One word? When seven would do…

Curiously not the first time I’ve used that as a post title – must go and check what the previous one was, bet it was a Home Ed camp of some sort :).

Saturday morning I went off to work while Ady did splendid work keeping Davies and Scarlett’s excitement slightly under fever pitch (well he hadn’t felt the need to strap them to their beds or anything so I assume he managed to do so 😉 ). They picked me up at 1pm from work, having come in to choose a selection of dvds to take to watch on the journey which meant their excited chatter spilt into the library for the last 10 minutes of my shift. The journey was ok – we went through pretty much all sorts of weather conditions on the way including bright sunshine and torrential rain. Scarlett slept for a lot of the journey with Davies almost constantly eating the variety of snack food we’d packed. We arrived about 430pm whereupon it began to drizzle with rain and I had an almost immediate hissy fit about not being able to camp next to *my friends*, which was all speedily remedied by Colin moving his car so we could pitch in the dip between them and Merry, the rain clearing up and James coming over with beer :).

We did pitch the tent. Then we re-pitched the tent. Then it rained, ever such a lot and we took shelter in Kirsty and James’ tent (and drank more beer) and then Kirsty took me to Morrisons to get food supplies. Then I had another hissy fit about the tent still not being pitched right (are you starting to notice a pattern? ;)) and while Ady sat in the car with the children I tried to re-pitch it again in the pouring, driving rain. The problem seems to be a combination of a cheap tent with design fault in it’s tautness and very probably being a single season tent coupled with a very wonky pitch on very uneven ground. Once the rain had stopped a small crowd of far more knowledgable and experienced campers gathered with an eventual verdict of it not being remotely suitable for camping, in that field, in that weather, for that night. I was steadfastly refusing to believe this at all but the point when I waved Ady goodbye while Chris was blowing up my airbed and making up bedding for me in his and Alison’s tent while my clothes were being stowed in Lucy and Colin’s tent and my food was remaining in Kirsty and James’ car boot was a particular low point where I was torn between feeling immense gratitude towards all my lovely friends and the almost overwhelming urge to sit in the middle of a puddle and cry my eyes out. Thankfully the moment passed when my joke to Chris about my airbed having a puncture to top it all off was proved prophetic and we had to dig out the single spare airbed we’d brought along. 🙄 Fairly shortly afterwards I realised Ady had gone off with my make up too. Call me shallow, call me vain, but I really struggle without my eyeliner and mascara, not to mention my concealer for that big spot brewing under my nose that could probably be seen from space.

However, a lovely evening was had, Chris sat with D&S which enabled me to drink and catch up with friends in Steve and Sarah’s awning followed by a few of us sitting in the marquee for a while and aside from a 2am need to wee (I did it in the dark behind the tent :oops:) I slept well.

Sunday – I had slept in yesterdays contact lenses and then very VERY foolishly took them out before heading over to the shower having realised just as I screwed them up and threw them in the field next to the tent that my contact lenses were in the same bag as my make up. Oh and my glasses. This meant I did wonders for the political correctness of the camping field ticking off back homeless and disabled as without some assistance I am ridiculously shortsighted even struggling to distinguish between my own and other peoples’ children from any more than about 2 foot away. It was still raining and by now I was quite enjoying kidding myself that the fact I couldn’t see anyone meant they couldn’t see me (without make up and with big spot) either. Davies had his first taste of independance going to visit a friend in the statics while Scarlett played with Eve and Rei and I sat in Em’s tent drinking copious volumes of tea and eating bombay mix while picking out the lentils :lol:.

Ady arrived with the only suitable tent in our collection of 3 (one borrowed, one paid for, one still in the ether of delivered in error and not yet collected) which Em helped us pitch (while it rained a bit more) and suddenly the world seemed a much better place. We set up our gazebo infront of the tent and with our camp kitchen and wind break it all looked like a proper little temporary home for the week. I was introduced to the ‘joy’ of Sparkys Krew Club and very quickly decided that if nothing else came good that week I would come home with a medal 😆 There was a gathering of people outside our tent when I got back from Sparkys, where Ady was cooking a lovely curry which was ready just as another downpour started so everyone scattered and we ate in our tent. Merry appeared with a bottle but no bottle opener and while we were trying to work that one out Bob and Katy arrived in the dark in the pouring rain. We attempted to put up some pup tents to accomodate them (there were times this week when I was mightily disappointed in myself but other times when I was quite proud of myself, this was one of the latter – time was when I would have sat in a car wailing faced with wind, rain, dark and tents to errect, but not only did I have a headtorch of my very own, I knew which pole was supposed to go where and everything 🙂 ). It didn’t work so once we’d installed them in Merry’s cavernous tent and done some repair work to the marquee we decamped to Chris and Helen’s tent with Alison for more wine, crisps and chatting.

Monday morning Scarlett woke around 5am wailing. I’d been awake for some time with the knowledge that one corner of the tent over the kids’ bedroom pod was flapping (no idea how I knew this, I just did, and I was right 🙂 ) and had been debating getting up to fix it. I got up and moved Scarlett into our bedroom and unzipped the tent to go and sort the corner out to be faced with a faceful of white gazebo roof. I decided this was a sign that I shouldn’t go out and deal with it so sent Ady instead. He never came back, taking the opportunity to dismantle the gazebo, move the kitchen to the side of the tent and go and have a shower while I snuggled up next to Scarlett and went back to sleep. I start to lose track of the days at this point but I know it was Em’s Samba workshop in the morning which was utterly fab. I really wanted to join in but neither of the children were up for it at the time so I didn’t. Davies joined in late though and the water bottle drums echoed round the field at various points for the rest of the week. Ady and Davies went swimming in the afternoon while I sat infront of our tent with the henna out ready for painting. No one arrived but I enjoyed sitting with my feet in a bucket of water for an hour or so, which did wonders both for thawing them out and cleaning some of the ingrained mud off them. My toe was properly diagnosed as broken so I felt justified in the fuss I’ve been making about it and Scarlett soaked her feet alongside mine. More Sparkys in the evening and I think that was the night that Davies won a medal up there while my quest went unfulfilled. More sitting round our tent that night and eating a very nice spaghetti bolognaise that Ady had cooked.

Tuesday – I think that was the day of all the tent moving. By now, three solid days of rain had marked the field into ‘crap for tenting’ and ‘utterly impossible for tenting’. I’d fallen over 3 times and was on my last pair of clean trousers (the first and second time was with good humour, the third time involved a lot of swearing!) so we moved various tents to better areas within the fields. I think this was also the day Merry, Helen and I went to complain and the day we all went swimming. I could be wrong :lol:. It was definitely the day my patience ran out with a certain child and their parent and I did a spot of behaving for which I am certainly not proud, but probably not particularly ashamed of either. I’m pretty sure this was also the day we had a really pleasant evening outside The Beans tent which was sullied by some complaining about noise levels. Yup, I’m pretty sure this was the day my utter sense of humour bypass was carried out, in a muddy field, with rusty instruments. We did do some tie dyeing which was great, and Scarlett and I did some scoobie and beads stuff in the seasiders room. We ended up leaving the site for teatime and having a KFC in the car followed by a quick run round on Lowestoft beach in a short break in the rain. Back for Sparkys and the karaoke competion, won by Anna.

Wednesday – Africa Alive! I like Africa Alive! I like the fact that all the staff seem to work there because they are genuinely passionate about animals and that any money made seems to be ploughed back into yet another developement for the animals. I like the enclosures which seem far more about being nice for the animals than good for showing them off, I like the fact you can get *really* close to lions, giraffes, zebras etc. and I quite like the train too. Unfortunately Davies and Scarlett were at Day Five Of Home Ed Camp phase by then so were more interested in the ducks and the slide than the wild creatures of Africa we’d spent over 20 quid for them to come and ogle, they were both tired and wanted to cuddle with their heads in our laps during the train ride instead of look at the animals and I spent most of the train ride either on the phone to Merry or Em trying to sort out the payment to Africa Alive! We hopped off and pretty much got that sorted (although I know Merry would have managed to sort it perfectly well without me 🙂 ) and then went into our Discovery Session. That was excellent actually, true it was the same animals we’ve petted for the last 3 years – Davies made me laugh when he told the woman that he’d stroked Charlie the cockroach when we came last year and she said ‘shall I let you into a secret? We’ve got a whole tankfull of Charlies in the back!’ 😆 We had a late picnic lunch, chatted to Ali, J and Freya and then went for a final look at the lions, during which I had a phonecall from a friend for nearly an hour which went all the way back to the car, through the gift shop and most of the way back to Morrisons. We went for our final trip to Sparkys where I managed to achieve my weeks ambition of winning a medal for adult achievement. Justice was finally served and it was almost worth the endless dances to The Macarena and the truly dreadful costume character show to win it ;).

Thursday we’d decided was to be our last full day. I’d been due to do a pebble painting craft in the afternoon but having gained use of a room off reception for our activities we’d decided that the Caberet Evening should be pulled forward to a Caberet Afternoon instead, plus I was rather reluctant to be doling out paint to small children in a carpeted room as opposed to the sunny field I’d anticipated. Having decided that I’d allowed the first day / night crisis of canvas, the weather and the camp wankers to interfere way too much with the holiday I’d anticipated having with my family and friends we buggered off out for lunch and some time on Lowestoft beach. It was cold, but it wasn’t raining. Ady and I managed to chat about various things which had been pissing us off all week and we returned to the campsite ready for a caberet followed by a nice last evening. Caberet was good, as per last year. Davies did the inbetween bit but having been keyed up for bigger build ups at home he wasn’t on top form and just introduced acts. He and Scarlett had a proper turn planned but despite getting changed Scarlett developed total stage fright. I offered Davies the chance of doing nothing, something alternative or whatever he wanted. He ended up taking his keyboard up to the stage and doing a sort of medley of the demo tracks on it. He was very disappointed that Scarlett hadn’t don their act and if I’d have fitted in her tutu I’d have done it with him instead, but he dealt with it really well. The sun shone, having already got my medal I had no need to go to Sparky’s, the children were finally doing the running around the field playing in a big group thing they’d all come along to do, Ady cooked a lovely dinner of steak sandwich and chips (on a camping stove, the man is a genuis 🙂 ) and Doug made fire! It was a really nice evening ending with just a couple of us left round the fire talking nonsense until way past 3am.

Friday – After another 5am waking Scarlett ended up in bed with me. Ady gave up and went to sleep in the car and none of us woke until nearly 10am. We packed up very s l o w l y finally getting going around 130pm. It was Wallace and Gromit’s Wrong Trousers Day which I’d planned to do an event for but had just completely run out of patience, energy and enthusiasm for anything other than a bath and a bed by that point so we headed for home. We took a fair old while to get home, stopping at Tescos in Ipswich for (very late) lunch and then again at Dartford Costco to renew our annual membership, get some photos developed and drink tea. We finally reached home around 745pm. Davies and Scarlett had a bath while Ady unloaded the car. I scrubbed them with a nail brush but they still have ground in dirt, as have I. 😆 They went to bed, I popped out for some basic food supplies and we finally ate dinner around midnight having both had baths too.

Saturday – A slow start this morning with Ady doing stuff for the chickens while I flickr’d. Then we had to get my car taxed at the post office, drop Ali’s laptop back to her (we provided door to static delivery service :lol:) and do our months food shopping at the supermarket and the butcher. Home in time to watch last weeks’ Doctor Who and then get ready for bed before tonights.

I woke to the surprise news that it is mooncup time, which means it is just as well we’d come home yesterday as I was not at all prepared for that at camp either. Makes me wonder whether peroids are brought on by PMT symptoms or PMT symptoms are because you are about to come on really 😆

There are loads of pictures on flickr and having now blogged and looked at my own and others photos I am coming to the conclusion that it was actually not just a week I endured but one I enjoyed too. I am very glad it was not my first experience of tenting, I’m very sorry I didn’t manage to lay on any of the activities I’d planned, I met some new people I liked a lot, some I didn’t like at all, some I’m reserving judgement on and some I never actually identified at all. I came to the week with some expectations which were quite spectacularly not met and I think my crown of eternal optimism slipped rather a lot, but overall the children enjoyed it, the evenings were lovely, once again friends rallied round to help out in tricky times and whilst I’m not sorry to think I’ll never see Kessingland beach again it was overall a good week. Oh, and did I mention I won a medal? 😉

I’m disinclined to post today really cos I’ve been very short tempered and annoyed most of the day (one of those where the childrens’ noise levels and my own shrieking have made me very glad we live in a detached house, otherwise I’d be expecting social services round any moment to do a nighttime raid and remove the poor poor children from my inexpert and rubbish care).

But we’re packed and ready to go 🙂

First thing we did some watching Class TV – they really enjoy it actually, it is very varied and often sparks all sorts of interesting conversations, plus I get to go on a nostalgia trip about sitting cross legged aged 8 in the TV room at school in the dark watching that clock tick round before the programme started and edging closer to Stuart Smith while no one was watching 😉 Oh how I wanted to grow up and marry Stuart Smith when I was 8 😆

Then we whizzed over to drop some plants off and collect some vegan foodstuff from Ali to take to Kessingland to make their load on public transport a little lighter (see I can be lovely ;)) and called into Asda to get last minute bits and snacks for the car tomorrow.

We came home for lunch and while I tried to do various online bits and pieces the children practised their ‘turn’ for Kessingland, honing it into something a little more polished and slightly briefer once I pointed out that other children would also be wanting to entertain us and it was only one night 😆 I still can’t quite believe that they are going to get up and do it, particularly Scarlett as there was no way I had that confidence as a child, but Davies stood at the front last year and did warming up to the point that he wants to compere it this year (and has lots of cheesey lines prepared in the style of a host :lol:) and Scarlett packed the two outfits she needs for her part in a little musical theatre they have planned, which has a storyline and everything so we’ll see :). I spent ages procrastinating before finally getting going and assembling all the stuff we’re taking which wasn’t already in the garage into the playroom. We have a stacking crate each of clothes (mine is the fullest :oops:) and it is all now finally in the car thanks to Ady.

The children were packed off to bed before 7pm, partially for their own wellbeing as my final shred of patience ran out around 3pm, I took to the bath with a large glass of wine while Ady was being a ‘representative of management’ at a company barbecue held to mark the end of the season to thank all their foreign workers. He got home around 830pm to find both children still awake and Davies now told that he is definitely not coming on holiday with us – might have to retract that in the morning ;). The car is now loaded up, pizza is waiting to go in the oven as soon as Ady gets in the bath (he’s still faffing around packing Pompey tops) and I am sufficiently inebriated to feel no pain. 🙂

I’m working in the morning (it should have been the afternoon but I’ve managed to swap shifts) and we’re leaving straight after work so I’ll not be online any more after tonight. Really looking forward to a relaxing week, hoping sufficient organisation has been done in advance to mean there are no traumas while we’re away and I get to spend some nice time with friends and some time with my family too, rain or shine it’s going to be a good week :).

I didn’t get downstairs until nearly 10am this morning but for once it wasn’t because I was languishing in bed, I was sorting through the wardrobe getting stuff out for camp and trying to find this very expensive stuff I bought for the first Kessingland which you paint on over make up and it turns it waterproof. Yes I know 😳 which is probably why I’ve never actually used it but thought I’d take it with us this time and got a real bee in my bonnet about it when I couldn’t find it. It did turn up in the end, it had fallen behind the cupboard in the bathroom so I needn’t have gone through the wardrobes at all but it was a job well done. Then I put away all the clean washing with the children ‘helping’ (why is it so difficult to carry a neatly folded pile of clothes from one room to another and get them put into a drawer without screwing them all up in the process? :roll:) and then we came downstairs.

They got dressed, ate breakfast and lolled around infront of Class TV, it was Watch this morning and lots of it was about religion so that started some conversations about Heaven and Hell and God and Jesus including Davies saying:
D: so God is in charge of Heaven isn’t He?
Me: Ye-es
D: so who is in charge of Hell then?
Me: the devil
D: so Jesus was God’s son?
Me: yep
D: so who is the devil’s son then?

Various answers sprang to mind 😉 but I explained that little has been written about the life and times of the devil and that seemed to suffice. There was also some talk about earthly bodies and heavenly bodies and why it is only our soul that would go to Heaven. I tend to let them decide for themselves about such things on the basis that I have no belief at all and if they are going to develop one of their own, then it should be just that – their own. Surely there is no right and wrong in their interpretation and if they are going to ‘find’ something then it needs to be on their terms and fit what they want it to – for now at least.

I left them to it and went to saw up some more pallets but Dad had left me a very crappy saw – I demonstrated to Davies how crappy by sawing on my hand with it without it leaving a mark and explained that with good tools the hard work is done by the tools with you guiding them but with crappy tools you are the one putting all the effort in. I did lots of working out angles and drawing lines to be cut when Dad arrived with a decent saw and removing rusty nails before giving up and deciding I needed something indulgent to reward myself for a long hard week. So we made some scones to have with our home made strawberry jam. 🙂 While they were cooking we walked round to the local shop for some cream to have with them. As we went we were discussing when Davies might be able to go to the shop on his own. It would mean crossing one very quiet road which he could do infront of our house and then going round two corners (the shop is on the same block as our house, just the parallel road to ours). Surprisingly, as Davies historically has been loathe to take any independance, he was really up for it and keen to do it right now. We decided he would need to be a bit better with money first – able to know what money to give and get change etc. He was quite adamant he is able to do this now, demonstrating it by pointing out price tickets he knew and telling me there is 100 pennies in one pound and that 8 pence is four 2 pence pieces etc. I think the time for pocket money is nigh and equally the motivation to control it and be able to go to the shop to spend it might well prove his maths trigger :). Have decided to give them both ‘holiday money’ for next week to spend as they so wish and today he bought sweets for him and Scarlett at the shop too. Very excited about this next phase of growing up for him, only this weekend we were talking about when he’d be ready to learn how to make cups of tea but he’s still too short to manage that without standing on stools, which I’m not keen on the idea of with boiling water involved – hurry up and grow Davies! 😆

We came home, Davies whipped the cream for me and we all had scones with jam and cream for lunch which was gorgeous and did some henna body painting, which we then all washed off too early so it’s already fading but at least I’m getting the practise in. Then we were off to the PYO farm for some fruit picking. We met Lucy and The Rs there and Julie, Jack and Maisie joined us after a short while (or as Davies very specifically answered when they arrived and Julie said ‘have you been here long?’ 15 minutes! He was actually about right too and I should probably start assuming that every similar incidence is a fluke rather than a genuine understanding of how long ‘about 15 minutes’ is which he probably has). We picked peas and strawberries, but in modest amounts as last year we went fruit picking a couple of days before Kessingland and came home with tons of stuff I had to give to my parents as we were going away. I got enough strawberries to finish up with the scones and some peas to eat raw tomorrow, or even bring with us as a present for Alison ;).

The children all love it there and they had a whale of a time, they made friends with two other children and Davies, Scarlett, Jack and Maisie befriended a young couple with a small toddler too, chatting away to them at the other end of the field. Then we hopped on the tractor that goes round the crop fields for a ride round the circuit, with the children talking to everyone on the tractor. We pulled in at the start and as it was quite pleasant Julie and I and our four children stayed on while Lucy and The Rs hopped off and we went round again. 🙂 Scarlett’s shoe (pretend crocs) had broken a rivet again so on the spur of the moment we dashed into Rustington to get a new pair for her which come complete with a set of jibbitz which you can use to fix instead of rivets – so fixing her pink shoes and getting her another new pair for just £5.99. I parked right outside and as she’d already requested ‘orange like Davies’ I dashed in, leaving them in the car to grab a pair – and found Lucy and The Rs in there crocs-a-like purchasing too :). Dashed back out again and home in time to meet my Dad at 4pm.

The children played in the garden while we built our chicken coop. It is far from perfect and certainly not a work of art or even much to be proud of but we were working with the crappest wood – dismantled pallets which were rotten in places, riddled with nails and very rough and ready. It has made me long for money to buy decent timber and do it properly as my design worked fine and is totally suitable – might take some pics tomorrow if I get time. It’s butted up to the run we built which we’ve made a hole in to allow them to be in and out of the coop and run during the day and then herded into the coop at night with a door coming down to keep them in. It took until nearly 8pm by which time we’d both had enough. Ady had come home and fed and bathed the childen. Dad left and I remembered we’d run out of cat food so had to pop to Sainsburys to get some so that cat would stop mithering us, then home for a bath and cooking dinner while Ady did various outdoory things.

We started doing a mental checklist of all the stuff for camping and realised we don’t know where the airbed it. We have 3 potential places we’re thinking it might be – cupboard under the stairs, garage or loft space in Davies’ bedroom so that’s tomorrow morning’s job. We also need to pack up all our clothes into a folding crate each and then we’re pretty much ready to go. Ady is loading the car up tomorrow night, I’m working Saturday morning and then Ady and the children are collecting me from work and we’re off at 1pm. In honour of camping holidays and the chicks spending their first night outside it has been pouring with rain for about 2 hours. I’m off to bed now having genuinely felt that today deserved it’s Longest Day title this year. 🙂

Another training day today, at Worthing again. This morning was all a bit of a flurry as I didn’t come downstairs until about 815am and then was rallying D&S to eat breakfast and get dressed so I didn’t actually get to drink the tea I’d made before Ady came home to take me into Worthing. Parking is a nightmare, expensive and a 10 minutes walk to the library anyway for long stay so it was far easier for him to pop back home after an early meeting at work and drop me off before heading off for his next meeting.

It did mean I was nearly half an hour early for the training though, so I went into the library and had 15 minutes on the computer in there while I waited. 🙂 I did the same at lunchtime and again after the training while waiting for Ady to collect me, another fab benefit of working for the library is free internet access subscription. 🙂

The training was all very interesting, but it is still very difficult to sit in a room with one person dishing out information while you try and concentrate on taking it in and storing it in your brain, makes me wonder how on earth I coped at school with it for six hours a day five days a week! It so isn’t the right way to ‘learn’ anything is it? You need to be engaged with it, find it relevant, interesting, something you actually want to know rather than something you ‘should’ know. When I think of how easily I grasp learning something I can either see a point to, need to know for a specific reason or am passionate about compared to how diffficult it is to soak up knowledge that is just chucked at me while I try and cram it in my brain it really does cement for me how we approach Home Education with Davies and Scarlett. They are just the same – something that is the answer to a question they have asked, or information to help them achieve something they want to, or is relevant to what’s happening right now or simply will enable or empower them goes in so easily, the instant I try and ‘teach’ them something or change from what they want to know to what I think they should know they just switch off and it becomes ‘work’. I don’t recall whether I ever did post my musings about learning styles that I was thinking about a while back but it’s been very interesting to watch the different tactics to soaking up knowledge that the children have and indeed what has worked for Ady while he’s been doing studying this year too. They all have very different ways to approach the challenge using different aids to assist.

So this morning was all about Reference, Information and Enquiries and was very interesting in parts. Doing this training has made me realise how different my own personal view to library services is compared to the public as a whole. I’ve always used libraries, although I slacked off in recent years when I started buying books rather than borrowing them, but it was always almost exclusively to borrow books or find a quiet, warm, dry haven to read in. I’ve never asked an enqiry there ever I don’t think and tbh it wouldn’t have occured to me to consider the library as a place to get information other than what I could dig out of the books held there myself. But it would seem that for many people it would be a first port of call for any sort of information and whilst they are being challenged by the internet and specifically search engines like google in this information giving service role there is still a big call for it to the tune of having a positive army of staff dedicated to it throughout the library service in West Sussex. We ended the morning with a tour of Worthing library with it’s massive reference section including about 40 computers, a massive area for family history including subscribed pcs for online services in geneology, a huge area for reading the many papers and magazines they have, lending books on the ground floor and the hub of the whole operation in the basement including loads of reserves of last copies of books in the county which are all stored away for reference. Some really interesting things stashed in there on the basis they may well have historical reference value some day in the future eg. a little pocket book guide of events happening to mark the year 2000 which would have seemed out of date in 2001 but actually come 2050 might well be a really interesting historical record.

We broke for lunch and I walked into town in the sunshine. I realised recently that Scarlett is currently wearing bigger pjs than Davies – he is still in very worn age4-5 ones which are halfway up his legs and looking very tired, while she has several new sets in age 5-6 years on the basis she can get two years out of them. So on the same frugal mindset I bought him 3 pairs of age 7-8 years. They are slightly on the roomy side but pass the ‘do they fall down when you jump up and down in them?’ test so that’s good :). I’ve even been using old pjs (which are no good for ebaying) as rags for cleaning (well I don’t do the cleaning obviously, but I put the pjs in the cupboard under the sink for the person who does do the cleaning 😉 ) so I truly am doing well in the frugal housemanagement stakes ;). Then I wandered back to the library and had another 15 minutes online.

This afternoon was interesting, we were set up on pcs and given a load of cards with questions a customer might come in and ask and we had to find the answers using the online subscriptions services the library uses. Previously I would simply have googled but actually that can be very time consuming for a general enquiry (a 14 year old needs help with their RE homework about Jesus Christ, give them an overview of his life and work) and of course not necessarily accurate or credible depending on the resource you use. West Sussex subscribes to all the Brittanica online encyclopedias, the Oxford Dictionaries and loads more similar sites, all neatly catalogued into subjects and age appropriate groupings. It was really interesting and I will definitely be making use of some of it from home for when the children ask me questions as you can access it via the library website using your library ticket number. We spent about 90 minutes doing that and then came back down to the basement for training on data protection and copyright while we had coffee.

The data protection and copyright stuff was very interesting, not least because I was asking (with my own agenda in place of course 😉 ) about information sharing across council departments and how much information gets cross referenced. Currently it would only be cross referenced if someone paid their £9 and got all the details held on them collated and sent to them but there are long term future plans afoot to create a backbone of cross referenced details allocating all WSCC residents their own reference number and tying up all their details from all agencies. Apparently WSCC is a frontrunner in installing this sort of technology and no other county councils are planning it at the moment and they were quick to assure me it would be accessed only at very high levels but personally I find that quite horrifying. I’m undergoing some sort of change in my feelings and views about the law, rights and the amount we are dictated to currently, with all sorts of tendancies towards anarchy coming out in me. I’ve no idea where it will end up but its been very interesting in a few recent real life and online discussions and situations to realise my once very closely held views on things have changed quite dramatically. I managed to hide all that though as clearly it was neither the time or the place to go slating such ideas ;). The training was wrapped up earlier than expected so when I rang Ady to check where he was he was still at the office an hour or so away from me. Retrospectively I should have walked home at that point as I was over half way home when he caught me up an hour later, having gone back into the library for another half hour online but I did more than enough walking today overall, to the point that the damaged toe is rather swollen today although it’s only really hurting now with direct pressure on it rather than a constant ache.

We got home and had a very quick turnaround of getting Davies ready for Badgers, the house licked into some state of tidyness, a card written for my Granny (both children signed their names) and a present wrapped up for her. We dropped Davies at Badgers and then walked with Scarlett into town to Waitrose to get a cake and then back along the beach to collect Davies. Then we went to my Granny’s house which is just down the road from Badgers where Mum and Dad were already waiting to have 90 minutes with her tonight for her birthday tomorrow. Mum is busy doing something to do with work tomorrow and although I am not actually working (I should be, but I had enough time owing to be given the day off as I have had all the training this week and am working Saturday morning) I have lots to get done in the next couple of days. It was pleasant enough round there and the children were really well behaved and I was really proud of them :).

We came home about 830pm, I sorted the chicks out, the children took themselves off to bed and Ady cooked dinner, but we didn’t eat until 1030pm. We watched an interesting programe on BBC3 about being ginger with Little Cook Small from Big Cook Little Cook. Ady sat there amazed as I reeled off the list of names I got called at school before they listed them on the programme and although it deduced that ginger men do worse than ginger women, which I would agree with, it did open Ady’s eyes at least to the fact that being ginger is something that imediately marks you out as different from other people and effects the way you are treated and therefore the way you act. I wouldn’t say I was bullied particularly for being ginger but I was always aware I was physically different and it was something remarked on from as early as I can remember as a child. Every time I go to a hairdressers I get at least one comment on my hair colour and now in my current phase of enjoying being different I am quite happy with my hair I am still aware that it is my biggest defining physical feature and gives people an expectation of my temprament before they even know me (which I appreciate is the case with blondes and even brunettes to a point but perhaps because those hair colours are more common – and less often natural – it is diluted more). Anyway, an interesting programme.

Yesterday was a slow start day with me caught up in online stuff while the children played. Davies X boxed but played about 4 different games rather than staying infront of the same one for hours and Scarlett played some elaborate game with soft toys and plastic animals. I did do a load of washing and put loads more away though and deal with the chicks, who are looking less chick-like daily.

Scarlett and I did some baking, we made some cheese scones for lunch. We were planning on doing more but ran out of time. We had the cheese scones with butter (yum) and then got ready to go out. We had an interesting conversation in the car about eating meat. Scarlett had found a chicken bone and identified it as a chicken and was concerned it was from one of the chicks. I explained it was from our roast chicken dinner the night before which led onto eating animals generally and whether it was sad or not. I explained that most of the animals we eat are bred specifically to be killed to be eaten so probably wouldn’t be born in the first place if not in order to be eaten eventually and we talked about the fact that we attempt to only eat meat that we are assured of having lived in good conditions. We also talked about the food chain generally and how we are ‘supposed’ to eat meat and are designed to be omnivors. We also talked about different creatures and whether they are herbivores, omnivores or carnivores and how their design shows us that (something they are familar with from dinosaurs – four legged walkers, big, long necks and long legs means they eat plants, two legged walkers, with sharp teeth, smaller bodies etc.). We then discussed people we know who are vegetarian and vegan, and why someone we know (mentioning no names) is a crap vegan because they eat things like honey and milk chocolate ;). There is a display of animals jaws showing how they differ depending on their diet at a park that is fairly local, we must try and get there again soon as I think it would interest them both given the conversation about it all.

I was off to Worthing library for training and D&S were off to my Dad’s for the afternoon. We stayed in my car and Dad dropped me off (no parking at the library and parking in Worthing town centre is an expensive nightmare) which led to an interesting dilemma for him when the children wanted to know why he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, resulting in them all deciding he was silly – him included 😆

The training was ok, all stuff I’ve already covered working in the branch tbh but interesting to meet other people from other branches more than anything, it was training about equal access services, so things like our schemes for delivering books to residential homes, housebound readers, items for visually impaired borrowers and hearing impaired readers, making libraries accessible for disabled borrowers generally and a bit about the library service we run at Ford prison. There were some interesting statistics given such as only 4% of visually impaired or blind people can read braille. I’m there again all day tomorrow for information services which should be interesting as it will help with training to get me ready to man the enquiry desk which I’m keen to do as it’s more varied (and you get to sit down 😉 ).

Ady came and picked me up and we went back to Dad’s to collect the children. Home for a speedy tea before Davies went off to Beavers and Scarlett had a very long bath on her own. When I collected Davies from Beavers there was a big card they’d made to send to Shoreham airport to say thank you for their recent visit. All the boys had drawn a picture of something from the airport (so that’d be planes, mainly) and they’d stuck them all inside. Some of them weren’t named, and they varied loads in terms of how they drew / coloured in etc. but Davies’, although unsigned was instantly recognisable, and really good :). I dropped Davies back home for his bath and headed back out to go and get some pallets to make a chicken coop from the industrial estate. I found a load piled up outside the unit I’d got them from before, so that was good cos he’d already told me to ‘help myself’ last time. I brought 5 home and toiled over dismantling one with a hammer and screwdriver before giving up at about 830pm when I decided it was getting a bit late for making so much noise.

Ady and I watched Hot Fuzz, well Ady watched it, I fell asleep on the sofa so went to bed at about 1130pm before the end of it.

Today has been super productive, helped no doubt by me being driven by anger at an online spat which I (very admirably I think!) walked away from although I feel inclined to rant about lengthily I won’t. We went to Tesco’s first thing, where we got various bits and pieces including 4 cheap collapsible crates for our clothes at kessingland and some preserving sugar for making jam from all the strawberries going yucky in the chiller from the PYO last week and bits for dinner this week as we seem to have been left with five portions of chicken breast and nothing else due to messing about with the menu this month a lot. I also got the children a new water pistol each (Tesco own 87 pence each) for camp. They were really well behaved all the way round, playing with the water pistols and being quite helpful until we got to the checkout where they helped load all the shopping on the conveyer belt. The cashier looked at them both and said to me ‘No school today then?’ to which I replied ‘No, they don’t go to school, they’re Home Educated’ which they took as their cue to act like lunatics for five minutes hence being a great advertisement for HE – not 🙄

Home again and I pegged out all the washing (four loads, all the dirty washing in the house, and it all dried before the storm started today, hurrah 🙂 ) before Lucy dropped Rebecca off to play for a while. I’d planned to do baking with them but they disappeared straight off to play so I waited until Lucy arrived and then made cheese scones with the girls and snickerdoodles with Davies. All of which got eaten this afternoon – best sort of baking, in place of other food and not kicking around for ages afterwards. Dad arrived shortly after Lucy, followed by Ady popping in between stores, so it was all a bit hectic here for a while until Ady went off again, Dad went outside to start pallet dismantling (found it was far quicking with a crowbar / wrench) and we kicked the kids into the garden so Lucy and I could have half an hours chatting. Lucy and the Rs left, Davies and Scarlett came back inside to play (although they spent most of the time hanging out the lounge window ‘supervising’ Dad and I with Scarlett asking helpful questions like ‘Mummy and Grandad, what the heck are you doing?!’ :lol:.

We’ve made some headway with the coop – it is rather rough and ready and unlikely to be the finished item tbh, Ady is on the case to get a very cheap damaged shed from B&Q next time one comes up and I’ll keep looking out for suitable wood on freecycle, but for now, particularly until we know how many chickens we’ll actually be keeping we’re fashioning an extension of the run we built, triangular with a door, so that Dad can herd them in and out fairly easily next week when he’s here chick and cat minding while we’re at camp. The design is mine again, with Dad providing the brute strength and the power tools and we got the two sides built today. Dad has some wood for the floor and door at home so I’ll be cutting the rest of the wood to size for the front and back over the next 2 days and then we’ll get it completed either Thursday or Friday.

Dad left, Ady came home, I fed the kids and then spent hours in the kitchen making strawberry jam and dinner, while Ady brought the chicks in and tidied the house and he children went to bed. Strawberry jam has come out really well – I got three jam jars full from our leftover strawberries which were only otherwise fit for the bin really (probably no more than about £2.50 worth from the PYO) and a £1 bag of preserving sugar, so cheaper than posh branded jam and loads nicer :). Thinking of other recipes I can try out maybe in D&S decorated jars as gifts for family at Christmas / birthdays, must start collecting screw top jars.

Fell asleep on the sofa again last night so didn’t blog. 😳

Nice day yesterday, I got up with D&S and we made fathers day cards for Ady. Very mad trying to get them to write at the same time as D knows letters and can do a lot of the spelling himself whereas S only knows a few letters and so I have to write some of them down on a seperate sheet of paper for her, so trying to combine agreeing that yes ‘A’ should come next after ‘H’ and why there is a double P in happy with Davies at the same time as showing Scarlett what L looks like and agreeing that yes there is one of those in her name pushes even the most talented multi-tasker to her limits ;). We had a hurried breakfast, Ady got given his cards, chocolates and dvd and then we were off to swimming.

Ady and Scarlett went for a walk along the beach while I sat and watched Davies. He is probably the most behind in the group now, but at the same time as not progressing at the rate of the rest of the class he is clearly progressing within himself, and most of all really enjoying it so that’s good. Yesterday he really mastered going right under the water and the look on his face when he realised not only could he do it but he actually enjoyed it was lovely to witness (and impressive to me as I still hate going under water :oops:). He does have more than a bit of a Frank Spencer element to him when he’s trying to do something sporty though and he was quite comical trying to hold a float in both arm and get his legs up to kick. He was getting them up and kicking but going nowhere with lots of splasing – just like when we was learning to crawl on the floor actually and mastered moving backwards way before he started going forwards – he was also late to walk, I wonder if that follows through in all phyiscal things somehow? He kept losing one float, then letting go of the other one to go after the first one, grabbing it and turning round to find the second one had floated off, so he let go of the first one to go after that one and so on. Meanwhile the rest of the class carried on around him while he was still in the middle of the pool doing his comedy float routine. 😆 I think the lessons are a good thing and will definitely carry on with them, but I’m hoping he makes some leaps and bounds of progress next week at Kessingland with lots of swimming and lots of attention one to one on him.

We left there and the torrential rain that had been falling since the early hours of the morning had finally stopped so we headed off to the local car boot sale. It was pretty quiet – both buyers and sellers but we got a few bargains including HP3 on video, a HP broomstick for 20p and a HP figure for a quid. Scarlett got a load of plastic cats and dogs for 20p and I got a body art kit with a load of tattoo pens for 40p which will supplement the henna I’ve got and having been practising on myself have realised will actually only be suitable for the older children anyway given how long it needs to dry.

We popped home to put the chicks out for the day and collect my Dad’s Fathers Day present and then back to my parents for the afternoon. We had lunch, my Granny came for a couple of hours, my Mum cut a load more off my hair as I’d decided it wasn’t short enough (it’s definitely short now 🙂 ) and the children played while Dad and Ady watched cricket. Frazer came home from work just after 5pm so we stayed another hour or so to catch up with him before Scarlett started to fade fast (she’s now also got the cold) so we came home for an early night for them.

Dad and I made some plans for a chicken house which hopefully we’ll get sorted this week sometime but he’s pricing up wood as he reckons recycled pallets (the only wood within our budget 😉 ) are too much hassle, so hopefully he’s got that sorted this morning. I’m off to work this afternoon (another training session at Worthing library) and I’m dropping D&S off at Dad’s on the way. I’ve promised to do some baking with S so I need to get off and do that now as we’re leaving here in an hour, so we better bake something suitable for lunch.

Sung to the tune of Kaiser Chiefs Ruby. Just because we’ve all been singing that all day today. We had it on in the car and then Julie put Kaiser Chiefs cd on at their house and later we were in the garden with all four children in the playhouse and realised they were all singing a little chorus of it – very cute and funny :). So we’ve been singing everything to that tune today ‘do you, do you want a sausage? Ah ah ah ah ah’.

I’ve realised this afternoon that it is actually 16th June today, not 17th. No idea where I got the dates muddled but I thought it was 15th June on Thursday, was writing 16th June on everything at work yesterday (luckily books get date stamped rather than written in otherwise everyone would be bringing their books back late in 3 weeks :oops:) and thought it was our 14th anniversary today – which actually it isn’t until tomorrow :oops:, so thanks for anniversary wishes and twitters, will read them all again tomorrow :).

I was reading my diary entry for 17th June 1993 earlier today, the day Ady and I got together. It’s not suitable for copying here but suffice to say everything I gushed about back then still holds true today – and more. There’s another entry about 3 weeks afterwards talking about how Ady and I have talked about getting married and having babies one day, we were always serious from day one really. We’ve proved a lot of people who knew us back then wrong by still being together 14 years later, indeed married and indeed with babies. We’ve been through a fair bit together, faced a lot of challenges and had a lot of adventures. Our relationship remains the thing I am probably most proud of in my life, the constant I can always rely on and in reading my own words from 14 years ago I recall sitting there knowing this was for keeps even then.

I had a rough night’s sleep last night, waking with the birds at about 4am and struggling to get back to sleep again thanks to their noise. Made me think twice about cockerels I can tell you ;). So I really cut it fine getting up this morning, getting out of bed, dressed, kids dressed, everyone in the car, me dropped off and sitting in the hairdressers chair within 20 minutes :). As a last minute decision as I walked into the hairdressers I had a fair bit chopped off, it looks really nice and I’m pleased with it, bit odd to feel breeze on my neck though :).

Ady and the children came and picked me up and we came home and got all the camping stuff together ready for next week stacked up in the garage. The children were really helpful, going and getting and things together, loading boxes up and so on. They are really excited about camp specifically and camping generally. And with a weekend we’ve planned with Chris and Julie today we have 4 camping trips already booked up ready for the summer. 🙂

This afternoon we’ve been over to Chris and Julie’s for a barbecue. It’s Chris’ birthday on Monday so we also had chocolate cake (contraband foodstuff in the normal way over there 😉 ). It was a lovely afternoon actually, lots of music, singing, chatting, playing, drawing and lovely food. We left there just in time to get home for Doctor Who, Scarlett tolerated about half of if before deciding she really didn’t like the pointy teeth future beings and heading off to bed. Davies watched it and I drooled over Captain Jack and I’m now drooling over James Nesbitt in Jekyll and Hyde.

I worked, it was fine.

Mum was here this morning, Dad was here this afternoon, Ady was home by the time I got back from work. I’ve worked too much this week, missed my babies and not enjoyed the too wide variety of childcare that has been necessary.

Davies has come down with a streaming cold. If one of us had to go down with something I guess this is in plenty of time for us all getting it and being over it by Kessingland, but it’s shite timing with me feeling I’ve not been around enough this week to come home to him huddled up in a blanket tonight. He is really suffering with tics and twitches atm too, which I have put down to tiredness but can’t pretend doesn’t worry me on some level as to whether there is a deeper issue.

I brought home presents for all tonight, I’ve earned overtime from the extra working so felt inclined to splash out and got Davies a Dr Who model making kit so he now has a dalek, K9, Cyberman and Tardis, Scarlett got a princess jewellry kit and a book mobile and Ady has Hot Fuzz on dvd in honour of fathers day on Sunday and our 14th anniversary tomorrow (expect a sentimental post about that if I have time 😉 ) .

And as I’m the wrong side of a bottle of wine, very tired and have to be at the hairdressers for 9am tomorrow morning I’m off to bed now.

An interesting day today. I had a full day of training sessions. In the morning it was Bibliographic Services training – the department which purchases all books, music, films etc. for West Sussex Libraries, processes them, works with the budgets to decide what to buy, what to replace etc. and then recieves in all the books, gets them ready for borrowing and sends them out to libraries. They also have all donations (and we get a lot of donations of books etc. in, even in Lancing I am aware of tens of books being given to us each week) in from libraries around the county and get them ready for borrowing with date labels, barcodes, entering them onto the system, jacketing them and doing spine labels for non-fiction or genre labels for fiction. Finally they deal with requests from our libraries for books we don’t hold on our own catalogue and want to borrow from other libraries around the country or the British Library, copies of periodicals or articles (I processed an order for one from 1947 today) and incomming requests from other libraries around the country to borrow titles from our catalogue. They also deal with determining whether to spend money on getting titles from around the county (it costs to borrow from other counties libraries) or to invest in buying that book ourselves.

It was actually a really interesting training session, although I am staggered at several things every time I attend training. One is how contradictory the training programme is – on the one hand they invest a lot in training – every member of new staff attends 8 training sessions (full day courses) in libraries around the county, so that includes freeing them up from the business or paying them to work on their days off, covering expenses for travelling, taking the trainer out of the business for the day and we also have pre-training discussions with senior staff at our branch and then a debrief after the training. They have IIP (Investors In People) accreditation, which requires that sort of level of training and is very commendable, yet when it comes down to it the actual quality of the training is poor. Many of the staff within the library service are classic library service staff, without wishing to be critical the stereotypical library worker very much exists closeted away within high up positions in the West Sussex library service. They are shy, unassuming, unable to project or come across with passion, zest or enthusiasm. They are all excellent at their day to day job, but not much cop at training. The other thing, which I now have proper statistics for is the proportionately very small numbers of support staff in offices compared to the larger numbers of staff out in libraries, but more on that later.

So the training was interesting subject matter, rather tediously presented. We did get very nice chocolate biscuits at break time though :). Next we had a practical hands on session which was good, where we got to actually put new books and donated books onto the system. I ended up being shown how to do this by the only man working in the office who I had been prewarned about as having a very bad stammer. He was utterly charming, very chatty and took ages to get every sentence out. I was torn between finishing sentences for him, smiling encouragingly as he struggled to get words out and looking away pretending not to notice. I worked with someone with an even worse stammer once, who was very open about how he struggled with it and the coping mechanisms he used, some of which I recognised this guy putting into practice. We muddled through though and ended up managing a little chat at the end with him asking me questions and me giving long answers.

Then it was lunchtime. Ady and the children had brought me over to Chichester (where the training was) and were coming to collect me again at the end, so I had to walk from one end of the city centre to the other where the afternoon session was being held. I could have got a lift with one of the people who was driving but would have felt obliged to stay with her for lunch too then and I couldn’t afford the pub lunch she was planning. So instead I had a lovely leisurely walk through Chichester, got a drink and sandwich and sat on a low wall to eat it watching the world go by and then headed to the next office (above the registry office, so very prettily the doorstep was decorated with confetti) for the afternoon session.

This was equally interesting and equally poorly executed really, we were given loads of statistics, about the standards that libraries should be meeting, about how WSCC receives the lowest budget from central government, what our budget is and how it is spent, how we are performing generally and plans for the future. The guy running the session is the Business Performance Manager which is a line of work I’ve always thought would be very interesting, and indeed could see being a really good role to have. I like going to these training courses and meeting the sort of people who are doing the kind of job I might aspire to have in 10 years or so when I am in a position to work ‘properly’ again – funny to think in a different life I’d be starting to think about that now with Scarlett due to start full time school in September.

The afternoon finished earlier than scheduled so I walked back through the city centre to meet Ady and the children, we went to McDonalds for them to have their tea and then came home via the farm where the chicks parents live (where Ady got the eggs) so we could see what they might look like when fully grown. If you’ve been looking at their recent pictures on flickr it won’t surprise you the answer to that is ‘huge!’.

The children had watched Night at the Museum with Ady, played loads outside, made some sort of first aid centre (it’s their current passion, first aid) and generally had a good day at home with Daddy. I spoke to them both on the phone at lunchtime, but when Ady is looking after them I don’t give them a great deal of thought in terms of worrying about them through the day which always makes it easier to focus on work.

We got home and I cleaned the chicks brooder out and moved them into the garage for the night – their first night outside. Someone on my chicken forum floored me yesterday by suggesting they all looked like cockerels from the most recent pictures so I’m very disinclined to build anything else until I know whether I’ve got any hens or not. They seem pretty happily settled in the garage tonight anyway so the house doesn’t stink any more which is a definite plus.

I worked this morning, which mostly involved lots of gossiping about Torchwood and Doctor Who, discussing chickens and me hobbling about on my foot. I am really surprised that more brusing hasn’t come out actually as it is really aching now and while I can walk pretty fine on it barefoot when I’m wearing shoes it does make me limp.

Came home to find four happy children having been out in the garden all morning (which also makes for a less messed up house, so all good 🙂 ), had a speedy lunch and then headed off to PYO for some strawberry picking. We met up with Julie, Jack and Maisie there too. Davies and Scarlett were off, picking fruit, pulling up onions and generally enjoying themselves with just the occassional reappearance for a cuddle or to show me their scratched legs from the straw and thistles, which allowed me chatting time with Lucy and Julie which was good. Ady rang me to say he was in the garden centre next door so he appeared just as we were making our way to the exit with strawberries and ended up taking Davies and Scarlett home, which was great as I got to play what I wanted really loudly all the way home 🙂 and eat strawberries too :).

A quick turnaround of bath, food and getting dressed for Badgers for Davies and he and I headed back out again, leaving Ady and Tarly here. I parked the car in a space alongside the SJA building so Davies kept appearing at the window to mime at me which was entertaining, while I read my book and enjoyed the peace and then was totally entertained to the point of giggling helplessly in the car when the Badgers came outside for the last 15 minutes of so of the session for a game of rounders. Davies had never played it before, and was clearly the only child who didn’t have an inkling what was going on. He was last to be picked for a team, but utterly oblivious to it and then totally flumoxed by what was supposed to be happening. He got distracted by the freshly cut grass sitting around in heaps, drifted off into his own little world, totally missed the ball thrown at him, had to be yelled at to run, dashed off in the wrong direction and had to be yelled at to go towards first base. He then stood there and was distracted again by the grass and got overtaken by both the next two batters round and ended up being pulled round by the third one. He was then offered to be backsman (not at all sure that’s the right term? the person who stands behind the batter) but was looking the wrong way so the bowler had to come and keep retrieving the ball even when it was at his feet. Finally someone yelled at him when the ball was literally right next to him, but he misunderstood and starting running towards first base when they called out ‘Davies!’ instead of picking the ball up. It was hilarious 😆 Fortunately the teams are so mixed in age, gender, size and sporting ability that is all very good natured and not very competitive so it didn’t matter, but I found it all highly entertaining to watch, showmanship and a sense of humour he does have big time, a serious threat to future olympic sportsteams, not likely 😆 And what is great is that he’s getting all the physical exercise he could ever need from running, clambering, scrambling and climbing round the garden, riding his bike, playing in the sea, picking strawberries and going for walks and getting loads of fun, enjoyment and pleasure out of it without any of the scheduled, nailbiting, doomed to a sense of failure, hatred for anything physical that I got from doing PE at school and demonstrating the same lack of aptitude for team games and organised sports as he seems to have. I don’t want to write it off, but in the same way as those things had no value and were infact quite damaging to be so publically crap at for me as a child I am so happy that they have no relevance, importance or place in his life. And that he was delighted to have entertained me with his vain attempts too.

We dashed onto the beach to grab some pebbles for me to do some more pebble painting to bring as examples to Kessingland and came home. Scarlett greeted us at the door saying ‘it’s very sad about the chicks Mummy’ which had my heart sinking. Ady had been upstairs and heard the chicks going mad, dashed downstairs to see a rat in the run with them dragging one of them about. He ran outside and managed to shoo the rat away (he was barefoot or he would have disposed of it I think – he was cursing not having time to put on the swiss army shoes first) and checked over the chicks. He’s not sure which chick it was but the rat had hold of one of the brown ones by the tail area and was dragging it back towards the hole it had dug under the run to get in. The chicks all seem fine, I can’t see any wounds on any of them but as they are only 4 weeks old today and still too young to be outside full time, but have really outgrown the tub they are in, are very stinky in the house and clearly not safe in the run after late afternoon (I assume the rat wouldn’t have struck in the middle of the day?) we’ve a bit of a dilemma really. I was planning to run with them being inside at night and outside for part of the day until we returned from Kessingland and then try to determine how many hens and how many cockerels we have so I knew how many we’d be keeping and could plan a rat-safe coop accordingly. Will have to think about this more, but I think they might be moved into the garage at night pretty soon. I’d worried about Candle or other cats, foxes and even seagulls threatening them but rats hadn’t been something I’d even thought of so that was a bit of a nasty shock.

I’m on a training course in Chichester all day tomorrow with Ady working from home to look after D&S so that will be good, I like training and it’s always nice to not have to worry about the children for a whole day and then I am working all day Friday with Mum having the children in the morning and Dad in the afternoon, so I will only have second hand reporting of what goes on at home for the next two days, you may have lots of work related wittering instead. 🙂

Today was a free day with no arrangements made and I had various possible plans in mind but as it turned out the children were very happily engaged with various things; making Doctor Who characters from lego, playing with the toy animals, watching Class TV etc. so I didn’t bother disturbing them. I did several loads of washing, put the chicks outside and when Candle the cat was fast asleep and the children were utterly engrossed in their game I snuck outside with the camera hoping to get some good shots of the chicks. In under a minute the children were out, closely followed by Candle, so although we got Freddie out for a quick photoshoot further plans were scuppered and we all came back in again.

We walked round to the postbox just before lunchtime and when we got back I realised we didn’t have any defrosted bread so I made some cheese scones and as I had ingredients out anyway and three bananas going way too brown and mushy to eat I baked some banana cakes too. Lucy and The Rs came round for the afternoon which was great as I’d really missed Lucy while she was on holiday and Scarlett, particularly, had miss Ms R too last week. The children spent most of the afternoon in the garden playing until Ady arrived home, Lucy and The Rs left and I whizzed to the supermarket for food supplies for the week.

When I got back Ady and I shut the children and cat in the house and went and got the chicks in and got my photos of them for posting on my chicken forum for ideas on their breed and gender and in a very rare show of utter organisation we were bathed and eating dinner before 830pm ( last night it was more like 1030pm, so this is worthy of note 😉 ) . Everyone, including the chicks and cat have been asleep for about an hour and I have been enjoying the peace, but now as I am working for the next 3 days I need to go to bed myself.

Ady and Davies had a great time at the airport. It’s the second time in as many days that Ady has had the chance to see Davies in a different environment to usual so I quizzed him lots on that. He said Davies seems to stick with the adults still rather than be in the thick of the children – although I have to say that is not what I have observed particularly so perhaps that is specific to Ady being around and more of a novelty than me ;). He said Davies was really paying attention to what the speaker was saying about the planes and the airport, asking intelligent and thoughtful questions and really listening to the answers – he certainly came home full of knowledge and information about what they’d seen and showed a really good understanding of it rather than parroting back what he’d been told. Ady said that was really different to most of the other boys who either messed about or didn’t really seem interested in ‘learning’. His perception was that Davies views everything as a learning opportunity whereas the other boys consider they’ve done their learning during school hours and Beavers is their socialising time, which sort of makes sense in lots of ways. Ady also said there were more than a couple of references to ‘asking your teacher at school’ and ‘when you get to school tomorrow’ too, at which point Davies always went glassy eyed and Ady thought was a shame it wasn’t ‘when you get home’ or ‘ask your parents’ instead.

While they were gone Scarlett and I got out a pile of about 15 library books and read them all curled up together on the sofa. We did some singing, some chatting and as is always the case with Scarlett lots of stroking and cuddling, she is a very affectionate child when she is in the right mood and will sit for ages brushing my hair, stroking my hand or curled up touching skin somewhere. I finally spoke to the leader of the local Rainbows group tonight too after nearly a fortnight of leaving messages on each others answerphones. Davies’ Beaver group had quite a long waiting list so I wanted to ensure if there was one for Rainbows then Scarlett’s name is on it for when she is five. It turns out there is no waiting list and she can start as soon as she’s five, so the leader is ringing me back mid August to discuss her starting from the first week in December in order to get a few sessions in before they break for Christmas. She was keen to stress there was no waiting list and she has room for more girls too so if ‘Scarlett has any little friends from school who want to join…?’ I didn’t put her right just yet, I think I’ll wait and do that in person nearer the time. I’ve also got her name down to start going to Badgers with Davies in December too so I’m feeling good that we’ve got that side of things well covered now.

Feels a bit like Noah’s ark at the moment on this blog – I’m only managing two days together at a time 😆 I did intend to blog last night but I fell asleep on the sofa, very early indeed, leaving a glass of wine half full and then staggered straight to bed when I did wake up again.

The toe is better, although still painful and very bruised, but I can walk, drive (putting weight on the foot is fine, if I was to stub it again or someone was to tread on it I might well go through the roof though) and although I didn’t sleep well on Saturday night as everytime I moved the pain woke me (which probably accounts for falling asleep so early last night) I slept fine last night. I’m thinking maybe it isn’t broken as it seems to have bent back into shape slightly now, but it is certainly injured and I’m still limping on it.

Davies had swimming lessons yesterday morning, Ady and Scarlett went for a walk along the beach while I sat and watched Davies. He is doing ok with them although he is clearly not destined to be any sort of great swimmer. I’ve always felt slightly bad that Davies isn’t more physically able, thinking that it is largely because we don’t do anything like that with him. Neither Ady or I are remotely sporty and where most boys aged about 2 seem to spend time kicking a ball around it’s not something we’ve ever done, not has he ever shown any interest in doing. The only physical thing he’s ever really enjoyed and wanted to do more of is circus skills type stuff, so I really must follow that up as I was talking to someone local the other day who was also interested in circus skills stuff for their children. Anyway, he’s trying hard with swimming although it clearly doesn’t come naturally and I can see that if Scarlett’s name comes up as soon as she is five they will probably end up in the same group. I think what he really needs is some more time in the pool to back up what he’s learnt, so hopefully we’ll get plenty of that at Kessingland and really try to move past where he is at the moment. The main thing is that he is enjoying it, which he is, and he is not scared of the water as I was at his age (and infact still am a bit).

We left there and headed off to a car boot sale. Our current wants are toy animals, Betty Spaghetty stuff and one of those china hens sitting on eggs to keep real eggs in, in very early preparation for any hens we might have starting to lay :). We bought a few bits and pieces, most noteably a shoebox full of Betty Spaghetty stuff for two quid :).

We left there and went to Lancing College Farm where I’d booked us on an Open Farm Sunday event. I’ve been up to the college before but didn’t know there was a farm there so it was nice to go and look around. It was a guided tour of the animals given by the farm manager who was very passionate and knowledgable, therefore very interesting to listen to. We saw alpacas, sheep, pigs, goats, chickens and rabbits. I listened to the talk, learning a fair bit about all the animals, particularly about their slaughter that I hadn’t known before, while the children just enjoyed roaming around among the animals. Scarlett paired up with a boy about her age and they had a whale of a time together herding the sheep about. It was all very interesting given that some of our conversations this last week or so about where we’re headed next as a family included talk of land and animals with discussion about what animals we’d most like to keep :). So yesterday and Friday at the SoE show mixing and mingling with all the livestock and farming folk has been very enlightening.

It was also the local Springwatch Festival yesterday, which was a real shame to have clashed as we’d had a really good day there last year. Probably against my better judgement given my toe I suggested we popped along there for the last hour when we’d finished at the farm, so we did just that. We had about an hour and a half there, which was long enough for the children to do a leaf search and get cloth bags as prizes and to have a quick glance round most of the stalls and enter a colouring competition, but not long enough to participate in any of the workshops which all looked fab. I started to fade fast after that so we came home. The children had their tea out in the garden, the chicks, who are spending all days out in the garden in their run now, came back in and the children were packed off for an early night. I cooked a roast dinner for Ady and I an then, as mentioned at the beginning of the post, fell asleep on the sofa.

Today was Magical Mondays. So after doing several loads of washing and putting the chicks out for the day we picked up Ali and Freya and got there shortly after 11, having had a discussion about songs without their title in the lyrics (could only think of Bohemian Rhapsody off hand) when Scarlett was all excited about hearing a song title in it’s lyrics and I explained that actually that isn’t really a novelty and does indeed normally happen with most songs. There have been some issues at MM lately which after a flurry of emails this last week were discussed at length by the adults present today. I think that some progress was made, I know I am feeling more inclined to invest and commit myself now as a result. We won’t be there for the next couple of weeks and after that it moves outside to parks for the summer, which realistically we probably won’t attend every week, particularly once Beavers finishes for the summer and we are free to do whatever the mood takes us when we get up in the morning. I let D & S play outside today which I don’t normally do, and they enjoyed.

Later Davies is off to Shoreham airport with Beavers, which Ady is going along to too and currently the children are playing with toy animals and Betty Spaghetty reinacting the Doctor Who they’re watching at the same time – one I don’t remember called The Five Doctors and I’m off to cook their tea.

Yesterday I was woken to the sound of rain. Not good as we were planning a trip to the South of England Show for the day. A quick phone conference with my Mum about the state of the weather meant my Dad went off to work and we agreed to talk again in an hour. An hour passed and although it was still raining the BBC weather forecast for Ardingly was sunny intervals with no rain and it did look like it was clearing up, so we decided to go anyway.

Ady was off doing his second and third exams. He didn’t have a great day, the questions were focussed on a couple of areas he’d not been advised to revise on, so we’ll have to see whether he did well enough on the other questions or has sufficient generic H&S knowledge to have answered those questions well enough to pass. He is not confident but is just massively relieved that the exam is over and he doesn’t need to be either revising or feeling guilty about not revising every time he has a spare ten minutes. I’m really proud of him for sticking with something he found particularly challenging, regardless of the results and even if he doesn’t pass this time he can retake in December and can already quote ‘trained to NEBOSH standard’ on his CV regardless of whether he has the actual qualification or not ;).

Mum arrived, laden with picnic and we headed off to Ardingly in Ady’s car (he’d taken mine to college). The children put on a Doctor Who dvd (Cybermen episodes) to watch which scared Scarlett to the point she needed a cuddle. My Mum was convinced she was about to be sick as she’d gone white although I was pretty sure she was just scared (my Mum is totally phobic about vomit though which accounts for her hysteria) and was begging me to pull over. It took a while before it was safe to do so in a bus stop and a quick cuddle and chat with Scarlett reassured me she was fine and we put some music on to sing along to and all was well for the remainder of the journey.

Ardingly was great, as ever. Loads of stalls to look at, things to try out and learn about and livestock to look at. The children ground some grain to make flour, had a look in an ambulance (and sat in the drivers seat – D tried to turn the sirens on :lol:) We looked at pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, bats, birds of prey and horses. Davies amazed the British Red Cross volunteers to the point they took me aside to ask where he’d gotten his resuss. knowledge from having placed his hands correctly on the dummy’s chest and used the right terminology when talking to them about it. I explained he was a Badger (SJA) but all the while was wondering what they’d make from Aprilia if they were impressed with Davies. 🙂 Scarlett demonstrated loads of knowledge about chicks and chickens too, being thrilled to see a very large, very proud, very tame, very impressive cockerel – and then watched a hen in a cage lay an egg and went off to tug the sleeve of an official to let them know all on her own :). They both spent ages talking to a woman from the customs and excise department exhibiting endangered species souveniers seized at ports and airports and the various ingeneous methods of smuggling drugs into the country. I’m always staggered at the information they retain from various places and the confidence with which they retell it and interact with adults – utterly confident that they have something to say worth listening and totally expectant that people will want to hear it. As ever they did me proud :).

They both required a bath when we got home, so had a speedy dinner followed by bath followed by bed, but it was a late night, again.

This morning we finally watched last weeks’ taped Doctor Who, fretting that although it was not a follow on episode tonight we probably shouldn’t watch tonights until we’d seen last weeks. I cried, Scarlett lost interest, Davies and Ady deemed it a ‘bit soppy’. We needed to stock up on chick food so we dashed over to the supply store which due to loads of traffic took way longer than expected and meant we were all cutting it fine for our afternoon arrangements. I was off to work and Davies was taking part in an ‘It’s a knockout’ tournament with Beavers. I was really sorry to miss it, but Ady took loads of photos. Due to our rushing I ended up in town slightly early for work so had a quick look in the charity shops and ended up buying a skirt, a jumper, a t shirt and a shirt for under a tenner altogether. :).

Work was slow, particularly as I had a specific place I’d rather have been. I’ve been thinking lots about seperation between me and the children and probably have a blog post about it floating round my head for a less late in the evening and more sober time. Ady and the children collected me from work and we headed off for McDonalds tea for the children and me to pick up a few bits of shopping from the adjoining Tescos.

We came home in time for a bath for the kids before Doctor Who. I dashed round to get the chicks in – they’d been out in the run all day and needed their brooder clearing out. I need to give a bit of background here about just how clumsy I am – I probably stub my toes on average twice a week, am always covered in bruises and scratches and quite genuinely do walk into doors, fall down stairs and collide with door handles on a regular basis. Anyway, I was walking up some very shallow steps in our garden with the chicks plastic brooder when I caught my two smallest toes on the chicken run, stumbled, dropped the brooder (making a big hole in it where it slammed down on the steps) and instantly realised I’d done more than my normal stubbed toe. My little toes sit almost underneath the next toe up on both feet normally but it is currently bent right out away from the other toe at a very queer angle and depsite lots of anaethesatising wine it isn’t really easing in pain. I have now bandaged it to the next toe along and taken some pain killes but I am anticipating a rough night and hoping it doesn’t call an end to tomorrows plans.

We watched Doctor Who (well Davies and I did, Scarlett got scared and went to bed and Ady went to read her a story), children went to bed, I mostly moaned about my hurty toe and Ady cooked dinner.

I’ve done loads of thinking about all sorts of things this week, lots of which I’m intending to blog about just as soon as I sit down at the laptop without being too tired, too inebriated or too rushed to do so.

it’s just that it seems such a long time ago. There is a certain exhaustion that just comes from being at work for too many hours. I felt it yesterday (and I only worked the evening but it had been a busy day with the children) and I really felt it today. Back in my retail management days a normal working day was 8am to 6pm, so a 10 hour day was totally run of the mill with regular earlier starts or later finishes at busy times such as January and July sales, promotional evenings, late night shoppping in the run up to Christmas and various other events such as stocktake. Going even further back to teenage days I used to go to sixth form college Monday to Friday, work a 5-8pm shift Monday to Friday at B&Q and work all day Saturday and Sunday at my parents’ restuarant, so I quite literally worked 12 hours every weekday with no days off either – and I used to manage clubbing 4 nights a week too 😯 and one memorable occassion I worked a straight shift through from 5pm one evening til 8am the following morning, having done a day at college beforehand, whizzed home to get changed and went off to college again the following day. Couldn’t do it now though!

Today was my full day at work this week so I walked into work this morning, leaving Ady with the children. I have three days of training coming up over the next two weeks so I had all my pre-training briefing sessions and then spent some time with a lad who is doing work experience in the library this week before Ady and the children picked me up for lunch. That was all a bit frenzied with all of them wanting to tell me stuff at the same time while I shovelled cheese on toast down my throat before taking Ady’s car and going back to work again. The afternoon was similarly busy with me spending an hour on the Enquiry Desk. I realised today it was the six months anniversary of me starting at the library yesterday – that’s gone quick! And means Scarlett is exactly four and a half too – again, that’s gone quick! 😯 Ady arrived at the library around 3pm as Dad had come to look after D&S for the afternoon so he could get some study time before his two exams tomorrow (the last two – phew!) and we left at 5pm and came home together. The children had set up ‘Davies’ shop’ in the garden with more Dad-made signs and the chicks had spent a very happy afternoon in the garden in their new run. We spent an hour dismantling Davies’ shop, tidying the house up, I cooked the kids’ tea and just had time for a quick shower and change of clothes before heading back to the library again while Ady put the kids to bed and cooked our dinner.

Tonight it was an author talk by Pam Goodall a quite remarkable woman who toured great chunks of the world on her bicycle shortly before her 60th birthday, alone and with no pre-planned route or accomodation. She was gone for about a year and experienced all sorts of amazing things, met some wonderful people and saw some staggering things. Her talk was very good, she is very inspirational and interesting and although I hadn’t previously read her book I have now added it to the very long list of titles I would like to read. Above all her message was one of ‘just bloody go and do it’ ness with her planning and setting off on this journey within four months of having the idea – it would have been quicker if she’d not needed rabies jabs! Having done it all before yesterday and being in my own library rather than Shoreham tonight I was super efficient at getting tables and chairs organised and then setting up the refreshments stand (wine, soft drinks and nibbles). I have mainly worked these two nights to win brownie points, they are not paying me although I will get the time back in lieu (infact I was given a day off next week for the hours, which is just as well given I have two training sessions and would have been working four days that week otherwise, nightmare for sorting childcare!) and I certainly won lots of brownie points – all to keep in reserve for the day I do have to let them down at short notice due to my own children being poorly or my childcare falling through – the feeling will be that ‘it’s not like Nicola, she is normally very reliable’ rather than a tutting and eye rolling about me never being able to offer much committment.

The talk was given, questions were asked and answered, attendees had another drink and then we put all the chairs and tables back where they belonged again, cleared away all the refreshments and finally left around 930pm. Dinner at 10pm and now I really am ready for bed. A bit of a lie in tomorrow for me as my parents aren’t due to arrive here until 10am and they are bringing picnic lunch for everyone so all I need to do by 10am is be up, dressed, with children up, dressed and breakfasted. The weather is supposed to be lovely so I’m looking forward to a good day. And of course, we’ll be celebrating the end of A’s exams in the evening too. 🙂

Blimey, that was a long day!

I did indeed tidy, hoover, clear out my car and get changed before heading off to work. It was an event to mark the winner of the Orange prize for fiction announced tonight at Shoreham library and was staffed by me and three senior library staff. We had 32 attendees so the library was pretty full which meant we messed around setting up chairs and tables for ages, sorting out refreshments and then last minute photocopying ballot forms and cutting them out while people queued outside the doors from 20 past 7 onwards (the event started at 8pm). We did meeting and greeting and pouring out drinks and offering nibbles before all sitting down and someone read a synopsis of the six shortlisted books then people read excerpts of them all. Brenda (second most senior person) read two and she said to me afterwards she’d almost passed me one to read which actually I would have done quite happily. Then everyone voted for their favourite and had more wine while we counted up the votes and announced our winner followed by the actual Orange winner. The same book won, which was one I’d got about halfway through and given up with but actually having listened to a passage read outloud will possible go and try and read again giving it the chance to drag me in a bit more as I’d tried to read it in small sections with Ady or the children around and listening to it read aloud I realised it deserves more than that and needs the chance to pull you into it’s pages and make you feel like you are really there with the characters.

The attendees (very s l o w l y) left, we cleared up and I left just after 10pm getting home within about 10 minutes to a dinner in the oven (Ady had long since finished his) and the taped Apprentice which I’d avoided all text messages incase I got the result before I’d watched it. And now, I’m off for a bath before staggering to bed and doing it all again tomorrow – reminds me of retail at Christmas time and as next week is even busier than this week I really will be ready for a holiday come Kessingland!

The weather changed from threatening rain and being all cold and gloomy all morning and the sun broke through just as we arrived at the PYO farm. Another HE friend met us there so there were 9 of us altogether. We picked strawberries, peas, broad beans and onions. At one point Scarlett stayed with the strawberry pickers and Davies went off with Julie to pick sugarsnap peas which I don’t like (taste like runner beans to me!) while I picked normal peas so I was without children – felt very odd seeing them both in the distance on either side.

And now I’m home alone! Ady’s taken Davies to Badgers and he and Scarlett are waiting outside in the car – Scarlett’s watching Peter Pan on the in car dvd player and Ady is revising. I’m off to work in about an hour. This is the longest I will have been home on my own since I had children – noone has ever taken them out while I’ve stayed at home before – it feels very strange and really rather lovely. The quiet is amazing :). I do of course have a job list to keep me going during this hour, including washing strawberry juice off my hands and getting changed ready for work, clearing out my car so Ady can have it on Friday and I can have his and running the hoover round, so the feeling of utter freedom is slightly hampered and about to go away again 🙂

starting with Carnival Child this morning. I can’t find a link to the company who present it although I can find evidence of it travelling all round the country. It was held at the local secondary school so for the second time in four days Davies, Scarlett and I found ourselves walking into a school reception and inhaling that unique ‘school’ smell. I’d not told them until we got there what the surprise was and had half wondered if they’d fear I was at least carrying out my continual threat to pack them off to school, but they were just interested in the various posters etc. so they clearly never believe that threat ;). I had to sign in as a visitor and then someone came to collect us. I had thought that more tickets would have been bought by ‘normal’ people as it was billed in the festival brochure as suitable for 3-11 year olds so I expected to see a smattering of preschoolers at least, but it was us, an entire primary school (aged 4-9 or so I guess) of about 300 pupils and some special needs adults. The hall was set up with chairs along the back and a row along each side with the schoolchildren to sit on the floor. We were first to arrive (by about 15 minutes) and told to sit wherever we wanted so we sat on the row of chairs along the back and busied ourselves looking around the school hall spotting no smoking signs (both children horrified by this ‘but children don’t smoke!’), spotlights, a covered piano and a stage. I explained about school assemblies, we talked about what things the stage might be used for and then the school children arrived and were directed into classes to sit on the floor. They arrived in the classic crocodile formation, in pairs with adults at the back and front. A ‘luvvy’ type who knew the company putting on the show had come and sat next to us and was very amused by Davies, Scarlett and I talking about the schoolchildren. They had most curious methods of crowd control including getting one child to stand at the front and carry out a bizare series of touching his head, shoulders, nose, clapping, sticking his tongue out etc. while all the children on the floor had to copy him and all the adults (teachers and helping parents I assume) joined in too. Davies sat there looking very horrified and faintly embarrassed for them all whispering (but they look silly!) while Scarlett and I played paper, scissors, stone and refused to be quiet when all the schoolchildren were being hushed (why? the play hadn’t started, people always talk at the theatre before the lights go down). Two of the children were from Beavers and looked delighted to see Davies, waving and hissing ‘Hey, Davies! Hello!’ at him before sitting on the floor while we sat on our chairs. The person at the front started doing a clapping hand raising thing similar to the we will rock you crowd move at a Queen concert to which I started to explain to Davies about crowd control and also about how there was only one adult to every 15 or so children and actually they could get together and revolt if they thought about it. I don’t think I could ever send the kids to school really, having given them so many encouragements to defy pointless authority! 😉 Then again they might rebel against me and be the most conforming adults ever 😆

The show was pretty good – a full hour long so Tarly was slightly restless in places but Davies sat transfixed with just the odd whispered question. There was an odd moment when some of the children seemed to think they were at a panto and started interacting with loads of ‘oh no it’s not!’ when the first puppet was explaining the plot line (to do with carnival magic saving the rainforest with the use of dancing, music and a magic mirror – slightly tricky to follow anyway so not helped by the wave of ‘it’s behind you!’ that followed once one or two children had started) and the adults all looked panicked while trying to shush them 😆 We left the instant it was over as there was a load of ‘now sit with your hands in your laps while we all line up in order’ from a woman who I assume was the headteacher but having been there really early I wish we’d gone over to the stage and tried to talk to the people putting on the show beforehand to learn a bit of the behind the scenes stuff. I explained to Davies how the puppets worked (they were on sticks – we saw the occasssional flash of hand from beneath) so I think we might have a go at that next time we’re home for the day. Also there was a bit about snake charming which I tried to explain to D&S in whispers but need to find a proper clip of real life to show them. Will search youtube later.

Home for lunch and in about half an hour we’re off fruit picking.

Today was our only free day this week – we had MM and Beavers yesterday, tomorrow we’re seeing a play in the morning, fruit picking in the afternoon followed by Badgers and I’m working in the evening, Thursday I am working all day and evening and Friday we’re off to the South of England Show. At the weekend I’ll be working on Saturday and we’ve swimming lessons followed by an Open Farm Sunday event on Sunday. Hehe, look at that linkerama!

So we had a nice lazy start to the day with Scarlett coming and getting back into bed with me and snuggling up to fall asleep again. Davies answered the door to the postman who’d brought an ebay parcel of Betty Spaghetty stuff so they played with that on my bed while I got dressed and talked on the phone to a local EO woman who was ringing me for a catch up chat. We all came downstairs, the kids had breakfast and got dressed while I tidied the kitchen and generally pottered about deciding what to do with the day, drinking tea and doing a few online bits while the children watched Class TV and Watch.

The chicks currently reside in a big plastic tub which used to house our dressing up outfits before we got all above ourselves and put up a clothes rail in the playroom for them and put all the clothes on hangers! Over the top to prevent the chicks from getting out (and Candle from getting in) and to rest the brooder lamp on we’ve been using two of the shelves from our camp kitchen. Clearly this means we either can’t go camping, we have to leave the chicks without a lid while we go camping or we made an alternative lid. I decided to make my mission making an alternative lid today. My Dad had offered us a roll of chicken wire he’s had in his garage for ages, so my biggest requirement was the timber. I explained the challenge to the kids and off we set.

Firstly we drove to the now shut down Wizard store on the local industrial estate as I know they had a whole pile of pallets in their yard which I thought might still be there abandoned. Indeed they were, but the unit was all chained up. We drove around the estate a bit but all the likely looking pieces of wood obviously belonged to people. Next we drove to the nearby local tip which closed a while back and I thought may have piles of fly tipped wood just waiting to be used by someone else. Nothing. On the way we drove past loads of skips which we’d talked about as possible sources of ‘treasures’ aslong as we could find someone to ask permission to rummage in but they all had garden waste, hard core or things like tiles in them. We drove to B&Q to price out timber and realised it would be about £30 to buy it new so that was not an option but we did have a very lengthy ‘lesson’ in there about hardwood, softwood, sawn wood, barcodes, measurements, pricing, internal and external doors, architrave, tongue and groove cladding and flooring, chipboard, plywood, MDF and treated and untreated woods. I surprised myself with how much I knew about wood quite frankly but I guess a builder for a father, 6 years working in B&Q – 2 of them in kitchens and living in two houses having loft conversions gives you a bit of a working knowledge of such things :). And now D&S have one too – and it was clearly interesting for the couple of builders watching and listening to me explaining about how chipboard and MDF is made too ;).

We left B&Q and went to Wickes to price their timber up and as we could detour onto another industrial estate I did so. This time I found a little area with several empty units with skips outside with pallets in and just one shutter door up. I went inside and found someone to ask if they were really rubbish and he told me to help myself. 🙂 Result! I could only fit two in my car whole (hadn’t thought to bring tools with me to try and dismantle them, just as well as it happens, I could still be there now!) so we loaded up with those and then called in to my Dad’s to collect the chicken wire and scout about his garage for tools. I couldn’t find any (he keeps them all in his van, so if he had one of those stickers saying ‘no tools are kept in this vehicle overnight’ and thieves believed it then it really would work :lol:). We came home and after much swearing, telephone consultation with Ady about tool location and rummaging through the garage and the cupboard under the sink I turned up a staplegun with no staples, a rusty saw which must be older than me and I think was already in the garage when we bought the house and lengthy searching in the garden turned up the hammer too. I managed to use the hammer and saw to good effect and made a new lid for the chicks brooder 🙂

except I ran out of staples halfway through fixing the wire on so we went back to B&Q to get staples and some nails because I now had a design for a run for them in mind and wanted to do that too.

We came back for late lunch, I left a message on Dad’s answerphone to ring me, partially to let him know I’d collected the chicken wire and partially because I had a sneaking suspsicion I’d need more tools that I had. Sure enough although my design idea was sound my hammer wasn’t up to dismantling the pallets and my nails would not penetrate one thickness of wood let alone two to be fixed together. So it was very fortunate that Dad rang back and agreed to come over and give me a hand. The children were very free range during the afternoon, playing mostly outside, coming over to find out more about what we were doing and learn about the tools. While we were waiting for Dad I let the chicks have a roam about outside under D&S’s watchful eyes while I cleaned their brooder out and then we popped them back in outside on the lawn for a couple of hours to enjoy the sunshine.

Dad was great, he did the drilling and screwing while I did the dismantling and directing and stapling. My right hand and arm is now absolute agony from stapling and hammering and sawing so hopefully it will be better tomorrow. We built two identical panels which we then joined together at the top and put struts across the base of to form a triangular pen – about 8 foot by 4 foot, pretty portable and very well received by the chickens 🙂

Ady came home and we sent him straight back out again to buy beers which we sat and drank watching the chicks loving the freedom of space and being outside with safety from a very curious Candle. They can have a few hours in their each day in the nice weather ready for outside eventually. We rang Mum and asked her if she wanted to come over too for fish and chips, I got her to bath the children (filthy dirty children!), Ady tidied up inside and Dad and I went off to get fish and chips for everyone to have with more beers to congratulate outselves on a job well done. The children went to bed (very late again!), Mum and Dad left and I’m off for a quick soak in the bath before heading off to bed myself – another busy day again tomorrow!

Magical Mondays today, we picked Ali and Freya up and arrived super efficiently on time. Ali did a drama session today which Scarlett joined in fairly well with before getting fed up and wandering away from and Davies and I stuck with to the end, with Davies really enjoying it. I’m sure it helped that it was Ali running it (he loves Ali 🙂 ) but it is his sort of thing anyway. I always get faintly exasperated with the few who try to spoil it for the rest at these sorts of activities – and indeed the parents who abandon their children to it, particularly when it is their children being disruptive and struggle to understand why the school / work mentality of being *forced* to participate and therefore protesting by being rude or acting silly still surfaces in an entirely voluntary activity like that. 🙄

In the car once everyone had calmed down from asking me questions all at the same time (I say everyone, I mean Davies and Scarlett :lol:) and my phone had stopped telling me I had a text message about 20 times in very quick succession ( 😉 you know who you are!) Davies asked if I thought Mika was doing his own backing singing by him being recorded singing one thing and then it being played back while he sung the other bit. I agreed that could be the case and told him about watching someone on TOTP accompany themselves on the piano and violin on a split screen video which was cutting technology in it’s day. I then mentioned the duet Nat King Cole and Natalie Cole had done after Nat’s death which led to surreal discussion about whether Nat had been a ghost or a skeleton. Davies went straight into MM and drew a skeleton complete with detachable head that it could juggle with, which I entertained myself by singing ‘When I fall in Love’ with for a while when no one was looking 😆 he then drew lots of Doctor Who things and Scarlett did some drawing too before we went through for Ali’s drama. They both returned to the drawing again afterwards and then Davies went off to play Doctor Who with some of the other lads while Scarlett appeared at a loose end for a little while – her two usual playmates – Lulah and Freya had teamed up with each other and were outside – before settling down to play with some ponies quite happily. The Doctor Who game ended and I read Davies a bit out of someone’s Doctor Who book for a while before helping to tidy up and coming home. There is one particular child at MM who I really struggle to see in a positive light and they were particularly irritating to me today which has led to some low level pondering on my part this afternoon. It’s not a cheap activity for us with entrance fee and petrol and although there are some really nice people there I am trying to be objective about what we do and where we spend our money, which friendships could be maintained without the need to attend a specific group on a specific day and precisely what all of us get out of it.

We dropped Ali and Freya home and came home via two supermarkets and a clothing store on the quest for a sun suit for Davies, which we finally got in Sainsburys (thanks for the tip Ros 🙂 ) so that’s that ticked off our list :). Ady picked up some more toy animals at a car boot sale yesterday so they were being played with this afternoon while Doctor Who and the Cybermen was being played on dvd and Davies did an invite for his birthday party. I had a phonecall from the Beaver leader to say they weren’t wearing uniforms tonight and to come in old clothes as they were doing painting, so I gave the children their tea and then we walked round to take Davies to Beavers and give back forms for him to be part of the team for the It’s A Knockout tournament this Saturday (which I’ll miss because I’ll be at work 🙁 ) and to pay for a trip to the local airport next week – Ady’s going along to that one too, I think he is probably more excited at the prospect than Davies is :lol:.

Scarlett and I came home and I painted some henna pictures on her at her request, we danced a bit, looked at some song lyrics online and then she danced some more. 🙂 Ady came home and we all walked round to collect Davies from Beavers.

I’ve just posted pictures of the chicks on a US chicken forum and had my suspicions that Freddie and Rhonda are hens and Punzel is a cockerel seconded (nothing conclusive but I didn’t admit that was what I thought and someone came out with them themselves), noone seems to know about the black ones but I’m almost 100% that Wobble is a cockerel with no real idea about Feathers. Hopefully that gives us our two hens we wanted and maybe 3 cockerels to choose between with Feathers being a definite to keep having come this far so that maybe being the decider on the cockerels with Punzel being the second choice to keep (although if that looks like being the case moving forward I may very well swap Punzel and Rhonda’s bands over given we did that purely on which one came out of the box first when we had the bands ready to go on 😆 The plus of only 2 hens is that if we did then keep a cockerel we could maybe keep one or two of a second batch of chicks we let them hatch themselves, it’d be nice to watch it happen naturally having done it the ‘lab’ way first. 🙂