of career advancement, having felt in my ingrained retail terms that I’d done all there was to do in that role. I learnt that what I’d been good at was not actually retail management – when it came down to it there were massive chunks of retail management that I totally sucked at, my skills had been in working with those individuals, learning about them, what made them tick, what made them happy and motivated and then giving them lots of it to do, in recognising their potential – I employed a previously unemployed for 6 years woman and left there with her as the Assistant Manager – she could probably have even taken over my job if I’d had another year or so with her boosting her confidence and showing her what she really was capable of. All of us there used to actively enjoy coming to work, being part of that team and working in a happy, friendly, coopertative environment.

Motivational techniques, and yes even money do work to an extent, of course they do. For some people they work forever, for life. For others they simply don’t work at all and for the majority they work like sugar – a small and artifical high which slumps just as quickly as it has us up and leaves us feeling deflated, cheated and conned into thinking we wanted something that actually we weren’t really that bothered about. Think about what brings you real joy? Is it falling in love and realising that person loves you too or is it a lottery win? Is it a brand new car or a brand new baby? I’m forever telling my children that something worth doing can be hard to achieve. Scarlett loves her jigsaw puzzles at the moment – she gets far more out of completing them all by herself and seeing it finished than she would from winning a sticker for tidying them away again. If you ran a sponsored marathon would it be completing it or the amount of money you raised that gave you greatest satisfaction?

I want my children to identify what makes them happy and gives them a genuine sense of fulfilment and then work out how to make that what they spend their days doing as adults rather than go through life gathering badges and rewards for having done stuff they didn’t really want to do. Which is not to say that life isn’t about cause and effect and bartering our skills and abilities for goods and services because of course it is. Almost all the rewards in parenting are intrinsic, there is little praise, financial incentive or obvious congratulations but I’d consider it one of the most worthwhile, rewarding and meaningful tasks I’ve ever done.

going to TED tomorrow…

I’m going to apply for a free place at next year’s I reckon 🙂

Thanks for the reminder Sarah 🙂

Right, well today was the day I was planning London and clearly we didn’t go there 😉 But Legoland? I think we were waiting to see if that Monday was feasible for Helen or not weren’t we?

As I’m having enough of a nightmare trying to get shifts swapped for Kessingland I’m simply writing off the days I am working which leaves us with:
Tuesday 17th April
Thursday 18th April
Friday 27th April
Monday 30th April

So for those interested parties can you order them in preference including any that you 100% couldn’t make and we’ll go with the one which most people can attend and then I’ll open it out elsewhere. Also, I’m no longer a member of any official HE group anymore – is anyone else EO or similar and willing to send Legoland some ID to say so?

I flicked to channel 615 today and to my horror found it is no longer a channel. Further investigations confirm that Discovery Kids is no longer on TV. Sure they are now online with TV on demand of some of the shows but this is truly a tragic day 🙁

Friday I worked all day. Julie was here in the morning, Dad was here for about an hour over lunchtime before Ady got home. Seems a long time ago now. Ady has been ill all week and is only really better this weekend. S woke in the middle of Thursday night with a temperature but seemed ok in the morning. She slumped mid morning and was asleep on the sofa when I got home at 5ish. She drank some lucozade but complained that everything she ate tasted funny. 🙁 She did perk up when I brought out the Shrek soundtrack I’d brought home from work though and we all spent some time dancing around the room to that. I was totally worn out and went to bed at 10pm, ending up asleep even before Davies. 😯

Saturday we deemed a pj day. Davies was clearly not right either so they watched lots of films, listening to lots of music and did lots of xboxing and barbiedotcomming. I did a load of baking (flapjacks, snickerdoodles and chocolate cake – all without beetroot naturally 😉 ) and loads and loads of washing taking advantage of the lovely sunny, windy day. My Mum called in for an hour or so and came out with me to get some clothes pegs (where do they go?) and bought the kids a kinder egg each and some minadex tonic that me and Frazer used to take when we’d been poorly. She was on good form actually, it was a nice visit. 🙂

We thought we’d got the children both asleep, exhausted by about 7pm and settled down to a nice dinner and eclipse watching but both children ended up awake for various parts of the evening / night with musical beds all over the place and I think Ady saw the moon doing it’s thing but I’d long since zonked out ready to be woken for the next shift. 🙄

Today has been by necessity another lazy day. Scarlett is pretty much over it and Davies had perked up by the end of the day depsite spending most of it sat on the sofa with his duvet wrapped round him. He was asleep nice and early and seems to be sleeping peacefully (although I don’t want to speak too soon…) so hopefully he’ll wake recovered tomorrow. He was well enough to play some xbox though so not totally broken. We had roast chicken at lunchtime although the children didn’t eat a great deal and then our friends Bruce and Paula arrived for an hour bringing with them an incubator and 19 fertilised hens eggs. 🙂 We talked last year about hatching some chicks for them (Bruce is a farmer) for the children to see it all happening and then handing back the hatched chicks at a few days old to return to the farm but the timing was never right as we were away so frequently last spring / summer. The incubation is 21 days but the eggs can be stored for up to 2 weeks before starting them in the incubator so we’re going to start them off next weekend to be sure of them not all hatching while we’re at NicCamp, tasking my Dad with daily turning of the eggs along with feeding the cat and the fish while we’re away. Can’t wait 🙂 Ady has another mate who can get us fertilised duck eggs which we would actually be interested in rearing to keep but we’ll see how we get on with these ones first. Ady was getting quite emotional looking at the eggs in their boxes and muttering about new lives at our hands etc. 🙄

After Bruce and Paula left we put on High School Musical which I’ve wanted to see since it was talked about last year but have only just got to the top of the waiting list for at work. Davies and I snuggled up and watched it all the way through with Tarly coming in to dance to the songs and Ady being initially snitty about it being ‘no Grease!’ to ‘well that was alright actually’ – told him it’s working title had been Grease 3 and when we went back to the singalong bit with all the songs he was singing along too. 😆

Which, in brief, brings us up to date. Scarlett has been coughing loads in the her sleep and was sounding a bit bark-y which was worrying me so I’ve been googling croup ready to pounce and blogging this to kill half an hour while I listen to her but she seems to have quietened down and is more peaceful now too, so again, fingers crossed for a decent nights sleep and a brighter pair of children in the morning.

A line from one from the valleys for St Davids day 🙂

I’ve had lots of reminders from Davies this week of just how much a small child remembers things. He was talking about something, I’ve totally forgotten what of course, at the weekend which had happened when he was about 3 and a half. He recalled it really clearly and in detail. He also showed at Paradise Park how much he’d taken in about dinosaurs way back when he was obsessed with them aged 2. We’ve definitely recapped a few times over the years but he still remembers all sorts of names of them and other information. Today he and Tarly were playing with the toy animals (and the geomags, natch! 😉 ) and lining them all up in different types and deciding whether they were young or old. Ady had arranged to work from home today as he was still feeling (and looking) pretty crap. Our original plan was for me and Tarly to go to Fun Junction and for Davies to stay here and have some one to one time with Ady. Davies changed his mind about this about 14 times during the course of the morning including tears at one point which I finally established were about Scarlett getting lunch at FJ which if you have one of their ‘lunchbox’ deals comes with a small toy (usual value approx tuppence! plastic tat!). Having promised there was no way I’d be buying her one of those – I usually get them one to share, he was happy to stay behind as planned.

So Scarlett and I headed off in Ady’s car and as Davies’ seat was still in the front from Badgers last night I bunged her in that and she sat in front with me. I don’t think we’ve ever gone anywhere with her in the front before so she loved that. During the ten minute drive to FJ we talked about all sorts of things including a very basic first driving lesson – oh how educated my children would be if they were only children who I took out in the car a lot 😆 Oh to be a MOO on the road (MOOOTR). Which reminds me does anyone know why bird droppings are brown and white? Davies and decided it must be because it is wee and poo combined and a quick poll of others today confirmed this to be a common assumption. Infact noone seemed to know whether birds even had a seperate way of expelling urine. I’ve done a quick google and it seems to be something refered to but I can’t find any sort of definitive answer and wondered if anyone knew? Ady’s car has everything on the dashboard clearly labelled so there are words and letters everywhere and Scarlett happily picked out all of the letters for her name from it.

We got to FJ and found Lucy, R and R already there so Tarly ran off to play with them and Julie, Jack and Maisie arrived shortly afterwards. S was not at her best, possibly a combination of jabs yesterday and it just feeling so very strange to be without Davies. None of the other children seemed to notice his absence but Tarly did miss him and I felt very odd without him. It wasn’t even any easier particularly as S was hard work wanting a variety of things without D to jolly her out of it or distract her like he normally does. Lucy left after lunch and Julie and I stayed for less than a further hour before popping into the main library. S and I chose a few books and left Julie, J and M still there. Scarlett played on the kiddie computer for a little while and managed to get to a page where it required a password. Her barbie.comming has taught her that a small white box with a flashing cursor means it needs her to type her name in so that is what she did. Except it is one of those dumbed down kiddie keyboards (which I could rant about for ages) with lower case letters in alphabetical order and primary colours. So my poor uppercase qwerty familiar baby was thrown. But not for long. She hovered over where the letters would be on a qwerty and with the exception of choosing f instead of t – easy mistake, particulary when f is nearly where t would be anyway – she managed that 🙂

We got home to find Ady and Davies had had a good time but A was fading fast and I thought it would be a good idea to get Davies out for some fresh air and exercise so I took them both into Lancing to use their World Book Day vouchers. They didn’t get excited by the specially prodcued WBD selections (and I can’t blame them, I’d have struggled) and after lengthy consideration they both chose an activity book. Which actually given the wealth of books we already have and the endless supply of story books from work was probably a good choice. So I had to put two quid each towards their selections. Tarly got a princesss book and Davies got a Chicken Little one but they kept them entertained for a good couple of hours and they both took them to bed having done dot to dots, spot the difference, mazes and colouring in in them both so that was money well spent.

When we got home I put Hoodwinked on which I’d borrowed from work. I’d been really impressed with it when we’d seen it at a FilmEducation screening, considering it exactly the sort of thing I’d have been so proud to have worked in writing and wasn’t disappointed with a second viewing. I love the clever take on an already known story, I think the writing is slick, the gags are fast paced and funny and it appeals on a universal level. So the kids did their books and we all watched that then they had tea and a bath.

Scarlett looked at her book in bed for a while before falling asleep fairly quickly but Davies kept coming downstairs while I was cooking the dinner. Now I know (not least because I recall using the same tactics) that asking really clever, insightful questions or getting an adult talking about a topic you know they are happy to discuss is a really good way of killing time for a child so I’m always aware that when Davies is wanting to stay up later he will employ just such skills but I’m also happy to answer and talk about some things as and when they crop up so our white board in the kitchen (not sure how to qualify this really as we do indeed have a whiteboard in the kitchen and explaining it as where we write the menu planner for the month probably does nothing to dispel the wrong impression I know people will be getting from that mental image. But most of you have been in my kitchen so are probably imagining a very accurate thing actually!) now has loads of years of birth on it (mine, Ady’s, my parents, Davies’, Scarlett’s, Richard’s and Jasper’s) and some examples of decades, centuries and milleniums, including 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000 and 1000000 just because he noticed the pattern of increasing noughts. All because we have a novelty tin can of 20th century air in our kitchen and I was explaining the joke and how the year 2000 was a big thing and that not many people get to see the turn of a century let alone the turn of a millenium and how many generations to come it will be before the year 3000. Which led onto me talking about how 2000 was built up and from being a very little girl I had wondered what my life would be like in the year 2000. Then he said what sort of Daddy he thought he’d be with examples of how he would allow lollies before dinner, which he quickly backtracked on as he realised the dilemmas of parenting and responsibility 😆

Then we got onto why some people don’t get married – it bugs both my children that my brother still lives at home and is not married and doesn’t have children. Which serves really only to demonstrate now unrepresentative most of our friends are with their classic nuclear families with two parents and all ;). We do know one family where the parents have split up so we talked about them and Davies said mummies and daddies should always stay together otherwise it would upset the children. I am a bit crap at agreeing with things like that even when it is an hour and a half past bedtime and my hypothetical reply may give nightmares so I did a gentle ‘well no actually’ answer with plenty of reassurance that I am not about to choose to leave Ady though because ‘I think Daddy’s great!’ 😆 which then led us to families with two mummies or two daddies or just one with the other not around at all for various reasons (for which I’m afraid Dani and Allie you were my best example of a two mummy family so there is a possibility of questions from Davies at MM Allie 🙂 ) which went dangerously close to the whole egg and seed conversation with questions about the colour of the eggs and the seeds and whether he could see them under his microscope or not? We then talked about time capsules (we buried one under the floorboards here in 1999) and the Millenuim Dome (which we visited when I was very newly and still unknowingly pregnant with Davies) before we began to touch on things which simply had to be ‘wait until tomorrow and we can explain it properly’ type areas.

I was saying to Julie and Lucy today how very much I enjoyed Davies being four, it was quite my favourite age of his so far and I am enjoying Scarlett being four just as much. I love the combination of independance, spirit and exploration with the additional rationality, patience and articulacy four has with the echoes of toddlerdom still very much in evidence. But actually this new side of six with it’s enhanced level of wonder at the world, curiosity about times before he was created and wanting to know about me and Ady’s childhood is a whole new area of wonder too that I am really enjoying as we get there.

Work all day tomorrow – Julie is here in the morning for the first time which I think will be a good thing for Davies as Jack is a good combination of hero-worshipping and proper ‘boy’ company and Maisie and Scarlett are excellent at either getting lost to play ponies together or providing the perfect princesses for when Davies and Jack want to be dragons :). And then, woo and also hoo, it’s the weekend 🙂