One word? When seven would do…

At 930 this morning I had a blood test. We walked across to the doctors and sat in the corridor which is where you wait for the nurse. I am not sure whether this is because they don’t want the official waiting room clogged up with non-ill people, if the nurse’s rooms don’t have the special system that puts your name up on the electronic message board (like those ones in shops that you can programme and they have in the window announcing stuff scrolling across) or maybe they feel the corridor is an underused part of the surgery and they’ve done some sort of efficiency of space test (that would be done by highly paid consultants obviously) and had recommendations to make better use of it by sticking chairs and notice boards in it and having people spend 7 minutes there before their blood tests.

We spent the time talking about the stair lift installed there and Scarlett observed that the man waiting in the chair next to us looked like he’d been waiting there a long time. We pondered on the need for a seat belt on the chair lift, discussed whether having one installed just for fun with a ‘hands in the air’ policy would be prohibitively expensive and I said that Stannah was the leading name in stair lifts just like coca cola, fairy liquid and hoover (although that should possibly be Dyson nowadays). Then I got called in.

The nurse wanted to check the children would be okay witnessing the blood test – I explained they regularly watch while I donate blood so should be fine. Scarlett was adamant the nurse should examine her wobbly tooth – when we walked across the road to the doctors she had wanted to ask the receptionist if a doctor could look at it but she was content with the nurse in the end :lol:. They got the full run down of the sharps procedure, bruising from blood tests and admired the tie dye effect band used for tightening around my arm.

We popped home to collect our picnic and headed off to PYO to meet Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna. We listened to our Chevrolet cd which has 13 songs all including the word ‘chevy’ or ‘corvette’ or ‘chevrolet’ in the lyrics somewhere.

It was very, very, very, very, very hot at PYO and Julie and I really struggled to drum up any enthusiasm for fruit picking. I did get some raspberries and Julie got some beans and we had 20pence worth of red and white currants the children had half heartedly picked too. Davies was struggling with the younger 3 so hung out with us a bit. We had a quick look round the farm shop and then headed to Highdown Gardens for lunch.

We sat down and ate and then some older boys with lightsabres appeared. They were called ‘Josh’ and ‘Toby’ and were terribly well spoken and very keen to play with our four. Jack and Maisie didn’t quite get the idea of pretend play but Davies really enjoyed playing with them and Scarlett joined in too. The game lasted ages and meant Julie, Lorna and I got to lay around on the rug chatting. We both had a go at jiggling Lorna who likes to be held lying flat face down and is most vocal about not being held thus. I love her lots; it’s so nice to cuddle a baby and kiss her soft cheeks and feel her downy hair and tiny grasping hands but it’s even nicer that she is not mine :).

Davies had a babybel for lunch and I played with the red wax covering and made various little models. My final one was supposed to be a horse but came out slightly stunted and looked like a cross between a fox and a horse. We discussed for some time whether it should therefore be called a Hox or a Forse and decided on Hox. We listed it’s hobbies (stealth and cunning in show jumping) and it’s eating habits (polo flavoured chickens) and then put it on a stone to stay safe while the children played. It didn’t stand up well to the heat and was looking a bit melty so Julie put it in her tupperware container of nuts and seeds – henceforth known as the Hox Box. They are taking it home but when the weather is colder and it will stand up to transportation in my very hot car we may bring The Hox home again.

In the carpark as we left Julie and I were having a ridiculous conversation about wearing leotards for horseriding next week when I realised unloading all their children in the car next to us were someone I used to go nightclubbing with and one of the club bouncers who are now clearly a couple. I was so shocked at seeing them looking all old and together and being caught talking utter nonsense that I couldn’t bring myself to say hello and got all flustered! 😆

At home the children were playing in the playroom and I was pondering cooking them some tea when I remembered we’d been promising them a McDonalds since Tuesday and had a brainwave. I checked the cinema times, rang Ady to check he could do it and then told the children I’d take them to the Marina for dinner at McDonalds. They were delighted and we headed over there and they had their Happy Meals and were all lovely, angelic and grateful for the treat. Some covert telephone chatting went on with Ady and I and me and the children headed back to our car to ‘go home’ where we found Ady waiting for us! Davies asked why and I asked them what they’d really like to do if we didn’t go straight home to which they both replied ‘go and see WALL-E’ to which we of course replied ‘well that’s just what we’ll do!’ and we did! 🙂

It was more of a ‘where’s WALL-E?’ to begin with as the film was due to start at 610 but with a massive Cbeebies advert, other adverts, trailers and a short film before the main film it was the best part of 7pm before WALL-E actually started. I won’t spoil the film for anyone who’s not yet seen it but I didn’t think it was as clever a plot line as Monsters Inc, as charmingly charactered as Toy Story and it was a very slow start but it was a good film nonetheless and as it is *everywhere* I’m glad the children have now seen it and know what it’s all about.

Both children chose to go home with Ady which meant I got to drive behind them all the way singing really loudly to whatever I wanted on the cd player :).Bed for them, more Gavin and Stacey for us.

The wobble is in honour of Tarly who has her first wobbly tooth. I forgot to mention in yesterdays epic blog that she was complaining of it being hurty yesterday at the motorshow and when I checked it was slightly wobbly. But she’s eaten about 4 apples since then and now it is proper wobbly :). I suspect she will pull it out or certainly spend all her free time wobbling it whereas Davies has wobbly teeth for months before they finally give up and jump out of his mouth lemming-style. He’s only lost two so far so she could well catch him up!

Today was a working morning for me and Ady dropped Davies and Scarlett off to play at Liza and Andrew’s house – you’ll remember their full postal address from last week ;). Liza assured me that they behaved well and were nice to have around. She did look utterly drained and I suspect it is no coincidence that her blog I know about disappears and she claims not to have started a new one just at the time she would be ready to blog The Truth about my children – if anyone finds horror stories splashed across the internet about them please do let me know so I can shriek at her in public and send it email lists etc. 😉 😆 Davies and Scarlett were full of what a fab morning they’d had anyway so thanks again Liza, really appreciate it 🙂 xx

My morning was fairly frantic with many children either coming in to sign up or coming in to talk about books for the SRG which I manned for the first couple of hours. Some of it was actually quite enjoyable when I got some shy children to talk passionately about stories and agree to do pictures of their favourite bits and bring them in to show me so I can put them up on the wall. I was amused to have 2 different children come to talk to me about the Little Red Hen and her grain story, particularly as that is one of Scarlett’s favourites too (not I said the cat, not I said the pig) and another little boy brought in the same Meg and Mog book Davies had read to talk to me about too so I knew that story well :). I was saddened by the childminder visiting who I remember from last year with her young charges – a brother and sister a few years older than D and S who she claims the parents refuse to bring to the library themselves even to join the children so she gets all the books on her own card. The children were really chatty but she had another younger charge with her this year, not a sibling of the other two and he so didn’t want to talk to me about books :(. He had a big tantrum at the very prospect, sat on the floor in the middle of the library yelling and crying and throwing his shoes at her. At one point she was holding him restrained on her lap trying to get him to talk to me while he fought and struggled, still yelling his head off. Eventually I told her is she wanted to take his stickers etc then she could but that as the point of the SRG is to inspire and encourage reading and sharing books, promote positive library visits and make library staff more accessible, friendly and clearly there to help this was rather a counterproductive exercise. There are small things I have to overcome my personal feelings and beliefs about at work but that was something I was not prepared to be a party to or compromise my own opinions on forcing children into things. I also get cross at the parents who push the children to ‘tell the lady’ and talk across me or answer for them. I don’t think it is all about demonstrating to me whether the child has read the book themselves or indeed how good their reading it – for me it is about getting something, anything from experiencing that book for the child whether it is laughing at the silly bits, enjoying the illustrations, being inspired to go and draw some scenes from the book or act it out in play, find more books by the same author etc. I also got annoyed with a couple of older people who thought it would be okay to interupt a child talking to me about books to ask for a newspaper when they wouldn’t dream of doing that if an adult had been talking :(.

I collected Davies and Scarlett, stopped for a cup of tea with Liza and then we called in on Lucy and The Rs on the way home for a couple of hours. The children all went off to play really happily letting Lucy and I chat which was nice. 🙂

We came home for tea and then Ady arrived with a little tent. Davies had suddenly decided he’d quite like a little tent of his own to put up in the garden so Ady got one of the little £6 ones from Asda and with minimal help Davies put it up himself :). The children had a bath and I read stories to them while they were in it as I have a blood test in the morning and needed to fast for 12 hours beforehand which meant a very early dinner for us tonight.

We’ve watched the first two episodes of Gavin and Stacey on dvd as we missed it on tv the first time round and have heard enough people rave about it to be curious about what we’d missed out on.

I won my first (see how positive I am at the prospect of many more to follow) prize as a result of my new hobby of ‘comping’ of a family ticket to the British International Motor Show. The ticket was only valid for weekdays so we decided to go today and Ady took a days holiday to join us. This had the added bonus of meaning we could drive up – for me to drive, petrol and parking would outweigh the cost of train and tube tickets – for Ady to drive with his free petrol meant we saved loads.

We had a series of complications about where to park, where the correct entrance to collect the tickets was, whether the tickets were actually there once we’d finally found the right gate anyway and at several points during a rather stressful hour I was tempted to have a strop and come home again. Finally we were in though. We could actually have not paid for the carpark (it was a tenner for the day) as we were waved in to find out where the tickets were and then went back to pay, and we could have got into the event without tickets too as they let us in one entrance and told us just to walk across the venue to the other entrance, which actually meant we were there and in. Davies added to his ever increasing collection of wrist bands (he is wearing two from the FoH weekend and now a third from today) and the children got bands with my phone number on incase they got lost. This seems to be standard practise from somebody at most events we’ve been to recently – good idea :).

So we found ourselves in the outside section first and as the weather was okay we looked round that area. We did the Disney Pixar Cars stand,

had a very comprehensive nose around the campervans and motorhomes,

We then queued up to do the Landrover Ultimate Experience. There were a choice of 3 courses; one you drove yourself, one that was very high and another with very testing terrain and plenty of 2 wheels only on the ground stuff. We chose that one and really enjoyed it although the driver was disgusted with us for not being scared and urging him to drive faster 😆

There were various remote control driving challenges which didn’t really appeal to any of us and one where you got to race round a track in sporty looking cars but had to have brought your driving licence to do, which neither of us had thought to do so we couldn’t have a go at that.

We sat down for an early lunch as we’d done early breakfasting and then headed off round the first of the two exhibition halls. I should state for the record at this stage that although I enjoy driving, I do like speed and thrills and I can see the beauty of a nice car I am not hugely interested in them. My preference is for BIG cars; one of my favourite cars ever was a Ford Cortina which was a tank of a car but I loved driving that. So little zippy, sporty things where you are practically sitting on the ground and lying flat to reach the pedals are not for me, even if I do concede they sound nice.

We looked at various people carrier type cars and I was hugely impressed with one that had really cool fold out baby seats that turned into booster seats and then all collapsed back into themselves to be normal seats again. I liked sitting in the campervans the best I think for that driving a bus type experience that I favour. At one point I was asked if I’d answer a few questions and one of them was to name some American cars. I started off well with Hummer and Chevy and then rapidly ran out :oops:.

We did various things on various stands and got loads of freebies. The children squished into a cool pod thing and watched a WALL E trailer,

they sat on bikes and quad bikes,

we all had great fun in the Honda problem playground area

I entered loads more competitions for everything from a holiday to America to a handheld Dyson. We had a go on some bumper cars on the Zurich insurance stand which was wild and with no regard to health and safety at all, but tremendous fun and the kids adored it. I have a bruise on my knee from the steering wheel and we half expected the people manning the stand to nobble us on the way out with an ‘accident? not your fault? want to claim against the person who crashed into your bumper car?’ 😆

We moved into the second hall where they had a ‘green pavillion‘ with hybrid cars, ones that ran on water, oil, electricity, the power of positive thinking… you get the idea ;). That was interesting and we watched a good Michellen display about energy saving tyres, Ady signed up to a liftsharing scheme and took some literature about greener ideas to give to his transport manager at work too.

Davies and Scarlett had a go on a surboard style simulator driving along to replicate how much attention you need to give to various factors when driving including road surface, weather, visibility, what’s happening up ahead and so on.

Then we were lured across by the sound of American Pie booming out to the Chevy stall. Scarlett was utterly delighted and wanted to sit in every single one so she could pretend to drive her chevy to the levy (a fruitless journey as she already knew as the levy would be dry, but she wanted to go along for the ride :lol:). Almost impossible to actually get a picture of her inside due to bright lights and tinted windscreens but she is indeed inside the driving seat here:

She claimed it was her favourite stand and says she will now sing the correct lyrics than her previous version of ‘bye bye it’s american pie, but the levy, but the levy, but the levy was dry’ 😆 And we got a free cd with loads of songs mentioning Chevys including of course American Pie but a favourite song of mine ‘ where have all the cowboys gone’ which I’m looking forward to listening to :).

Hyundai (that doesn’t look at all the right spelling but I’ve already done my disclaimer about my ignorance about cars) and Ford were both very cunningly giving away free ice lollies which guaranteed plenty of visitors although actually it was fine temperature-wise in the halls. Several of the people manning the stands said it had been unbearably hot all the previous days when the weather was so warm outside though so I’m glad we chose not to go before. The Ford stand was easily the biggest and most of a circus. There were of course rows of all their cars but also a stage where a ‘professor’ was doing chemistry experiments and wanted to borrow a five pound note to demonstrate something. Scarlett ran up with one and was projected onto the massive tv screens all over the stand and introduced. Unfortunately Ady (and the camera) was looking at the Ford Galaxy and only looked up when he heard the name ‘Scarlett’ so didn’t capture much of that on camera

I got my fiver back and a digital tyre pressure checking machine though. Then we moved on to the climbing wall. Davies and Scarlett have never been on one before but were both really keen to have a go.The queue was quite long, I had to sign scarily worded parental disclaimer forms and they stood for nearly 20 minutes watching other children either get half way up, look down and see how high they were and get scared, or zoom straight up to the top like rats up drainpipes. I fully expected both of them to get all harnessed up, put one foot on the wall and back out of the whole thing but they were both so up for it, insisting they were going to try and climb right to the top and chattering away to the people running it.

Davies went first and got well over halfway up before struggling to find the next foothold and deciding he’d had enough. Scarlett got really quite close to the top but slowed up and when the guy called up to encourage her she looked down and lost her nerve. She had a real pace on though and looked so tiny way up high. I realised that whilst I often lead the way for my children into crazy things it’s not often I sit on the sidelines watching while they take on these challenges themselves. They were both totally up for it, did well and were pleased with themselves – good result even if my heart was pounding faster with every higher step they took!

We had a quick look round the stands we’d missed out in the second hall and then went back into the first hall to see if there were any more Science museum shows happening. There was one scheduled for 6pm so we decided to hang on for that and the guy on the stand showed Davies various tricks including whipping away a tablecloth and knocking a mat and tubes out of the way to get eggs to land in glasses. He loved it :).

We retired for coffee, chai latte and chocolate cake and then went back to watch the show with was a Punk Science demo by Jon Milton (from Scientrific off Discovery Kids and various other places) – very cool and very funny. It was all about energy, gas, liquids and solids and very interactive. Just how education should be 😉

After that we had one final peep outside to see if the queue had gone down for the Landrover stuff before calling it a (very long) day and heading back to the carpark.

On the way there Ady and I had both had our first ever real life experience of going through the Blackwall tunnel. I was most disappointed that the walls were actually white although in places they were black with pollution. On the way home it totally lived up to every time I’ve ever heared it mentioned in a road traffic report and was closed. So we sat waiting for it to reopen for about half an hour, had some interesting demonstrations of the endless patience and friendliness towards one’s fellow road users that London is so famed for particularly with it’s taxi and bus drivers and finally got home around 9pm.

It would not have been something I’d have paid money to visit and I don’t know that we’d go again but it was an ace prize and a really good day out.

Davies and Scarlett bounced into my bedroom this morning and announced they wanted to stay home and invite someone over to play today. That seemed like a nice idea so via text I arranged for Lucy and The Rs to come over and thought it would all be plain sailing from there.

Or not.

Scarlett was awake in the night and has had two late nights in a row so she was Very Tired and Emotional, what’s that phrase of Jan’s I liked – limited emotional resources? That was Tarly today :(. As mentioned elsewhere I don’t function at all well in the heat either and I suspect I may be post-hormonal too so I had limited patience resources – never a good combination really.

Davies and Scarlett – and it truly was a six of one and half a dozen of the other type situation were really squabbly and irritating each other just by breathing let along the myriad of other things they were deliberately doing to wind each other up. I went off to the kitchen to make some cheese scones as we had no bread and some banana and chocolate cakes as we had bananas which needed using up and within moments was summoned back by a scream and wail to learn that Scarlett had hit Davies so he’d pinched her. He got a massive yelling at for that – I HATE pinching. There was a girl called Deborah Morley in my class when I was five years old and noone liked her because she used to pinch for no reason. It’s a horrible sneaking little way of hurting someone. Lucy and the Rs arrived just as they’d been sent to their rooms so they were brought back out again and told to be nice otherwise their friends would be sent home again.

After an initial shakedown they did all get on and play nicely but Scarlett and I had another falling out when she wanted me to wipe her bum just after I’d painted my nails. I gave her the option of wiping it herself (which she is more than capable of, does regularly and has been doing for well over a year when the mood takes her) or waiting for my nails to dry. Cue huge meltdown with all her classic Tarly drama queen language ‘I can’t BEAR to wait Mummy. I simply can’t BEAR to wipe my own bum. This is the worst day of my life, my heart is breaking’ etc. We overcame that and then she carried on about something else (I think I offered to tie her tear sodden, sweat soaked hair back so she could play without it all in her face) so she got sent to her room. She sat outside her room instead wailing at full volume so my temper was completely compromised and she got sent right into her room and the full finger wagging, full volume, menacing tone treatment including phrases like ‘don’t you DARE’, ‘another think coming’ and ‘just about enough’ before I slammed back out again. We did kiss and make up but it left her very fragile for the rest of the day poor child :(. Her episodes of trying behaviour are fewer and further between, I am usually far better at dealing with them in a diffusing rather than detonating manner and there are almost always circumstances such as tiredness or illness to hold accountable but today I wasn’t in a being the grown up frame of mind myself.

Lucy and The Rs left around 4pm and after checking what was on TV I offered to listen to Davies read a book and he agreed. I’ve been trying to be very casual about what has obviously been a massive leap forward in reading for him and have offered a few times and he’s refused. Today he grabbed a book – one he’d selected from the library and read it start to finish word perfect :). It was brief, there were many clues in the pictures and the rhythm of the book but he truly is reading. I think this is as momentous as his first steps in many ways as that was much longed for, not without false starts, later than I expected or was considered ‘average’ although still well within ‘normal’ and of course life changing and opportunity widening and door opening etc. I’m tremendously proud – of him for doing it and of me for letting him get there this way :).

Scarlett wanted to do some activity / workbook type thing. I do have a stash somewhere but I cleared the shelf and haven’t tracked them down since; must dig them out as she likes the idea of them. I did find her a dot to dot book and she did that for a while. She did the first lesson of 100EL before deciding she doesn’t want to read after all and actually was just struggling to wrestle some of my attention back from Davies. I so rarely grasp that issue that people seem to worry about with HEing different age children but I suppose this was one such moment.

They went back to playing with geomags and were discovering which bits of the Barbie Tanner dog poo pellets and the pooper scopper were magnetic like the rods and which were ball bearings like the balls.

Ady arrived home with some sausages for their tea to cook on a barbecue that we’d been promising them all weekend. I went off to Tescos to do the ill fated food shop. I spent literally hours on the tesco website over the last couple of days slowly amassing a months worth of food shopping only to struggle to get to the checkout this morning and when I finally did it wouldn’t take my card. As it is the end of the month after payday and before the beginning of the month’s bills going out there is a rare in excess of £2K in there so I knew it wasn’t lack of funds and have to assume that like a few other places they don’t take visa electron online. I tried twice and it was having none of it so as the next online slot at Sainsburys wasn’t for days and we needed food I had to go and walk round the supermarket with a trolley, like the olden days! 😆

I got back just after 8pm when the sky had blackened to find Davies had eaten a couple of sausages but Scarlett had chosen to have pasta for tea rather than barbecue fayre and due to impending rain Ady was covering it all back over again. We’ve been expecting this rain for 3 days now and tonight it has finally come with a vengence. I am most tempted to strip off and go and stand in the garden I am so pleased to see / hear / feel it.

We watched the second part of can’t read can’t write which was as powerful and thought provoking as the first part and now because we are off to The Smoke to be prize winners tomorrow I really should go to bed.

Ady and Scarlett have been going to the local mammoth car boot sale on a Sunday morning and taunting Davies and I about it as they are often gone before we get up. So today we decided we’d get up early and go with them. I’m rarely out of bed before 8am normally let alone on a Sunday but I was today and we were at the car boot sale just after 9am. It was HUGE, eight double rows of cars at least 50 cars along, so literally 100s of sellers and 1000s of buyers. Davies and I walked round together and aside from a W&G bubble bath that he bartered the woman down to a quid for we bought nothing. We were too hot, too tired and too grumpy. When we rang Ady and Scarlett to see where they’d got to they were barely halfway round so we collected the keys from them and went to sit in the car. I did insist that they didn’t have to come away but I possibly wasn’t convincing enough (and I did do a bit of foot stamping and teariness about hating it and wondering why I’d come and wishing I’d stayed at home in bed maybe..) and they arrived back at the car shortly after we did. Scarlett had got a Tanner (pooing Barbie dog) and Mika (weeing Barbie cat) complete with all their accessories for £1.50 so she was very happy though.

We came home for lunch and to decide what to do this afternoon. Ady and the children would have been happy enough to stay home but I hate doing that when we’re all here. I’ve no interest in doing anything in the garden (either gardening or sitting in the sun), I can do stuff like play games, do crafts, watch films with the children any time and it seems to end up with us all scattered around doing different things and I’d rather we did something together. None of us were up for being in the sun so my suggestions were the cinema (WALL E or Kung Fu Panda) or http://www.bedgeburypinetum.org.uk/ which was the last remaining thing to do this year that’s not already been done or is already arranged from my list earlier this year. It needs updating actually considering it’s only July and we’ve completed everything expect ice skating already 🙂 (how efficient are we?! or did we just set our bar too low?). The website advertises it as shady and cool on hot summer days so it sounded perfect.

The traffic was heavy although there was more heading towards the coast than away from it and we arrived just before 2pm. We had a really nice walk round there, watched Go Ape (children are both desperate to be 10 now so they can do it and equally desperate for me to do it NOW so they can watch – not sure if they like seeing me in peril or know I will enjoy it and want to see me having fun?), had a good play on some of the bad playstuff including this amazing standing up communal swing which was just ace 🙂

Ady and I did leap on for a brief go too but then a load of really little kids came on and were dragging their feet on the ground which had me fearing we’d snap their legs with our more violent rocking so we had to hop off again.

We saw loads of wood ants and some mighty impressive ant hills swarming alive with them. Scarlett dropped one of her parma violet sweets on the heap and we watched the ants break it up and carry it between them – amazing. We were there a good 3hours before starting to feel worn out and must have walked several miles but it was mostly shady and cool.

We drove home a different way which was possibly further but seemed quicker without hitting motorways. We were filthy so the children and I had a shower while Ady cooked their tea. Then as promised Davies got to stay up and watch War of the Worlds. He loves the cd and was keen to watch it when it first came out on dvd and we watched it but I decided it was too scary for him then. It was on tv tonight though and as he watches Doctor Who without any repurcussions and seems very adept at seperating fantasy from fact we said he could watch it tonight. Scarlett didn’t want to obviously so her and Ady read books in her bedroom while Davies and I cuddled up and watched the film. He really liked it and enjoyed the various references back to the story he knows.

It’s been a nice weekend although I feel a little cheated that the weather forecast put us off a last minute camping trip and actually we’ve not seen a spot of rain. Tomorrow I think we’ll aim for a quietish day and then off to London on Tuesday.

We had this half a plan today to get up earlyish and head off to Dorset for the day with some basic camping (small tent, sleeping bags, camping mats, change of clothing) shoved in the car and if the weather stayed nice to find somewhere to camp overnight and come back tomorrow. But the weather looked iffy today (although it never came to anything -grr) and Ady heard on the radio that the New Forest was bracing itself for a mass onslought of visitors and campsites were reporting their busiest weekend in years so we decided following the crowds that way was probably not a great idea unless we wanted to sit in the car for most of the day.

Instead we decided to go to the Family Fun Day event at Pulborough Brooks RSPB reserve.While online looking for something else I stumbled upon details of the Worthing Fire Station open day also today so we decided to take that in on the way.

The fire station was heaving and we were there shortly after it started at10am. We watched a chip pan on fire with water poured on it demonstration, had a walk around, signed up for someone to come round for a home visit to check our smoke alarm provision and set up an emergency escape plan from the house which I thought the children would enjoy, gathered up some of the road safety freebies and then watched another demonstration .This one was about cutting out an injured person from a road traffic accident. The children were very interested in both demonstrations and although not the cheeriest of subject matters they were very impressive displays of the firefighters skills.

We went from there on to Pulborough Brooks and arrived in time to participate in some pond dipping. Davies got an impressive specimen of a waterboatman and Scarlett got the reddest non-biting red larvae the man claimed to have ever seen :).

We were all hungry by then so we sat in the park and had lunch. Davies went off to play and made friends with another boy and played tag with him for ages while Scarlett sat with Ady and I. She wanted to fill in her sheet about what she’d found pond dipping so I told her the letters to write. She was enjoying that so I decided to see how many letters she actually knew the names of and could write by herself. She got as far as J before getting fed and and going off to play again – I was impressed :). Davies was doing lots of incidental reading today too actually; he read ‘heron’ and ‘badger’ and ‘woodmouse’ all by himself :).

We moved into the ‘classroom’ to do some crafts next and the children made foam and paper sea creatures to hang in boxes mocked up as under the sea, paper plate fish, some tucan origami beak thing and some acetate suncatcher mobiles. All really good creative crafts that the kids could do themselves and enjoy :). It was so hot outside and they were so happy doing the crafts that we missed the storytelling session.

The children both then did a guess the bird song quiz and then we went to the meadow for parachute games. They both really enjoyed that 🙂

We moved on to owl pellets which Davies and I had done before from a kit so he got bored of before Scarlett. She loved it and had to be dragged away, it was right up her street! :).

We decided to have a walk round the reserve while we were there so did that. It took an hour and was actually not that pleasant at all as it was just so bloody hot. We did do some grass sweeping which was cool and we found ladybirds, crickets and grasshoppers, ants, spiders and other bugs. Scarlett and I also found an owl pellet of our own to bring home so we might soak and disscet that soon. By the time we got back to the visitor centre I was really ready to sit down, drink water and have someone fan me with oversized palm leaves though.

The skies were darkening with clouds and I really expected a big thunderstorm but nothing came and the sky turned blue again without event :(. We came home via Tesco where Davies and Scarlett were able to see Lucy at work in the pharmacy which seems tidy given how often The Rs see me in the library – I like them to see people with jobs outside the home aswell as in the home.

We came home and they played in the sandpit til their dinner was ready, we watched Who Dares Sings. They went to bed, we had a lovely curry and lots of cider and what the plan is for tomorrow is still very much up for debate.

Davies and Scarlett played in the garden this morning until it was time to go out. We were off to Liza and Andrew’s for a play and a testing of the water for regular playing while I am at work. I had written down bullet point directions to get there off AA routefinder but got lost when I mixed up my roundabouts and took a second exit off the third roundabout instead of a third exit off the second roundabout (or something). Davies and Scarlett were trying to help but actually when you can’t read spotting ‘Shirley Drive’ is something of a challenge 😆 We’d had a plan to time the journey but our scenic detour coupled with being unable to find the actual address even when we were on the right road meant there was no hope of working out how long it had actually taken :rolls:

We found number 76 and Liza lives at number 78 (not Shirley Drive I hasten to add, I am not giving out her address on my blog ;)) so we parked outside, paid £1.20 for parking for a couple of hours and set off. We walked for one and a half blocks before deciding something was wrong and ringing Liza to find out just where 78 was. We ended up walking back to the car and driving back up the road where we saw Liza and Andrew waving so pulled in again and paid to park there instead.

We had a really nice four hours; Liza fed us and supplied copious amounts of tea, Andrew provided entertainment for Davies and Scarlett by way of DSing, Wiiing and various other toys. Liza and I chatted and the children all rubbed along well with Scarlett spending some of the time playing Dolphin Island (I know, I know, and Liza’s lent it to us so it is currently back here in my house whispering ‘Ni ic, Niiiiiiiiic. Come and play me, see if you can get past day twenty niiiiiine!’ ). The time flew by and we managed to time our journey home at under half an hour too :).

Back home I did some more of my mosaic picture while Davies and Scarlett played with Mousetrap. Not played it, played with it, they used all the component pieces to make up a game where the mice were having adventures, very entertaining to listen to :lol:. Then they went back out in the garden again.

Ady came home and fed them while I nipped out for food supplies for payday dinner and came home to find the children back in the garden again. I read some stories to them but Davies took forever to get to sleep – he appeared back downstairs at nearly 1130pm, so he’ll be delightful tomorrow no doubt :(.

We have various weather dependant plans for the weekend which may or may not involve a night away so I may suspend my boredom with summer for a few days now and hope for sunshine :).

Today was easily the hardest days work I’ve done at the library since I started. When I first got the job I was warned about the ‘summer reading game’ in hushed tones. In much the same way as I’d been warned about Christmas at Clinton Cards, January Sale at Bhs, 10% off for over 60s on a Wednesday at B&Q…. Last summer I had only been there six months and wasn’t really working on the enquiry desk so although I did a few stints on the Summer Reading Game (henceforth called SRG for my blog) dedicated table it was towards the end of the time and didn’t see that hard.

But today was the first day of the school summer holidays for most children round here so they ALL descended to the library to sign up for the SRG. Except for those who were early and had already joined before today, because they came in with their first two books already read to tell us all about them.

At 930am when we opened I happily welcomed the first couple of children. I explained the SRG to them, talked about how they might want to make their books choices, went through the bronze, silver and gold awards and little prizes at every step of the way, chatted to them about their favourite authors and other authors they might like to try, encouraged them to choose a good wide selection of books, gave out their first challenge of spotting SRG characters hidden around the library for a prize draw, praised their writing, laughed with them about how all the local schools have done some sort of merging and renaming thing so even the children not changing schools in September will be going back to a school with a different name.

By 10am by patter was sounding tired even to my own ears.

By 11am I had signed up 7 children all called Chloe (sorry Michelle! I really like the name Chloe but having been one of 5 Nicolas most of the way through school I have an aversion to names that are really popular) and discovered 3 ways of spelling Callum that I’d not known about before. I’d been ‘treated’ to the story of a 7 year old born 4 months premature – amazing yes, miracle child yes, struggling to feign interest in her ‘telling the lady how big you were when you were born Chloe’ prompted by her mother – YES.

By midday I had mastered signing ’em up in record time and suspect I had the manner of an air hostess performing the safety procedure talk at the start of a flight with a crazed grin and a clear script.

I’d also began to talk to children who had returned with their first two books to tell me all about them. This varied wildly from the ones who wanted to basically retell me the entire story to those who I had to drag monosyllabic answers from about who’s this then? when I could just read the bloody book for myself if I cared!

Just before 1pm an 11 year old With Attitude came in to say she’d already read all six books after signing up on Monday. I wordlessly printed out her ‘well done’ certificate, gave her her bookmark and stickers (what is it with 11 year olds – aren’t they supposed to be binge drinking alcopops and cultivating eating disorders anyway, not collecting stickers for reading books!).

At 1pm I went for lunch and sat in the staff room seriously contemplating quite how I’ve ended up in a job where I sing Incy Wincy Spider to a roomful of under 2s once a fortnight and sit trapped behind a desk coaxing children to tell me what their favourite bit of a Rainbow Fairy story was. I’m fairly certain this was not my calling! 😆

The afternoon was quieter with altogether more adults than childen coming in but it was exceptionally hot and I am not officially bored with summer and would quite like it to cool down again please actually. Not rain, but just be cooler.

Meanwhile back at the ranch Ady was home in the morning and he and the children went on a sandpit sand purchasing pilgrimage so we can now recreate that just back from the beach effect on our hall carpet whenever we like without stepping out of our own front garden.

My Mum was here in the afternoon and she took Davies and Scarlett (without suncream!!!!) to the park for a bit and then they played in the garden with the chickens. When I pulled up there were two double glazing men waiting for me as they’d seen Mum in the garden with a chicken and wanted to find out more about them and ask about buying some :shock:. I took them round to the back garden where Davies and Scarlett mostly talked to them about them, insisted that they both held a chicken (the one interested in them was well up for it, the other looked frankly terrified!). He fell in love with the speckledy hens of Toms but only wants hens so he’s coming back in a couple of weeks to talk prices and I’ve said we might be able to breed for him at a price :). I felt all knowledgable talking about them and realised how much I actually do know about chickens now :).

Mum stayed awhile and the children made their own pizzas (Ady had put the dough on before he left so they did shaping, spreading puree and grating cheese) before adding the ingredients for the next batch for Ady and I’s dinnner later. We also chatted about just how the breadmaker worked too. They had dinner and went back to play outside.

Ady came home, Mum left, the children had showers and I read them several stories then they went to bed.

We planned to make some mosaic pictures today with the cut out colourchart squares but when we started gathering together necessary stuff we realised we didn’t have any glue. We found nice big pieces of cardboard but nothing to do the fixing with so we decided to walk into Lancing to buy some glue.

So we could tick off some exercise on the childrens’ fitness challenge sheets I walked very briskly and they semi-jogged but we went through a succession of alleyways which cut straight through rather than the twice-the-distance and not very interesting walk along the streets. Now the alleyways are your classic back passageways really – overgrown, full of broken glass, weeds, graffiti and so on, perfumed with eau da urine. Unless you are Davies and Scarlett however. They walked along exclaiming at the ‘beauty’ of everything. In the broken glass chips from beer and alcopop bottles they saw emeralds and diamonds, the nettles had ‘pretty zig zag shaped leaves’, the dandelions were like ‘sunbursts of yellow’ when in flower and ‘fluffy white clouds’ if they’d gone over to dandelion clocks. They spotted each little blue forget-me-not and daisy and other flowering weeds I don’t know the name of.

Whilst I still don’t think the alleyways should be litter filled and used as toilets it did strike me that as adults we so rarely see the beauty in things the way that children do. And they don’t do it in a conscious ‘behold the wonder of nature’ type way, they just see and feel it. I was chatting to a friend the other day about positive attitudes, feeling that things are mostly good and being a glass half full sort of person and pondering that I wasn’t always like that and I certainly don’t get that attitude from my parents. I think I realised today that actually it hasn’t been passed down a generation, it’s been passed up. Spending most of my time with people who see wonder and beauty everywhere has rubbed off :).

We had a quick look round the charity shops and Scarlett fell in love with a small cuddly rabbit for 20pence, Davies found a very 70s book called ‘Fun with Felt’ which I’ve not looked at yet but he tells me has some cool things to make inside. We got our glue and walked briskly home again.

We then started our mosaic pictures. We found a couple of books for inspiration – that 100 history projects book that I think most of us have on our bookshelf from a couple of years ago and a book about Ancient Rome which was an ex-library book. We sketched out a basic design on our paper and started cutting and sticking. I went for a dolphin leaping from the sea, partially inspired by a similar sort of design at Fishbourne that I’ve always admired. Davies went for flowers and Scarlett’s is still fluid (as in she has changed her mind at least twice and so far it is just lots of squares :lol:). We did that for an hour or so and I explained it would be a work in progress for a while rather than an instant piece of art but I think we’ll come back to them, I certainly want to finish mine.

Whilst we were doing the pictures the children put on Watership Down but it didn’t really hold them and eventually they decided it was too nice to be inside and went out to play with the chickens.

Then it was time to pack up towels, sunsuits and some marshmallows and sticks and head along to Worthing beach to meet up with Caz, Bid, Archie and Elliot. They are the friends Davies and Scarlett went to play with fortnightly for a while when I was working. They have rented out their house and spent the last month or so in their old campervan WWOOFing around the country. They’ve already got a story to tell and have met loads of interesting and different people, including several Home Educators. They were back in Worthing for a week to catch up with Caz’s parents before heading off for another month of WWOOFing and then heading off to LA in September on the first leg of a round the world trip that will take them to Mexico, Vietnam, New Zealand and other places.

The children had a ball playing in the sea, on the sand and pebbles, clambering and just being together; the four of them get on really well. Ady joined us on his way home from work and it was just a lovely few hours on the beach. Ady got the full guided tour of their campervan and naturally it’s led us to chat about doing something similar. We’d not have the luxury of keeping our house and doing something like that so it would be a less secure for the future adventure and not something to leap into but we quite like the idea of a lot of what they’re planning.

No idea when we’ll see them again – sometime next year probably but it was really nice to see them and wish them good luck and safe travelling and we’re looking forward to farflung postcards from distant lands with news on them along their way. 🙂

We came home and I chucked the children in the shower to get all the salt, sand and seaweed off them (one point to a house with a shower to come back to I guess) before reading stories and sending them off to bed. They are weighing up how they’d feel about having very few toys with them and living in a ‘RV’ – Scarlett isn’t at all sure about not bringing all her soft toys and Davies is a bit unsure about leaving the dalek behind :lol:.

The chick died in the night – not at all surprising and the children were accepting if sad about it :(. If we keep one of the cockerels I guess we might get back into chick rearing again but it won’t be for a while. I think the break will be good.

Davies and Scarlett had dragged out Tarly’s Barbie stuff from her bedroom. We got massive amounts of Barbie furniture two Christmasses ago from a charity shop which rarely gets played with but gets lots of mileage when it does. They set up a whole houseful and were playing with the various Barbies, Kens (although they call him ‘Kev’ for some reason) and horses. 🙂

I had a day off from the laptop and sat with Davies to read his second Reading Challenge book. A few pages in it became apparent he wasn’t enjoying it and it was becoming a chore – precisely what I don’t want reading to be for them. He was battling through each sentence and getting nothing from the story – which was a phonics book called ‘Hen’s Pens’ – very much in the style of the P&J books I recall from early reading at school and just repeptitive rubbish really ‘Hen has ten pens, hen likes her pens’ – I’d expect a bit more of a storyline as a reward if I were battling to get through each word too really. So I got Davies to choose one of the pile of Barefoot books we still have here instead and said I’d read it to him instead. He chose Herb the vegetarian dragon which we’d already read once and enjoyed so I read that to him again with him reading the odd words here and there.

Scarlett gathered up her two books – a nicely illustrated version of this little chick from over the way and a Where’s Wally book. We’d not finished Where’s Wally so we started to do that and then realised there were still pages and pages to go so I got her to choose a book from the pile too and read that to her instead – she selected Forest Singer so I read that and they both listened in.

Then we dashed off to Tesco. I’ve been semi-avoiding Tesco but we’ve decided we really want Merlin cards and they are super cheap on clubcard deals so I might overcome that and shop there again to build up points :oops:. I also wanted a couple of new laundry baskets and a new sock and pants peg thingy for the washing line which I knew Sainsburys didn’t have so needs must. They didn’t have the peg thingy either but I did get a couple of value baskets, a pair of trousers each for the children reduced to £2 each and the loo roll which was what we actually needed and had failed to pick up in Sainsburys yesterday. It was creeping towards lunchtime and I was very proud when the children requested a banana and a carrot for a snack 🙂 I’ve a lot to learn from them I reckon ;).

Next stop was the library with their two books each. We popped into Woolworths first where we got the peg things and Boots next door for some make up for me where Scarlett used testers to put pink, purple and turquoise stripes of eyeshadow on – she looked very punk :lol:. Then into the library. Scarlett talked about her chick story and Davies pretty much retold the Herb story including pointing out all his favourite bits of the illustrations and adding in what he liked about the story :). They got their wallet, stickers, cards and activity sheets and chose a couple of more books each. Davies chose another two he can try to read himself and we’ve agreed he will try to make at least one of the two each visit one he’s read which seems a good compromise.

We raced home as we were later than we’d been expecting Lucy and The Rs to arrive with us and they pulled up at the same time as us. The children played mostly really well for a few hours while Lucy and I caught up on holidays, camping and life in general. Scarlett surprised me by giving Lucy a brief summary of FoH which demonstrated she’d taken in more than I’d realised :).

Then it was off for the last swimming lesson of the term which officially ends our termtime stuff here too – Rainbows and Badgers finished last week – ah the freedom! :). They both had good lessons to end on and I sat and chatted to one of the mums I normally just smile and say hello to. Home Ed came up as we were talking about the end of term and she asked when our school broke up so I explained. She breezily said ‘oh right – a friend of mine Home Edded for a while last year’ and knew loads about it. She was also pretty anti the testing and pushing children that goes on in school and confessed she is worried about her son who will start reception in September although her daughter (just finishing year one) is loving school and doing well. Nice to have a chat with someone informed and non-prejudiced for once :).

Whilst at the swimming pool we signed up for the Junior Summer Fitness Challenge which looks both pretty good and something D and S will easily achieve given their fairly active lifestyle. So our lounge door now has their reading challenge and fitness challenge sheets stapled to it to remind us to keep on track with both 🙂 – honestly we’re practically structured ;).

On the way home both the children spoke to my parents on the phone to break the news about the chick and to tell Grandad,who finances the lessons, how they’ve done this term and that Davies is going up a class. Nice to hear their side of the phone conversation all chatty and happy (chick news aside). We got home and they had tea and then we filled out their names and their views on the books they’d read on their reading challenge sheet and their names and what activities they’d already done since last Monday on their fitness sheets. Davies is at sounding out and spelling stage with things like that, with a bit of help. Scarlett is pretty much at tell her the letter and she’ll write it stage.

On the way to and from Tesco we’d been talking about colours. They both know colour mixing and primary and secondary colours but we got to talking about shades – and how pink is actually ‘light red’ but it has a name whereas light yellow and light blue don’t necessarily. We talked about shades of blue for example and then green and then I said that the best way to see how many shades of colours there are is paint cards. Now my Dad is a painter and colour cards were always something I loved to look through in his work van when I was a child. And I used to love working the paint mixing machine and even filling up the colour cards when I worked in B&Q so Davies rang Ady and asked him to collect an armful of colour charts on his way home. We sat and looked at them all, compared different brands and colours and I squirreled away a particlarly charming Crown one which has little descriptions next to each colour about their origin and which era of interior decor they hail from etc. Then we discussed what to do with them now and came up with the idea of cutting them up into little shapes of colour to make a big mosaic with. Davies and I made a start at chopping them up and we’ve got a plan to do some picture making with them tomorrow :).

And just to prove that we really are card carrying proper home educators this week we took out our pressed flowers from last week and they have come out beautifully and we’re planning to do more and Davies dug out the cut flowers in coloured water experiment from a few weeks ago to see how they had dried with the colour still there. He mixed the two phials of red and blue together to make purple, topped it up with water and picked some more white flowers to put in it, which began to turn purple almost straight away in the centre. Tomorrow I might even laminate something! 😉

We finished with stories and the excellent news just before bedtime that Scarlett’s DS game was indeed the one from Kirsty’s tent that Scarlett assumed was Elinor’s so got given back to Elinor. She is delighted and hopefully has learnt the lesson about keeping better tabs on her things (and indeed I possibly have learnt I should check at least once a day that they have all their games rather than believing their airy ‘yes’ each time I asked).

Was a slow start obviously ;). The children were reacquainting themselves with toys, telly and unlimited drawing resources. I did most of the holiday washing and even got most of it dry and have been dipping in and out of catching up in various online places along with flickring all day.

Just before we went away the hen who was sitting on (not her own) eggs hatched one and the second one had hatched either Friday or Saturday. Dad comes to feed the cat and chickens while we’re away and he’d arrived on Friday to find the first chick dead and injured outside of the run. No idea why of course – but I wonder if the fact that so far 2 out of our 4 hen-hatched chicks have died is more indicative of nature rather than the incubator method of cosseting them along until they are fully feathered and completely able to cope alone.

Anyway on Saturday Dad had arrived to find the second chick also injured and lying outside of the run. He tried to put it back in the box with the hen but she attacked it visciously so he removed it and they rang me to find out what to do with it. They were determined to intervene (I’m not sure what I’d have done to be honest) so with guidance from me they took it home to their house and made up a brooder with lamp, put water in a shallow dish and gave it some egg to eat. I didn’t expect it to make it through the night and it has sustained a nasty head injury (pecked I assume) but it did and made it through a second night too. So today the children and I went to collect it from their house and bring it to ours. I was half hoping my Mum would ask if she could keep it as she was talking about hand rearing it, which realistically isn’t something we are able to do – aside from anything else we are away lots these next few weeks and the plan was never for the children to get over emotionally attached to something with such short life span and little reward in the way of keeping as a pet anyway. If that sounds callous it possibly is but we went into the chicken keeping from a smallholding point of view rather than as chicken fanciers or bird lovers or wanting them as family pets.

We called into Sainsburys on the way to my parents for various food essentials and got Scarlett some black trousers for Badgers next term. This makes life so much easier for Badgers as it negates the need for socks and means if she has to have black shoes she can have boots if she likes instead of the most un-Scarlett-like dainty shoes she has had up to now and has grown out of.

We got home with the chick who the children have christened ‘Winky’ on account of his habit of only opening one eye at a time. It is still not eating or drinking or indeed showing any signs of wanting to so I suspect it is a matter of time before it gives up but we’ll have a go with it. It is very cute and has fought this far.

We had lunch and then walked across to the doctors for my smear test. The plan had been for Ady to nip home for lunch and stay with D and S while I went but he got sent elsewhere and couldn’t get home so after some deliberation I took them with me. The nurse seemed utterly unfazed by their presence and chatted away to them about various things. She was very nice actually, introduced herself properly and chatted generally and of course specifically about all things gynaecological. I introduced her to the mooncup which she’d never heard of and wrote down to find out more about. I am still amazed by how little most women know about the choices of sanpro available. I’ve convinced at least 3 women to try a mooncup and am still working on persuading more onto washable pads :).

It was a straightforward procedure, easily the most straightforward I’ve had done which was good. Davies and Scarlett stayed their own side of the curtain so they remained ignorant of exactly what had gone on and surprisingly for them didn’t ask many questions about the full details. I suppose I can expect them to still come back to that though – Davies asked me in the car on Friday morning out of nowhere how exactly the seed gets from the man to meet the egg in the woman. And actually I remember sort of saving up various questions about things I sort of knew were slightly embarrassing and then asking my Mum at the right moment having worked up to it even if that right moment came out of the blue for her!

We came home and they did some more drawing. Scarlett got out an old Letterland book and did some of that. She seems to like them every so often so I really should sort out a shelf of them she can access as we have a load of them around. She is asking us to spell things out for her to write lots at the moment and I’m still amazed at quite where she has learnt all the letters she knows as I’ve certainly never sat down with her and told her.

Ady and I watched a really interesting programme that we’d heard talked about on the radio when the man in it was interviewed talking about it on the way up to Kettering on Thursday. It had me shouting at the tv and crying along with the people in it. Can’t read, can’t write. Very interesting and moving stuff.

And that about brings me up to date. Hurrah!

Thursday In the morning Ady went to work while the children and I (mostly I, obviously!) packed up everything ready to go. Ady arrived home at lunchtime and we got the car loaded up and were off for about 3pm. I’d read on the website that morning that tents would not be sited after 7pm so suddenly panicked that we might arrived and not be able to set up. Unlikely I know, and having been to the site now very, very unlikely but their website promises a lot more rules and
regulations than it actually delivers ;).

We had a straight run to Northampton but drove through all sorts of grim weather conditions. The last half an hour was the worst as the satnav kept changing it’s mind about ETA and adding another five minutes every so often for no apparent reason, Davies and Scarlett had exhausted the food and drink we’d brought with us and were chorusing ‘are we there yet?’ from the back of the car with monotonous regularity. We finally did arrive, spottted Kirsty and Chris & Helen with two tents already up and Jo & Bill arrived around the same time. The weather stayed tent-errection-friendly and (aside from a small anyone-could-have-made-it error of mine with trying to attach the wrong hooks into the wrong loops on one of the inners which pulled the pole all out of shape and had us all scratching our heads about whether it was the right pole or not :oops:) it was a fairly stress free set up.

Scarlett was delighted to see both Alex and Jo’s dog Poppy. I think she would have happily have existed the rest of the weekend without anything else really 🙂

We had a nice first night. Ady went off in the style of Chris French to Tesco and was gone for ages getting stuff for dinner and some new pans as we’d forgotten to pack ours. The children all played in a gaggle and it was very late before Davies and Scarlett were even fed let alone packed off to bed.

Friday we headed over to Wicksteed Park for the rides. We bought wristbands each for us and the children which came to £50. I still can’t quite decide how I felt about the park really. It was really expensive, even taking into account the educational discount we get at places like Legoland. They also seemed to have strange height restrictions and guidance about which rides required adults to ride with children. Scarlett was particularly fed up to realise there were lots of rides she was too short for given she is tall enough for everything at Legoland. Davies was right on the cusp of the 1.2m and it seemed to depend on individual ride operators whether they deemed him above or below it.

Rant about cost and height restrictions aside (and I do know it’s for safety reasons, well insurance reasons 😉 but the inconsistency between different theme parks does annoy me) the children had a fab day. We were a bit horrified to discover huge amounts of school children on a trip first thing and had to queue for the first few rides but they seemed to disperse through the day and when we made our way over to the tamer rides there was hardly anyone else around.

Some events of note were me trying to get my full moneys worth from my wristband and going on everything. This fell short when I tried to squeeze myself into the ‘minitower’ ride and the poor attendant had to tell me I was preventing the bar from coming down enough for the ride to start – ie I was too fat for the ride 😳 :lol:. Scarlett got on a horse on the carousel inbetween Elinor and Alex and then decided just as the ride was starting that she didn’t want to be on that horse after all. Ady and I were also on the ride so unable to do anything other than watch (and maybe laugh a bit) as she spent the whole ride with her head buried in the horse crying. A photographer had got on the ride behind the girls and asked if he could take some photos of them ‘having fun’ – presumably for some publicity shot. I’m guessing he didn’t get many shots he could use :lol:. Even funnier was that Scarlett wanted to stay on and go on a different horse so her and I walked almost the whole way round the ride before she decided which horse she did want to ride and then happily spent the next ride on it. Which horse was it? Yep the one she’d been on the previous time and cried about 😆

Davies and I went on a pirate ship ride which he barely scrapped into the height restriction for and I realised right at the top when we were hurtling back towards the ground that actually perhaps he was a little short for it and could possibly slip out as it jerked up at the very top so held onto him for most of the ride. He was fine and actually quite enjoyed it but I told him I didn’t think it had been safe as the ride slowed down and explained what could have happened. We were busy doing that so paid no attention to the other couple of people on the ride who had requested from the ride operator that they could stay on and have another go until he set it in motion again and Davies had to do the ride getting very graphic proof of just which bit he could slip out at! He did well considering ;).

After such high dramas it was lunchtime. Scarlett and I stayed back for one last go on the carousel and arrived back at the ‘camp hub’ last. Hunger sated, tales of death defying ride antics swapped and fleeces collected we set off back to the rides again. The log flume, rollercoaster, umbrellas and ladybird coaster were firm favourites with Kirsty’s and our children so we had a second go there for a while. Then we made our way over to the ‘wet rides’ including bumper boats and a crazy speed boat style ride for one person where you were launched from a great height into the water in a boat. Ady and I both stepped up to the pedal powered monorail challenge – which I bitterly regretted by about halfway round :lol:.

We had a ride round on the train and the children got to have a go at ringing the bell before heading back to the big rides for one last go round the log flume and umbrellas. We certainly made the most of being on site and were there from when the rides opened until they closed.

Jax & co arrived with James that evening so our party grew. Davies and Scarlett were horribly tired but took forever to go to sleep despite me reading them a story (ok so it was the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops so slightly on the bloodthirsty side but even so… ;)) .

Saturday was Festival of History day one. We called into Tesco for lunch supplies and then headed there. We’d agreed in advance that attempting to go round en masse wouldn’t work so hatched a plan to meet at lunchtime to gather together instead. In the queue I had a phonecall from Bob to say ‘we’re in the queue for the carpark of FoH’ to which I replied ‘so are we’. Bob said ‘we’ve just passed the bit where we could have turned right early’ to which I replied ‘so have we’ – it turned out they were about 5 cars behind us! 😆

We went first to the bit I think was called Living History – a huge tent filled with all sorts of interactive bits and pieces. Davies and Scarlett both did some giant jigsaws – of aerial views of places, stained glass windows etc. and both got a postcard for their efforts. They did a ‘what’s in the bag?’ quiz sheet of various archeological finds such as coins, bits of pottery, flints etc. and Scarlett did a ‘work out which bit of dug up remains would go where on the pictures of Roman dwellings. She really enjoyed all that and chattered away to the woman running it for ages. She was quite impressive actually, telling the woman ‘it’s a flint’ when she was just calling it ‘a bit of stone’ and discussing the various types of pottery tiles with her :). We chatted to some people manning the ‘found with a metal detector’ display and rummaged through their finds trying to identify things before moving on to sample some chutneys and wines.

I hadn’t really appreciated quite what a huge event it was going to be really. Also although I can understand it is wars and conflicts and the results of them that have shaped history and made it what it is I hadn’t really expected it to be quite so battle-focussed. Scarlett actually said to me at one point ‘Mummy why did you bring us here when you hate violence so much?’ :lol:. We’d decided not to splash out on the programme for a fiver as they tend to be one of those things that are too expensive to chuck away when you get home but just end up added to general clutter. We did find one abandoned (and it truly was abandoned, noone around and rather screwed up) towards the end of the day so it did assist with planning our day better on the Sunday.

We had a bit of a wander round generally and then ended up at the main arena for the end of a reenactment and when people moved away when it ended nabbed a good spot ready for the next display. A real life injury in the field (I think someone had fallen off a horse, it didn’t seem serious but the ambulance was on the field for ages making everything else run late for the rest of the day) meant we had a bit of a wait but it was worth it to watch the Roman Imperial Army. The commentator was hugely knowledgable and easily filled the 20minute delay talking about Romans and padding it all out nicely. I think I have some hangover zoning out still left from history lessons at school though as when he started quoting lists of dates and battles I realised I had stopped listening and Ady confessed he’d done the same. Actually given our distinct lack of historical knowledge events like FoH are probably perfect for introducing Davies and Scarlett to history in an interesting and relevant way so they at least get some exposure to the idea of learning about the past – along with Horrible Histories of course! 😆

There were a few showers while we watched the Romans so we huddled under our umbrella. On the way to the arranged meet up at the Family Zone for 1pm we looked at the various WW1 stands and learnt about what they carried with them, what sort of rations, personal kit and so on they would have had as well as their various weapons.

We met up with Bob & Katy, Chris & Helen, Jax, Kirsty & James and Merry & Max along with all assorted children for lunch. Davies and Scarlett (and I think eventually most of the others too) sat and watched a Punch and Judy show while eating their lunch which they said was ‘really funny and very crazy!’

Davies then headed off by himself and ended up at the Medieval Storytelling tent. Scarlett and Alex followed him and the three of them were in there for ages. Davies was really enthused by it and has been telling me about the storyteller today and how he made noises, used his whole body to emphasise his story and draw everyone in.

The children were all drawn by the giant sand area of the Victorian Seaside and I think Davies and Scarlett would happily have played there all day. I did point out that we have a beach down the road from our house, we had driven over 100 miles and paid lots of money to be there to see the other attractions and eventually lured them away!

We went off to do the WW1 trench experience next which had a long but fast moving queue. It was being managed by two soldiers walking amoung the queue and talking loudly to them. The young boy directly behind us drew the attention of one of the soldiers as he was dressed in armour. Clearly that had been enough to register me in the mind of the soldier as when we returned the following day he hailed me as ‘here again Madam? Ladies and Gentlemen I urge you to applaud the bravery of this woman, who has returned for a second tour of duty again today, bringing her young family with her to save the lives of many!’ – very impressive! The trench was one of those brief but moving experiences which really did go a long way to recreating what it might have been like. I didn’t think the children had taken much in but Davies particularly wanted to go again on Sunday and they’ve both refered back to that bit since.

We listened to a soldier talking about mess tins and soldiers rations and how they got more inventive with their food adding spices to their spam, that sort of thing ;).

Then we moved across to the Family Zone tent which was all but empty and did some of the many activities there. Davies and Scarlett both made Henry VIII finger puppets, then Davies and Ady went off and did some miniature buildings

while Scarlett and I made a tudor rose (her) and an Armada sinking boat picture (me)

I made a star chart to navigate a boat thing but the woman running the activity confessed she didn’t really understand how it worked and then got distracted from talking to me by a school teacher gathering information for school trips :(. Davies made a cool ruff though 🙂

Ady was itching to go and see the D day stuff that he could hear happening outside and was catching glimpses of parachutes and planes from but we couldn’t get anywhere near so decided to ensure we saw all of that on Sunday. We were walking back to the entrance and happened upon the jousting about to start so sat and watched that. We cheered for the South (it was north, south, east and west competing) but despite coming close South lost out and came second :(. We did get walked past by a suffragette who I cheered and got my photo taken with 🙂

which of course led to a potted history of suffragettes for D and S too.

After the jousting we were lured back to the main arena and watched the end of another re-enactment before the Grand Parade when representatives from every re-enactment through history march along more or less in chronological order – all very impressive and indeed a grand finale.

We went back to the campsite via McDonalds for the children as I had this vague idea they might go to bed early :lol:.In actual fact the addition of Merry’s four girls to the mix meant the children acted out that imortal line from Summer Lovin’ and ‘stayed up til ten o’clock’ when it finally got too dark for them to carry on playing the game that had kept them entertained and happy in their big gaggle for hours further down the camping field :).

Sunday We all packed up first thing. I quite like to pack up the same way as we set up, in installments, punctuated by periods of sitting down and drinking tea. It was not quite that leisurely but it wasn’t hurried either. It was marred by the discovery that Scarlett had lost her favourite Zoo Hospital DS game. We hoped it would turn up at the other end when we unpacked everything but it hasn’t made it home with us :(. It didn’t really hit her til today when she suddenly realised this meant she couldn’t play it and she’s been quite sad about it :(.

I think we finally got to FoH about 1130am, this time with a bit more of a plan. We had a good look round the medieval village area, Scarlett fell in love with a puppy (which seemed to be mutual. He was in a crate and the owner got him out so he could give Tarly the full body hug he was desperate to do :))

We were walking parallel to the Arena when the cry went up for children to come into the arena so in we dashed. They gathered a foam ‘sword’ (a bit of pipe lagging) as they went in and were split into two teams – the normans and the saxons. The dressed up commentators rounded them up and talked tactics to them, lined them up facing each other and let them loose! With hilarious results of course 😆


I doubt it was very true to historical accounts of 1066 but they all had a lot of fun! 🙂

By then it was time to meet up with the others again at the giant sandpit for lunch. Not everyone made it this time – I’d run out of twitters so was sad to hear Kirsty and James hadn’t made it back for the second day at all and were on their way home with RAC assistance :(. We never did see Jax or Merry again but we had lunch with Chris and Helen and The Babs and co who had arrived so that was nice :). I spent half an hour in a queue for tea which I eventually gave up on as it still didn’t seem to be moving and I’d taken a phone call (the second in a series) from my Mum which had irritated me too. We missed the play I’d quite wanted to see and the Punch and Judy show wasn’t there on Sunday so we headed back to the Trench at Davies’ request.

Just beyond that was a field with a cow and her calf and a heavy horse with a trailer which Scarlett was interested in. She stood and chatted to the woman about the cow and calf for ages and had her first experience of ‘coming out’ as Home Educated when the woman asked if she was about to break up from school. She tossed her hair back and smiled and said ‘No actually we don’t go to school. We’re Home Educated’ to which the woman looked slightly taken aback and replied ‘oh well that’s good then’. Given the level of conversation she’d been having with Scarlett she couldn’t really have come back with anything else 🙂 . I was proud :). The horse and cows started to move off to participate in an ‘animals in the war’ display so Ady and Davies settled down to get a good spot for the D day show infront of the main arena while Scarlett and I ran after the animals to go and watch that. We had to have a loo stop but saw most of that show including the cow and calf, the horse pulling an injured man in his trailer, an ass carrying rice (we liked hearing about how they’d parachuted in strapped to pallets and not one ass had been killed in doing so – sounded crazy to us!) and finally carrier pigeons which they let go as the finale :). We finally got our tea and coffee and then walked back to join Ady and Davies.

The children and I went to get icecreams while Ady guarded the space and the show began. There were parachutists dropping from planes and all sorts of aerial and ground based displays. Not entirely dissimilar to the airshow, which made all four of us feel strange both days after what we witnessed last year at the air show. It was very impressive.

We started to work our way towards the end at that point, ever conscious of the journey home but bumped into the Raines on the way so decided to join them to watch the jousting again. This time the south won! 🙂 We watched from the other side right next to where the knights actually met and although the children didn’t pay much attention as they were too busy messing about with each other I was mightily impressed with the lances smashing so close to us 🙂

The Raines headed off to see the grand parade but we decided it really was time to call it a day and headed for the exit. Both days there were staff on the gates at the end thanking you for coming, wishing you a safe journey home and just doing the final send off. We were really impressed at how well run and organised the whole event was actually. There were hundreds of staff, queues to get in including the carpark were all really well managed, we were greeted at the gate by someone with wristbands to give to the children with mobile numbers on and to talk to each child about what to do if they got lost (find someone with an EH symbol on their clothing and show them your wristband). It was an excellent event and one I’m sure will set off things we’ll refer back to in the future.

The drive home was straightforward if long and tedious and we arrived home just after 8pm. The children had a bath, dinner and bed but that was nearly 10pm. We had to get the car unpacked as Ady was back to work this morning and it’s as easy to unpack and put stuff away as it is to unpack into a heap and have to deal with it again so we were all sorted by about 11pm – another late dinner!

It was a great weekend – expensive but sort of a weeks camp squished into 3 days really. The children had an absolute ball playing with friends, going on rides, camping which they adore anyway. We loved spending time with a selection of fab people, I am utterly in love with my new tried and tested sleeping bag, the tent went up well and stayed up well and I think having somewhere to be for all 3 of the days meant we were all together for about the right amount of time to enjoy it without the stressy bits. 🙂

Thanks to Chris and Helen for suggesting and coordinating and lovely to see the rest of you 🙂 x

Off to work for me this morning. Ady was at home with the children; it’s really making so much difference that arrangement, a complete win:win on all counts, not least regular time for Ady and the children together without me :).

I had a nice morning at work. There are four of us on a Wednesday morning, open for 3.5 hours and a good blend of staff with me and the library supervisor, a woman who is sweet enough but gives us plenty of scope for taking the piss out of her and the new starter; S. I had tea with S and we chatted about her little girl who is 2 and has cerebral palsy. She is really into the idea of HE but confessed that she has really struggled so far with motherhood and her daughters disability, feeling that she needs a lot of support and that she has not necessarily adapted well to it all. Her daughter has no mobility at all – she can roll about but not yet even crawl and she doesn’t drive so it is pushchair or nothing which she finds pretty limiting. She said she often feels judged on how her and her daughter are progressing and I was shocked to learn she has not found any sort of support of others in a similar position – I would have assumed Health Visitors / doctors would have put her in touch with support groups. She does have internet access so I showed her how to join yahoo and printed off a list of 15 UK based yahoo groups specifically for parents. friends and carers of children with CP. Hopefully she’ll take them home and get herself into the loop. I explained that for us HE had only seemed a real possibility once we’d found others doing it and that online communities and support were what had kept us going in the early days- and of course led to real life friends now, locally and nationally. She was really pleased and grateful so hopefully it will be a real first step for her.

Back at home among other things they had done a jigsaw puzzle of a pirate ship with Ady tasking them to find and count a list of various animals featured in the puzzle. When I got in they were watching Peter Pan with the subtitles on which I think was accidental but had Davies pointing words out and telling me what they said.

After lengthy cuddles with both children I got Davies to bring me one of the books he’d chosen to read for the summer reading game. He brought over Meg and Mog and with really, really minimal help (on words like cauldron where I helped with what sound the ‘au’ made and words like ‘brought’ which phonetically are never going to work) he read the whole thing. I was surprised at the words he knew straightaway as whole words, many of which are either from his DS or Xbox. He worked through it by spelling out each word in a sentence and then going back and reading the sentence with feeling. I know this is something of a milestone really as although he has been technically able to read for quite some time inasmuch as if I sat him down with a page of writing he would eventually decode it this was reading proper with acknowledgement of the story. It was still slow, he still hit 2 points where he would have happily decided he’d had enough and I was careful not to insist he finished it but to remind him how fab he’d feel if he got to the end and read a Whole Book :). I doubt this is about to be any sort of huge turning point but my key hope is something along the lines of ‘they can if they want to’ for the children and I think we’ve probably hit that point with D and reading :).

Scarlett listened for a while and then got bored and wandered off to play with the chickens. She came in very excited to report that one of the two remaining eggs (she’s kicked the others out) under the broody hen was pipping (Pipping is when the first cracks appear in the egg as the chick starts to hatch out). Throughtout the afternoon I refereed a big old fight between our two hens. The one who has already hatched chicks, one of which she still has following her about everywhere had suddenly decided that actually she’d quite like to hatch these eggs and have the hens for herself. The poor broody hen who is knackered from sitting and being broody for weeks was getting a real pasting from her and the eggs were being nicked from each other and rolled about every few minutes with both of them ‘helping’ the pipping chick by pecking bits of the egg off. The poor chick (already hatched one) was utterly confused about who was his mother now and just kept following the eggs and scrambling underneath whichever one had them at the time.

Ady chatted to someone at work who suggested we needed to deal with it before the egg fully hatched as whoever the new chick saw first would become it’s mother and we could end up with a dead chick if the hens continued to squabble over it not to mention the reaction of the older chick. Eventually Davies and I chased out the hen with the chick and left the broody hen in peace with her hatching chick and one remaining egg that both hens seem convinced is going to hatch too. By the time we put them all to bed tonight it was fully hatched and seems fine. So we now have our 3 hens and 3 cockerels chicks who will be all mixed up soon when 2 of the roos get rehomed next week, our hen with the middle sized chick and our hen with one or maybe two brand new chicks. I’ve said it before – they really deserve a scriptwriter or a blog of their own, the politics are so indepth in that coop!

All that egg-sitement over with the children and I settled down with Where’s Wally which was one of Tarly’s choices of books for the summer reading game. We had a Where’s Wally fest last year but she is back into it again. She is at a bit of a pre-reading milestone too and suddenly seems to know most of the letter sounds despite noone ever teaching her them. She is doing lots of deconstructing words and tonight was asking me things like ‘I know ‘No’ has an ‘o’in it but what other letters are there?’ I said ‘N, like N for Nic, or naughty or nonsense’ and she came back with a few other n words too. Later still I found her lying in bed with a book moving her finger under the words and deciding what they said. She wasn’t right as she was working from memory, the pictures and her own rather active imagination rather than any adhesion to what the words actually were but again it’s the start of the journey.

I did some taking badges off and sewing them back on to other jumpers, gathered up all their uniforms and plaited Scarlett’s hair ready for Badgers while they had some DS time. Then we headed off to Badgers. Ady managed to join us there in plenty of time for the presentation. We looked at the ‘work’ they’d done this term which for Davies and Scarlett doing ‘creative badger’ including making picture frames, painting pebbles, making kites, painting bandanas, a collaborative hand and foot printing collage, sewing a glove puppet and weaving paper. Both of their efforts were lovely in everything, they’ve really enjoyed this term. Scarlett has made firm friends with a new little girl too.

Scarlett was as rubbish as ever at standing on parade doing the full range of ‘little kid at nativity play’ stunts including fingers up her nose, down her skirt, showing her pants, sitting down in the middle., waving frantically to us, sighing midway during someone’s speech, and pirouetting regularly when the mood took her :roll:. She does make everyone smile though and my frantic gestures of ‘calm down’ ‘be quiet’ ‘be sensible’ and ‘get your bloody finger out of your nose’ probably look much the same to her as she does to us 😆 It all seems to be tolerated in good humour though. They were both presented with their Creative Badger badges and certificates and then Ady brought them home while I nipped to Sainsburys for various bits to bring camping to tide us over til Friday when we find a supermarket.

Unfortunately Ady didn’t have any keys so although he was able to start sorting the chickens into new accomodation to deal with the fox, chicken, grain type situation we have with all the various aged bantams and who will and won’t attack each other then children were not able to get themselves ready for bed. They did when I got home though and aside from packing clothes and actually loading up the car we have everything dug out and assembled ready to be packed for camping. 🙂

Without any real planning to do so we’ve spent 3 of the last 5 days in the company of Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna. It’s been lovely actually. Scarlett and Jack have been getting on really well and it’s been so nice to be with Julie as we had slipped into more of a fortnightly getting together of late. It came about today as I mentioned yesterday that we would try and get along to the PYO farm today and Julie said ‘oh we’ll come too!’.

Before we went out this morning Davies and Scarlett played with lego and the pretend food. Davies built an ‘RV’ and gave me great descriptive detail about itand it’s various components and design features. I made some lunch to take with us and we headed out to PYO.

Julie and co arrived just after us, thankfully with suncream as I’d stupidly forgotten to pick any up again and the sun had broken through the clouds and was at full strength again so I’d have surely topped up my burn otherwise :rolls:.

The strawberries were rubbish but we sat for ages in the pea field picking, chatting, playing and in Lorna’s case having some milk too :lol:. We decided her little 5 week old life is pretty full and would make a good ‘Amazing Adventures of Lorna – breastfed in as many different locations as possible during the first 6 weeks of her life’ film 😆 Today she managed pea field, tractor trailer ride, sitting infront of Shakespeare play just in a few hours :). We also got loads of raspberries too. The children discovered the irrigation system which throws out massive jets of water across the crops and got soaked playing in that – happy, happy children :).

We drove a little along the road to Highdown Gardens and discovered a man in a funny hat in the carpark and then signs along the paths leading to ‘Rainbow Theatres’.It turned out to be the dress rehearsal and setting up of stage etc. for some plays happening there over the next week or so. We set our picnic rug up in full view of the stage and were soon approached by one of the set builders to say if we hung around we’d see a performance soon. We ended up staying for a couple of hours watching them get dressed up and start to run through the play. The children wondered around and about, sometimes stopping to watch. Davies was very interested in the setting up and costume stuff but was less for sitting and watching the performance which was Taming of the shrew.

Reluctantly we left as we had to get back for swimming. So we whizzed home for the children to get changed and me to shove pizzza dough into the breadmaker.Ady arrived home and we all went off to swimming. They both had a great lesson; Davies is really doing well and Scarlett appears to have had a real breakthrough and is actually swimming although she stops when she needs to breathe and puts her feet down. Davies has gone up a class from September which I am proud of him for but both children are quite upset at the idea of not being in the same class anymore :(. We spoke to the instructor about whether she thought Scarlett could take a couple of week long courses through the summer and get put into the higher class too but she said she doubted there would be space for her even if she was up to that standard :(. It means Davies’ lesson is at 4pm and Scarlett’s is at 530pm which will be a right pain for us so we’ll have to see how that pans out and hopefully it will only be for one term before Scarlett gets put up with Davies too. It is staggering how Scarlett has gone from thrashing wildly in the pool to a rather graceful stroke in mere weeks :shock:.

We came home and Ady took over while I got changed and dashed back out again to the library for book group. We were discussing two books this month having not met last month so that was quite lively. We finished about 830pm and I walked home again to find the children awake but allegedly in bed :rolls:. There was some toing and froing before they actually did settle down though.

It was second-Monday-in-the-month Pulborough Brooks Home Ed meet up today.The last couple have only really been Katie-who-organises-it and us but today had a massive turn out :).

Scarlett is being tricky (again – I’m sure I could find plenty of excuses or justifications, but really she’s being a poo-bag and I’m rather conscious of the impact on Davies who tends to wait patiently, trying to help if he can and adopting an air of ‘is it worth the hassle?’about him). We had a strop about her trousers which resulted in her putting two other pairs on before going back to the ones she started with. I will accept deciding not to like an item of clothing for rational reasons such as being uncomfortable or even not liking the style or design – I very clearly recall a pair of red flared dunagees with a soldier on the front that I loathed at a much younger age than Scarlett is now. But she is very articulate so a simple ‘I hate them!’ isn’t really going to cut it with me. She has had ‘potential issues’ in the past with things as varied as deciding she is scared of her bedroom, suddenly disliking food she has always loved and other such nonsenses and I have always employed the technique of not pandering to anything that she can’t clearly state the reasons for her upset over.

So that episode had us running late and we needed petrol and some additional top up to our scanty picnic. The petrol station had nothing so we decided to pop into the Tesco petrol station for food. Then we hit a major traffic jam through the small village that Pulborough Brooks is the other side of, then I went and got the extra food and it all conspired to make us half an hour late altogether. Both children chose to take spotter sheets and we walked along fairly quickly chatting as we went, all good humour restored :). We caught up with the others fairly quickly into the walk – Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna were there along with 2 of Julie’s other good HE friends and their children, Katie-who-organises-it, another 2 HE families who often come and a new family from Lewes with two children, the oldest is flexi-schooling at Lewes New School.

Scarlett and Jack imediately ran off together; Davies mixed hanging back with me and Julie or whoever I was chatting to at the time with running ahead with George and Aled the two other older boys who were there and he knows fairly well. It was a nice walk with plenty of different people to fall into step and chatter to for a while. Scarlett and Jack went right off ahead and Davies went off to catch them up. They’d been in the visitor centre / shop for a while by the time we got there and had already handed their spotter sheets in and got their packs :). The volunteers there seem to be getting more used to the fact they know their way round and are not going to go running out into the carpark and get run over if they are not tethered to me now :lol:.

I collected our random picnic from the car and we all sat together in the play park to eat and play. I felt rather ‘odd one out’ for a while as everyone was talking about school / Etudeo / structured reading and writing, plus they all seemed to be feeding their children mixed seeds and pulses with hummus dip and raw vegetables while Davies and Scarlett were mostly eating Monster Munch :lol:. There are some very interesting sub-sections of HE culture (and I’m very aware we are in one just the same as everyone else) and this is not my natural habitat one! I did get to cuddle Lorna for a bit which was nice but marred slightly by Scarlett having another big strop. I don’t think it was related but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that she was pulling the ‘I’m YOUR baby!’ stunt. She recovered fairly quickly and we’ve chatted about it since. She can be so mature and rational about things when she is not being a lunatic! She so is the little girl who had a little curl ;).

I got stupidly sunburnt on my arms and cleavage for managing to completely forget about suncream. I was so good about it back in April but have gotten out of the habit what with there being no sun for weeks and all. The children are fine, they were covered anyway and playing mostly in the shade so at least I don’t have bad-mother-guilt to contend with aswell as stinging red bits :(.

We left and nipped home to collect library tickets and some books to return before heading to the library to join this years Summer Reading Challenge. They did the find the characters treasure hunt, got their stickers, registered to start and chose a couple of books each. Davies has chosen books he thinks he might be able to tackle himself for his starting two so we’ll see if he gets anywhere with that. He also had a mini-adventure at the library when he needed to use the loo so I sent him to get the key for it and go off himself as he knows the building really quite well now. He did manage to use the lift though, got confused about going down and pressed 1 instead of G so the doors closed but the lift didn’t go anywhere and he pressed the alarm button. Someone came and ‘resuced’ him so he was very happy with his handling of the whole situation :lol:.

We had a quick look round the charity shops while we were there and found two brand new sealed kits in one. A ‘puddle monster’ kit which is basically a plastic pond with a channel for grass seed to create a swamp look and some sea monkey eggs – for 99p! We planted the grass seed and have put the puddle monster eggs in so should see something with the magnifying glass tomorrow :).

We also got a flower pressing kit with a nice chunky flower press aswell as bookmarks, cards, envelopes and glitter glue to make things from your pressed flowers. We all went and picked some to press and did that too. Funnily enough we’d been talking about flower pressing recently and talked about having a go at it so it was great to find that for a quid too :).

We came home, did the activities, Davies and Scarlett played with the geomags and then had tea. Ady arrived home and Davies and I popped over to Ali’s to return Freya’s car seat and drop off some promised plants from Ady. It was nice to have Davies all to myself for an hour or so and we had some good conversations about all sorts of things :). We popped into Sainsburys to get a few bits too and then came home. Time for a couple of stories and then bed.

Yesterday when driving past Stanmer Park on the way to Freya’s party we noticed the Kite Festival was on. We first happened upon it 4 years ago in much the same way when we were driving past to go somewhere else. I thought it was 2 years ago, but decided it could have been 3, only to discover checking back on my blog it was 4!

My hair is a bit shorter now but I was wearing that same jacket again today!

Davies on the other hand does appear to have grown in the last four years!

So this morning Ady and Scarlett went off to the car boot sale. The idea is anyone who is up by about 8am gets to go. Frankly I’m over car boot sales anyway so the appeal of buying other peoples tat for 50p or staying in bed in a quiet house for an extra hour is never going to be a tough choice to make. Davies tends to go more for my way of thinking too :). So he and I had a leisurely hour together once I’d got up, put away a load of clean washing and gone to wake him up too. We watched Gladiators and he ate cheerios while I drank tea :). Ady and Scarlett bumped into Julie the Badger leader and went round the car boot sale with her. They came back with a couple of books. Davies and I nipped up to Sainsburys for picnic food and then we all headed off to Stanmer Park together.

Scarlett was wearing a dress we got cheap the other day because I’d liked the colour but actually the design and the colour on her made it look like some sort of nurses or careworkers uniform. Adding a cardigan to it today because it was cold seemed to enhance that look – it was horrible :(. She won’t be wearing that again!

The weather was rather threatening but it never actually did rain and a couple of times the sun broke through and it was lovely. Davies and Scarlett made their own kites;

which actually flew really well 🙂 Davies had a great time with his for ages and I managed to get some impressive loops and twists out of it – not bad for an old cut up carrier bag and some bamboo barbecue skewers 😉

Sadly it went the way so many kites have gone before and got caught in a tree. But it knew the good times, it felt the wind in it’s recycled video tape tail, it had the glory of making a small boy smile with the joy of the next best thing to flying himself! Davies was wobbly but brave about it all.

We sat and lunched next to the arena where a constant show was on of various things. They did an Indian fighting kite display a la Kite Runner, choreographed flying to music, an amazing display of two kites with really long tails flown to ‘Windmills of your mind’ which was just stunning, a fab display by one man simulataneously flying 3 kites to Barcelona (which Davies listened to a few bars of having never heard it before and then said ‘this sounds like Queen’ :lol), various stunt and trick kites and my personal favourite of one man in a buggy and another on a board kite surfing with all sorts of cool moves.

They then called in the first 30 children, of which Davies and Scarlett were among the first five :lol:, which was great until they then wanted a few adults too and I got called in aswell :). They did a huge parachute game to music which was actually quite fun – and all the children got sweets too.

and we all took a bow at the end!

Then the children who had made kites all got to take them into the arena and fly them. Davies was very brave about having already lost his and came to help Scarlett fly hers. They gave some prizes for best flying technique but as Scarlett (and actually even Davies) hasn’t really moved past running very fast with it she didn’t win anything!

We had one last wander round the stalls selling kites and then watched the giant kites being flown before heading for home.

I cooked ham in coke while the children had a bath and watched youtube videos with Ady of bubble blowing. We’d been talking about the man who blew cube bubbles and smoke filled bubbles yesterday and managed to find some videos of him to show them. We all ate, I read another pile of stories and then it was bedtime.

Scarlett fell asleep pretty quick but when I got out of the bath Ady and I followed beautifully written signs and arrows up the stairs to Davies’ bedroom for ‘Christmas Songs’. He told us where the nearest fire exit was, alerted us to the first aid kit should we need it and then sat on a little chair and sang along to a musical book ‘Jingle Bells’ and ‘We wish you a Merry Christmas’. Totally out of season, he (rather amusingly) said ‘great stockings we bring’ instead of ‘glad tidings’ and clearly a bed avoidance tactic but it brought tears to my eyes just the same ;). Lovely child!

It’s been a lovely weekend 🙂

Yesterday morning I worked. I’ve sort of lost track of what’s extra and what’s not but I seem to be working every Saturday that I’m not away in a tent this summer! It was fine, I finally managed to finish my display for the Team Read, this summers reading game which kicks off tomorrow.

I came home and we set off to Ali & J’s for Freya’s seventh birthday party. Much as I adore Freya and birthday parties her turning seven messes up the whole 5,6,7 thing that Scarlett, Freya and Davies had going on which was just so nice and tidy. It will now take Davies and Scarlett having birthdays to put it straight again which isn’t for ages and will also mean I have children who are 8 and 6 which I am in total denial about the possibility of! :lol

The party was fab. I enjoyed being ‘the friend who knows where all the tea making components are’, Ady took charge of the one person at a time trampoline rota, Scarlett hilariously announced to Ali ‘I’d like to go outside, are there any rules?’ and Davies appeared to be being lovely every time I saw him. He had some idea to convert the energy from the trampoline bouncing into electricity and various other little insights I caught the end of through the day. We met the partner of one of the HEors we see a fair bit of which was nice, I like seeing people’s other halves and seeing whether they are like I expected them to be :). We saw a couple of other HE friends and some of Ali’s other mates too.It was a good mix of attendees and considering the amount of them it was all very smooth and enjoyable. I say this with the airy manner of someone who mostly sat down chatting and drinking Smirnoff Ice of course while others ran around after all the children 😆 :lol:.

There was a treasure hunt and party bags which all netted fab prizes of the sort I used to get myself at parties including stretchy men, wooden pigs, fortune telling fish and more. Towards the end when only a few of us were left Freya brought out her Rainbow Dash Fizzy Surprise drinks of her own invention which were very well recieved by the children and brought on further sugar-rush craziness :lol:. We stayed awhile after the rest of the partygoers had gone for tea and coffee and bubble making which was just lovely :).


We came home via Asda where Davies got some Ben 10 socks and Scarlett got an armful of bangles. I’ve been wearing an armful of bangles and she’s been desperate for her own and Asda had child-size ones. So they both got further spoilt in addition to party going :). A late tea for them followed by a pile of books and an even later bedtime. Ady cooked a two course meal which we’d planned but not looked at the clock for so I ended up falling asleep on the sofa after huge amounts of food and staggered to bed before midnight hence yesterdays blog today.

We met Julie, Jack, Maisie and Lorna at the stables this morning. We hit serious traffic on the way so an optimistic 20 minute / realistic 30 minute drive took nearly 50 minutes. That gave us plenty of time to listen to our current in-car cd and for me to explain ‘revolution’ (Sandi Thom, punk rocker with flowers in my hair) and ‘play boy bunny with bleach-blonde hair (Nickelback, Wanna be a rock star – slightly harder ;)).

We arrived 25 minutes late and Julie pulled up mere moments after us, also 25 minutes late. Clearly some sort of amazing ESP or mutually compatible crapness going on there! The children disappeared off to run round the farm while Julie tacked Honey up and we caught up. They organised their own riding rota and off we went with Maisie riding first. Scarlett and Jack have always been the least likely pairing of the four cousins but the last few times we’ve met up they have been very close and today they were inseperable. They were ‘Bug Hunting’ and spotting all sorts of interesting creatures. Jack is very into nature and always has been and is pretty knowledgable about plants, flowers, bugs and so on so they were having a great time together spotting and identifying things :).

Davies had a nice long ride on Honey and actually ended up having a second ride. He seemed slightly distanced from the other 3 today but he has been doing a lot of hanging around me the last week or so and trying to join in my conversations with other adults rather than playing with ‘the children’. He’s reminding me a lot of the daughter of a friend who would always rather be with the grown ups than the children at gatherings, particularly with his efforts to join in the adults conversations. I’m trying to find the middle ground between completely censoring what I talk about and not being at all responsible with what I say infront of him.

He talked to Julie a lot while he was riding about various horse related things.

Scarlett was so into her ‘finding interesting things with Jack’ that she had to be persuaded to ride Honey at all which was something of a surprise as she normally adores it. She did have a ride but was as keen to get down again and carry on exploring really. I did get a nice picture of her turning round to talk to me though which is another of those ‘future echo’ type shots where she could almost be any age;

And I just love this picture, not because it has any great photographic value, just because it has lots of people I love in it and sums up for me the best part of our normal weekday activities; relaxed, in good company, doing things that are active and happy, chatting and enjoying being together:

We got back to the stables and the children went off to climb on ‘the mountains’ which are the straw and muck heap and an equally towering pile of lopped tree branches. We ate lunch in our cars parked side by side and then the four big cousins went off to play again while Julie, Lorna and I hung out and chatted (and gurgled and gave the odd 5 week old smile :))

We left there and Davies had gotten upset about losing a croc button so I’d said we’d call into Littlehampton on the way home to the shop where we get their pretendy crocs from to see if we could get a replacement. The shop only had two different designs but said their Rustington branch had loads so as that was also on the way home we called in there and got them a pair each of new ones. We also got them a pair each of new shoes – Tarly, more pretendy crocs with glitter and heart shaped cut outs for a quid and Davies some camouflage print sandals for £2 – bargain! I got a £7 pair of jeans too :).

We got home and as they’d been eating jam doughnuts in the car neither of them were particularly hungry for tea. Scarlett finally decided to have a bowl of cocopops after seeing an advert for them. Ady and I love the cocopops ad campaign which seems to be mostly about coming up with more and more times of the day when cocopops are ‘ideal’ for – after school, with warm milk (being their suggestions as well as breakfast), when your wife has announced she’s leaving you, when you get in from the pub too lashed up to cook a fry up (being some of our tamer ideas).

Ady arrived home and Scarlett and I headed off to Rainbows. Next week is the last one of term but she will miss it as we’ll be at Kelmarsh so she was in a bit of a party mood about the whole thing. She took her new shoes (well she wore them actually) and a couple of toy horses and talked about how she went pony riding today. One of the other little girls came up to talk to me about Scarlett’s ring, why I stay at Rainbows and the fact that she thinks I look like Scarlett. While she talked she fiddled with my bracelet which as a habit both my own children have I found very endearing. I think she has clicked onto the fact that Scarlett isn’t at school but doesn’t quite know how to come right out and ask and that was where some of her questions about Scarlett’s ring were leading (she has a little gold buckle ring that was mine as a child which I gave her a while ago and she always wears) as I assume it would be something she’d be asked to remove at school, certainly for PE – I know I always had to hand over loads of bits to the tupperware box at PE when I was at school :).

They did some sort of jigsaw puzzle activity, played a few games, ate biscuits and then had show and tell. I chatted to the leader for a long while about her foster daughter who has been helping out for the last month and how she is finding it. The girl has all sorts of problems including learning difficulties and a long history of all sorts of horrible abuse. I had found her rude and sullen but am now utterly humbled at both what a girl that young has lived through in her short life and the amazing role that foster carers play in helping children survive and live. It’s not something I think I could ever do and perhaps surprisingly (given he was fostered many times himself) Ady reckons he couldn’t do it either. Rainbows has been great for Tarly and we’re both happy for me not to stay from next term :).

Home for yet more of the pile of Barefoot Books – just 4 tonight as several of them were long ones, then bed for D and S and curry for Ady and I. I’m working in the morning and then we’re off to help celebrate Freya’s birthday :).

One of the things I keep forgetting to blog is that twice this week Davies and Scarlett have caught a bit of the daily news on TV and it has led to tricky conversations. Once was about ‘drugs’ which actually I sort of struggled to define really. I thought I was doing an ok job and then Ady reminded me that medicine is drugs too so I had to start again. I think I got the basic information over in giving them a definition, a context and point of reference for the news story and then a wider explanation about issues surrounding drugs too. It makes it all the harder when I try not to give black and white lectures about right and wrong and do more of an offering them all available information, suggesting my own stance on things and encouraging them to think through their own opinions. Clearly I’m not suggesting I laid out drugs paraphenalia for my 5 and 7 year old and told them to ‘have a go if they liked’ but I do try to explain why people might take drugs, what the possible implications are and why it may not be such a great idea to take mind altering substances with huge possible side effects in a recreational fashion (all the while knowing full well that they know we and most other adults they know drink alcohol). I just think the ‘Just Say No’ type message isn’t always sufficient when you factor in natural curiosity and teenage rebellion some way later down the line.

Then yesterday we touched on terrorism. Once we’d defined it I used the Word Trade Center attacks, IRA bombings and the July 7th London bombings as examples in my own lifetime. We talked about why people might be motivated to perform acts of terrorism and again in striving to explain it I didn’t want to go down the ‘people are evil’ route without talking it through so we discussed things that people might be prepared to kill or die for, how the threat of terrorism and a culture of living in fear is still considered a victory for terrorists. I’ve been searching today for more modern day films or books about such things and found very little. The various films made of the 911 attacks are all a 15 certficate at least and probably too sophisicated to get the point across. I did find a fairly good bit on the CBBC Newsround site which I might show them tomorrow.

Today was a working all day day for me. It kicked off with Storytime which I’d already known I’d be doing this week and had gathered a few books together ready for. I attempted to read four stories which I now concede was ambitious – The Gruffalo, I Love my bed, My Beak your beak and Hairy Mclarey from Donaldsons Dairy. We sang lots of songs and I was clambered over my small crawling babies (shudder), I had a picture of the Gruffalo for them to colour and another one from the lion in My beak, your beak. Sadly about halfway through Hairy Mclairy I just utterly lost my audience and there was not one single child still listening by the end. Four of the older girls started squabbling over who was sitting on a cushion, several of the little ones were just at the end of their concentration span and as I lost some so the rest went. There were 22 children and 18 adults though and all the adults remained with me with one of them actually calling out ‘carry on, we’re still listening!’. I actually got a round of applause at the end as I closed the book with a flourish and a ‘And we’re there!’ 😆 The oldest children are possibly 4 and at that age both Davies and Scarlett required a very interactive storytime with lots of pointing out things in the illustrations, being able to contribute (read interupt) and actually participate rather than listen so it is totally understandable. If I did it every week I can think of small measures to try and make it an easier half hour but it is not something I do regularly enough to start trying to change things. I also think a storytelling session rather than reading a book might work better although I guess that starts to detract from the whole books at the library side of it.

The rest of the day passed fairly smoothly. A new woman started yesterday so I worked with her for the first time today. Her sister works with Ady so we’d both been told about each other already ;). She is very interested in HE – she has a 2 yo daughter with cerebral palsey so we were chatting lots about that and I’ve a feeling we’ll continue to do so for a while. She seems very nice so I’m looking forward to getting to know her better and working with another new face.

Ady was home this morning and they did painting. This afternoon Dad was here and the children mostly played in the garden as finally we’ve had a dry, fairly sunny day here today.

Having always liked Barefoot Books we’ve had a couple lately which have been really good books so I went through the library’s full catalogue last week and ordered in all of the Barefoot Books categorised as POR (picture books for older readers) – 25 of which had arrived today. So I brought home a huge great piles of gorgeous books and we read a few before dinner. Then Davies and Scarlett had a much needed bath (a day in the garden after 3 days of rain meant they were rather filthy, and also had been barefoot!) and then we read another huge pile. I think we reached 12 books altogether tonight :). I’ve been poking around the Barefoot Books website a bit as they have a very interesting looking Storytelling competition which Davies is interested in and I ‘ve been taken enough with the books to consider selling them. I need to think about that a bit more but I have a germ of an idea taking off in my mind which once I’ve thought about a bit more I might share…

I’ve had some emails back from the Sustainability Centre and the Campcraft people so I’ll need to start sorting out plans for that camp and getting numbers planned. Also Davies has agreed to have his birthday party at camp rather than at the party hall which is great but possibly offers new challenges which he and I need to thrash out too.

This morning, just for a change, it rained :(.

Scarlett had woken at 2am, claiming a bad dream, wanted a drink, come up to bed with me, laid and chatted for nearly an hour, cried because she said her ear hurt, decided she wanted to go back downstairs again, made me sit on the floor beside her bed and then when I said I was going back to my bed (what she really wanted was me to sleep in her bed with her) decided to come back up with me again :rolls:. Every so often she has a couple of episodes of broken nights, every time it nearly kills me and every time she then goes straight back to sleeping through and having no problems. Maybe we’ve been overdosing the Doctor Who watching?

So it was a slow start to the morning with no particular place to be and no inclination to go anywhere in this weather anyway. I was slightly shamed by Michelle’s twitter about going out for a walk and thought that actually we should have waterproofed up and done similar but by then we’d made plans for Lucy and The Rs to come over in the afternoon anyway.

So we flicked through the tv channels looking for interesting things. We watched a bit of a show called ‘The Blasters’ about people who demolish buildings, a bit of Hider in the House and some other kids gameshow that they like to watch and a bit of Raven. Then we found a really interesting programme about whether apes are as clever as humans with all sorts of experiments on how apes learn language, communicate and so on. Both the children were really interested in that and we followed it up with some Really Wild Show (or whatever that programme with the woman who used to be on The Really Wild Show is called now).

One of the women I work with choppped a tree down in her garden a couple of weeks ago and I helped her find a wood chipper to hire online at work. She was telling me they just had a pile of logs which were too big to be chipped to get rid of of and I said if they were suitable we’d have them gladly to burn on our fire next winter so she’s had them ready to collect at her house for ages. I decided that I really needed to take them off her hands so we drove up there in the rain and she dashed out to help me load them in the car. Her lovely husband has chopped them up perfect sized for our fairly small fire and there are five huge bags so they will greatly appreciated later this year (much later I hope although it’s practically cold enough to have fires even though it’s bloody JULY!).

We’d just got in and were debating what to have for lunch when Ady appeared as he was practically passing the door on his way somewhere and realised it was lunchtime so that was nice :). He headed off again while I used up some too soft to eat bananas in making some banana and chocolate chip cakes, which did as my lunch :). Ady got given a huge hot water dispenser flask thing at work that someone didn’t want so I’ve been boiling the kettle and filling it up to make tea out of rather than boiling the kettle several times a day when I’m home all day or have friends over who are likely to be drinking a couple of cups of tea or coffee. It will be great for camping but it’s nice to have instant hot water for drinks making at home too – makes me think of Melrose and that fab boiler in the kitchen there :).

Lucy and The Rs arrived and stayed for a good 3 hours plus. There was some initial squabbles although I think it was more Davies and Scarlett related than anything else. They are so good at playing together that they can either be rubbish at letting someone else break into their game or they can resent someone playing with the other one and try to disrupt things. They all settled into it in the end though and when it stopped raining for an hour towards the end we chucked them all out in the garden to run off some energy and get some fresh air. Richard did manage to fall over and scuff his knee badly to match the other knee which he scuffed last week when he was here. Last time the other three made up a song and dance to cheer him up, this time Davies and Scarlett both fetched a first aid kit and vied over who would present him with antiseptic wipes and plasters first :lol:.

Our guests left, Davies and Scarlett had tea and then got changed for Badgers. Ady had got a present of a sunflower each for all the Badgers and it was ‘bring a pet to Badgers day’ so I battled to get the big box of sunflowers into my car while Ady dashed home and selected a chicken to put in a cat carrier to bring with us. The Badgers were slightly depleted in numbers tonight but there was a cat, 3 rabbits and our chicken brought along to make up the numbers. I’d not really expected to stay and was very scruffily dressed so felt a bit self conscious sitting in the circle of chairs for the sort of show and tell type session it ended up being. Davies spoke most about the chickens with a small amount of help from Scarlett. He was actually excellent – spoke really clearly and confidently, explained things really well and gave lots of little nuggets of information and anecdotes too. He explained about hatching eggs ourselves, having hens and cockerels, incubators and letting hens go broody themselves, what an incubator is and how it works, the difference between chickens and bantams and loads more. He easily knew more than I did a year ago and put it all across really well :). On the way home he said he really liked talking to people and telling them about stuff he knows about :). He also was in charge of letting people hold the hen and answering any little questions they had while they did it although Ady and I got called on a fair bit for that and I explained about different types of feathers to a surprisingly interested little group. We were most profusely thanked for bringing her in by the leaders :).

There is a fairly new girl there -H, I think she is about Davies’ age and just twitches my HE radar with the way she is dressed and her general personality. Tonight her mum was there too with their rabbit and she had me looking at her thinking ‘hmmm, you look like ‘one of us’ too’. She was super chatty so I might ask her next week (or get one of the children to ask H :lol:). Scarlett likes H a lot too and has been insperable from her since she started.

Scarlett was fairly rubbish at sitting still and being quiet but then there were cats and rabbits to play with. Once the Badgers were ‘released’ from sitting in the circle she spent the whole time chatting to the grown up son of one of the leaders who had brought 2 rabbits with him to show. She was clearly asking intelligent questions and seemed fairly locked in conversation with him so it is just that formal setting she struggles with (and who can blame her, I was sitting there wanting to pull faces and be silly!). She really does love animals though.

We came home and had a final read of The Tear Thief and The Fish in the Forest (one of the stories fromt this book) before I take them back tomorrow. I’ve ordered loads of Barefoot books so hopefully they should be waiting for me at work already.