One word? When seven would do…

Feeling much better today, despite being woken by a hysterical Scarlett because Ady had already gone off to work. She finally calmed down and both children got into bed with me for cuddles before we all went downstairs. They breakfasted and Davies made a birthday card for Dad, then we headed off to Tescos for various ingredients and bits for a barbecue tonight. We were in there for ages looking at all sorts of things including picking up various bits for goodie bags for D’s party (on the basis that if I get something each week we won’t notice the cost :lol:), a sunhat for me as the only one I had has been taken by Scarlett and a load of vests and pants for both children as I noticed Scarlett’s draw is full of age 2-3 and Davies is full of age 4-5 with the odd 5-6 all of which are washed and worn and very shrunk. They were all on special offer anyway as part of the back to school stuff and reduced to clear as they were presumably last years packaging, so it made sense to buy now. Davies needs socks too but I think he might be about to go into the next size socks (I’m pretty sure it’s 12 1/2 to something) so I’ll wait for sock wearing weather again for that one. I did get them a pair of next size up wellies each though as they had £2 a pair plain pink or blue ones which I know will be nowhere to be found come welly wearing weather. When we get back from holiday next week I’m going to sort out a load of outgrown stuff to ebay and will then have money to do a proper new clothes shop for them come Autumn.

Home for lunch and as they were both fading fast from tiredness (and I’m pretty sure Davies has my cold and Scarlett is probably going down with it too) we stuck a film on for them to sit and watch – Arthur and the Invisibles. Davies had been looking at the case and asking if the actor who plays Arthur was Charlie from Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and also from 5 Children and It and I’d said I couldn’t tell from the picture, so he said we’d know as soon as we heard his voice. And sure enough it is and we did! We particularly liked his spikey hair in this film, which is not dissimilar to how Davies’ looks when it’s tufted up, so that pleased him. 🙂 I got bored of watching so after making a phonecall to arrange to go and visit Truleigh Hill later this week for a nose round I went off to start baking Dad’s birthday cake.

I had this vision of a cake with layers (not unlike how Shrek tries to describe himself to Donkey :)), chocolate cake, chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, chocolate frosting – you get the idea. When I was about 15 a friend and I used to go into a coffee shop and buy slices of this cake they called Death By Chocolate which was layered like this. I couldn’t find anything similar listed on google under death by chocolate recipes so gave up on that idea and looked for recipes for the individual layers instead – UK ones, because I’m always suspicious of things called corn starch and powdered sugar and measurements in cups :lol:. So I duly made two chocolate cakes, melted chocolate and cream together and chilled it and then then tried to whip some cream to fold some of the melted chilled stuff into to make the mousse. But I don’t actually have a proper handwhisk, just a blender from when I used to puree food for babies, which doesn’t actually whip cream, it just overwhips it to curdled yellow stuff. So when a quick check on argos website revealed they sell the very implement for under £4 we dashed along the road to argos and purchased one. Hurrah, it’ll be instant whips and creamy desserts a go go here from now on :lol:.

When we got back Lucy and The Rs were outside waiting for us so the children played outside – no idea what but I know it involved ‘clubs’ and musical instruments while Lucy and I chatted and I made full use of my new kitchen appliance. I learnt that making a cardboard ring to tape round the cake and the mousse while it set would have been a handy tip as it squished out of the edges but it still tasted gorgeous so is something I’ll try again. Lucy and The Rs left as Ady got home, with Mum and Dad arriving soon afterwards.

We had barbecued dinner outside then came in for cake after which the children – who were tired at lunchtime and really, really tired by 10pm 🙁 went to bed. Mum and Dad did their usual trick of not going home until we virtually kicked them out but it was a nice evening just the same.

The big news here today is that Ady has been provisionally offered a new role at work. This comes not two weeks after his job role changed from Merchandising Manager and Health and Safety Manager to National Account Manager for Wyevale Garden Centres and Health and Safety Manager with a member of staff below him to train up on the H&S stuff. Roundstone have just done a deal to supply QVC shopping channel with bedding plants to sell on the tv and part of the deal is that there is a ‘Face of Roundstone’ supplied to QVC to be on tv selling with the presenter and also to dress the set with product. Apparently the first person the board thought of for the role was Ady 😆 so he’s off to QVC next weekend for a screen test and if all goes well his job role will be that combined with H&S for the next 2 years. There are a couple of other work related things for him in the pipeline at the moment too, all of which are making him feel happier with his career so that’s all good. The downside is the potential for my 11 hours a week to become ever more trickier – particularly if my every other Saturday afternoon isn’t definitely covered by Ady, but losing that money would be one of the issues he’d raise with work as and when his new role becomes definite and they talk new salaries and benefits packages. I would be really sorry to let my job go and hopefully it wouldn’t come to that but realistically it would be the first casualty if it started to become difficult to work round. Apparantly it is by no means closed sets at QVC though so there would be loads of potential for us to go up with him to work and see all the behind the scenes stuff which I know would make one of our family very happy indeed to see the workings behind the camera 🙂

Tomorrow we’re off to Drusillas as it’s Wallace and Gromit day there, which Davies and Scarlett don’t actually know about yet. It’s the main reason we rejoined annual membership as we couldn’t have not gone along to that practically on our doorstep and membership is the price of 3 visits. I imagine it will be heaving with people but I’m determined to get a couple of photos of Davies shaking hands with his heroes. 🙂

it will be ready in time to get one for Davies’ Doctor Who party? 😆

69 today! Now I know I often take lots of pictures which look very similar to each other and flickr the whole lot. I admit sometimes I do it just for fun now ;). But tonight I took about 50 photos in a row of my Dad with his birthday cake, some alone and some with Davies and Scarlett and when I looked back at them almost every one had captured something slightly different in his expression. I’ve not flickrd them all, just the ones which made me smile when I looked back at them, but in at least 2 I caught a glimpse of what he must have looked like at Davies’ age sat behind the flickering candles on birthday cakes of many years ago.

So Happy Birthday Dad, the most infuriating, challenging, loving, supportive, caring, steady, calming and comforting person I have had the priviledge to know, let alone be related to. 69 years is a whole lifetime to many, I hope you have many more years left but I saw in your eyes tonight a whole life time of memories of birthdays and years of the past – I’m pleased today was one of the happy ones.

I had a really crap nights sleep last night with lots of waking up to cough or blow my nose so when Scarlett woke just after 7am I was so not ready for the day to start. But we had to be out of the house by 9am to go to the Beach Beasties event at Pagham harbour. It’s a bit of the coastline which I’ve never been to before despite it only being 20 miles away – and totally gorgeous. And totally within our budget of being a FREE event too :). Ady gave me some cold and flu tablets so I was flying high by the time we actually got down to the beach.

Full set of pictures here on flickr but here are a couple of my favourites:

There were five rangers and about 15 children and equal adults so a fairly good sized party of us, it was low tide so loads of rock pools and seaweed covered very shallow water to search in. We all were given a tray to fill with water and keep our catches in to show at the end and the rangers walked amoungst us telling us about what we were looking at. We caught crabs – shorecrabs and spider crabs, shrimps, sandmasons and Ady saw although didn’t manage to capture, an eel. The crabs were the most exciting really – I spotted a pretty sizeable shorecrab which Ady captured and we all gathered round to inspect and were told all about how they shed their shells once they outgrow them, grow back pinchers over the course of 2 or 3 shell sheds and how they balloon up with water to help split their shell. Really interesting stuff 🙂 Someone else then found a spider crab which was even bigger than our shorecrab and as it had just shed a shell it’s current body was still quite spongey and soft while it hardened off so that was an excellent example. Scarlett spent ages with one of the rangers learning about the different types of seaweed – mermaids hair, sea lettuce, bladderwrack and Davies talked to another ranger for a long time about the crabs and shrimps. We were there for about two hours before the tide was about to start coming in and looking back to the beach we realised it had filled up with sunbathers. All the trays were gathered in and we all had one last look at the various things the group had collected before the crabs were all taken off to be released away from the crowds and we headed for home to have some lunch.

Ady cooked sausages, eggs and bacon on the barbecue after which I decided I was too hot to stay outside in the sun and came in to slump on the sofa, falling asleep for the best part of four hours 😯 I had plenty of visitors – Davies brought me a blanket and Scarlett came in at least twice to tell me she lloved me and I kept rousing enough to blow my nose and hear twitter texts coming in but one minute it seemed to be 3pm and the next it was 7pm! I guess I must have needed it though and it’s not done me any harm because I’m already ready for bed again now, so it’s not messed up my sleep pattern either – probably just sleeping off the cold and flu tablets 😆

Ady and the children did some seaside inspired paintings and then made fish shaped pancakes on the barbecue for their tea. Ady chucked them in a much needed bath around the time that I woke up so I went and washed their hair while Ady starting cooking a roast pork joint and some roast potatoes on the barbecue for our dinner. The children took ages to go to sleep, which surprised me as it’s been a full on day for them. We were supposed to be going to meet friends in London tomorrow but it’s my Dad’s birthday which had slipped my mind when I made the arrangement so we’re having Mum and Dad over in the late afternoon / evening and actually unless I make an amazing recovery overnight I think a trip up to London would have done me in anyway. I so want to be over this cold for the end of the week so a quiteish day at home, baking a birthday cake for Dad and pottering about should be enough to see if off hopefully.

I worked this morning. It went pretty quick even though it was a quiet Saturday – I assume the lovely weather and the fact that loads of people are away on holiday meant that the library wasn’t a destination for most people today. I did bring shame upon my people though this morning for which I must repent. I let myself down, my children down, hell I let you all down. I must bow at the feet of the god of Home Education (it’s Mike Fortune-Wood isn’t it? 😉 ) and confess my sins and pay the price of my crime. For I cannot be truly called Home Educator any longer. I must give back my hama beads, recant my rainbow and no more must I take out free trials of education city using different surnames and postcodes to trick them into thinking I’m a brand new potential customer. I was tasked with using the laminator at work and I failed. It’s a big laminator, that much is true – not the simple A4 capacity only type home use one I am proficient with, having been A Home Educator for some 4+ years now, but it is still one of the most basic items in the HE kit – one of the first things you are required to have in your home, along with the map of the world (gulp) and of course the table to do work round (ah, fuck). So there you go. It’s time to come out once and for all and confess that actually I’m not even very good at being a Proper Home Educator. And I did once have a sonlight catalogue but I mostly just ripped it up to make papier mache with so that probably doesn’t even count. And sometimes when my children show an interest in something – for example Doctor Who – I don’t sit down with them and make lapbooks about it. Anyway, I was laminating today, having smirked a bit when I was asked if I could use a lamintor and assured my boss that I could. And then it all went wrong, and it chewed up the sign I was laminating (one about how the library could not be held responsible for any damage caused to audio visual equipment by playing items borrowed from the library such as cds, videos, dvds and audio books) and I had to get someone to help me yank it back out again. Oh the shame 😳

Other than that it was a fairly uneventful morning. 😆

I got home to find Ady and the children in the garden, playing with the hose pipe, having barbecued sausages for lunch. Ady’d heard about a car boot sale on in the big park in the town centre so we decided to head down to that and see whether it was any good. But before that Davies’ tooth came out and we got all distracted by looking at the childrens’ baby books to see when he’d cut his first tooth and then looked at all sorts of other information and pictures in there, I wish I’d been a blogger back then, it would be great to have more records of that sort of stuff.

We parked the car near my old secondary school and walked to the park. The car boot sale was somewhat oversold, with no more than 20 cars and most of them traders selling new stuff rather than genuine car-booters. Me and the children sat on the grass and watched some belly dancers do their thing (Scarlett was describing the dancers to me – one was fat, one was young and one looked like Alison! :lol:) then we walked round the rest of the stalls. There was a fire engine with firemen giving safety advise so we chatted to them awhile and then there was a load of chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, rabbits and other small creatures all displayed. The children wanted to hold the chicks and having done their usual charm offensive of telling the birds’ owner all about themselves and the chickens we’ve got at home that we hatched out of eggs ourselves, she very happily plonked all sorts of creatures in their arms, including the 4 day old ducklings that she said she’d not let anyone else hold :). We had a long chat to her about all things fowl and when she told us that the 4 week old rooster there would grow to be really huge I said to the children ‘Oh, like that massive cockerel we saw at the South of England Show’ to which she replied ‘ah yes, that was his father – we were there too!’ and it turned out that the chick today was indeed sired by the massive bird we saw at Ardingly in June:
which was pretty cool :).

We left there and had a little play in the park before walking back to the nearby CoOp for some barbecue stuff. They didn’t have much so we walked back along to the car and then drove to Sainsburys for food instead. We got home around 6pm, I made various salads, which the children even tried 😯 – a real surprise to see them both eating rocket and watercress! It was really nice sitting out chatting while the children played and the food was cooking – I think it was our first barbecue of the year here at home. The children are also old enough to do stuff like go to the freezers in the garage to get the ice creams too, so it’s lovely being able to direct them to do stuff while we carry on sitting down too :). We came in just after 8pm, Ady showered both the children while I cleared up and they both went to bed at 9ish and fell straight asleep, which is also nice.

Tomorrow we’re planning to go along to a rock pool beach combing event in Chichester harbour, which sounds fun so I’ve bought the children a net each from the local pound shop in Lancing and an early start to get there for the meeting time of 10am is required, hence an earlyish night for me.

See that tooth on the bottom? It was his first tooth ever, it broke through on 28th June 2001. 6 years and a few weeks later it’s come out. Anyone who’s seen him in the last couple of weeks will have been treated to seeing how wobbly it has been for *ages*. Somehow both Ady and I have been around to witness both children’s first steps and first words – by pure coincidence given we have both been working around the time it happened for both children. Today, not long after I got in from work at lunchtime Davies was eating a gingerbread man and his tooth started bleeding. I went to wobble it to see how far from coming out it was and simply plucked it out as I took hold of it, so we were both around for this landmark moment too.

I’ve always had a sort of idea but now I’ve wikiepedia’d and I really, properly know.

And if you don’t follow my twitters you won’t know why I was prompted to find out what a levee is today but I bet you could guess anyway, let’s face it levees don’t come up all that often in your normal UK average day to day lives.

Not at all sure where this morning went really, given we didn’t leave the house until 11am but I’d like to pretend I was occupied with constructive, productive pursuits, even though I suspect I was mostly messing about online while the children ate sugar puffs and made a mountain in the hall using the car mat. I know I did some more of my personal pages for my american chicken forum – I’m loving being part of a whole new community of internet folk who probably don’t really exist outside of my laptop. 😆

We left home at 11am to go to Ali’s house, taking with us the set of fun blox that we borrowed from Freya about 18 months ago. We’ve had two sets of our own since kessingland 2006 but never managed to coordinate visiting Ali’s house at the same time as remembering to take the blox with us. It did mean that we forgot to take bread with us though as we are only capable of remembering to take one thing a-visiting at a time. The roads next to Ali’s road have all recently been made parking meter parking only which seems to have meant that all the cars which used to park in those roads have moved into Ali’s road. Also there is lots of building work going on in at least 3 houses down their road so there were various vans parked about the place, which meant we drove round for about 10 minutes trying to find somewhere to park that didn’t require either paying for it or getting public transport to take us back to Ali’s 😆 We eventually found somewhere at the end of their road and in we went.

Very quickly into initial conversations Davies asked me something which I answered with ‘a long, long time ago….’ which, as I blogged about just the other day, I can’t say or type without breaking into American Pie. So once I’d answered Davies Ali and I indulged that, first with a minor singalong and then with all out 8 minutes 32 seconds of pure enjoyment of all the magic that is Don McLean by Ali putting American Pie on their fancy pc stylee music and video entertainment doobree. Ali knows more of the words than me but we had a great 8 minutes and 32 seconds of singing along and encouraging the children to do so too with lots of calls of ‘Everybody….’ for the chorus. Of course they didn’t join in, they mostly look plain scared but we felt great :). After that I popped out to the shop to get the bread. I opened Ali’s front door and stepped out with a very gutsy ‘the three men I admired the most….’ and realised that Ali’s next door neighbour was standing outside her house chatting with another woman, both of whom had paused their conversation when I exited singing. I had a brief internal struggle as to how to play my next move – I could blush, put my head down and pretend I hadn’t been singing, turn to them with arms open wide and urge them to join in, or lower my voice slightly and murmur the next line into the wind. I went with the third option and walked away quickly humming about the last train for the coast. 😆

We had a lovely afternoon at Ali’s. The children spent a fair bit of time off playing so we got to chat lots, we had lunch, Ali bestowed many gifts upon us and then foolishly, buoyed up by the success of their independant playing and possibly still riding the crest of thinking we were lonely teenage bronking bucks, we donned our pink carnations and drove our pick up truck (well ok we walked) to the P.A.R.K. Now we did the P.A.R.K. about this time last year and frankly it was a total disaster. This time Ali had prepared for it really very thoroughly. She had a rucksack with cornettos in. And water. But no, it was not to be. The very notion that the children would take their ice creams and play on the dedicated play equipment whilst allowing us to sit on a bench and eat our ice creams was so not to be. We had discussion on ice cream flavours available, a tantrum about being pushed on the swing, several handfuls of grass showers, a small body with very big ears squashed inbetween us on the bench (because the conversations of two grown women clearly outrank the conversations of a 6 year old and a 4.5 year old who mainly talk about ponies and princesses). So we gave up on that idea and headed for home, via the local shop where Ali bought them all a magazine each.

The magazine proved a very cunning plan – Scarlett sat and coloured in the ponies pictures in hers, Davies looked at the pictures in his Doctor Who one – mostly the ones of merchandise available 🙄 and we were inspired to put a Doctor Who episode on. My casting vote of one with The Ecccleston and Captain Jack won out so we had lots of ‘Are you my Mummy?’ punctuating our final conversations along with Freya giving me demonstrations in building things with fun blox. 😆

Home for the children to put on Shrek x box and play that together really nicely for about 2 hours. Ady came home and somewhere an evening has disappeared.

I’m working tomorrow morning instead of afternoon so I have a plan to go to bed very soon. I’ve got a list of the 60 odd items we have dotted around the house belonging to the library which I want to take at least half of back tomorrow.

Off to work for me today. Lucy and The Rs were here with Davies and Scarlett in the morning and my Mum was here in the afternoon. Ady’s been complaining of a cold for the last 2 or 3 days and during the course of this morning I started to feel a telltale lump in my throat and a sniffle started to manifest itself which by lunchtime had me concluding that a) I was ill and b) I felt ill.

It had been a busy and rather chaotic morning. A new assistant librarian started a couple of weeks ago and is clearly keen to ‘put her stamp’ on things. She is young, fairly earnest and as librarians go probably almost quite dynamic ;). Anyway she’s made a couple of small layout changes which even I, with my whole 8 months experience at 11 hours a week can see make no sense at all and are actually plain stupid. So, bizarrely, along with all my colleagues I felt really quite irritated by this and personally affronted at it. When I was at Clinton Cards one of my favourite quiet period pastimes was to reshuffle the layout of the shop and many a happy afternoon was spent with all the soft toys in the middle of the shopfloor while we redesigned the layout and moved whole great sections of the shop around. At Bhs we rotated great chunks of the shop floor on a very regular basis with swimwear at the front during January to April and chunky knitwear from May to August (and no, I am not entirely joking 😉 ), January and July and the various mid season sales meant all reduced stock was brought to the front, Christmas party wear and big winter coats took floorspace in the winter, the Christmas ‘Shop’ took over half of womenswear from October onwards and we created a whole island of novelty socks twice a year in menswear for Fathers Day and Christmas. Oh and we had a portable umbrella stand which we used to wheel to the front of the shop every time it rained 😆 So I guess I’m internally struggling with a) it not being my job to decide what gets moved about any more and b) it being a blatantly stupid move anyway! Oh and c) feeling ill so being irrational 😆

I wandered around the shops very half heartedly for 20 minutes or so before buying a bottle of coke and a jam donut for my lunch in the hopes that a combined sugar and caffine high would suffice to get me through the afternoon. Then I went and sat at a pc for half an hour and updated the links page on my blog.

The afternoon was rather better, several of us were bored so we entertained ourselves by singing mana manah from the Muppet Show and discussing camping trips and how our own garden might just be the very place to spend next week 😆 Oh and I did lots of cutting out of green paper leaves to form the display of a big tree with every child who finishes the Big Wild Read having their name written on a leaf and added to the tree. Very Blue Peter 😆

I came home to a very tidy house but Mum wanted to talk. Not listen, just talk. So I fed the children, bathed the children and listened to her monologue all the while fantasising about lemsip but knowing that cold and flu remedies are an evil that I should stay away from – I have learnt my lesson in the past with the siren song of the beechams!. Ady got home, Mum left, I went out to the swimming pool to pay for Davies’ lessons in September (Dad had given Mum the money to pass onto me). Then I had a very late dinner and watched Torchwood which made me cry which didn’t do much for my dripping nose really.

And I’m sure I had much more I wanted to say but I can’t because I have to go to bed immediately, before I succumb to the nightnurse!

First thing this morning we gathered up all the library owned items in the house. A recent tidy up in the lounge has freed up a corner beside the tv which we’ve now allocated to library stuff to keep it all together. I had several things to go back, we collected up all the watched dvds and all the children’s books and I got Davies and Scarlett to choose two each.

Davies chose George saves the world by lunchtime a fab book all about reduce, reuse, recycle, repair type environmental stuff and Guess who’s coming to dinner? which is one of those books where the pictures tell the story that the words are skimming over. Scarlett chose Cold Paws warm heart which is a cute little tale about friendship and loneliness and then Misery Moo which by pure coincidence was also a story about friendship – this time focussing on how if someone you love is sad then you feel sad too. We then spent ages trying to find the BWR wallets to take to the library with us, finally turning them both up, gathering up towels and sunsuits and then heading off to the library.

Funnily enough I’ve just read Allie’s post over at Green House By The Sea about loving work and what Allie misses when she’s not there and having not been at work myself for nearly two weeks it was lovely to go in today and be greeted by the colleague on duty and busy myself collecting the various stuff which had arrived for me since I was last in, checking my in-tray and so on. We parked in the library staff only parking bays, moving the traffic cones to get in the space rather than sit and wait in the general queue for the car park, which always delights the children. While I jumped out to move the cones they’d been chatting and reported back to me when I got back in the car that when they grow up they’d both quite like to work at the library, with Scarlett saying ‘well we already do sort of work in the library don’t we Mummy, we know how to do loads of stuff!’ 😆 They went off and told the person manning the BWD all about the books they’d read and got their next stickers and the incentive reward of a hologram bookmark. We didn’t get any more books out as we already have a huge stash here from our last visit.

We popped to the Co Op (they waited outside in the car while I ran in) to get some jaffacakes and we went round to Lucy’s. The children had a whale of a time, mostly outside, playing with the paddling pool, the garden table, the playhouse, water, mud and towels creating all sorts of imaginary games and adventures, mostly leaving Lucy and I to have a really good few hours chatting. We covered hugely diverse topics including feminism, parenting, catching up on the 15 years between us as 17 year olds and us when we met up again 2 years ago, relationships and all sorts of other things. I’ve noticed Davies in the last few weeks starting to do what I recall doing as an older child and indeed have seen the older children of friends’ do where they sit, quietly and without interupting, seemingly playing or busy but are actually taking in all of what’s being said. Today Davies suddenly had some questions about religion and God and Heaven and beliefs, asking that if you believed in God and Heaven and that when you died you would live forever in Heaven would everyone you love (quite specifically me) be there? I explained that was one of my big issues with religion, that actually, for most people the fact that I don’t believe in God would mean that no, I wouldn’t be getting to Heaven, even though I live as a (mostly) good person. I tried to explain how I don’t think we choose to believe in things, we just do and no matter how much you can try and be open to ideas if you don’t believe, you simply don’t believe – you can’t pretend to as that is pretending to yourself and you can’t suddenly decide, from this point forth that you are going to believe either. I talked about how the things I believe in are all things I have seen proof of – I explained how I believe in love and in happiness and in people, I also explained that for many religious people simply the fact that each morning a new day starts and that there are people around who love them and that life is beautiful is enough proof for them of the existance of God. It was all a bit heavy and I often worry about saying the wrong thing when having such deep questions thrown out me out of the blue but I just try and be totally honest about what I think and get across that it is ok to think pretty much whatever you want if that’s what you feel to be true so that even what seems like perfect logical sense to me isn’t influencing him and his thoughts too much.

Davies has suddenly got the look of a german shepherd puppy dog to him, with his head and feet looking too big for his body and his legs suddenly all lanky, which I assume means he is finally about to have a real proper growth spurt. He is really tired, getting quite emotional at little things and has several tics and twitches again at the moment, he’s asking lots of deep and challenging questions and appears to be processing all the new information very carefully – and of course that bloody tooth is still hanging – by one very thin thread – in there, although the tooth next door is also wobbly now, so I guess he’s going to catch up with gappiness pretty quick to all the other 6 year olds. I think he is on the cusp of a big leap forward just in time for his seventh birthday which does feel like a bit of a landmark ‘big kid’ age. Looking at the photos of him aged 2 and 3 I was uploading last night I am reminded of aspects of him as a toddler which have long since been lost forever but at the time were such big parts of who he was, and we’re going through something similar again now, with the basic Davies still in there but lots of stuff stopping to be who he is anymore and lots of new stuff coming along to take it’s place.

Scarlett is really revelling in making her own friends at the moment and being a seperate person to Davies. They remain very close though. I watched them sit for a good five minutes today, side by side, in Lucy’s garden while R&R were off doing something else. They were having a proper conversation, with loads of facial expressions and gestures. It wasn’t just the stating of factual information that children do at each other, it was a proper interaction, a real ‘chat’. Ady and I were talking about sibling relationships the other night and saying what a unique dynamic it is, which you don’t share with anyone else. It is closer than friends because you actually do love each other, and unlike with friends you don’t get to choose your siblings so you have to invest time and effort in making the relationship work rather than just choosing someone else to spend time with instead. Your siblings know you totally, understand where you’ve come from, share your experiences with your parents and are utterly demographically equal to you. But unlike with your parents there isn’t the emotional risk involved – I had physical fights with my brother, called him the worst names I’ve ever called anyone, told him I hated him and did utterly dreadful things to him – just like he did back to me. But it was a completely resiliant friendship – no grudges were born, we both knew we didn’t mean any of it and from the age of 2 and a half, so my earliest memory, I was always one half of ‘Nicola and Frazer’. Ady obviously has a far more complicated relationship with his brother – and indeed did with his late sister too, but there is still a very strong connection there – your siblings really shape who you are, they are around for all those formative experiences and without any rose tinted glasses they can really tell the truth about what you were like as a child – and most of the time, still be around to love you as an adult. It’s lovely to watch D&S sitting chatting like that and delighting in each others company for so much of the time.

I managed to change Davies’ swimming lessons to Tuesday evenings today, so come September we have commitments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday ‘after school’ which is a bugger – and from December we will on Friday nights too with Scarlett starting Rainbows but at least we get our Sundays back and every other weekend will be free again. It will also be interesting to see whether Davies does his learning mentality stuff better at the end of a day or at the beginning too as he tends to thrive at Beavers and Badgers with the activities there at the end of the day so maybe swimming will be the same.

We came home from Lucy’s and the children had tea, Ady got home fairly early so I nipped out to Tescos to get a few bits and spent about half an hour wandering round the very huge sale on clothes. I picked up a pair of red trousers for next summer for Scarlett and a pair of red trousers for me for £4 too but other than that there was nothing which attracted me – lovely to be able to browse in peace though – was just as nice as if I’d bought more just to be able to rummage. I got home just as my phone rang with a voicemail from Ady to say we also needed cat food and coffee, so I dropped the Tescos bits in and went back out to Sainsburys (nearer) to get cat food and coffee 🙄 Home for bath and dinner and an episode of Torchwood. The chickens are very entertaining at night now – they have learnt to flap up to the lounge windowsill and peck at the window to get attention to let me know they want supper and putting away for the night. They are very amusing pets. 🙂

Tomorrow I’m working all day and Ady is at a corporate entertaining event at Goodwood. He had a really good annual appraisal today so is feeling buoyed up and appreciated at work, which is nice. He is all fired up with plans for next season and we’re away camping for a week from the end of next week, which we’re really looking forward to as a proper holiday with rest and relaxation. Oh and some sunshine would be nice too 🙂

I’m reading The History of Love by Nicole Krauss at the moment. I’m not very far in but really enjoying it, it’s just so beautifully written with wonderfully constructed sentences.

Some writers have massive talent for storytelling, some for plot lines, some for painting scenery, some for bringing characters on a page into full three dimensional people that you feel you know and miss when you’ve finished the book. I’m not even 75 pages in and already this seems to have all those, but there was one paragraph, very early in the book which almost had me in tears with it’s truth and honesty, ability to take me into my own past and plunge me deep into my own children’s mentality once again:

‘Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible. A stick could be a sword. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle.

Once upon a time there was a boy who lived in a house across the field from a girl who no longer exists. They made up a thousand games. She was Queen and he was King. In the autumn light, her hair shone like a crown. They collected the world in small handfuls. When the sky grew dark they parted with leaves in their hair.’

Of course I’m a hypocrite, having just spent nearly 8 quid on a sonic screwdriver ready to be a birthday present for Davies when actually a stick painted with a blue splodge on the end would do the job just as well, but having watched four children play together for hours today with a couple of bucketfuls of water, some empty plant pots, a garden table and some towels building camps, castles, beds, boats and beaches the above words really touched me.