One word? When seven would do…

I realised today I’ve bumped into three people from ‘the past’ over the last couple of weeks – Dina this weekend, Alex my old boss last weekend (did I blog that? can’t remember) and someone at work peered at me the week before last and said ‘Nicola isn’t it? I used to go to school with you…’ and after peering back I recognised someone I’d sat next to in Art when we were 14 (blimey, that’s nearly 20 years ago :shock:). Lucy was showing me some old pictures today including a couple from when we used to go around together and whilst looking at flickr earlier I remembered I used to upload pictures to webshots so went and tried to sign in with the username and password I use in most places and low and behold there were a load of photos from 2003 / 2004 which I’ve now flickred. Really must scan some of the ones in we have in albums. Having lots most of the photos we didn’t bother to get printed or put online anywhere in various laptop and pc deaths over the last few years I am keen to have back ups wherever possible of photos now. Anyway, it’s all felt a bit ‘This is your life’ lately making me slightly edgey about who will turn up next from days gone by!

But back to today. Yesterday we had a note from the postman to say a parcel for Davies couldn’t be delivered so Ady went to the post office to collect it first thing and it turned out to be the membership pack for the local Green Diggers gardening club run by WS county council. I’m getting much better at knowing about local stuff since working at the library and reading all the leaflets and local newsletters :). We watched Wonderpets and then Scarlett and I went for ‘breakfast’ in Davies’ ‘cafe’ set up in his bedroom with menus and table numbers and everything. We had sausage, bacon, orange juice and Candle also joined us for cat food. On the menu there were pictures of all the various food options including beverages such as wine, tea and coke. Scarlett lent over to me and said in a hushed voice ‘tea? why don’t you have wine mummy?!’ all surprised at my request for orange juice, so I explained about appropriate times for drinking – in public at least ;). We watched some Tracy Beaker – I seem to recall a programme about a children’s home on kids tv when I was younger whereas of course Ady did indeed live in a childrens’ home when he was younger so that is always quite an interesting watch.

They then spent ages looking at the Sky kids magazine which comes each month with the Sky listings magazine and is always squabbled over as it has quizzes, mazes etc in it. Davies was very excited to see an advert for HSM2, while I juggled with sleeping arrangement plans for NicCamps and faffed about with a half drafted blogpost for Monsterteeny before giving up and writing a page for my personal pages – sort of a blog – on the US chicken forum I hang out on. I wrote up the story of the hatching and got all gooey eyed over the pictures of them still in eggs with just beaks poking out. 😆

Then we headed off to the butchers for our months worth of meat. I’d taken £50 with me along with my list of Sunday lunch joints, chicken breasts, mince, sausages, steaks, pork chops and bacon for the month’s menu plans. We had to ring a handbell on the counter to get the butcher’s attention and then out he came in his proper butchers apron 🙂 It’s a real old fashioned butchers with sawdust on the floor and everything and he is clearly a man who loves his trade and will talk for hours on the subject. Normally Ady goes in for the meat and I just pop in for top-ups and we’ve never taken the children in, but he’d clearly matched Ady and I up as mister and missus and chatted away to D & S as though he’d known them forever. They, of course, thrive on that sort of attention so were talking to him all about themselves and our chickens (their current favourite topic of conversation with strangers) and asking all sorts of questions about the meat, which animal it came from, which part of it’s body the cut was from and so on. Davies demonstrated quite a bit of knowledge about slaughtering which I assume he’s got from Ady, talking about the blood draining out when it’s hung up after being killed etc. which led to a chat about what the blood can be used for including black pudding. Davies said he’d like to try black pudding one day so the butcher immediately dug some out of his cold room and cut a slice off for him. When I realised we were going to go over my £50 and asked if I could leave the rest of my list with him and collect it later his insisted in sending me off with everything on the list and telling me to pop the rest of the money in later, including rounding it down by nearly a fiver and chucking in a dozen eggs for free. I felt quite the 70s housewife having my meat ‘on tick’ from the local butcher but rather uncomfortable these days with owing anybody any money for long I sent Davies back in there as soon as we’d been to the cashpoint to hand over the rest of the money.

We came home and while I put the meat away the children went out to play with the chickens. I’ve been reading about how chickens establish any humans and other animals who live with them into positions within their pecking order too and how you should ensure you are above any of the birds in the order. I would say Scarlett and Davies are way above me and Ady in the pecking order here as they are forever picking the birds up and carrying them around, which is one of the recommended ways of showing them you are their boss. Lots of real chickeny clucking noises but still no attempts at crowing which should probably have started to happen by now if they are cockerels. Also none of their combs and waddles have totally reddened yet – they are all still very pinky, which is a good hen sign too. Hopefully only another 6 or 7 weeks before we could see eggs, which will be very exciting. 🙂

We had lunch, I made some chocolate chip rock cakes and the children played with the toy food and money and pretend till, with lots of chatter about coins and notes and money. Then we loaded up towels and sunsuits and headed round to Lucy’s for the afternoon where the children played in the garden in the paddling pool and jumping off the garden table while Lucy and I sat and chatted. The children had tea there and I rang Ady to get him to run them a bath to come straight home and get into. A really nice afternoon with lots of half finished conversations and catching up – it feels like it’s been ages since we’ve seen each other properly.

We got home to discover that one of the neighbours mothers had lost control of her car and crashed into our wall, knocking part of it down. It is the mother of the police man who lives inbetween the Thank you neighbours and the Sexy Builder who recently had the nasty bike crash. He and his nurse got married last weekend and his mother had come to take them to the airport to go off on their honeymoon and crashed into our wall instead (which seems a very high profile way to exhibit her disapproval at the marriage 😉 ), so David (the thank you neighbour) had swung into action instead, whisking them off to Gatwick in his car, while the mothers’ car was taken away to the garage and Ady assured her that it really isnt’ a problem and he can fix our wall – which he can, it was a fairly clean knock down and the blocks can be cleaned off of cement and rebuilt. Oh the dramas in our street! 😆

I’ve got the decluttering bug having put away all the clean washing in the house and realising that as the weather never did really change into summer I never did my usual twice annual swapover of summer / winter clothes in mine and the childrens wardrobes which leads to the ebay frenzy of getting rid of anything not worn since last winter in my wardrobe and anything which will no longer fit them by next winter in the childrens. Davies appears to be finally growing and as most of his wardrobe from last winter was also from the year before I think he may well be due for a fair amount of new clothes come Autumn. Scarlett seems to be very steadily growing too and indeed most of her skirts are too short so she’ll be needing new clothes too. I sense September’s spending will be Davies’ birthday and Octobers will be new clothes for them both. So I pulled out various things which I know don’t fit them any more and as soon as I have a spare couple of hours I’ll go through all the wardrobes and do the same and get stuff listed on ebay to help raise funds for the new stuff needed. Hopefully some of Davies’ jumpers and even jeans might do Scarlett and Tesco / Asda basics will sort out the rest, with a bit of assistance from the NCT nearly new sale :).

of something new. D & S came to me mighty excited about this today having spotted the advert for it in the Sky kids magazine. Reading may not have got there yet, but brand awareness and logos certainly has 😆

A frantic morning today. Yesterday at Sainsburys I let Ady, Davies and Scarlett choose two breakfast cereals of their choice each – normally I buy own brand rice crispies, coco pops and honey nut cornflakes but there was lots of offers on the cereals so we went crazy! Which means we now have a cereal mountain of choice on top of the microwave which led to a five minute very tricky decision about which one to have this morning with lots of ‘I’m going to have to hurry you’ ‘the clock is ticking’ and ‘I really do need to press you for an answer between sugar coated cereal fortified with vitamins and minerals which you won’t be eating round the table darling!’ 😉 Davies also had a picture he wanted to draw for Ros too so he did that while eating his breakfast and Scarlett and I argued about her getting dressed while she ate hers. Davies wrote ‘To’ ‘love’ and ‘Davies’ totally on his own and just clarified the spelling of ‘Ros’ at which point Scarlett piped up with ‘Ros is a bit like Rose isn’t it?’ and we talked about how magic e made all the difference to the sound the o made. Ah, education everywhere :). I made a picnic, hung a load of washing out and then we were off.

We had to go to the bank first so I could pay the mortgage money in, some of which I needed to draw out of the cashpoint first. Our bank is just off the seafront road in a disabled and loading only parking area but you can park right outside if you’re lucky and this morning I was. So I leapt out of the car only to find the cashpoint not working – I ran back to the car to tell D&S I was dashing round the corner to the nearest cashpoint and wouldn’t be a moment. Did that, ran off with my card leaving my money still spewing out of the machine 🙄 which fortunately the bloke behind hadn’t made off with before I realised and dashed back. Dashed into Superdrug to get some sun cream having realised all of the many bottles I have bought already this summer in vain hope I might need are either in Ady’s car, packed with the camping stuff or still in the back garden of my hostess from last week. Dashed back to check D&S were alright and then finally into the bank to pay the money in.

Then to get petrol. The petrol station is one of these all singing all dancing do your whole weeks food shop and get coffee, frappucios and freshly baked morning goods too while you refuel your car and keep 27 people behind you in the queue waiting while you check all your lottery tickets too places, so that took forever too.

Finally we were off. I had got Ady’s satnav to use and although when I checked the Science Centre website it did say not to use their postcode with GPS systems as it would take you to the wrong entrance I decided it was my best hope of finding the place and would surely have a sign on the door of the wrong entrance explaining how to find the right one. We were already about 6 minutes late according to the satnav by now and when we hit the traffic built up all along the A27 round Lewes where there is major road works going on I sat and watched it readjusting itself to about 27 minutes late :(. Finally having taken us down some very minor country roads we did indeed end up at very much the wrong entrance but fortunately despite there not being any helpful signs to find the right entrance I was able to work out if we went left, left, left and left we were likely to find outselves on the other side of the place and we picked up brown signs for it. We met up with Ros and one third of her children, Steve and Sarah and all three thirds of theirs.

The Science Centre isn’t a cheap day out, and if the weather wasn’t so lovely it would have all but halved the things to do as lots of the cool stuff is outside, but actually I think it was good value for money with loads of educational stuff presented really well, totally interactive and at the level the children could experiment and play with things to learn stuff even if they weren’t interested in the explanatory signs. We wandered round, then sat and had lunch before hearing a science show about to start advertised over their loudspeaker system so heading off to go and watch that. There was a tent set up with some bridge building activity which we never actually made it to but of course the Clarke’s don’t need that anyway, with their superior knowledge of how bridges work 😉 (as seen on TV). The show was bubbles, bicarb and vinegar volcano explosions and some tornado stuff with real fire. Oh and an egg floating better in salty water solution than in plain water. Laughed lots at Adam’s answers to ‘where do you float better, in the sea or in a swimming pool?’ Adam replied with great confidence ‘in the sea’ and then to the why?question answered straightaway with ‘because there’s more room!’. Scarlett was very busy pulling the legs off a moth she’d captured, singing while she did it in a merry little voice :roll:. We sat outside for a while and the children played with the water activities outside, Scarlett got soaked 😆 then The Clarke’s left us and Ros and I took Adam, Davies and Scarlett into the ‘Zany Zone’ which we paid a quid each for them to do. It didn’t quite live up to being particularly zany but there was helicopters and jumping beans to make, cornflour gloop to play with, a bottle to increase pressure with, balloon and bottle lungs to make, circuits to test and magic tricks with ordinary paperclips and ordinary paper which amused and entertained us 😆

We had one last laze around outside while the boys ran around and Scarlett ate Ros’ biscuits before the sun went in and we called it a day. We had a much better run home, Scarlett had a nap in the car while Davies and I sang along to music. Once home they had tea, Ady came home and they all went into the garden while I ticked off about five jobs from my neverending job list including finally getting NicCamps booked, doing various bits of paperwork including the booking form for Davies’ party, some invitations I couldn’t email, the customer feedback questionnaire for Kessingland and cutting out some photos to send off for our Drusillas membership cards. The children came in for a bath and then bed, I spent ages pmsl at the chickens who have worked out how to fly onto the lounge windowsill and peck at the window to get my attention before putting them away for the night. I made a rhubarb crumble for pudding and spent some time looking at campsites online for our holiday next week. I have a couple of more little things to get organised tomorrow and I am starting to feel like I’m back on top of everything I need to be again, which is good. 🙂

Modest, Social, Competitive, Responsible and A Leader.

At least two I would have to totally disagree with there 😆

A long, long time ago (which I can never type or say without wanting to carry on with ‘I can still remember how that music used to make me smile….’) when I first worked at B&Q as a 16 year old there was a 17 year old girl who also worked there part time. Our shifts rarely clashed but I recognised her sufficiently to shyly talk to her when I went to a sixth form open day before I started there and she showed me round with lofty, soon to be Upper Sixth superiority. During the summer she dropped out of sixth form to go to art college instead but as I was taking two of the same courses as her she gave me all her old course notes and we bonded a friendship. We had similarly giddy mothers (who also got on very well) and lived in similarly large houses and had similar aged brothers and that was sort of enough to base a friendship on back then.

For a while we were very close, we once went out to Brighton with a group of her friends on the Thursday night before Good Friday with a plan to pub and club til closing time, stay in an all night cafe until morning and then get the first train back home. I was working at 11am the next morning but I was 17 and didn’t really need sleep back then 😆 Unfortunately after a great night pubbing and clubbing (in this fab nightclub which had pinprick holes in the dance floor which had different colour spotlights underneath which showed through making sparkly twinkly rainbows of light through the dry ice) we failed totally to find one of the all night cafes we’d heard about, and when the last kebab shop shut at 3am we worked our way to the station to find the first train home was on Sunday timetables being a bank holiday Good Friday and we had about 6 hours to wait. We all tried to sleep on one of the docked trains but got kicked off, then we tried to sleep in the hard plastic chairs on the platform but the pidgeons kept crapping on us and then they shut the station so in the end Dina and I got a taxi home and split the £16 fare back to Worthing. We shared confidences of all sorts back then and she supported me through a particular period of teenage angst and in true Malory Towers fashion gave me a tiny silver locket which was one of her own belongings as an 18th birthday present cos she was too broke to afford a new gift but wanted me to have something. It’s still in my very meagre box of treasures upstairs actually, I’ve told Scarlett the story behind it and that she can have it one day when she’s old enough to treasure it properly.

Our friendship drifted a bit when she started seeing one of our friends who had recently split up with his fiance. Him and said fiance got back together, by which point Dina and I had moved into different social circles – as you do when you are that age. It was truly moved on when he split up with the fiance again a while later and hooked up with me. That would be Ady! All very symmetrical as one of my exes was a very close friend of Ady’s. Infact I think the two of them should have hooked up to really make it tidy 😆 Strangely out of the whole incestuous group of friends who all had various one degree of seperation relationships with each other over the course of a couple of years there is only Ady and I who went the distance and ended up married with children.

Anyway, I still bump into her Mum from time to time and I know my Mum still bumps into her Mum too and they exchange stories about ‘Nicola’ and ‘Dina’ and respective grandchildren so I knew she was married and living in Bristol with a son about Scarlett’s age. We were very different people and I don’t think it was one of those enduring ‘for life’ sisterhood type friendships but for a period in time we were very close, and of course she snogged my husband before I did so there will always be a bond :lol:.

Today we all went to do our mammoth months worth of food shopping and towards the end I had veered ahead with Scarlett to get toilet rolls with one trolley while Ady and Davies were tailing behind with the second trolley choosing which coloured bottle of bleach to get. Scarlett was prancing about nearly colliding with everyone’s trolleys and I said to her ‘Quick look behind you!’ grinning at a big, friendly looking man she was about to back into while pulling faces at me and he did a really good Sully style ‘Rah!’ at her sending her running back to me giggling while his wife behind him looked at me and shrieked ‘Nic!!!!’. And there was Dina :). Introduced her to Davies and Scarlett and sent the children back to fetch Ady too. We had a brief catch up and went off on our respective ways again but I’ve spent the day recalling the times when Dina was the first person I’d ring to report something exciting happening and some of the laughs we shared. I hope she’s done the same too :).

Anyway, food shop done and brought home and packed away – which takes bloody forever, we had lunch and headed over to Chris and Julie’s a mere hour later than planned. 😉 We had a nice few hours over there including chatting, a wander down to some nearby fields where plums were ripe for picking and generally catching up with each other. It all ended rather annoyingly when their old and quite blind dog who is prone to crotch sniffing and obviously as I hate dogs makes me his prime target came and tried to sit on me – he is a lurcher and HUGE and knocked my boiling hot cup of tea all over me, my camera and the picture of a tardis Davies and I were sitting on the floor drawing 🙄 Bloody animal! Having said we’d go when I’d finished my tea and knowing our dinner would be ready for us as we’d bunged it in the oven before leaving the house we set off for home.

Lovely dinner followed by a laze around while the children played with Doctor Who characters and Where’s Wally books and then they went to bed. I had this crazed idea that if I sat and read Davies a bedtime story and then sat with him reading my book he’d go to sleep quicker as he is twitching a lot and has been quite weepy today through sheer tiredness. It didn’t work and at 930 with my alcohol consumption hours severly eaten into I gave up and came downstairs for a bath :roll:.

Tomorrow we’re off to the Science Centre in Hertsmonceux which I’ve wanted to go to for about 2 years since Steve and Sarah were down here before, to meet up with the Clarkes and Ros and remaining child, which I’m really looking forward to :).

Had a lovely, lovely day at Chris and Helen’s. The weather was pretty much perfect – although it did start to rain as we left their village and is indeed still raining now, so we drove home through some pretty horrible road conditions. 🙁

The children had a great time, loads of friends to play with, swords to swish, pinatats to bash with swords, castles to clamber over and play with and a playhouse with a bolt on the outside to lock other children in with 😆 Oh and the swings, mustn’t forget the swings – a real attraction for both Davies and Scarlett. Loads of photos on flickr, but a couple of quick ones:
Davies being a knight
he was in his element running round with Marcus, Ben, Jonathan, Kit and various other boys.

Scarlett being a princess
lovely to see her playing in her own right with people – Alex, obviously ;), but I also overheard her and Chloe swinging together and discussing how best to swing their matching long golden hair to best princessy effect :lol:, she loves playing with Eve and Rei and also spent some time with Amelie. And lots of time on the swing. Did I mention she liked the swing?

I toyed with the idea of properly dressing up and went with cleavage in the style of a wench to be inkeeping with the castle theme. Frankly I’d be hard pushed to think of a theme that cleavage wouldn’t cover but my top was pronounced ‘good’ which was then back up by someone else and even Ady resorted to long distance shots of cleavage (why? it’s not like he needs to sneak around to look at it, clearly just showing off infront of his friends :lol:) so I guess it was ok 🙂

Ady naturally wore a Pompey top 😆

A very enjoyable day and I shall be using my rainbow shield to protect my cleavage for many days to come 😆

I’m supposed to be at work all day today, but it’s the every other Friday morning that I have a childcare problem with and having thought I’d sorted it out between my Mum doing the morning and my Dad doing the afternoon over the weekend I went off to Nuneaton not worrying about it. Until my Dad rang me late on Tuesday to say he could do the morning but my Mum was working all day, which left this afternoon not covered. I had three possible friends who I was planning to beg for help but then Scarlett spent Wednesday night throwing up so I decided I couldn’t ask anyone to bring their children round and look after vomit-ridden children. I was still feeling pretty delicate myself from over indulgence so it didn’t feel too dreadful to ring work yesterday and explain we had some sort of bug which was laying us all low and that as a result even if we were better today I couldn’t run the risk of passing germs onto my childcare providers. Work were fine about it, very understanding, I guess I’ve proved myself enough in 8 months of reliability to not raise any suspcions. But it does mean I feel obliged to stay in all day today, although we are all now totally fine, just incase I bump into someone from work.

So we’ve got outfits ready for tomorrow – gold princess dress for Tarly – she was going to wear her pink one but a quick trying on session revealed she’s grown out of it, along with her blue one and actually the gold one is very snug fitting, and it needed sewing up too, so just as well we tried it on first, Knight outfit for Davies, made a hama bead frame for some pink material to make a Cassandra which Davies drew a face on, spent ages looking at Doctor Who toys on ebay and amazon trying to decide what he wants for his birthday, which led to me starting to make some plans for his party. I want to make sure we have enough games and activities to keep everyone occupied, particularly given there is no guarantee about the weather being ok and three hours to fill with lots of children.

We then spent about 2 hours in the playroom trying to tidy up a bit and get rid of some stuff. We were fairly ruthless – Scarlett and I more so than Davies, with some things put into a ‘holding bay’ status with Davies getting upset at the prospect of getting rid of them but me knowing full well they’ve not been played with for months. So the compromise is them going into the cupboard under the stairs for a month and if they have not been missed in that time then they can be sold on ebay. I refuse to spend loads of money on bigger boys toys for his birthday if he weeps at the prospect of selling his sticklebricks! 🙄 toys are something I am not remotely sentimental about, I welcome the idea of them getting shot of the towers of plastic tat and moving onto compact little electronic things ;). I’ve been expecting him to ask for a DS for his birthday but he hasn’t mentioned it at all – maybe he will at Christmas.

I did get several loads of washing done and the tent stretched out to dry but it has since rained on everything so it’s all still wet 🙁 Getting really fed up of the weather now, we have a camping trip planned for the week after next which we’re not even going to attempt unless the weather forecast is good, I can’t face another week of sitting under canvas with the sound of rain hammering down on the roof.

Davies has a wooden fort and a wooden colleseum both of which are pretty big and unwieldy so I was reluctant to bring them to castle day tomorrow as they would need dismantling and reassembling once we arrived too. So with two Grolsch boxes about to go in the recycling we made a castle each for the children to bring instead. Davies’ is the reverse of the cardboard box festooned with toilet roll turrets, a drawbridge and Davies’ own decorations, Scarlett’s is pink with pointy turrets and flags and big double doors. Davies is bringing a couple of figures from his fort, Scarlett is bringing ponies :roll:. I had planned to do some castle inspired baking but with no ingredients and too scared to go out and risk being seen to buy any I’ve made double the pizza dough needed for our dinner tonight and will make some pizzas to bring and pick up some alcohol and other bits on the way. I then sewed the material onto the hama bead frame for Davies’ Cassandra by which point all I really wanted to do was sit down and drink wine.

My mood today hasn’t been great, the children have been shouted at a fair amount and I think not having either of my stints at work this week (I was off on Wednesday as we were away) hasn’t been that good for me really, I do like my few hours away from the children as much as I miss them, and of course being in the house for two solid days yesterday and today is never good for any of us. Really looking forward to catching up with friends tomorrow and pleased that next week is filling up so we’re not at home again for a while.

Tuesday – For once it wasn’t raining! We packed a last few bits in the car and set off for Nuneaton where we were staying at an online friend’s house for a Feminist Parents meet up. We took Ady’s car, sang along to music, laughed at the robotic voice of the sat nav when it talked about the A444 and had the clearest run on 3 motorways I think I’ve ever known. We were at Heathrow within an hour and in Nuneaton within 3. Once I’d readjusted to driving on roads with traffic lights and roundabouts about 170 miles of motorways we found a Sainsburys and got supplies of Pimms, fruit and snacks, used the loo and then found the house we were staying in. We had one false start where we were on the doorstep of a poor man faced with a woman and two children carrying bags of alcohol and asking if he was Cally’s husband. I knew she had a husband who’s name I couldn’t remember, a son who’s name I couldn’t remember who was an age I wasn’t sure of all with a surname I didn’t know! 😆 Luckily I had a phone number so was able to ring and find out the right house number (I’d written down a housenumber which was part of her postcode for some odd reason!). So we pulled a bit further down the road to where we were supposed to be and joined the three families already there.

Three more families joined us over the course of the afternoon and a wonderful day / afternoon / evening was had by all. 🙂 The children had a whale of a time, although Scarlett amused me the next morning by saying to me in hushed, incredulous tones ‘Mummy, some of these children here GO TO SCHOOL!!!’. They really enjoyed the company of the various children there (16 altogether) and adults with Scarlett making a beeline for the token bloke there as a substitute Daddy for the evening 😆 Completely overindulged in alcohol leading to a very delicate state the next morning. 😳 We camped in the garden, along with two other families, which was something of a novelty to put the tent up in sunshine. It rained overnight though and we took it down again wet, much more the sort of camping I’m getting used to :roll:.

We had a chilled out morning until eventually we roused ourselves to leave around 230pm. The satnav originally gave an expected arrival home time of 1710 which we remained on track for until we hit the M25 and stopped. 🙁 There were queues when we joined it, massive queues around Heathrow and further queues for the final two junctions before we left it, when I turned the satnav off on the M23 because it was starting to irritate me with its dinging noise every time I went over 70mph it had changed to expected arrival time of 1815 and we didn’t actually make it home until closer to half six in the end. 🙁 Davies watched films all the way, Scarlett slept most of it. I dropped the children home to Ady for bathing and feeding and headed off to Sainsburys to hoover all the rice cake crumbs, opal fruit wrappers and general crud out of his car. I was utterly exhausted, well ok, hungover, so I just about saw in 1030pm having eaten very little and enjoyed watching Nigella making comfort food on tv before heading off to bed.

Unfortunately Scarlett was up half the night being sick, which lovely, lovely Ady dealt with. She is much better today, has eaten and other than being a bit warm is perky enough. Davies seems fine so I’m assuming it’s a Scarlett-specific thing but to be on the safe side I’ve taken tomorrow off work so as not to need childcare from people bringing their own children along. As long as none of the rest of us show any signs we’ll still be at C&H’s for Castle Day though as that will be well over the 8 hours cut off time and we’re all really looking forward to meeting up with everyone :).

Today has been slow and cosy. I’ve made some chocolate chip rock cakes as we all felt in need of comfort food, Scarlett is still in pjs, we’re on about our fifth Doctor Who episode of the day, children are playing with geomags and jigsaws. I had a couple of cards which needed posting (thank you card to hosts, sympathy card to mate who’s just lost her mum) which Davies volunteered to run round to the postbox with. It’s across the little road outside our house, to the end of our road and on the corner of the next, perhaps a two minutes walk. Following his wanting to buy the cream earlier in the week we’d talked about him going round to the shop on his own now so this seemed a good first try. Scarlett and I watched him til he was out of sight from his bedroom window upstairs and a couple of minutes later he was back, crossing the road really sensibly. He was really thrilled at the independance and wanted to post something else so decided to finish his letter to Marcus so he could post that. With fairly mimimal help he managed ‘To Marcus, My chickens are very big, love Davies’ which is hardly groundbreaking correspondance but goes to prove he is getting there 🙂 His letters are not very consistent in size but all very well formed. So he went off to post that aswell.

It’s very grey here although it hasn’t actually rained I can’t quite believe it won’t at some point but I’m hanging out washing just the same. The chickens are out of chicken food (Ady’s getting some on his way home from work) and when I last opened the back door to take washing out they were all outside it waiting and came dashing into the kitchen and started eating Candle’s cat food 😆 The latest on the chicken forum seems to be they may well all be hens, which will be great. I’ve got used to them coming and pecking at my toes and needing to wear shoes outside due to chicken poo everywhere and it will be lovely to have eggs soon. 🙂

Go one, someone tell me it should be une or bonne or something! 🙂

Today it mostly rained. It rained in the morning, it rained in the afternoon and it rained in the evening. Our reclaimed palletwood ark would be coming along nicely if only it would stop raining for long enough to get out there and work on it. Scarlett, (as I predicted she might – she often does when her and I have had a falling out during the day as it plays on her mind and gives her nightmares) woke at about 530am and came into bed with me where she curled up in my arms, insisted she was ‘Mumma’s baby’ and went back to sleep. Ady went off to work, the children got up and watched Doctor Who while I lazed in bed with my book and chatted to them as they popped upstairs every so often.

Once we were all up properly and dressed they did some drawing and colouring while I did some editing of Davies latest film and then I put on the First Fun with French dvd I got from work. I put it on really casually expecting them to either ignore it or ask me to turn it off but they both stopped what they were doing to listen to the song (Frere Jacques) and Davies said ‘this isn’t in English – what it it? French?’. They sort of half watched it while they carried on colouring and then both got really engrossed in it. Scarlett hadn’t properly computed that there are other languages which people actually speak, although Davies was aware so we talked about that for a while. I distinctly remember saying to my Mum when I was a little girl ‘why doesn’t everyone just speak English then? Because we talk a proper language and all the others are just versions of English anyway’ somehow the idea of translation to English had got me confused that everyone really spoke English everywhere, it’s just that they translated it onto their language first! They asked me a few words not on the video in French and I was able to either tell them or look them up and I explained that I’d learnt a bit of French at school and been to France a few times on school trips. I then told them that Chris & Alison had just come back from visiting France and that if we got Davies’ passport sorted out we could go over for a day trip or even a couple of days soon, but we’d need to know a few words in French so we could talk to people there. They really liked this idea and the dvd was put on again while they ate dinner and then twice more this evening with them answering ‘oui’ and ‘non’ to everything we asked them and bidding us ‘Bon Soir’ when they went to bed. 🙂 I told them that I can count to 10 in five different languages ; English, French, German, Welsh and Japanese so they asked for demonstrations of that and I explained how I learnt each. From only getting the dvd cos I was fretting that it could be a potential gap in our autonomous approach to the vast amounts of chatting about languages and indeed in different languages today I guess I can confidently cross that one off as firmly introduced and run with as an idea. Facilitation complete ;).

By then it was time for lunch so I went and made sandwiches while D&S tidied up, then after lunch Davies put on a show. It had a few magic tricks, inlcuding lots of ‘volunteers from the audience’, some joke telling and some general entertainment. I tried to explain again to them about how a ‘joke’ works including deconstructing the knock knock genre but I’m not at all sure it is a) possible to take something as abstract as what is funny down to that level and b) certainly not to small children when actually the word ‘poo’ is hilarious. Guess sophisication in their sense of humour may or may not develop 😆 It was about 130pm by then, I’d made several phone calls, replied to various emails and done everything I needed to get done myself today which meant I gave the children the option of popcorn and movies or getting dressed up in waterproofs and heading to the beach. I was sort of expecting the beach to the the favourite and indeed it was. 🙂 A definite retail need in waterproof trousers for all three of us as both of their pairs of dungarees were too short and I think Scarlett’s will even be too short for Davies, and I don’t have any at all, but we donned what we did have and headed off to the beach.

We parked in the deserted car park which should be heaving and charging £1.50 per car on the first day of the school summer holidays but was empty with the kiosk padlocked shut and tumbleweeds blowing across the puddle ridden tarmac, climbed over the very lush verdant green (which is normally sun bleached and yellowing by this time of year) and down onto the pebbles. It was high tide, which was a shame as some sand and rock pools would have been nice but it was about 6 foot from highest tide so we followed the line of washed up cuttlefish and seaweed and did a spot of beachcombing and rock clambering.

We walked for about an hour along the sea, watched some kite surfing lessons, played with a very friendly chocolate labrador who wanted us to throw stones for it to fetch, chatted about all sorts of things, spotted shells, driftwood, seaweed and all manner of other washed up things, got wet and generally just enjoyed being outside for a while. Davies told me he wanted to be someone who cleaned up beaches when he grows up, then said actually he wants to be a film maker when he grows up but he might clean up beaches in his spare time. Both of them were really shocked and annoyed by the amount of crap either washed up or just dumped on the beach, broken glass, plastic lids, empty packets, a patio chair :shock:, it’s really sad to see the disregard that people have for the world really. 🙁 Scarlett said she’s going to stay with me and come to work at the library too when she grows up – possibly still a little fragile bless her :lol:. We were all getting pretty tired by then and had stopped for a rest to sit on the rocks and look at the sky darkening over Brighton so we decided to go back up to the path and walk back to the car, stop at the shop for squirty cream on the way home and then make hot chocolate. The path back is above sea level and the road levelf for a while so we had a good clear view up to the downs where it looked a bit clearer, and into the airport where small planes were landing and taking off – people’s litter aside we do have a lot of nice scenery where we live. 🙂 We also walked past the caravan site where a 15 year old boy was recently murdered and saw the static all boarded up and loads of flowers laid on the ground. I explained to the children what had happened and what little I knew about the case – the local paper had mentioned drinking and drugs use leading to an argument that got out of hand so we talked about that for a bit before cheering up and talking about how lovely it would be to live in one of the big houses with the massive gardens that back onto the beach.

When we reached the car Davies asked if he could pop into the shop to get the squirty cream. It’s a little local Co Op that you can park right outside of with one door in and out so I said he could. We parked outside, I explained that it would be in a fridge near the milk but he might have to ask for help if it was on a too high shelf and sent him in with a five pound note. He came out giggling ages later (I could see his shoes under the window posters from the car) having been chatting to the lad who works there and is a bit of a comedian. So first foray into independance of shopping totally successful. 🙂 The thing I have utter confidence about in Davies would be his ability to remain pretty calm in a crisis, work out the best course of action and go about doing it, he would always be able to ask someone for help and give them any information they needed and he is not at all scared of talking to anyone. This is of course tricky when it comes to giving him the right information about stranger danger but I guess that is something I don’t need to fret about just yet all the while I’m around watching from a distance.

Home for the promised hot chocolate, with cream, and sprinkles and marshmallows. 🙂 Then I set about trying to book NicCamps only to hit a brick wall when I discovered that they have just had all their hostels re-evaluated for room sizes and loads of them have been made less beds – including the previously 69 bed one we wanted to book and is now only 46 beds :roll:. Several rather lengthy conversations later with YHA, with their website still saying 69 beds but me getting absolute clarification that it is only 46 but is still at the same price we’ll have to make a decision about which hostel to go for by the end of the week but as I’m away tomorrow until late Wednesday there is nothing I can do until Thursday now. Grrr. The children made Doctor Who characters from geomags including an excellent tardis and K9, oh and as a result of an argument about who got to make / be K9 they created K10 as a new character 😆

I cooked their tea and Ady came home so I dashed off to Tescos to put petrol in my car as Ady is using it for work tomorrow so I can take his, get another single airbed as we’ve decided the children are better off with airbeds and sleeping bags for camping and some bits for dinner tonight. I packed everything ready to load in the car tomorrow, curry for dinner and we watched The Devil Wears Prada which was predictable fluff but easy enough to watch. Back on Wednesday 🙂

Hurrah for it being the last early Sunday morning for a while! 🙂 I’m going to try and change Davies’ swimming lessons to a weekday evening too so that not every single weekend will be spoken for come September. Ady and Scarlett decided to go for a walk while I watched Davies’ swimming lesson – quite possibly in preparation for another of Nic’s Crap Swimming Lessons Related Rants 😉 having sat wide eyed and shocked last week at it while I went off on one in reception in full view of about 20 people while they both sat trying to pretend not to be related to me. Davies is always quite proud of the fact I’ll shout at anyone if I feel justified in doing so so is quite happy to stand alongside me pointing at me and saying ‘that’s my Mummy!’ 😆

Anyway today was the ‘test’ day really, I’d checked with Dad yesterday that he is up for paying for lessons again for Davies come September, Davies insists he wants lessons, I want him to have lessons as I consider swimming a life skill which is worth being taught rather than picking up as you go along and in full accordance with our autonomous learning principles (for anyone wanting to pick a fight ;)) getting in outside tutorage for something that is beyond me and has been specifically requested by one of the children it totally how I aim to approach HE. There are not many things I consider beyond the combined forces of me, the library, google and a good field trip but swimming is one of them! So fully primed for the idea that whether Davies got something out of this weeks lesson or not would be a big decided in whether he was coming back in September or not Davies set out to prove my theory that if you try hard enough you can do anything ;).

And do anything he did :). The teacher this week was the original girl who is ok, certainly better than last week but not as good as the chief instructor. But Davies was on a roll, with only the occassional glance at me he did everything he was asked, paid rapt attention to her every word, really pushed himself and did brilliantly. 🙂 There are some things he really excells at – going underwater, having a go at anything asked of him, jumping in, holding buoyancy aids in the right places – and others he struggles with – leg positions and kicking in the right way generally being the chief ones. Better than that he clearly really enjoyed it too, I could see various things clicking into place for him this week. The instructor spent the last 10 minutes trying to write things down and whether or not she’d been primed about the angry ginger swimming lesson mum or not I don’t know but she actually said to me ‘oh it was really hard to teach and write all these things out at the same time’ to which I replied that she’d done a really good job and continued praising Davies for doing so bloody well. The things she was writing turned out to be a questionnaire about the swimming lessons, which I will be taking great pleasure in completing with my usual honesty 😉 and a slip to say Davies Goddard has passed swimming level one and can buy a badge for £1.95 at reception if this slip is handed over :shock:. Davies was blissfully unaware of this, is very unmotivated by stickers / badges anyway and I’m buggered if we’ve got £2 to spare for a badge which I don’t actually feel is any mark of achievement other than turning up and paying £60 for the term and wouldn’t know where to sew on anyway. FFS you’d think they’d give the bloody things to the kids rather than try and get another couple of quid out of each family 🙄 So I’ll be completing the feedback questionnaire, trying to find out where Scarlett is on the waiting list and signing Davies up for another term on the understanding that he gives it the same level of effort that he did today, but I really could see some level of value for money today thinking back to where he was at Easter when he started, and of course a weekly lesson for Davies is still cheaper than just a weekly swim for Davies and I let alone paying for Scarlett and Ady to come in too and given none of us are wanting any sort of teacher / pupil relationship with each other it does seem to be the way forward for now.

We left there and as the weather was nice we headed off to the car boot sale. We had planned to go to the New Forest today as we’re camping there in a couple of weeks and had an idea to go and peep at some campsites but the roads being what they are just now with flooding made it seem a crazy idea to go driving off so we stayed closer to home instead. We had a really good day at the car boot sale, getting a box of sea creature animals, a Where’s Wally puzzle, a china hen on a basket for the kitchen to keep eventually home laid eggs on that I’ve been keeping an eye out wanting one of since we got the chickens and finally got today for £1.50, a toy pony for Scarlett, some Tom & Jerry notepaper and envelopes for Davies who’s been wanting to write to Marcus ever since Scarlett got a letter from Alex, and a couple of other bits and bobs. Total spend about £3.70 I think.

As we left we bumped into my old boss from my Recruitment Consultant days and her two children – a boy aged nearly 9 and a girl a month younger than Scarlett. Alex and I always got on really well and have stayed in touch through odd emails and Christmas cards each year although she only lives here in Worthing. She’s had a rough time since we both left the recruitment agency, finishing with the partner she was with when I first met her to start a fairly torrid relationship with a taxi driver some 20 years older than her, which resulted in her son, some crap experiences and him eventually moving to Spain, then she met a man who seemed lovely, had their daughter and bought a house together, but they are in the process of splitting up and selling the house. She has been back working full time in Recruitment again and her daughter starts school in September. It was a very brief five minute catch up but lovely to see her even if her life is as direct a contrast to mine as you could imagine. We made promises to catch up soon, so hopefully we’ll manage it.

We came home and as the weather was still holding out well Ady made lunch and I got a bucket of soapy water and hand scrubbed the groundsheet which still had Kessingland mud caked on it. I then made a start on cleaning up the flysheet which was particularly bad around the porch opening before deciding that it would be far easier to clean and indeed dry if it were pitched, so I got the poles out and put it up in the garden before giving it a good scrub and leaving it to dry. Job well done :), and I packed it all away again this evening ready to be used on Tuesday night.

We spent the afternoon either outside where the chickens free ranged all day or inside watching Doctor Who, applying nit treatment to Scarlett and I who had both been itching although we found nothing at all on either of us and I’ve deduced that my itching is down to using hair gel the last few weeks since I had my hair cut to help it curl rather than frizz and Scarlett’s is due to me talking about nits a lot. We were both very thoroughly treated though, so if there was anything lurking it won’t be lurking any more. I sat and did the Where’s Wally puzzle with Scarlett ‘helping’ and Davies and Ady working on writing a card to Marcus. This took a very long time with Davies working out how to spell ‘To’ (which he knows pretty well from doing so many birthday cards) and ‘Marcus’ – he got as far as M A R C and then stumbled on which letter started the ‘US’ sound getting hung up on ‘OS’ rather than ‘US’ so we left it there as it was dinner time but he is starting to get the idea of spelling words I think. 🙂

The children had dinner, there was an unpleasant episode with Scarlett which I’ll put down to tiredness and possibly lots of socialising this week giving her new tactics in expressing her cross-ness but it all got sorted out and apologized for. Ady bathed the children while I took the tent down and got dinner on. We’ve watched another Torchwood tonight and had a lovely roast beef dinner. Tomorrow is a lazy day with nothing planned other than packing up ready to head north on Tuesday morning for a FP meet up overnight. No MM, no Beavers and no work for me til Friday. Let’s hope the weather holds 🙂

We had a plan to visit a car boot sale this morning but further rain of the type that inspires me to start collecting more dismantled pallets to build at ark (I have a drawing for the design and everything, I know where to get the pallets – so if it really does keep raining do all feel free to come to Nic & Ady’s bringing two of every animal you spy on the way :lol:) put paid to that plan. At about 1030am we decided it had stopped sufficiently to go out and see whether the car boot sale was still happening, just as my Dad pulled up outside. His first words were ‘I thought you’d be at work!’ to me, charming! 😆 The reason became apparent when Ady served him coffee and toast anyway ;). The children swarmed all over him and then left us to it having had a Where’s Wally fest both crowded onto my lap before heading off to Davies’ bedroom to play.

Dad and I chatted, he agreed to fund Davies’ next round of swimming lessons, which we’re holding out on a final decision on until after tomorrow. Davies is very keen to go again come September and is aware that it is solely down to how he gets on tomorrow – ooh I guess this would be like SATS – except of course he wants to go again next term ;). We also talked about other, non bloggable stuff which having talked to my mum last week I’m not altogether sure I particularly want to be privy to, I do hope that whatever else Davies and Scarlett grow up blaming us for, being caught inbetween two parents from first living memory won’t be one of them. Sigh.

The rain cleared up so the children went off outside to play with the chickens, Dad left, but it was too late for us to go and do anything before I needed to go to work. Davies wandered back in the house again and saw me looking at the monsterteeny blog so asked to look at his Monster Movie Productions blog to which we started talking about other ideas for films and came up with the idea of a documentary about the chickens for him to do. So in the half hour before I went to work we went outside with the camera and filmed him introducing the chickens, showing us around their home and talking about ideas for the finished film. He then drew a picture and I dictated the letters to spell ‘My Chickens’ to him, then it was time for me to get changed and head off to work.

The four hours went pretty quickly. I did an hour on the Big Wild Read desk but only had a couple of children to talk to – one to register and one to listen to talking about the books they’d already read and issue them with their first set of stickers. I tend to talk about ‘my children’ quite a lot when talking to children. I’m not sure whether that is to put them or me at ease really but I still consider myself to be fairly crap with children generally, although maybe that’s just living with Ady who has a total Pied Piper thing going on and is therefore always likely to thrust me into a bad light! 😆

I came home to find my Mum here, but she didn’t stay long. Scarlett played on Ady’s laptop on barbie.com while Davies and I edited the chicken movie and took some more video clips of him linking between chicken vid clips – the finished project still needs work but I’m waiting for Davies to do it with me. We did stuff like brightening clips, rotating them 90 degrees and trimming them to change the length, including editing out a bit that went wrong, so it was all very good practise for putting together a film. I’ve sent off the consent form today for him to go and participate in a CBBC workshop of making movies in a couple of weeks time. No idea if he’ll get chosen as I imagine competition / uptake will be pretty stiff but it’d be great if he does get to go along. One of the local theatre places is running a summer holidays workshop including an animation workshop day which he’d love to do but only takes 8-12 year olds – if it was next year I’d think about pushing for him to go but he’s still way too young this year. I love working with him on stuff like this though, he has so much creativity, original ideas and articulates it all so well, he’s very imaginative :). We also looked at another reproduction book – Made with Love – which was excellent and answered all his questions except for ‘why are most babies born head first?’ which I could cover myself, so that’s good :).

The children had a bath, I brushed Scarlett’s hair and then I popped to the supermarket while they settled into Davies’ bedroom for a sleepover. They watched Charlottes Web and started Cat in the Hat before Scarlett decided she missed her toys and her own bedroom and came back downstairs again, falling asleep in minutes. Ady and I had dinner and watched another Torchwood and given we’ll all be tried and grumpy tomorrow from likely being woken by an alarm at 8am for swimming I’m off to bed myself.

I could do it, I could. I’ve done all the thorny ones today, how the seed from the daddy gets to meet the egg from the mummy (been fudging that one a while with large amounts of descriptions of menstruation but I was pinned down with a very direct question today 😉 ) whether I personally believe in Father Christmas (infront of a captive audience of children), trying to diplomatically answer a question about whether a birthday in March is before or after Christmas when one child was talking about ‘during a year’ and one was talking about their specific birthday in relation to the next occuring Christmas, oh and Where’s Wally?! 😆

Ady and I have just been watching 8 out of 10 cats too where there was a question about Britains being offered one wish and only 7% asking for world peace. Ady says he’d choose to meet God which I pointed out could prove rather disappointing given both our religious beliefs. We decided that as his intention had been to prove to the world at large the existence or not of God then he’d need to amend his wish to ‘meeting God on live television’ 😆 Although frankly if wishes were genuinely being handed out and granted I might need to rethink my stance on God and Father Christmas :lol:.

This morning started at about 630am when Ady kissed me goodbye, but that was something of a false start as I went back to sleep until about 7am when Scarlett came and started talking to me, which was another false start until just after 8am when Davies gotg into bed with me and then Scarlett joined us. Rather like that Grand National a few years ago. We finally got up around 830am and the children sat with me while I put make up on and got dressed. I have no idea how we got onto the subject but we ended up talking about family size and how come we had one boy and one girl and wouldn’t be having any more. I explained that Ady has had a special operation that means he can’t have any more children, which led to them asking if I still could and me explaining that yes, I could, but would need a different man to help me as it takes a man and a woman – or at the very least seeds and eggs from men and women. Which took various turns via puberty but ended up with a direct question from Davies about precisely how the seed from the man met the egg from the woman. I answered it without actually going into graphic details about intercourse and promised to get a book from the library to explain it better with pictures.

We had breakfast and watched the stair rod rain falling and the road swiftly turning into a river outside the window. We waited til about 1030 watching Sorcerers Apprentice and Stitch Up on CBBC until there was a break in the rain then we headed out to the library taking our four read books with us. We parked in the library staff only parking spaces in the car park, driving past the row of queuing cars, nice to have a perk ;). Both the children were SUPER confident about telling Yvonne about the books we’d read which was nice, as last year they both hid in my skirt when it was time to talk about the books. Scarlett went first with her The Dog That Dug book and would probably still be there now retelling the story, and then Davies talked about Felix the fast tractor and the new building remembering all sorts of things I hadn’t realised he’d taken in such as words like ‘trench’. They got scratch and sniff stickers, their reading game wallets and various activity sheets. I have tended not to take the children into the library much lately, seclecting a huge pile of books for them once a week whilst at work and then taking them back again the following week but actually the fact that they feel at home there knowing I work there, that everyone knows their names and that they treat it like they own the place is probably one of the benefits of my job that I’d slightly under-rated looking at them there today. I am the only member of staff with small children – all the others are childless or grandmothers with grandchildren with other libraries more local to them, with the exception of one of the Saturday staff who has same-age-as-Scarlett twin boys who also treat the library like a second home, knowing how to issue and discharge books themselves, walking behind the counter as though they work there and not being fazed in the least by the air of shushing which adults cannot help but respect, just like Davies and Scarlett. 🙂 They also got a packet of seeds for their first ‘gift’ of the reading game (the next one is a bookmark followed by the medal for completing it) so Scarlett wanted a book about seeds for one of her choices, which we found a suitable one for in the Early Information area, then as they were both rather randomly grabbing whichever book was at the top of the kinderbox for their choices I directed them to the Picture Books For Older Readers section where I usually select books for them from and they found five Where’s Wally titles so that took care of that :). I grabbed two books on reproduction and bodies for them too and we left.

Both childen made me a plastic container of perfume yesterday using crushed flower petals from the garden which are currently residing on the kitchen windowsill waiting to be decanted into spray bottles so I’d planned to get a couple from Boots. Boots in Lancing was shut due to flooding so we walked round the pther shops for a while before heading up to the big Boots on the local Retail Park only to find they are £2.15 each. EACH!!!! Which means it must surely be cheaper to buy some Tesco value beauty product for a quid, tip the contents down the sink and use the spray bottle for the kids perfume really. Will do just that tomorrow.

We came home and as we had no bread defrosted I made some cheese scones for lunch and we read some of the very excellent Lets Talk About Where Babies Come From which means they now know what bodies look like from every age from babies to ‘older grown ups’ having spotted the changes throughout a life, what a period is all about, where girls / women wee from (previously we’ve gone with vagina, now we are specific about how many holes we’ll be talking about urethas!) and the internal organs of a woman. We looked at the bit about what happens when a sperm meets and egg but didn’t get into how it gets there but no doubt that will come. Somehow the whole reproduction chat doesn’t feel as much of a challenge as I’d anticipated. probably to do with a very open attitude to body parts and functions since day one, lots of questions to this point leading to it being asked and the fact they are so young it will be a very basic chat about reproduction rather than sex for recreational purposes – for now at least. I’m torn between feeling pleased they seem to be together for most of these conversations therefore I’ll only be covering it once and worrying that in doing so I am leading them towards a natural ‘you have X, I have Y, let’s see if we can make a baby brother’ type scenario! 😆

We consumed cheese scones and then went to pick Lucy and The Rs up. We drove through rain, chatted about flying lessons having driven past Shoreham airport just as a plane was coming in to land and happened to be one of the ones that Ady and I both had a trial lesson in a few years ago. I’m sure there were further conversations but I can’t recall them and then we arrived at Monkee Bizness soft play. Ali, Freya and Ali’s Mum who is called some name beginning with the letter J were already there, swiftly followed by Eira, Lulah and Tialys from Magical Mondays so we all went in. Davies and Scarlett were instantly swallowed up by the soft play only resurfacing occasionally for drinks, ice cream (provided by Ali – thanks mate 🙂 ) and cuddles or declarations of love for me. Ali’s friend K was there with her two children once they’d been released from school and she was nice to chat to aswell, particularly when she exclaimed about how gorgeous and beautiful my children are, with particular reference to their amazing eyes – none of which I can take credit for either as a result of parenting or genetics but is rather lovely to hear just the same. I think they’re gorgeous too :). It was a very nice couple of hours being largely childfree without any real need for my parenting and whilst observing others who were called upon rather more than me it was also a reminder of how far we’ve come. Once upon a time the idea of sitting in a soft play would have been inconceivable. First of all I wouldn’t have been sitting, I’d have either been coaxing a child into the soft play area or following one round, simply sitting with the occassional glimpse of one of my offspring, out there, making friends of stranger, having a ball and enjoying themselves was very much an alien concept. It’s a bit nice to be sitting back and enjoying the fruits of going through those days. 🙂

We left and had a very good run home, traffic wise. Conversations included birthdays and before / after Christmas status, birthdays generally, age gaps and how they continue to be static even while ages might change, whether I believe in Father Christmas and the varying prices of soft play places in and around Sussex. Thanks to Polar Express and my relunctance to shatter my childrens’ childhoods coupled with no wish to outright lie to them either we have reached a compromise that they both know I don’t believe in Father Christmas but they both do, which we agree is fine. This is very much our stance on God too actually, although I do hope to at some point get across that God is rather more accepted as a genuine belief and indeed following to worship rather than the big bloke with the beard in the red suit :lol:. Apologies in advance to any Santaists that offends ;).

We dropped Lucy and The Rs home and came back arriving a short while after Ady, I cooked D&S some tea then went to clean out the chicken coop. I’ve been enjoying watching the debate on my US chicken forum since I posted some pics of them taken last weekend as to whether they are roos or hens. I have a couple of people convinced they are one and a couple convinced they are the other. Everyone seems to think Wobble – the only one I was fairly sure was a cockerel – is a hen though. I think it is a case of waiting for the egg or the cock a doodle doo to be honest, but I’m pretty relaxed at the idea that there is probably three or four hens there actually and am even pondering where to get a rooster from in due course should we decide we’d like one.

The children looked at Where’s Wally for ages while Ady and I got stuck into Friday night beers and then they finally clicked onto the idea that if they were quiet and out of sight we would be less likely to send them to bed, so they headed upstairs to play in Davies’ bedroom for ages playing with micromachines. We finally packed them off to individual bedrooms about 9pm and have had dinner and watched Torchwood since then while continuing to consume alcohol. See, there’s another reason we’re not at a bookshop about now – we’re too drunk to drive and our children are asleep ;).

My most favourite state to be in is slightly under pressure but managing I reckon. I quite like precariousness and a touch of uncertaintly and I definitely like busyness. For pretty much my entire pre-children career it was a constant state of being really, working initially as a waitress or in the kitchens of my parents restuarant where it was soo much more exciting when a coach load of people turned up for cream teas and we were dashing around trying to get it all done, to being on the refund desk at B&Q with customers queuing both sides, the phone ringing, constant tannoy calls and then moving into management where there was always something pressing happening. I’ve got slightly more protective of peaceful downtime nowadays but my day to day life could be considered fairly frantic at times and I love the feeling of looking at my diary on a Sunday night and knowing we’ve got a full week of ‘stuff’ ahead of us for the following week. So I have found the rather s l o w pace at the library a little testing at times, the day drags, I quicky get demotivated and slope off to try and skive a bit when there is nothing urgent to be getting on with and wish I was at home where I can set myself pressure targets such as getting all the laundry done, leaving getting the kids tea and tidying up the kitchen to just before Ady gets home so it is a mad dash rather than a leisurely exercise and giving myself constant ‘to do’ lists. I’m definitely a performs well under pressure kinda girl – most of the time anyway, before anyone pops up to cite instances when I haven’t 😉

So today was just excellent – in just four days we have signed up over 100 children for this years Summer Reading Game in our library and today far from the staff outnumbering the public three to one we were having people queuing! And I totally knew what I was doing – I joined new borrowers to the library, helped small children find the clues to solve the hunt the characters signs around the place, issued stickers and books, answered ringing phones and generally thrived off the buzzed up atmosphere of it being busy with a very slight edge of only just having it all under control – it was ace :). And then at the end when it all quietened down and I was trying to find a cd with the Big Fish Little Fish song on it to use for Davies’ party we had most of the library staff either singing the song, doing the movements or looking on wide eyed while the rest of us demonstrated it. I Nic’d up the library! 😆 Had no luck finding it, and a bit of googling reveals I’m not the only one searching so far from thinking it would be on a party dance mix album that I could order from work I’ve had to contact the bloke who wrote and recorded it about getting a copy 🙂 Did find some T shirts with it on though which I thought were rather cool (hey Em, when’s your birthday? 😉 ).

Came home to a rapturous greeting from Davies and Scarlett which was lovely – I do miss them lots when I work a whole day. I’d brought home loads of dvds as most of the ones I’d got on order had come in since last Friday so they got straight into a Doctor Who dvd while I cooked their tea. They had a bath which Davies got out of early so he went and fetched the two books he’d chosen for the reading game on Tuesday and we read one together with him reading a few of the words and one with me just reading it. He still really struggles with reading and it is genuine struggle rather than not wanting to put the effort in. He can do it but it is really, really laborious and doesn’t seem worthwhile or enjoyable at all. Some stuff he seems to read effortlessly like words on his x box games but it’s just not clicking for him yet when faced with a whole page of writing in a book. He tried though, seemed to enjoy the idea of him decoding a few words and then reading them when they were repeated through the book so that might be something we do again, but it served to cement my idea that he’s simply not ready, which having watched numbers be a similar mystery to him until fairly recently but have suddenly all clicked, I am happy to trust the process of it and remain hands off still. 🙂 The one thing he always has enthusiasm for is writing and sooner or later the two will merge I guess.

Scarlett got out the bath and brought me a couple of books to read for her and then they chose another one each, so we’ve done six books for them to choose two favourites each out of and maybe pop to the library tomorrow for their first stickers and seeds incentive. They went off to bed, Ady went off to buy cat food and I had a bath and cooked dinner. Tonight we’ve watched the first episode of Torchwood (another dvd) and I’ve spent lots of time on chicken forums :lol:.

Davies has been a bit ‘fragile’ of late. He goes through these funks every so often and always comes out of the other side but it’s bloody hard work while he’s processing it. In a crowd of people he knows well he plays the role of very loud, very confident, very self assured boy very well but deep down a lot of those early personality traits that led us to consider Home Education are still there and whether it’s a growth spurt, hormone rush, too many late nights in a row, phase of the moon, reaction to the tides or simply a reaction to lots of socialising that does it he puts himself in the role of victim, then gets all upset and delicate when he gets treated like one. He is a big wallower and in the same way as he enjoys being happy there are times when he can equally enjoy being miserable somehow. I’ve mentioned before that I struggle with this, I don’t respond well to neediness and clingyness, even when it is my own adored child demonstrating it and whilst I am great at offering kind words, cuddles and answers my patience and tolerance rapidly runs out when none of that makes a difference and the option of simply sitting on my lap looking mournful is taken up instead. 🙄

I’ve bandied about lots of theories the last couple of days, the most feasible is that his normal posse of children, that he mixes with weekly are all younger and he is normally very good at dealing with younger children, leading them in games, suggesting ideas to keep them all occupied and happy. But suddenly there’s been a bit of an upsurge in independant thinking from the ranks of 4 year olds who are rebelling at being told what games to play and are voting with their feet and playing something else instead, which he then struggles to infiltrate and ends up flouncing off because ‘no one wants to play with me’ which accusation is met with incredulous stares from said 4 year olds who all adore him and would love him to play with them, just not necessarily in the role of dictator :lol:. And he is the wrong end of way too many late nights aswell.

He cried while we were out today – genuine, crushed, hurt feelings tears, because ‘the girls’ had said ‘nana na na nah!’ to him and then decided he was a monster and run away screaming – which is a game of his invention. I talked to him about it and said that it was ok to show his feelings and be upset but he couldn’t expect me to tell other children how to play any more than I thought he should be telling them and that normally he would be utterly resilient in dealing with such pettiness. He explained that normally when he feels a bit sad about something he can deal with it just fine, but when he’s feeling ‘a bit delicate it all just bubbles over inside him and makes him cry’ which I thought was very articulate and could utterly sympathise with having had a similar time at Kessingland where just one more small thing would have had me sitting in the nearest puddle wailing!

So, to get back to today, we all rose late and had a mad dash about trying to get last nights washing up done and the kitchen put back together again, a picnic packed for the day out, everyone dressed and breakfasted and in the car within an hour of being up. Lucy and The Rs came over and we drove over to Julie’s who was also running late. We followed her to a Natural England site for a walk up into the downs. It was an Activeo event (specifically listed as Non Activeo Exclusive just so we could go 🙂 ) and there were two other families with us and another joined us a bit later. Davies was in full on clingy mode, wanting to hold my hand and interupt my conversations with adults to debate who loved the other one more out of him and I – honestly, if I had a man that needy I’d run screaming in the opposite direction!) but he did eventually wander from my side and ran off with the others. There were the most amazing yew trees there which were like individual play centres with all sorts of fantastical shaped branches, swirly patterns in the bark and big holes and gaps supporting wildlife. The children clambered over them, named one tree ‘Bug World’ having seen a family of woodlice in it and spotted holes for other bigger creatures. Davies found an egg shell which we deduced had not hatched as it didn’t have the pecked appearance of a hatched one but discussed what it’s fate might have been. We saw loads of beetles, bugs and butterflies (to quote a well loved book 🙂 ) many of which Davies and Scarlett identified. Julie is excellent at all things natural like plants, wildlife etc. and the children regularly bring her flowers or leaves or little creatures to identify. So we saw rain beetles, pill bugs, a walnut tree, hawksbeard, goatsbeard and various other things that I wouldn’t have had a clue about but the children either knew from previous walks with Julie or were able to learn about from her. It’s so exactly how I envisaged Home Ed working, that they have people around them who know ‘stuff’ and are able to ask them sensible questions and process the information they’re given. This week they learnt stuff from Helen at Fishbourne and have learnt more from Julie today. It’s great :).

We sat down for lunch and then the children wandered off to run yelling down the hill many times, search for more interesting things and generally enjoy being outside with loads of space, while the adults chatted. There was then a sudden downpour of rain which sent most of us scurrying back to the yew tree canopy for shelter and started us back towards the car park on a slow return walk. I had a brief chat with Cate, who was one of the first Home Educators I met when we moved back to Sussex and has a boy and a girl about 3 years older than D & S, so would have been about mines’ ages when we first met. She has gone through many incarnations of HE approach including private school, utter autonomy and fairly curriculummy stuff. We were having an interesting conversation about Hesfes and HE in general when Davies came and pulled me away as the rest of our party had started back to the car, so hopefully I can catch up with her again sometime soon.

On the way back to the car the sun came out again and aside from Davies regressing back to clingyness it was nice to walk bits of the way with Julie, Lucy or Fiona (a new HE woman with a 2 and a 3 year old who is just starting out at meeting other HE families) and chat. When we got to the carpark there was a lovely old car parked there which we all looked at for a while before loading everyone back into the car and heading for home. Scarlett asked ‘what are trees for?’ which led to a very long and interactive car-ed session covering uses for leaves, fruit, nuts, uses for trees while alive such as shelter, their effect on the environment and the uses for wood including furniture, houses, pencils, firewood for cooking, heating etc. play equipment, then wood being used to make paper so all the uses of paper for books, newspapers, drawing or writing on and finally bank notes. It was really good with all the children contributing, even Richard and it then led to a chat about where things grow – on trees, on plants, in the ground etc. It did degenerate into arguments about who’s turn it was to shout the next thing out but there was a good 10-15 minutes of pure learning in there first :).

We came home and let the chickens out, Davies and Scarlett stayed outside to play with them, Richard and Rebecca were asleep for a while and then came in and sat with Lucy while we sat chatting and then Ady came home. He put the chickens on the lounge windowsill where they all learnt to peck at the window for attention, so I imagine that will be their new party trick :). Lucy and The Rs went home, Davies and Scarlett had a speedy tea and then we went off to Badgers for the end of term presentation evening.

The Badgers were all playing host / hostess to the visiting families so we were plyed with tea, coffee, lemonade and biscuits while Davies changed from being the boy who’d annoyed me all day and became back to his usual self, proud of showing his drawings and other craft work off, messing about with his best friend at Badgers, taking Scarlett round to show her everything ready for when she starts in December, introducing his friends to us and going and getting more biscuits for us. I think he really likes to be the one in control of a situation actually. He doesn’t abuse the power when he has it, but he likes to know he’s got it. And erm, I guess I have to concede to relating to that rather heavily so maybe he has rather more of me in him than I first though :oops:. Badges and certificates were handed out to all the Badgers, with some of them leaving Badgers to join SJA cadets in September. I do think it’s an excellent group, far and away better than Beavers and Davies gets loads out of it, I think Scarlett will too, it’s a very supportive and caring environment. Julie, the Badger Leader had a baby 3 weeks ago so she was there as a guest star and as Scarlett was very keen to see her close up I accepted the offer of a cuddle and sat talking to Tarly about babies a bit. It was a difficult birth with ventouse, forceps and episiotomy which baby Alice still has a few scabs to prove some of and she is still under 8lbs so tinier at 3 weeks old than either of my children were at birth. I explained to Scarlett about ventouse and forceps, we looked at her little fingers and nails and Scarlett had her grab her finger, we looked at her unfocused eyes and talked about fontanelles on her head – baby ed! 🙂 She was however quite stinky in a dirty nappy and after all, a baby, so once we’d covered all that I passed her on to the next eager cuddler :lol:.

We left there and in celebration of the end of term took the children to McDonalds for an ice cream. Once home Ady cooked dinner while I finally put away the towering piles of laundry, some of which were residual clean clothes from Kessingland, so we all have full wardrobes, enough pair of pants and clothes to wear tomorrow without having to raid the clean clothes baskets, and I have three empty laundry baskets again to start the whole process again! 🙂

Work all day tomorrow so I really should be in bed making zzzs by now. Some pics on flickr of walk and Badgers, Ady has more on his camera of Badgers so I may come back and add them in later.

Snap! and

Maybe not so snap 😉

is what today was 🙂

I was playing catch up this morning having not gone to bed til about 230am and then not got up til nearly 10am. 😳 I then did some speedy housework, rounded up D&S and we headed off to the library. I wanted them to join the Summer Reading Game before it got all mad and busy with school children 😉 so we enjoyed parking in the LIBRARY STAFF ONLY parking spaces in the otherwise very full with a queue waiting for spaces carpark and headed in there to sign up. The children were super confident and chatty, and of course, being my children were utterly indulged by all four of my colleagues who were working today 🙂 They did the hunt the character thing around the library, chatted away to everyone and anyone and chose stickers and their first two books each. Then we popped into the supermarket to get various bits and pieces of food for today where they were both utterly charming, helpful and lovely. Whilst in the queue Helen rang to say they were already at our house and liked our chickens 😳 thereby cementing my position as craphostess 😆

We dashed home, made drinks, let the children do their thing and during the day Ali and Freya, Lucy, Richard & Rebecca and Ros with No Children At All arrived to be part of the day. It was really lovely 🙂 They children mostly played outside, the adults mostly sat and chatted inside, we enjoyed lots of phones trilling at once with twitters, Ros did some NLP(;-)) stuff, well ok it wasn’t NLP it was some sort of mind over matter type stuff, Elinor showed Scarlett a better way to climb up the doorframe than she’d already been doing, Alys was lovely, Freya got the hang of the Shoe Law straight away, Richard didn’t. Rebecca showed us her gymnastics and Davies was Mostly Being Doctor Who Even If No one Else Wanted To Play! 😆 I had lots of various chats in the kitchen with various people which was lovely and enjoyed being hostess without doing an awful lot :). Oh and there was a chicken in the road type incident which resulted in no deaths but possibly answered the ‘why did the chicken cross the road?’ question for us! 😆

Freddie – the first born and by far most adventurous chicken delighted us all by flying up to the washing line and roosting on a pair of my jeans! 🙂

Gradually everyone except Chris and Helen left, Ady came home, we fed the children and retired to the garden while they had baths in various combinations, then ate ourselves, cutting it fine as usual between acceptable eating time and Goddard eating time at about 10pm (we often eat at 11pm so that was almost early 😉 ). C&H left, Davies and Scarlett and Ady went to bed – Ady via Davies’ room, I sat with Scarlett and sang her songs and talked to her about great grandparents. And now I am feeling the effects of decent wine rather than under three quid a bottle wine and really should go to bed given I am due to be walking across the downs in under 11 hours time :). Thanks all who came for a lovely day – it was great. 🙂

We went to Fishbourne Roman Palace today. I went with the school when I was very young along with a trip to Bignor Roman Villa which is also local-ish and another place I’ve been meaning to take the children at some point.

We got there just before midday, having learnt that Chris and Helen were running late and had time for a quick play on the ‘match the symbol to the god’ game and were then invited into the audio visual presentation. It wasn’t really suitable or designed for small children, with Scarlett announcing to the room at large that she was bored about five minutes into it, but I pulled her onto my lap and whispered into her ear my own Scarlett-tailored commentary which seemed to help. 🙂 We then went back round the museum and they were interested in most of the various bits and pieces – mosaics which had been restored to show the patterns, some early tools and jewels and a skeleton as there had been four burial sites discovered there too. We were looking at the mosaic floors and talking about the various different patterns when The Beans arrived so we went back to the picnic area and had lunch. Well we had lunch, the children mainly ran around like loons playing some sort of monster game. They also hooked up with some other children, which was initially fun but ended up being upsetting to Tarly after they seemed to take the game a little more seriously than our four and were being quite scary monsters apparently! 😆 We sat and discussed whether you can indeed tell if children are home educated just by looking at them. I don’t think we reached a conclusion on that but maybe we could have some sort of controlled experiment 😆

We then went back in, Davies and Scarlett got sent back out again as they had now decided to eat their lunch, so we waited outside and then caught up with The Beans inside once they’d finished eating. I have to say Helen is the best person I can think of to visit a Roman Palace with as she was able to answer all the questions from the children – and me! 🙂 and also have an impromptu biology lesson when they were looking at the skeleton. I was glad we’d had that half an hour or so to look at stuff properly as Davies and Scarlett went all crazy the moment they had friends with them and just wanted to run and shriek really, but they enjoyed the roman-ness of the setting regardless and we get a season ticket for our entrance fee so can go again any time in the next year and do the bits they were too giddy for this afternoon 🙂

They did some stuff in the activity bit, matching modern day things to Roman equivalents which we called on Helen for again, some mosiac pattern building, some coin rubbing and some blocks building etc. before they felt the need to run around again so we went out into the gardens for a while. They played hide and seek, found some things to be spotted from a sheet and then requested to play on the hills outside again. So we sat back on the bench, they hooked up with yet more children and had a final play before we parted company and we drove home listening to the Rotten Romans cd all the way home. 🙂

Once home we let the chicks out for a free range wander, the children had tea and then we walked Davies round to Beavers – the last one of the term and a teddy bears picnic theme. I only found out when we arrived that it was ‘bring a guest’ so Scarlett could have stayed, but never mind. We came back and taught the chicks some new tricks – like jumping to get a bit of bread held above them and eating out our hands. Reading on forums it appears eating out of your hand is a big deal for non-hatched by you chicks but all of ours are very used to it. And no, still no idea what they are. With the exception of Wobble – the black one, who looks huge to me but someone said could be a fast growing breed indicating it’s a hen, they all look identical which suggests they are all boys or all girls. Ady reckons they’re all hens today, I’m still undecided.

Ady came home and I popped back to collect Davies and his bear and witness an incident of the Beaver leader shrieking at the boys – which she does all the time- and one of the dad’s pulling her up on it and checking his son was ok. He was really cross – and rightly so, but I’ve done my fair share of ranting at extra curricular activity providers already this week so I just watched and listened. That’s it til September now but he can do a Beaver Hobbies badge over the summer if he wants on a hobby of his choosing that he needs to participate in and tell the group about when they go back, so we’re putting some thought into that one.

The children played with the chickens for another half an hour or so before we shut them in for the night and the children went off to bed. As reported below Davies spent time at his window, but Scarlett was asleep very quickly.

Tomorrow we have lots of people here and if we’re up and about early enough I might take Davies and Scarlett off to the library to sign up for this years summer reading game – Big Wild Read which launched today and is apparently going to blow me away this summer with how mad crazy busy the library will be, so it would make sense to beat the rush of the children breaking up from school and get in there first.

It’s a Nic’s neighbours special post. Ooh what a treat. 🙂

No idea if I’ve kept you all fully abreast of the goings on in our street of late so here’s a nice update. You may want to settle in your chair with cocoa and a nice biscuit.

Don & Maureen, who live opposite and are the childrens’ most regular lavender stall patrons are fine. No news about them for you. Next door to them Owen and Carolyn (the one’s who went away for that weekend and left the car with the car alarm that went off for hours and days behind) are rarely seen. We still maintain low level curiosity about what they do for a living, why they don’t have children and why they never seen to do anything remotely coupley together. Next door to them live The Thank You Neighbours, who several of you have now had the good fortune to meet. We bumped into them today when we were off to Beavers and they were off to the local shop to buy ‘some ham and a few other bits’ which makes me wonder as to the nature of the ‘other bits’ really when they’d been so specific about the ham. I was much complimented on my new shorter hair, which they’ve noticed and decided they really like but not seen me to to talk to to tell me properly. Apparently it makes me look ten years younger, which I hope is an exageration as really I’m quite happy looking 33 and wouldn’t be that keen to be looking 23 with two children the ages of mine and a husband who is over 40 😆

Next to them live the nurse and the policeman – fabulously gender stereotyped couple 🙂 He was out fixing his roof recently – he does lots of outside-y tasks without a shirt on, which frankly he is unwise to do, but then I imagine neighbours think similarly of me dashing outside to get jeans off the washing line in my pants some times or putting the blue boxes out in a vest top without a bra so I guess I shouldn’t comment really! Anyway, he had the chimney taken down and was patching the roof with tarp. as the roof tiles had been delayed. We have a huge great pile of roof tiles in our back garden (where the rats live :roll:) from when we had the loft converted so we gave him a load and he cancelled his own delivery and brought us a rather nice bottle of rose wine to say thank you. The nurse (who never really says much but she works shifts so I assume she is always tired :lol:) went out on a hen night recently and was collected by a pink stretch limo and waved and shouted Hellooooos at us in a very friendly manner so must have been either drunk or well rested as it was very out of character. She’s not done it again since though.

Next to them lives Keith the unfortunately names foxy builder and his ‘missus’, who had a nasty motorbike accident recently and both ended up in intensive care for a while. They seem to be on the road to recovery now and it did lead to Keith answering his front door in his dressing gown and even spending some time chatting to the Policeman neighbour on the front path wearing it, so it wasn’t all bad. Their house has been up for sale for ages – they are apparently buying a camper van and going off travelling, but doesn’t get many viewings and seems to not be selling. Poor Keith.

Further up the road we are not so familiar with the intimate goings on, but it wouldn’t take much effort to learn 😉 A nod to David and he’d be on the case with all the gossip, and Davies’ room is perfect for citing long range binoculars 😆

Across the road lives Dragon Lady and her husband, they aged a lot while we were away and she now walks totally bent over and he gets collected by a community bus each day to go to a daycare centre. They still feed the birds every day though and have had four racing pidegons living on their roof who must have got lost mid flight for about six weeks too. Next door to them live a mad family who have given us many hours of entertainment with their comedy carrying on. They currently have a lodger who works nights at Sainsburys and there is always an assortment of odd characters pulling up day and night for the older man who lives there to look at their cars. They put the house up for sale about a month ago and a sold board went up this week, so we have ringside seats for the new neighbours whoever they may be and their moving in and settling period. Rubs hands together with glee!

And finally, next door. When we first moved here there was a family with two youngish children living next door, we never knew their names but called him ‘Ashington Motors Man’ because that’s where he worked. They split up and she moved out leaving him with the two children, by that time teens. While we were away he met a new woman and moved in with her, leaving his son in the house while he was at uni locally and then selling the house. The new neighbours moved in while we were at Kessingland last year and aside from David (thank you neighbour) accosting them and even inviting himself in when they first arrived, and the whole street talking about them being ‘Mitchells’ which is a well known Lancing Mafia style family we’ve never really heard much from them. The only room you can see their house / garden from is Davies’ bedroom, which means that when they have 3 boys leaping on the trampoline at 9pm and Davies is supposed to be in bed, he is more often than not standing at his bedroom window looking wistfully down at them. I’ve no idea how many of the children actually belong in that house – it always seems to be be different children every time I peek out. He often bangs on the window and waves to them and they exchange hand signals quite often.

So tonight he was trying to communicate with them and find out their names, long after he was supposed to be asleep in bed, he came down with a piece of paper and pen and asked me to write ‘what is your name?’ on it to hold up to the window 😆 and he got some yelled out answers too :). He is now very keen to go round there and play with them, but I’m not altogether sure how we arrange that one, I’ve told him to try shouting over the fence to them next time they’re in the garden at the same time as him and invite them round here first. They are lots older than him and although the idea of having next door neighbours he can play with is quite appealing I am slightly concerned at him attempting to climb out of his bedroom window after he’s gone to bed once he’s been aquainted with them properly!

which we can’t make as I’m working on Saturday 🙁

We’ve just a leaflet advertising loads of concerts at Crystal Palace Bowl including a FREE concert on Sunday 19th August called Noisy Kids.

It was the penultimate swimming lesson for Davies today. I’ve got really mixed feelings about them. On the one hand we don’t do teaching here, so I do appreciate it is not something that Davies is familiar with but he wants to learn to swim and has enjoyed the process and insists he wants to carry on. He has had a variety of instructors during the 12 weeks, some way better than others but actually I think consistency and continuity of teacher is a really important part of learning. The class has varied between 6 and 10 children with some of them way ahead in terms of ability. Davies has always been one of, if not the least able and to my mind has really suffered as a result with the teachers focusing on the more able swimmers. I’m fairly sure if roles were reversed and he was a better swimmer I’d be happy about this and not so keen on the slower ones ‘holding my child back’ so I’m not really complaining but he does tend to get rather ignored and left to his own devices which is a bit of a recipe for disaster really as he doesn’t then pay much attention to what’s being asked of the group, tends to just chatter to the child next to him or play with his float or noodle instead of doing much in the way of swimming. I’ve spoken to him about it several times, expressing that he is there to learn, not play or socialise, the onus is on him to do that and we’re not prepared to pay money for him to mess about, offering the chance to stop lessons if he doesn’t feel ready and just bring him to the pool to play instead until he does feel ready to focus on the learning, but he is adamant he wants to have the lessons. I think he has got plenty out of them, he is utterly confident of putting his face in the water, ducking under and laying right back into the water for back stroke, what it has given him is a great level of water confidence which I don’t have as an adult, but he does need to be pushed or at the very least coaxed along as without that he otherwise tends to mentally and physically wander off and do his own thing.

Last week they had a different teacher again and she was utterly fantastic, got loads out of every individual child, regardless of their ability level, learnt all their names within minutes and really pushed them all, Davies came out buzzing and I really felt we got money’s worth for the first time since he started. Today it was yet another teacher and she was rubbish, absolutely rubbish. Davies didn’t pick his feet up off the pool floor once I don’t think – he either walked along backwards or forwards depending on what stroke she’d asked for, he spent one entire width just lifting the float up and smacking it as hard as he could back into the water AND IT WENT TOTALLY UNNOTICED!!! I got so angry I clambered down to the pool side from the spectator area ready to drag him out of the water and shove him under her nose shouting ‘IS THIS CHILD INVISIBLE???!!!’ at her and quite probably had steam rising off me. There was a final insult of her getting them all to climb out and then jump back in. Davies struggles to climb out and this was also ignored with him trying, falling back in and trying again until he finally got out, by which point all the others had had their first go at jumping in and were having their second go, so he only got one try at that too.

I did some dreadful poolside public parenting and ranted at him in full view and hearing off all the children coming out and their parents and all the children about to get in for the next lesson, also being just loud enough in my ‘and worst of all it went unnoticed, the instructor was oblivious!’ ending to my rant to (hopefully) get overheard by her too. I would have spoken to her if she’d not been about to start the next lesson, so instead having got Davies changed I vented all my rage on the duty manager once we got upstairs. He was equally useless and advised me to email the instructor manager, who just so happens to be the excellent teacher from last week, so we swept out of there, no doubt fodder for the staff room for the rest of the day as ‘that lunatic woman from this morning’ 😳 I eventually calmed down and spoke to Davies about the whole thing, outlining again my expectations on him if he wants to carry on with lessons, but actually he *is* just a six year old child and we are paying money for him to be taught, which the right teacher managed effortlessly last week getting the best out of him. Anyway, a lesson in how not to parent, complain, behave in public for me probably – it’s not often these days I get red mist rage to that degree, although I can think of a couple of incidents just lately 😳 but when I do it I do it properly… About to compose a rather more reasoned and articulate email to them anyway.

Then we headed off to the car boot sale. I think I’d just about stopped shaking by the time we got there. We did well, a few more animals, a pony for Tarly (toy one, obviously 😉 ), a W&G jokebook for Davies and a coat to use for his Doctor outfit for his party for a quid. Oh and Gremlins on video which I’ve been keeping an eye out for. We left there and went to my parents for lunch / the afternoon, which was nice.

They have just bought a massive HD tv, dvd player/recorder and Ady had taken some dvds round to show them what it could do. He is very impressed and envious of it – personally I think they’d have done better spending the money on taking their grandchildren to EuroDisney but then I’ve always been more about the experiences than the ‘stuff’ – I was only saying this week that I could fit all the belongings I’d ever need in one small suitcase if I was ever going to leave home (laptop, phone, camera, make up 😉 – no not about the stuff at all :lol:), but then as I may have mentioned The Littlest Hobo had a big effect on me as a child 😆 So we watched a load of home video of the children from when we were in Manchester and the first few months back here – from the childen being 18 months and 3 years old up to about 2.5 years and 4.5 years, so ending with Davies being the age Scarlett is now. Very nice to watch and interesting to see in what ways they have and haven’t changed.

We left there at about 4pm and came home to find a Doctor Who back to back fest on one of the sky channels which the children dipped in and out of, interspersed with playing outside and hassling the chickens who I’d let out for a bit of free ranging. I was really curious to see the first interaction between cat and chicken and managed to be looking out the window when it happened. Candle was sitting in the bushes, more idly watching them peck about than anything and when they got a bit too close she lashed out without making contact. The chick squawked a bit and flapped away and that was the end of it. Very much a ‘sod off’ warning swipe than a ‘I’m going to have you with cranberry sauce little chickie’ type one which she didn’t bother to follow through with anything. I still wouldn’t totally trust her and will only let them out for a while yet when I / the children are around but it appears promising for future relations.

The children were packed off to bed fairly early, I put the chickens away for the night, we had a roast dinner and watched The Holiday. Well I watched it, Ady deemed it ‘not funny enough and way too girlie’, spent some time researching sonic rodent repellers online and then buggered off to bed! 😆

We’re planning a meet up with The Beans at a nearby Roman villa tomorrow, which should be lovely and a bit of an open house here with them on Tuesday – so if anyone local, or indeed anyone not local but willing to travel miles for our combined company would like to join us, please do so :).