One word? When seven would do…

Friday morning was mostly taken up with gathering myself together to head up to The Beans for the weekend. I made some rice crispie cakes but was unable to muster ingredients or enthusiasm for further creativity in baking. And I ran out of paper cake cases which would have been needed if I’d moved on to cupcakes which would have been my next plan.

Davies and Scarlett gathered their own stuff together to take which I then filtered to remove things that were totally unnecessary and to suggest a few sensible additions. Somewhere in the whole getting them to get some stuff while I got the rest I managed to forget pjs for Tarly though :oops:. She was offered a pair from the stash of girls pjs that exist in a house with 2 girls but instead chose to wear Davies’ t shirt to bed on Friday and my top on Saturday. As with most of my tops it has a deep v neck on me it was positively indecent on her :lol:.

My Mum arrived just after midday to stay with Davies and Scarlett while I went into work. Due to them owing me hours for the bank holiday I was only working from 1230-5pm instead of all day as usual. I spent most of my shift on the enquiry desk and chatting to one of the relief staff who is 20 about whether we ever actually feel grown up or not.

Ady had hoped to beat me home and get the children fed but he got caught in traffic so Mum was still here when I arrived home just after 5pm. Weird stuff going on with my parents again, none of which I have any desire to get entangled in and I was slightly pissed off that she said ‘they’ve been saying they’re hungry for the last half an hour or so’ but hadn’t fed them 🙄 so she left, I did feed them and gathered together the last few things (aside from Tarly’s pjs) and had everything gathered by the front door when Ady did arrive home.

I think we finally pulled away at about 610pm which was nearly an hour later than I’d been hoping to leave 🙁 Satnav said an ETA of just after 830pm but as we sat in traffic just after Dartford and then again at various points along the M11 I watched the ETA move to after 9pm in the end. It was an otherwise fine journey though, which I had privately been a little nervous about. Although I’ve been driving for years and drive most days locally Ady is always the one who does the driving when we are together so he does all the long haul driving. Consequently although I have been through the Dartford Tunnel and over the bridge many times I have never actually driven them myself. Plus it was in the courtesy car which was automatic (I’ve only ever driven one automatic car before and that was a courtesy car at least 10 years ago) and lacking the essential kid-distraction unit of in-car dvd player with headphones allowing them to watch their films and me to listen to music without interfering with each other.

As it went it was all fine. I’d picked up a handful of various cds from work so we listened to Billy Joel, the StTrinians soundtrack, The Monkees, Gabriella Cilmi, Duffy and the Juno soundtrack and all sang along together. The only slighty stressy moment was just after I’d made them turn their DSs off after they got louder and crosser with each other over a linked game of Big Brain Academy and was explaining why I’d done so, it was by now dark and the satnav told me to take the fourth exit on a roundabout that only had 3 exits. I found myself with a gear stick to grab, without an exit to take and without patience for children!

We arrived safely though and were welcomed by SB getting up to greet Davies and Scarlett and a glass of wine thrust into my hand :). After a brief play and sufficient alcohol to restore myself I set up beds and the children were packed off to bed. Neither of them went to bed well either night as they still have this novelty thing going on when they share a bedroom and consequently are dreadful at chatting, being giddy and then winding each other up which is very annoying but not something I can do anything about other than make them sleep in each others rooms more regularly so it becomes less of a novelty. I fear for my children that would take exposure of the situation for at least a year though so it’s not likely to happen! They did eventually go to sleep and we had a very pleasant, and quite late night chatting – Chris and Helen, Jax and Tim and I.

Saturday morning felt like it started too early with Scarlett clambering on top of me around 730am. I persuaded her to cuddle up with me for about 15 minutes before she asked if she could go downstairs. As I opened the door to release her Big walked past so off they went. I couldn’t get back to sleep so I laid and read my book for about an hour before following her downstairs – Davies had already joined her.

The children were all quite loud but we persuaded them outside while we drank tea, ate croissants and a list of stuff still to do was made. I love Chris and Helen’s lists :). Tim was dispatched to gather glasses and shopping, Chris continued his sterling work of turning the climbing frame into a pirate ship and Jax, Helen and I drank more tea, did tidying, moved food and drink around, chopped up swords, hung up balloons and got children changed into pirates. As we were working on normal time rather than Home Ed time we were ready before guests arrived which meant children were hungry and could see all the food long before we were ready for them to be hungry or eat any of the food but it all seemed to work out – or at least the mixing of a rather Nic-quality sangria was done by Helen and at that point we ceased to care so much. Sangria o’clock :).

People arrived throughout the afternoon – none of them in the order we’d placed bets on them coming in :lol:. The weather was ace, the company was fantastic and Babs even brought meat! :lol:There was sword fighting aplenty, pirate arr-ing in spades, eating, drinking, photo taking. Various adults (I suspect I may have been the first but I was making up for Ady not being there so had to be more child-friendly than normal ;))got involved in sword fighting and were made to walk the plank. Doug trumped us all with a marathon of swordfighting including quite possibly saving Anna’s life as he swiped her out of the way of some wild swinging by Kit and Scarlett which would most certainly have sent her flying. There was treasure hunting, flag making and a wonderful hook-a-duck game provided by Chloe which gave the second most popular pastime after beating each other with pipe lagging which was getting wet in the paddling pool. Some stripped off completely, others went in their pants, some said to hell with it and went in fully dressed and Beth carried on in her mothers’ tradition by needing to take her trousers off! 😆

Scarlett provided entertainment in the form of a spectacular tantrum with me for not removing the slide from the pool (BB wanted it in there still so it wasn’t going to happen) and then not holding her hand while she jumped with a polostick alike toy (dangerous enough with both hands on dry ground, utterly perilous in a paddling pool one handed while holding onto your mother!). When I refused she told me I was lazy, a bad mother and then ran off down the garden screaming. All about 15 minutes after I’d been commenting to Em how much different she was being without Ady around 😆

We stayed in the garden til long after it got dark with the boys splintering off to play with pipe lagging and the girls all playing in the pool. Eventually everyone not staying the night departed, hot chocolate was provided for little people and then they went off to bed and the remaining adults moved into the comfy chairs. It was another late night – Scarlett joining us for some of it, in an intially cute and engaging but fast becomming annoying and wearing manner as she was disturbed by the kareoke next door (and slightly fragile from the earlier fall out, she is often clingy afterwards, particularly when she has said something she regrets to me).

I have flickr’d but I didn’t take many pictures so I’m hoping other people’s will capture more of the day (and indeed me and the children!).

Sunday was a more acceptably timed start. I woke just after 830am, before either child :). Davies went down before me and I woke Scarlett to come down with me. They headed off to play while I sat with the adults in the kitchen drinking tea and watching Chris cook mammoth amounts of pancakes. At about midday we moved through into the dining room and had a very enjoyable brunch for 18 with much passing the chocolate sauce, sugar, lemon juice etc. up and down the big table – it was ace :).

Ady had said the forecast thunderstorms and heavy rain had already hit Sussex so I was keen not to leave too late incase the drive was bad with weather. We left about 1245pm and I managed to shave 20 minutes off the satnav ETA along the way and be home just before 3pm :). It was a very easy drive, and if I didn’t have a personal fear of going above 80 mph in the car with the children in it the empty roads and performance of the car would have probably had me home even quicker 😳 And we missed all the weather :).

Ady had a lovely roast dinner cooking ready half an hour after we arrived home. The children and I walked round the shop to get some wine (they are funny, they’ve been with me all weekend, both talked about missing Ady lots and five minutes after we get home I say I’m walking round the shop and they both insist on coming with me :lol:) and we had dinner. We watched The Spiderwick Chronicles on dvd while eating that I’d brought home from work and then they had a big, long bath before snuggling up with Ady to watch Earth while I had an even bigger, even longer bath (with added wine). They went to bed and we watched Fiona’s Story which was quite harrowing and had us both shouting at the tv but was very good we thought.

It’s been a lovely weekend – so nice to see friends we’ve not seen for too long and really made me realise how much we’ve missed Kessingland this year (not Kessingland itself, just the whole being together for a whole week). Thank you so much to Chris and Helen for an excellent party and their fab hospitality for the weekend. 🙂

Ady stayed home to go to the Shoreham Airshow with some friends from work and had a good day yesterday although he was very sorry to miss Pirate Day and was very much there in spirit sending me regular texts including the Captain Pugwash theme tune 😆 and of course having his spirit channeled through me during my brief periods of running wild with pipe lagging! 😆

Today we met up with Mel, Liam and Lily. Despite the school holidays being nearly over and us making arrangements right at the beginning today was the first – and only – day we could all manage during the whole 6 weeks they were off school. Busy lives and part time working mums make for full diaries :).

Ady arrived home just before we were about to leave to show off his courtesy car. His car may well take a couple of weeks to fix although he seems to get a different guestimate from each person he speaks to, so we’ll see. The courtesy car is another Touran, slightly higher spec as it has tinted rear windows, all electric windows and air con controls in the back seats. It is a lovely blue colour too, but of course that makes no difference to the driving experience. That will be different to normal as it’s an automatic which I have very little experience of driving only ever having driven two previous courtesy cars over the years that were automatic. Never mind, it’s motorway most of the way to Chris and Helen’s so it won’t make much difference! It is of course missing the built-in dvd player with wireless headphones which Ady’s car has so my musical choice won’t be as free as usual.

Ady left to go about his days work and we headed off to Mel’s. My new peg loom had arrived so we went via a charity shop which seems to specialise in materials and wools and threads for some cotton to thread it with. I wasn’t sure how much the big spools would be so selected three and was amazed that they were only 10pence each for miles of thread just perfect for the threading of the loom 🙂 I got white, pink and green. Scarlett picked up a toy lemur and Davies picked up a balance science experiment box thing both for 75pence and in the shops’ BOGOF offer on toys – bargains ahoy! 🙂

We arrived at Mel’s and were very enthusiastically greeted by their 3 dogs (shudder). Mel lives with her mum in the house she grew up in and moved back to with her (then) husband and children when her Dad died. It’s an arrangement that seems to work quite well for them and allows her mum to stay in the house she loves but would be too big for her alone and Mel to have a bigger house than she could afford to buy with a built in babysitter when required. They have just had a load of building work done to create an additional bedroom for Liam downstairs (it is 3 bedroomed upstairs and Mel had one room, her mum another and Liam and Lily were sharing one). It’s looking really nice and it’s a deceptively sprawling house behind a smallish looking frontage.

The last time we met up, which I think was in the February half term or maybe the Easter holidays the four children had struggled a little with Davies being a bit too boisterous and Lily feeling left out when Scarlett joined in with the boys games. Today they all rubbed along really well together. Scarlett and Lily actually found some common ground (it’s only taken them nearly 3 years :lol:) and bonded over their pet tortoise. We had an hour or so at their house and then walked to the local park for a play in the playground before heading to their nearby Emmaus centre. Mel has talked about Emmaus before so it was interesting to actually go there and see it. We had lunch in the cafe and then wandered round the stuff for sale. Mel had a full basket of stuff (mostly toys) which she got for a quid (A QUID!) and we got 3 soft toys for Scarlett which they just gave us and a stargazer thing for Davies which was marked up at £3 but he only took £2 for in the end. We had a walk round the gardens there and then went back to Mel’s for another cup of tea and further playing for the children.

The day went really quickly and I had to tear the children away at 430pm to come home as they were really enjoying themselves. Mel either gets HE or does a very good job of pretending she does and often shares with me her frustrations with school and the institutionalisation of her children although she does see the good side of school for them too. This makes her good company among my friends with children at school as it is neither a subject we both studiously avoid or one we are trying to convince the other of our own viewpoint on. So we had a good ‘never like that when we were young’ and ‘youth of today’ type chatter which was nice, if made me feel like a proper grown up :lol:.

Just before we left Davies and Scarlett had a go on Liam’s Dareway which was a Christmas present to him last year after weeks of begging for one, that he only ever went on once on Christmas morning. Both my two fell in love with it instantly and were whizzing around on it like pros. They were very taken with it but I don’t think we have a suitable house for such toys really. Shame, because it did look like lots of fun :).
Once home I threaded up the peg loom and had a try with it. The threading is quite slow and laborious but worth doing as the result of the little bit I did weave was very promising. I need to get my hands on a load of rags now to make a rag rug which I think is going to be the very best first project. I’ve found various websites with patterns to properly make stuff like clothing on peg looms but I don’t want to try anything too ambitious until I have made at least one basic thing that has worked well. Any suggestions of good free rag sources gratefully recieved :).

Davies and Scarlett had a bath which all the new soft toys joined them in for a good wash and then the stargazer thing was set up in Davies’ room. It is American so has ‘fall’ written on the autumn globe (it comes with four different globes) and comes with a 30 minute tape telling you all sorts of interesting star facts. Scarlett went up to listen to it with Davies and they both kept having to pause the tape and run to tell me what the tape had said about various things. A definite bargain that :).

I went to bed around midnight last night and Davies was already in my bed. He almost always sleeps with me when Ady is away and in many ways I don’t mind it but I never sleep quite so well with a child in the bed as I do when they’re not. He didn’t get to sleep until at least 11pm maybe later so predictably when the alarm went off at 7am I had to wake him and prod him at least 3 times to get up before he actually did.

We needed to get to Liza’s house and drop Davies and Scarlett off and then for me to get back to the library. I calculated at least an hour, possibly more and managed to chivvy us out of the house with about 70 minutes before I needed to be at work. They both ate in the car, I took a camping mug with a lid with my tea and I dressed Scarlett while she was still drinking milk – it all felt a bit like I was one of Wallace and Gromit’s morning routine contraptions :lol:. The roads were surprisingly quiet but that will be down to the school holidays rather than my forgetting what rush hour is like. Drop off was successful and I was in the library car park at 824am and didn’t need to be there for another 20 minutes. I drank my tea, spilling a huge splash down my pale cream top which I managed to mostly hide with my name badge but I was aware of all morning.

Work was steady and went quite quickly without event. Then back to Liza’s for a quick cup of tea and mini catch up with her before taking two reluctant children away. Thanks again Liza, they really came away full of having had a great time and how much they’d enjoyed playing with Andrew :). I’d realised on the drive to collect them just how near to Booth Museum we were so we called in there for half an hour as we passed and there was a parking space right outside. I’ve promised a longer visit next time as it really was a quick glance round and there is so much to stop and linger over there. We talked a bit about the skeletons and the differences between humans and gorilla skeletons and they played for a while on a ‘make your own scene for a stuffed animal’ area before it was time to go.

By the time we got home I had completely slumped. Hormone and tiredness related :(. I managed to persuade D & S to play something quietly without the need for my interaction and made myself a sandwich. I ate it too quick, gave myself chronic indigestion to add to my list of woes and sat with my laptop and just entered every competition I could find, finding the monotony of filling out boxes with my name and address quite lulling. Davies watched a Horrible Histories and Scarlett went out to play with the chickens. She came in covered in a huge stream of poo from Scruffy the poorly one and said she thought he might be dead, having been alive when she went out there and then going limp in her arms. I suspected she might be right and she may well be covered in the final bowel release consequence but the energy required to wash her clothes out and shower her quite made me forget to go and check :oops:.

Davies had tea, Scarlett didn’t want any having been eating french bread all afternoon. Ady rang me about 27 times with updates on his journey home and his car – the latest is he will either collect a courtesy car or his own, very speedily repaired car tomorrow. When we realised he was going to be cutting it fine to arrive at the blood donation appointment I arranged to meet him there if he could make it and wait for him there to bring him home.

Davies and Scarlett wanted to come into the initial blood test bit with me which the guy was initially nervous about and made them put their fingers in their ears while he asked me if I had been pregnant in the last year or could be pregnant now. As soon as they’d taken their fingers out of their ears they asked me what he’d said and I told them 😆 I can understand the need for caution, particularly as some of the questions are things like ‘have you ever accepted money as payment for sex?’ which I possibly would be less keen to explain to them but that question was fine. Scarlett wanted to know about the two different coloured test tubes of liquid for dropping blood into for testing so the man haltingly at first, and with more explanation as he realised they were both listening and understanding what he was telling them told them about that.

My record of giving blood is not great – before tonight I’d been four times and only managed to donate twice. My first time they had had trouble with my veins and had to abort trying having injected in both arms and cocked it up. The second time was fine, the third time my iron levels were too low and the fourth time was fine. Tonight I increased my previous 50% success rate to 60% :).

Davies and Scarlett had loads more questions at the actual donating bit including; why is the blood bag kept in a rocking container (it has anti coagulation stuff added to it and that mixes it in), how the pufffy thing works that is used to tighten the band around your arm (they both got to have a go at the puffy thing), how much blood you give, how much blood you’ve got, how your body replenishes what’s been taken, how long people have been giving blood for and more.

I learnt that blood donation has only been happening for about 55 years and it is as a result of blood transfusions and odd success rate patterns that the existance of blood groups was discovered (hence explaining why some people had died). The two people taking the blood donation learnt all about Home Education as they asked when the kids were going back to school and I was hesitant to lie incase it led to further questions. The man was very impressed especially as they were so full of questions and curiosity and were so clearly taking in what was being said to them and what they were seeing. :).

Ady arrived mid-donation and as usual almost caught me up as his blood flows very quick while mine is very slow. We had tea and coffee (and water with straws for the children) and snaffled plenty of the biscuits and chocolate on offer.

Next came a quick walk round the supermarket for various bits on the way home. Home and bed for Davies and Scarlett, the discovery that Scruffy was indeed dead (Scarlett was pleased that when he did go it had been while she was holding him and we’d been anticipating it for literally weeks so it was no great shock, although sad 🙁 ), a very hot bath which sapped the very last of my energy and yet another very late dinner.

And now to bed.

Bank Holidays always mess with my head for the rest of the week, I’ll still be thinking it’s only Sunday by next Monday :lol:.

A need for washing powder, various bits of food and a desire to get out of the house drove us out this morning. We headed over to Littlehampton as we’ve said we’ll get Jack and Maisie a pair of pretendy crocs each for their birthday in September as they’ve been coveting Davies and Scarlett’s for the last two summers, so I wanted to get that sorted as soon as possible before all the shops are filled with clumpy black shoes and wellies.

We’ve been listening to the OST to Juno in the car (skipping all the many very inappropriate for younger ears songs) so we sang along to that on the way. We had great luck in getting a pair of pink sparkly with heart shaped cut out pretendy crocs just like Scarlett’s for Maisie and a pair of turquoise ones for Jack who claimed his favourite colour was ‘blue or green’ so I thought would fit the bill for either. I got Davies and Scarlett to choose them each a pair of jibbitz too to personalise the gift and that’s that all organised, a whole month in advance :). We looked for black Badger shoes for Davies (to wear to Badgers, not made out of badgers obviously, they would be black and white shoes otherwise) but had no luck in finding anything.

We had a quick peep in the charity shop and I found a mini exercise bike for 2 quid which I snapped up just because I like to clutter the house up with things that remind me I am overweight and unfit and never to anything to help myself change that 😆 Actually I have already used it for 30 minutes making it better value for money already than many people’s gym membership for a year in a spend per minute ratio :).

We called into Tescos for various bits and then had the joy of playing with the self service thing which always has me hissing at the children and takes at least twice as long as queuing up to be served by a real person. They were both in acquisitive moods and slightly annoying me although in fairness I did drag them round getting presents for other people and something for me and I later realised all my crossness was hormone related :oops:.

We arrived home and Lucy and The Rs arrived shortly afterwards. We had lunch and despite occasional wobbles we managed 5 hours of mostly enjoyable times. Interesting conversations about various things including school and I even managed to make some rock cakes as we had no cakes or biscuits to offer for after lunch.

They left, the children had tea, I read stories and then they failed to go to bed or to sleep for ages. At 11pm Davies was still awake and I told him to go and get into my bed. Typical when we all have to be up at stupid o clock in the morning as I am working and they are going to play with Andrew at Liza’s house so we need to get them over there (for full postal address see previous blog posts ;)) and then me back here again for work which is 15 minutes earlier than usual due to the bank holiday.

Ady is away for the night and has had high drama with his car today when the key woudn’t fit into the ignition. It eventually was taken away and a new steering column is being fitted which could take up to 2 weeks. He’s collecting a courtesy car tomorrow and has stipulated that it needs to be a big car rather than a little Polo or something as not only will I be using it this weekend it might well end up being what we bring camping too. The car is not even 18 months old so I’m very glad it’s not ours.

We arranged to see my parents today and as we attempt to find things to do which are cheap / free when we see them so that they don’t carry an air of weariness about our finances and then sigh heavily as they pay for us we’d suggested going to Raystede Animal Centre where we’d been a while ago. It has the benefits of being free and with sufficient stuff to see to walk round for a couple of hours on a fine day. Today was not a fine day but we managed a couple of hours there anyway.

Fitting in the car was amusing. It is technically a seven seater but it does say that the rear 2 seats are only really suitable for children. It would have been a real faff to put either of the kids in the back (and actually neither of them would have wanted to go in the back on their own) so Dad scrambled in. I did offer but he laughed and said ‘you’d NEVER fit in the back’ at which point I decided he deserved to be uncomfortable and squashed and considered throwing things at him to make his journey even less pleasant 😆

We walked round the parrots and other exotic birds. There are signs up everywhere warning that they might bite but Ady likes to think he has some sort of way with them (Dr Doolittle complex, he has it with all children and animals ;)) so he was cooing at them and stroking them which gave Mum a false sense of security and she got bitten on the finger by one! Dad was more reticent and used a stick to stroke them through the cage with. I didn’t put any part of me anywhere near them but enjoyed saying ‘Hello’ to them.

Next we moved onto the cats. They are behind glass and wire so not very easy to interact with but one of the runs was being cleaned out so the cat came out and was just behind glass. He was stunning – a beautifully marked striped cat in chocolate and cream with almost tiger like markings. The keeper told us he was a year old (so not fully grown) male called ‘Brian’ which was just the most unlikely name for such a sleek, gorgeous animal.

We looked at the goats and Davies found a sheep. He loves sheep, always has done and often has to be prised away from the sheep for sale at the South of England show each year. This one nibbled at his jacket much to his amusement. We walked through the rabbits area and were most entertained to find one called Brian. At this point we decided every animal there must also be called Brian and set about visiting Brians the geese, ducks, moorhens, chickens and cockerel, dogs, rats and guinea pigs. We also took to calling each other Brian for the rest of the afternoon, which everyone found amusing except Scarlett who was quite insistent that she was not to be addressed as Brian under any circumstances 😆

We sped up as the weather worsened and while Ady and my parents had a look round the charity shop onsite the children and I went over to an inflatable slide and they each had a few goes on that (supposed to be five for a pound but the woman running it was chatting to her friend and ignoring them so they probably got closer to 10 goes :))

We then decided to go for lunch and headed to a Harvester. Back in the day eating out was something we did a fair bit but it’s been a while since we had funds for things like lunch in places that doesn’t serve it’s food in a cardboard box with a free plastic toy so I was very proud of Davies and Scarlett being really well behaved and using cutlery and everything ;). They both liked the novelty of the salad cart even if Scarlett just chose a bowl (and then a second bowlful) of carrot and Davies only had bread rolls. He was really pleased to see steak and chips on the childrens’ menu, ordered it and ate the lot :). Scarlett was less bothered about proper food but polished off a bowl of chips, nicked some of our chicken (we had a sharing platter and Mum and Dad had a different sharing platter) and ate loads of my corn on the cob.

We had dessert – Davies’ eyes lit up at the mention of profiteroles and Scarlett had the childrens’ jelly then finished off a communal honeycomb icecream bonanza thing.

(did I say she knew how to behave in restaurants?!)
(did I say he used cutlery?!)

Then while we were waiting for the bill we indulged in a game of round the table mini football using glasses and condiments bottles as goals and a butter pat as the football.

and Davies discovered another benefit of having a big tooth gap – the ability to drink from two straws at once while keeping your mouth closed! 😆

We took a brief walk to try and let a huge lunch go down before squishing back in again and walked into Polegate and back, stopping both times at the level crossing as trains came. Then back to our house for tea and coffee and watching Takeshi’s castle which I’ve never seen before but was very entertaining and kept us amused for ages.

Mum and Dad left around 7 when Davies and Scarlett started to get ready for bed. They’d just gone to bed and I’d run a bath when Frazer texted Ady to ask if he’d like to go over and watch the rest of the Man Utd V Pompey match with him as they have Sky sports so Ady headed off while I had an hour long bath and read my book which was very nice.

A very good weekend :).

We had a long standing arrangement to go to Chris and Julie’s today. We used to see them pretty much every weekend but life seems to have gotten busier these days and we have to coordinate diaries well in advance to book weekend get togethers nowadays. The plan was a barbecue which although early weather looked unlikely to be suitable for by the time we arrived there at midday it was bright and sunny and perfectly acceptable weather for.

The cooking was a fairly communal affair with Julie and I doing some indoor stuff and Chris and Ady doing the outdoor stuff. We all ate completely different things I think catering for vegetarians, carnivores, Scarlett eating Disney princess pasta shapes as she’d refused any sort of barbecue fayre, Davies insisting on tinned hotdog sausages when he heard sausages were on offer, Julie cooking some tuna steaks which needed using up and Chris, Ady and I eating homemade lamb burgers.

The four older children played most of the time outside, coming in at various points.

Julie bathed Lorna which all of them wanted to help with and was very cute :).

Davies spent some time cooing over Lorna and I got all misty eyed thinking that he is only 3 weeks away from being 8 yet it doesn’t seem five minutes ago he was as teeny as Lorna is now.

We sat around chatting, drinking copious amounts of tea (Chris kept making endless cups and I think we counted up that he and I had had seven cups each in the end),talking about camping, laughing about all sorts of things and Julie showed me their new peg loom which I fell instantly in love with and have ordered one of my own off ebay :).

We finally left there, loads later than planned after 5pm.

I had picked up a leaflet at work about The Big Picnic, a series of events across West Sussex to celebrate the handing over of the Olympic torch from Beijing to the UK. We’d planned to attend a couple of the events but had written the idea off as the weather had looked so crap. But as we were driving home from C&J’s the sun was shining, the children were in happy moods with loads of energy left still so we decided to stop in Worthing for the last event of the day.

We parked, walked through town to McDonalds for some tea for them and then walked back to the park where the event was being held and spent some time with the children having races, generally being silly and listening to the vocal group practising. The children and I chatted about choirs, different singing voices and tenors, basses, altos and sopranos, harmonies and stuff.

The event started with a marching band of soldiers in full red and black uniform complete with busby hats, one of whom was on stilts. They marched on parade to standard brass band music and then it suddenly changed to Queen’s Good Time and they did some breakdancing – very funny 🙂

They were followed by a three piece string set with invisible instruments and very strange face masks worthy of Doctor Who monsters.

Then came a chicken, a crow and a baker on stilts with the ‘baton’ of bread and a very large egg which will apparently hatch in 2009 as part of a Celebrate Sussex event.

The children were all invited to collect a lantern then; either a star or a crab. Davies and Scarlett both got crabs, which Davies was initially disappointed by as he’d wanted a crab but turned out to be for the best as they were quite heavy and his arms were aching by the time he’d carried the star round and the crab would have been heavier. About 100 children all circled the whole gardens walking behind an accordianist in a procession just as darkness fell. It was quite, quite lovely :). It took probably the best part of half an hour (no wonder their arms ached!) and Scarlett spent most of it at the very front of the the parade as she was chatting to the crow and the chicken 😆 Davies joined her for some of it and fell back further into the line for some of the rest.

As they walked past lanterns around the park they were lit and they walked past the flagpoles where the mayor was waiting and the Olympic flag was raised


they finally ended at the giant teepee thing which was representing the Olympic torch and the choir sang by the light of all these child-held lanterns. Then it ended with a pyrotechnic display.

It’s not often I think very highly of Worthing, despite it being my home town and one I’ve returned to but last night I did feel quite proud to be part of it; there was a nice community feeling and quite a cool mix of people :).

We came home and the children went from park to toast to pjs to bed to asleep within half an hour 😆 We had an extremely late dinner of curry at about 11pm and then I sat up chatting to online friends until long past 2am.

First things first I’d like to say a very big indeed THANK YOU to Bob for getting my blog back. I’m not at all sure you know how much it means Bob but let me assure you it is a big deal and I am hugely grateful :). Thanks also to Chris P for various additional tech support during my 48 hours in the dark place of no blog too. Top men, both of you xx

So, other than blog related angst what else have we been up to since Wednesday then? Well…

Thursday was a working day for me. It was nice to be back after 2 weeks away, very busy and chaotic. There is the final flurry of SRG attendees, most with their last 2 books of the challenge but a few on the 3rd and 4th books. This year has been a record year both for people signing up to do the challenge but also for people completing it, which quite aside from my opinions on the initiative generally is still a good and positive thing.

I’m feeling very sorry for my direct boss at the moment as she has had a pretty tough year at work (and at home too actually which I’m sure hasn’t helped) with a parade of people leaving, new people starting and needing training, loads of relief staff to deal with, several really crap volunteers for the SRG and very little support from above. It makes me shudder to remember how I struggled in several of my jobs under similar conditions and feel glad that I don’t have to deal with that level of responsibility at work any more. I’m not at all sure I’d manage it so well now and I’d definitely have problems with not losing my temper if I was back under that sort of pressure.

Ady was at home in the morning with Davies and Scarlett and they turned the downstairs of the house into a shop, which was all still set up when I got home. There were magazines displayed on the stairs, a paying and bagging area (complete with toy till and a load of cloth shopping bags) on the table in the playroom, a gaming area on the lounge windowsill with DSs, DS games and Top Trumps (we have several sets), a greetings card section on the fireplace complete with ‘to a cool 7 year old’, ‘It’s fun to be 4’ and ‘now you are 2’ cards they’d dug up from various places. The dolls houses had been turned into shelving units for pretend playfood and there had possibly been more that had been tidied up before I got home.

My Mum was here in the afternoon and she and Davies had played draughts while Scarlett played with her Barbie laptop. We got it at a carboot sale a couple of years ago for £2 because Davies had a similar one (I think they are V tech or something similar, proper screens and keyboards, a mouse and a load of preset games with an educational slant). She has been playing with it a lot lately and I suspect she is teaching herself to read and spell with it as I often hear it saying ‘well done’ or ‘great job’ to her in it’s American accent. I’ve always thought Scarlett will just suddenly announce she can read one day without any input from me and I think Barbie might help her 😆

I’d brought home masses of books – 2 weeks worth of reserved books, films and cds had trickled in but I’d also gone through the books for sale trolley and hand picked 30 of them to bring home too. And that was me being reserved and choosy! I had a great selection of mostly reference, all junior books including a couple of biographies, one being Helen Keller who I remember learning about at school when I was about six, some about weather and natural disasters which will go well with the various Raging Planet dvds we also have at the moment about earthquakes and tornadoes. There were various science and nature ones including a book we fairly recently borrowed all about British Mammals and one about Big Cats which Scarlett fell on in delight :).

We looked at books, they had tea, I killed my blog…

Ady had gone up to London for a meeting in the afternoon so was home late and they were in bed but far from asleep when he finally got home.

Friday We went to Pulborough Brooks with Lucy and The Rs. We were later arriving than planned due to a very long and very disorganised queue for petrol at Sainsburys. People are idiots when faced with coordinating a queue aren’t they, especially when great big metal lumps of cars are involved :rolls:

We had a really good walk round, all the children had spotter sheets and we chatted loads about the various things we saw. Davies came over very nature spotting serious and both girls got loads out of it too. Richard did remarkably well but didn’t quite stave off tiredness or hunger for as long as the rest of us. They all handed in their sheets and got a pack of RSPB stuff in return then we had our picnic lunch in the play area.

They all played really well for another couple of hours, teaming up with another few children in there for a game for a while and then going back to playing tag together again. I booked us into a Halloween event there and Davies and Scarlett are joining the Young Wildlife Explorers group there from September which meets once a month for nature related games, crafts and activities. I think they’ll get a lot out of that. I like Pulborough Brooks lots; it’s a nice size to walk round easily, the visitor centre is staffed with volunteers who are friendly, helpful and love to chat and share their knowledge, they are always great with the children. It is pretty much all weather suitable providing you have the right clothes and shoes and the changes of the seasons are really clearly marked through the differing landscape and wildlife. We get a lot out of our less than a fiver a month membership to the RSPB :).

We came home and Lucy and The Rs came in for coffee and prolonged playing which inevitably wasn’t as harmonious as they had been playing while we were out but it was a lovely day which we all enjoyed lots. 🙂

Lots of bedtime stories – they both kept begging for just one more and I kept giving in and then Davies and Scarlett went to bed. Ady and I had a late dinner in honour of it being Friday night and got cheerily inebriated before eating and watched St Trinians. I was expecting to hate it but actually quite liked it. It reminded me of Summerhill. Ady said we must be sure never to let Scarlett see it as she will be desperate to go to school if she thinks that’s what it would be like! 😆

Saturday
I worked this morning. It was quiet and I felt old as I was working alongside two girls who got their GCSE and A level results this week. Both are super intelligent and got A and A* for everything. One of them said she’d heard they results were the best this year since 1989 and I was saying I thought that must have been the first year of GCSEs when they took over from O Levels because I did mine in 1990 and I was sure we were the second year to take them. She replied ‘you’re asking the wrong people – I was 2 in 1989!!!!’ 😆

Ady and the children had been tidying the playroom. They’d apparently been debating going to a car boot sale and then decided to get rid of stuff from our house rather than add to our crap volumes by buying stuff from someone else’s house 😆 Very commendable! When I got home Ady carried on and tidied out all the kitchen cupboards, making room for a Kenwood Chef we have had for years and never used (and I suspect still won’t but at least it’s getting an airing ;)) and then tackled the understairs cupboard.

Davies and Scarlett sat side by side on Ady’s laptop and my old laptop having a Zoombini fest. Scarlett calls them ‘Ribenos’ which is what she also calls albinos. Davies sat and played his game and oversaw hers – she was playing the one with the characters (Nerfs?) who you have to feed and they say things like ‘nobody here wants milk’ and ‘the people eating fish are not sitting next to the people who want a sandwich’ – it was very interesting listening to Davies explaining logic and elimination to Scarlett. He then played on Blobs for a while which was a birthday present (last year, year before?) from Ali.

Davies then decided to take an old camera to pieces and as we had two old cameras Scarlett decided to do the same.Inspired by Bob, who was I believe inspired in turn by someone else we’re trying to let the children loose on old not working technology to take it apart, see what’s inside and maybe get some understanding of how things work. We took an old mobile phone apart a few weeks ago and it really is fascinating seeing what happens inside behind the scenes when you press buttons on the outside. The cameras were even more full of interesting looking bits including screen, lense and loads of PCBs. Davies managed to put the casing back together on his which was no mean feat as it sprung apart when the screws came out. Scarlett managed to cut her thumb on one of the sharp edges on hers but was very cheerful about it.

Then Davies got out the x box dance mat and had some fun using it as a controller to play a W&G game – each square is also a button so you can technically dance around and control things on the xbox – very energetic :). That degenerated into a game of Shrek superparty which had them getting stressy with each other so I chucked them in the garden to play for 15 minutes while Ady cooked their tea.

We watched X Factor and then they went to bed, which meant for a late bath and dinner for us again but I don’t care about any of that because I’ve got my blog back! 🙂

Things I have stuck with:
hair colour
Ady
this blog
home education (so far)

Things I haven’t:
everything else! Including all my other blogs, most other people’s blogs, jobs, hair length…..

I’m already bored of the whole twitter and brightkite (keep wanting to call it blackkite, was that some nutter on MP from a few years ago?) thing. I turned notifications to my phone back off again today and can’t see me keeping up with checking both websites and clicking back on comments on dullkite on various threads to see if anyone has said anything. It’s too much like yet another blogring to click round. I liked twitter, it was easy to use, I didn’t have to read conversations with people I didn’t follow and aside from being irritated by the ‘I blogged’ notifications when I was out and about it was a nice quick way of keeping in touch with friends while away from home. I gave up on facebook because I really didn’t want yet another website to keep visiting (and actually there is only so much entertainment to be had by throwing fish at people, I was crap at scrabble and I got really pissed off with being sent Mortimer bears to forward) to check up on what the same circle of friends that I already kept in touch with via other channels were doing over there.

I suspect I just don’t really get the whole ‘networking’ thing – that and my ability to only juggle a finite amount of friends at any one time so the whole notion of ‘gathering’ more and wearing them like some sort of badge just doesn’t appeal really. Anyway.

Davies was awake for lots of last night due to a nightmare. He so rarely wakes at night and almost never gets nightmares but he ended up in bed with me insisting on the light on so it wasn’t the best nights’ sleep I’ve ever had. Ady got into Davies’ bed but not before he’d been the one running around turning said light on and getting glasses of water (and lightly buttered toast, a copy of The Telegraph ironed flat, freshly squeezed clementine juice and the moon on a stick) so he didn’t get a great rest either. I was finally woken at about 730am by the cat throwing up in the bedroom doorway which Scarlett then trod in when she came up about 15 minutes later at which point I gave in and got up. (see I have no time for this luridkite nonsense, I’m far too busy!)

Scarlett decided to play Xbox first thing and did some random shouting at the Barbie wild horse game, because she still believes that actually the xbox controller is a placebo and really it is all voice controlled. So that was nice and relaxing. Davies tried to help and got shrieked at for being ‘extracting!’ (she meant distracting) and eventually she gave up and he had a play on an Incredibles game instead.

I have been meaning to try using lavender in baking for ages after trying some delicious lavender shortbread at a food fayre ages ago and having finally got lavender growing in our garden again in copious quantities (leftover from that which the children sold obviously) and about to go over I wanted to harvest some for future dried use and decided to have a go with fresh and dried while I still could. I found various recipes online and gave the most straightforward one a go.

Scarlett and I gathered more lavender and she chopped it up with the herb chopper thing which probably has a proper name (ah yes, it’s a mezzaluna, I will henceforth refer to it as such and as often as possible, what a nice word) and I made the shortbread. It made 8 cookies which were so delicious we immediately decided to make a full tray of fingers with double the recipe amounts. And at Scarlett’s request we made a batch of snickerdoodles too.

Once we’d finished our mini bakefest I had a cup of tea and some shortbread while the children did some drawing and geomagging and then we headed off to Lucy’s. We’d had half a plan to walk but the weather looked a little threatening and I didn’t want to walk carrying snickerdoodles either so we drove.

We had a nice time there although Scarlett and Rebecca wanted to be left to play together without Davies and Richard which would normally be fine but Richard was being shy about asking Davies to play with him and Davies felt rather like he was babysitting Richard as Lucy and I kept suggesting things to them to do. They did play for a while when Davies drew a picture of Richard’s toy rabbit which Richard then kept beating up and Davies drew corresponding injuried on the picture! 😯 Eventually the girls rejoined them and the last hour or so was better with them all playing together.

Lucy and I more or less managed to catch up and arranged to get together again on Friday, thus filling the end of our week nicely.

Home for tea for D and S, Ady arrived home, I read stories and then they went off to bed. They have both taken to listening to classic fm in bed (they both have old radios in their rooms) and have been going to sleep really early all week which is probably a combination of sleep deficit from last week, a concerted effort by me to get out and about for at least an hours exercise and fresh air each day and the relaxing music.

I’m off to work tomorrow. It feels odd to have a week off as it is then actually the best part of a fortnight between working days so I’m looking forward to it.

beside the seaside…

As anticipated by today we were already bored of quiet stay at home days – I do think the children and I all suffer from short attention spans :oops:. I had a very productive morning of getting the aired tent all packed away (it was not up, just draped around the place. Amazing how much harder it is to fold up in a cramped playroom floorspace rather than a big open field), several loads of washing all put away and the rest washed and hung out and various online stuff sorted including holiday organisation for camping in September and hostelling in December.

We watched some Berenstein Bears – that’s an awful show isn’t it? And I did some other online stuff while Davies and Scarlett played – and annoyed each other.

After lunch they went out to play with the chickens for a while but when they came back in and were still all squabbly I decided we needed to get out of the house and we headed off to the beach. We were there for just over an hour I guess but plenty long enough to blow away all the cobwebs, have all words quite literally whipped away by the wind and get a good dose of fresh air and exercise. We had it all but to ourselves except for a few people out walking dogs. We did some getting quite close to the sea which was very high and very dramatic with lots of big waves crashing and sea spray all the way down onto the green where the car park is, some leaning into the wind, some scrambling about on the rocks and some collecting stuff as we beachcombed along the highest point of the sea which must have been just starting to go out.

I’ve decided to change my definition of children growing up from them being able to eat an ice cream without parental intervention to being able to leave a beach without a collection of things :lol:. Davies – who only just realised today while he was collecting a new stash that he’d left the stash of Eweleaze beach back at the campsite – gathered all sorts including driftwood, seaweed, shells, pebbles and a couple of crabs legs. Scarlett was more discerning and decided to limit her collecting to cuttlefish spines only, but in varying sizes 😆

Of course it wouldn’t be right if we didn’t get a selftimer 😉

and there is nothing more tempting than running towards a large group of birds to get them to all take off together in a mass of flapping wings!

Finally we were sufficiently wind tossed, salt sprayed and some of us were very laden down so we came home again for Walking with Cavemen and tea for the children, while I drunk what must have been my 7th cup of tea of the day. Davies and I went into the garden and I trimmed off some of the wilder bits of his hair that were getting in his eyes. He’s had so many people ruffling his mop of hair the past week that he’s decided he quite likes it being a talking point and wants to keep it longer though so the rest of it stayed. It all blew away in the wind and we decided it was Extreme Hairdressing :lol:.They had baths and hairwashes to get the seasalt out and then some stories from a lovely Barefoot book of Faery stories before they went off to bed.

Ady cooked a nice dinner, we started to watch Once but decided we didn’t like it (too much singing and yes I am aware of the irony of that accusation ;)) so watched Lake House instead, which I quite liked.

I’ve emailed all the people I have listed as coming with the booking form for Sustainability Centre. I did bounce back from Layla and Chris French (who I had as a possible Chris?) though.

I’m waiting to hear back from the Campcraft people about a revised price based on more accurate numbers so I’ll post again once I have more information on that.

Other than that here are details so far:

Ady and I will be camping from Saturday 6th September (arriving sometime mid afternoon) until Saturday 13th September. Various people seem to be coming at various times including a few for just one or two nights. My SIL and a couple of her local HE mates are probably going to join us too at some point and may come along to Butser. If anyone local would also like to come along for any or all of the camp please do say so including just the Butser day trip.

Here is some info from the website:

Our camping field is in a peaceful open space, ideal for individuals, families and group expeditions. Facilities include: Drinking water tap, small fridge and freezer for campers use. A campfire and barbecue area (needs to be pre-booked). Toilets and showers are a short walk away at the Centre

The Sustainability Centre
Droxford Road
East Meon
Petersfield
GU32 1HR

I’ve provisionally booked Butser for the Thursday (the only day they had free in the end) and if we do the campcraft it will probably be Tuesday. I’m planning some sort of birthday thing for Davies on the Friday in lieu of the usual big birthday party production so there will be cake and games etc.

BUTSER INFO.
Website is here
address is Butser Ancient Farm, Chalton Lane, Chalton, Waterlooville, Hampshire, PO80BG

We have booked for Thursday 11th September at 10am. Price is £7.93 per child and £7.05 per adult (that is the plus vat price, I hadn’t realised the £6.75 they quoted wasn’t inclusive of VAT) but we will get 1 free adult for every 10 children so I’ll amend prices accordingly once we have final numbers. Payment is on the day so please bring cash with you.

We will have a timeline talk when we arrive which they will tailor to meet our group needs (I have quote ages as 2-12 years so it should be pretty wide ranging) and then we will have 4 activities to work our way round too aswell as touring the site. I’ve chosen a range of activities which might not necessarily be suitable for everyone but didn’t want to write off the things which would appeal most to the older and younger attendees so hopefully there is something for everyone. I’ve selected daubing/clunching, wattling, mosaics and jewellery.

My numbers at the moment are as follows:

Nic 2 adults, 2 children
Em 1 adult, 2 children
Em’s friends 1 adult, 2 children
Layla & Si 2 adults, 1 child (to pay for)
Kirsty 1 adult 2 children
Ros? 1 adult, 3 children – Ros have you decided yet?
Alison 1 adult, 3 children
Michelle 1 adult, 1 child

I need to get the booking form back to her within the week to confirm numbers.

Is possibly not everyones ;).

Davies woke to his pound under his pillow from yesterday’s lost tooth. He’s never really been into the idea of the tooth fairy as it wasn’t really something we talked about until after he’d already shared his suspicion that Father Christmas might not be real. However he is still savvy enough to expect a quid if he puts it under his pillow so I did indeed swap it over last night after he fell asleep.

I read a couple of library books to Scarlett and Davies read me the remainder of the book he started yesterday (Pet to school day – we decided the illustrations were good and very Quentin Blake in Roald Dahl books but the book itself was pretty lame and the storyline not worth struggling with the not very friendly for early readers words. I read it to him again once he’d read it to himself ) and Has Anyone seen the crocodile? by Colin West.

Davies gathered up his wallet and some money while Scarlett raided her piggybank and found a purse to bring out her carefully counted out £1.56 and we walked into Lancing. We took a route never walked before which included all sorts of roads we don’t normally go down and the discovery of some new alleyways. We really want to do one of those penny walks where heads is left and tails is right but never seem to organised ourselves to be in a suitable place to do it and time enough to risk walking in circles. Mid walk down a really quiet close Davies suddenly said ‘STOP!’ and made us all stand and listen to whatever we could hear.

At the library they both talked about their books, got their stickers, medals and as it was mad busy in there I said I’d print off their certificates myself later in the week when I am working rather than hold up the queue further. We beat a speedy retreat from the chaos of children that was in there and went to the postoffice sorting office as I had a parcel to collect. It turned out to be another competition win (my third so far) of a Thundercats DVD box set :lol:. We then wandered round the bookshop, newsagent and various charity shops so the children could spend some of the money burning holes in their purses. Davies chose a viking helmet and a Rataouille toy for 20pence each, Scarlett found a cuddly duck billed platypus for 50p and they both got some sweets at the newsagents. Then we walked home by yet another route chatting all the way.

Scarlett has developed an interest in duck billed platypuses having been introduced to them on her Zoo hospital DS game and she recognised the cuddly purple toy as one straight away (not sure I would have done). She then proceeded to ask me lots of questions about them, none of which I could answer so we had a happy half hour later in the day googling, youtubing and wikipediaing to learn more about them.

Once home we had a plan to eat popcorn that was scuppered by us not having any. My Dad rang to ask a favour of me popping along to a garage door shop near us for some leaflefts as it closed for lunch before he would have been able to get there so we dashed back out again this time in the car to get the leaflets for him and to Sainsburys for some popping corn. Once home we ate our corn, I drank lots of tea and we watched Penelope. Whilst eating popcorn Davies’ other front tooth came out so he is now gappy, lispy and as of tomorrow morning another quid better off!

Dad called round to collect his leaflets and stopped for a quick coffee, Davies and Scarlett worked their way round the house rating each room for ‘coolness’ and ‘fun’ – not sure what their criteria for either was. Then Davies did some xboxing while Tarly and I were on the laptop learning about platypuses. We ended up watching some of our own youtube stuff with this particular one having us in fits of laughter again (tinged with degrees of OMG how young do they look? for me) which we were still doing when Ady arrived home.

I read some bedtime stories which have been missed for the last week and then it was bedtime. We all have a cough which I am undecided as to whether is a cold or some form of human kennel cough brought on by sleeping in tents and inhaling campfires but other than that I think we are restored and rested sufficiently to get back to normal again tomorrow.

This week was always going to be one we had to take time to recover from when it was over. But it was all worth it :).

After a brief one night touchdown back at home to bath, sleep in our own beds and unpack / repack the car we were off again. This time to Dorset to meet up with Em, Eve and Rei to camp at Eweleaze Farm. Em went 2 years ago and we’ve planned to go ever since but not been quick enough to book for the month they are open. We’d planned 3 nights with Em staying on for a further 4.

All week Ady had been saying to me at regular intervals ‘are we really, really going camping this week?’ as the rain lashed, severe weather warnings were issued, flash floods and structural damage causing winds lashed the country and to be honest although I was adamant we were going I did have in the back of my mind that it was only 2 hours from home and if needs be we could all do a dash back to our house for a mass sleepover.

We met Em at the services just after the M3 (her route) joins the M27 (ours) and travelled the rest of the way in convoy. Aside from a very heavy downpour just before we met it was blue skies and sunshine all the way and our first view of Eweleaze totally lived up to expectations:

We booked in and I was amused to notice a slight blip in my hetrosexuality in attraction to a very specific sort of woman. Those who work on running campsites! I developed a small crush on the woman who runs a campsite we stayed on earlier this year and sure enough there was a very gorgeous woman who checked us in at Eweleaze. Given my own appearance while camping is quite possibly at my worst and grungiest I suspect this attraction will never be reciprocated so my marriage and safe little family unit is quite safe while I secretly look at women in wellies 😆

We drove around, braving the crazy mud trenches and found a good pitching place with close proximity to the nearest loo shed, giant haystacks in the middle of the field for the children to play in, a spot near the hedge at the top of the slightly sloping field and plenty of views across the gorgeous Dorset countryside even if the actual sea was slightly over the hill. We decided to trade a sea view for peace of mind against the forecast winds.

We got set up while the children explored and did indeed play in the haystacks

Scarlett had a nap in the car while this was going on and carried on napping in the car while Em, Eve and I popped to the local shops for supplies. Hence she was not on best form when I woke her up again. She did manage a bit of a play, some bug hunting and some firewood collecting but ended up snuggled back in her sleeping bag, fully clothed, very early and slept.

The rest of us ate sausages, sat round the campfire and admired the truly amazing, sky-on-fire sunset:

It finally got dark and Ady, Em, Eve and I enjoyed the fire while Davies and Rei sat in the back of Ady’s car and DS’d by moonlight 🙂

Friday morning dawned with yet more glorious sunshine so we packed up a picnic and headed across the hill to the campsite’s private beach. It was busy but certainly not cramped and the children enjoyed playing in the sea (Scarlett particularly with the farm dogs who you could walk and someone had brought down to the beach with them);

and clambering back up the cliff and playing in the watchpoint shelter;

while we sat and chatted (and maybe drank cider and beer :))

There was stone collecting, bug hunting and some fairly competitive kite flying when another person came with their kite and it got tangled in ours 😆 We’ve all read the Kiterunner and we knew their game! 😆

The stone collection always amuses me as I watch the children scramble over loads of stones to bring one they’ve found far away and felt the need to carry, over many identical stones :lol:. Davies found some he was so attached to he insisted on bringing them all the way back to the tent. He carried an armful and loaded his pockets to the point his trousers kept falling down with many more. He then dumped them on the grass near the tent, didn’t glance at them twice afterwards and left them there! 😆

Em and Eve returned to the tent via the scrambling up the cliff face path while Ady, Davies, Scarlett, Rei and I walked along the alleged 250 metres to the steps. Actually the steps were not much better and walking along the stones to get to them almost did me in. They started at metal steps, then went to wooden and finally were concrete which the observant 3 children noticed, I was too busy concentrating on breathing without the aid of an inhaler!

We walked over to the ‘hub’ of the farm to coo over the kittens they had for sale, sit around on strawbales, eat ice cream from the shop and then gather some firewood from the massive mound of lopped trees and hedges.

We lit our fire early that evening and cooked burgers (from the farmshop) on it, toasted marshmallows and enjoyed another evening under the stars. I so love camping with a fire and really miss one when we camp without.

There was a big group of campers who had entertained us the previous night by releasing a whole load of fire lanterns off into the night sky. They were packing up and leaving behind a whole load more firewood and some strawbales so we went over to say goodbye and beg their leftovers which meant our campfire was bigger and better with added strawbale seating that night :).

We also had haystack challenges with a ‘can you jump from one to the other’ competition and an inevitable hay fight to end 🙂 I think I might have lost!

Sadly it was a rowdy night on the campsite and although I semi slept through it the others had all been disturbed by it. We also woke on Saturday to gloomy weather. We had a plan to head over to Portland and visit the castle and the lighthouse so we all squished in Ady’s car, listened to American Pie several times and arrived at the castle. Davies had been looking pale and shivery in the car and despite sitting next to Em who he adores chatting to had been uncharacteristically quiet and then announced he felt ill. First I and then Ady walked around with him assuming it was mild car sickness which he is prone to but he looked paler and greyer and was burning hot but violently shivering :(. We stood and watched a helicopter take off while he composed himself and then went into the castle.

It’s a small castle and well served by a comprehensive audio tour but possibly a bit too ‘modernised’ with work done to it which sort of compromises its historical feel. We did try on some armour, look round the canons etc. and get a good feel of it though

We also spent some time in the activity room and did some rubbings and build curved and straight walls to see which stood up to the demolition ball the best

I stayed in the room with Davies and Scarlett and we used the walls as props for the 3 little pigs story too. Sadly despite being bundled up in Ady’s hat and woolly jumper Davies couldn’t rouse himself and was very miserable and just wanted to go and pack up the tent and go home :(. He was convincing enough for me to decide that was what we should do, so aside from a brief stop at the Chesil Beach visitor centre and cafe for chips and tea (and a spectacular falling off a bench backwards injury for Scarlett) we headed back to the campsite.

We packed up fairly efficiently, aside from me being dizzy about how stable the tent would be once I’d taken out all the guys and most of the pegs and getting ahead of myself with dismantling it before Ady had actually emptied it 😳 which led to a last minute shoving everything in the car rather than Ady’s usual careful and consider packing technique. So 24 hours early we were on the way home.

Both the children slept a fair bit of the way which is simply unheard of for Davies and Scarlett, I was desperate for a hairwash and Ady was starting to believe he’d live the rest of his life behind a steering wheel having driven well over a 1000 miles this week.

We got home, unpacked the car, I whizzed up to the supermarket for essential supplies while D and S bathed, they ate and were both asleep by a record 8pm, we bathed and had a massive curry.

Today has been very much a recovering from a mad 7 days sort of day.I’ve managed to get all the laundry done, made pancakes for breakfast from the egg stash from the hens, a huge roast chicken dinner for 5pm for all of us, battled with flickr and it’s wilful ways of uploading some photos many times and others not at all. Ady has cleaned out his car and removed all traces of it having been a tour bus for the week, done various gardening related tasks that mean nothing to me and got the tent aired. Davies has lost his third tooth – top front, he now can’t say sizzling steaks and sausages 😆 and watched a lot of TV, spent some serious time on flopping and read me most of a library book at his own (surprise!) request. Scarlett has helped with the pancakes, watched some TV, spent lots of time with the chickens, taken herself off for an afternoon nap and amused the rest of us greatly by drawing up a grid on a postit note and then wandering round the house looking for things to tick off. She greeted us this morning by asking if we were ‘alright?’ when we replied yes she just ticked her postit and said ‘check!’ in a very efficient manner. She also ‘check’ed all the baking ingredients 😆

I insisted that everyone came out for a walk for an hour while the dinner cooked at 230pm and we walked into Lancing for some wine for me (bored of cider) and a promised ‘holiday present’ for Davies and Scarlett from Woolies. He got a Ben 10 figure, she chose Endangered Wildlife Top Trumps. On the way home my parents rang to say they were at our house and where were we so they came in for coffee and a very brief catch up as our dinner was ready.

Bath and early night again for Davies and Scarlett. It’s been lovely to see so many friends, go so many places and have such a busy week but I think we may need to lie low for a day or two to recover our equilibrium and catch up with various other things.

We’re having a Here, There and Everywhere week off this week which was supposed to be largely camping and thus far hasn’t involved any! This is just as well as August in the UK is clearly not the time or place for camping 🙁 Tomorrow we’re off again for 3 nights in Dorset which really will be a proper camping experience so fingers crossed for a better second half of the week weatherwise.

Saturday seems a very long time ago now. I worked in the morning, then Ady and the children picked me up from work and we headed straight off to J&J’s. The traffic was fine, the satnav got confused right at the end when we reached Holmfirth which was helped even less by us knowing Holmfirth a little, having a vague memory of arriving there 2 years ago for J&J’s last time we visited and presumably a slight change in road layout.

We were greeted in the rain by Jan who’s salutation was ‘you can sleep in the house!’ so in we went and were quickly swallowed up by friends in different directions :). Scarlett was delighted to see Alex, Davies was quickly in the middle of the Boys Who DS posse, I lost sight of Ady and I got stuck straight into the wine :). Excellent welcome :). We had a lovely first evening with plenty of chatter, laughter, more wine, tea, baking and although there was only one new family to get to know as there were 9 of them it felt like a whole gaggle of new faces to put names to.

Lots of people drifted off throughout the evening to put children to bed in tents but at about 1am there was a sudden influx of people in sleeping bags as 2 tents came down and the lounge became a refugee from the wind and rain area completely floored out with cushions and camping mats. The Babs finally got her trousers off

and newly rechristened with our porn star names people gradually wandered off to whichever bit of floor they were sleeping on. We very gratefully had Catie and Megan’s bedroom with beds and everything :).

Sunday Was wet and windy. But there was a fab pastry based breakfast, a constant supply of tea until wine o’clock. Jan and then later Jax played the piano for us which was lovely :). Various people trailed off during the course of the day, we had a lovely walk during a rare dry patch of weather,

I impressed myself by being able to quite literally ‘whip up a quiche’ from scratch to add to the dinner food supplies

and eventually it was just us, J&J and Caroline Wellyboot left. Of course this still left 12 children but they seemed to go to bed relatively easily, I told some stories to some of the remaining small people and then had a nice evening chatting and even got to play with a cylinder dyson before a relatively early night.

Monday We left J&J’s and took the very scenic and beautiful route across to Manchester. I remember driving that road two days into starting The Atkins Diet back in 2003. We were living in Manchester and I visited the web design company in Holmfirth for a day’s training in website content management. I was only allowed decaffinated tea made with full cream so had to turn down all offers of refreshment and had to hurry home for my late lunch of ham and full fat cream cheese with a very lightheaded and slightly dizzy feeling, driving across the moors and scary roads with sheer drops both marvelling at the beauty and peace and remoteness of it whilst pondering on how long it would take to find me and my car if I swerved off the road in a hunger-related lapse of concentration!

We arrived at Lynda and Stuarts around 11am. Lynda is the woman who used to nanny for us. She looked after Davies and Scarlett for 2 mornings a week from when Scarlett was 6 weeks old and Davies was 2 years old and was with us for nearly 18 months. We all adored her and given Davies and Scarlett’s honoroury grandchildren role with both her and her husband I guess she quite liked us too :). They have been down to visit us several times, we’ve met up midway with them for a couple of weekends away and we have stayed with them several times. Stuart took (very) early retirement earlier this year and is currently still on a euphoric high (his words) at the freedom from the working week. Lynda is still working a couple of afternoons a week doing the afterschool run for a family and they have their own granddaugher twice a week too.

We had a lovely 24 hours with them – good company, lovely food and drink, so much attention for Davies and Scarlett and yet again a proper bed, a bath and a very nice evening of fish and chips from the local shop which the children stayed up to eat with us, followed by a couple of hours chatting.

Tuesday morning we all slept in and then had a nice lazy couple of hours breakfasting and chatting. Lynda has a DS lite her boys got her for Christmas for playing suduko and crosswords on so Davies and Scarlett showed her how to do pictochatting and the three of them sat for ages playing each others games and connecting. Quite surreal!

We moved on from there, as ever vowing to return, soon and for longer. We drove passed and paused awhile outside our old house, where Scarlett was born. The last time we paused outside my Mum had rung me to say she’d found Malice at the vets having been run over back on our Goddard Tour of the North (including Scotland). This time we just got to sit and look at the house before driving on to The Trafford Centre.

We parked and had a brief wander round it. We had some very exciting times there and regardless of my current feelings about shopping centres and shopping as a pasttime it is still an impressive and exciting building.

We moved on and went back up again this time passing the highest point on a motorway in England on the M62 and telling Davies and Scarlett the story about the farmer who wouldn’t sell his land for the motorway so it got built around him (Davies: ‘just like the north going Zax and the south going Zax!’). We arrived in Leeds, had a sort of team effort thing going on with the satnav again on various ring roads, new roundabout layouts and her insistance we ‘TURN LEFT’ when there was no left to turn down and finally arrived at Jay and Mark’s house. Jay is a Feminist Parent friend and was hosting this summers FP get together at her house.

With the exception of 2 male partners I’d met everyone before so was in my element with very good friends. Ady had briefly met a couple of them but very quickly was at home playing with all the children and making teas and coffees ;). Davies and Scarlett were slightly slower to warm up but we were last to arrive, most of the children already know each other well or had been there since the night before and D&S had only met most of them once, a year ago, for one day, in another house they’d never been to before so they were understandably slightly daunted. Scarlett was quicker to leap in and infact shortly after we’d arrived most of the party decided to head to the park leaving only a handful of us behind. We needed to pop back out again for various supplies and Scarlett happily stayed to play with a couple of the other girls while Davies came with Ady and I. Later in the day, and this morning, he had paired up with the younger boy of the house having bonded together over a shared love of Ben 10. Scarlett was quite happy to join in with that and the 3 of them had great times playing with various Ben 10 related toys.

I had a fab time with friends, singing, drinking, laughing, chatting and feeling very happy to be spending real life time with yet more people I spend lots of online time with but live too far away from to see often in the flesh – lovely to have had four whole days of it :).

I have photos to add in but will come back and do that later.

Another egg today. That’s three in two days which sort of suggests to me that all three of the ‘of age’ hens may well have started to lay now. Hurrah! 🙂

The chick with no name has been tamed by the children who having been given permission to try and catch it yesterday set about doing so straight away. I suspect it is a cockerel as it has been attacking poor Scruffy, who is our one remaining cockerel that can’t stand up. He used to be fine but about 6 weeks ago he went all wobbly and now can’t stand or walk very far. He is often to be found on his back but still eats, drinks and is otherwise quite perky. My personal suspicion is that he got onto the patio area and ate some chili peppers which have turned him insane. The little chick had a real go at him today though and pecked his comb til it bled 🙁 Little chick is also now herding all the hens in at night and really establishing his power. We’ve put Scruffy in solitary confinement for his own protection and safety and if needs be will seperate Little Chick when we get back.

My plan for today was baking, washing and packing. I have done baking – I’ve made pizzas, cheese scones, snickerdoodles and rice crispie cakes. I sort of did washing but my washing machine isn’t spinning properly which means the rinsing doesn’t happen and the draining isn’t up to much. I’ve more or less packed but as we’re only away for 4 nights before coming home for a night inbetween and we’re at real houses rather than campsites I’m being properly frugal about the amount of clothes I’ve packed and we won’t be needing camping kitchen stuff either.

Davies and Scarlett have been squabbly today – the result of 3 late nights in a row in Davies’ bedroom. Scarlett is sleeping in her own room again tonight in an effort to not start the week with them both sleep deprived and horrid – I’d far rather keep such delights in reserve for days 1 and 2 than peak early ;). They have still insisted on attempting to play together rather than keep out of each others way of course though :rolls:

We walked to the dentist so I could pay an outstanding amount I keep forgetting to go and settled and was reminded of by a letter from them yesterday. They had addressed it to ‘Liza Goddard’ though, which bizarrely I must have been called in error at least 3 or 4 times since I married Ady. I know of the famous Ms Goddard of course but Nicola and Liza are not particularly similar names, I don’t look like her and it’s an odd thing to have happened so many times really.

I’m sure there is more to say but all of it escapes me now. I’m only really blogging because I’ll be away from the laptop all week and wanted to get one last fix before I go!

A work day for me today. I struggled to get up and was slightly fragile first thing due to an excess of birthday cheer last night. I had to snap out of it rather rapidly though as it was mad crazy busy at work with small children coming in to either retell every single word of the books they’d read in high, enthusiastic voices, or reluctantly squeeze a couple of heavily prompted words out – both quite hard work.

I’m not convinced about the SRG to be honest. I hate the idea of incentivising reading, I loathe the stickers / medal / certificate hullaballoo of the whole thing. I cringe at the parent who literally dragged her reluctant child to sit in front of me last week, who clearly didn’t want to talk to me about the books or get any sort of positive experience out of it. I cringe equally at the mother today who scornfully told her child ‘you don’t want to do that, it’s for babies‘. The children who sail through it reading books in record time are the regular library users anyway. But then every so often you get a chink of light shining through when a child really enthuses about a book they’ve read and get pleasure out of sharing that experience with someone, or talks about the wonderful descriptive language in the book, or raves about the illustrations. Today I had a boy who had read all the Spiderwick Chronicles and was now working his way through a trilogy of teengae books (he was only 9) and was so passsionate about the one he’s just finished I was tempted to borrow it :).

I had a dramatic and potentially embarassing ‘wardrobe malfunction’ when the wraparound skirt I was wearing lost it’s button. It happened at teabreak time so I borrowed a safety pin from a colleague and thought I was safe. The safety pin proved a failure however and the skirt de-wrapped itself in spectacular fashion as I walked from the enquiry desk to the counter. It was not witnessed life on television or by the worlds’ press like Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction but it did create a ripple of excitement at the library 😆

I had a bit of a reservation frenzy last week at work and ordered in all the dvds catalogued as ‘natural history’ so today there was a huge pile of ‘walking with monsters’ ‘walking with beasts’ ‘walking with cavemen’ titles as well as various Raging Planet ones about volcanoes, thunderstorms and more. We have a lot of time in the car over the next week though so I’m sure they’ll all get watched and the children will get duly educated by them ;). They fell on the ‘walking with monsters’ one with delight and watched the whole disc of 3 back to back episodes in hushed wonder and have been recounting it to each other ever since. 🙂

Ady was home with the children this morning and then at Mum and Dad’s request he dropped them off at their house for the afternoon. Strange things are happening with my parents and they were both home today. The children had a nice time though and had been to the park not long before I arrived to collect them. I stayed for a cup of tea and then we came home.

Big news here today is that we have had our first two eggs from the chicks. Not sure whether it is two from the same hen or whether two or the three have started laying but very excited to have second generation eggs from hens that hatched from eggs our own chickens laid. The legacy of the fiesty cockerel lives on – and Scarlett had them for tea :). We currently have 5 hens, one chick too young to tell and one cockerel who is unable to stand up so I’m hoping for the eggs to start coming thick and fast again and paying for their keep.

I carried on with the wallpaper stripping which is now thankfully finished. Davies and Scarlett were abmysmal at going to sleep – again – Scarlett has spent the last 3 nights sleeping in Davies’ room with him which has huge novelty value and always makes for late nights and overtired next days.

Yesterday was my Dad’s birthday. He is now 70. We decided earlier this year (he and I, I get my proneness to the ridiculous from my Dad, Davies gets it from me, the 3 of us can happily sit for hours talking utter nonsense to each other) that 70 was the official age at which you start telling random strangers how old you are – in libraries, supermarket queues, park benches, bus stops etc. So he’s been practising and yesterday was able to unveil his new hobby properly.

We have a video recording of my Dad’s 62nd birthday as it was celebrated here with a barbecue and I was heavily pregnant with Davies. Mum, Dad and Frazer were here and we interviewed everyone about the impending shifting up a generation-ness that was about to happen ‘are you looking forward to being a grandparent / uncle’ etc. Last night we videoed us all having another birthday barbecue but this time complete with that baby bump now a nearly 8 year old.

Here’s Dad at 65

and at 66

at 67

at 68

69

And here he is yesterday at 70 you know

Dad was 35 when I was born so I’ve only ever known him older than I am now, he was always the oldest dad among my friends’ dads. I said it last year though, every so often I see a glimpse of the little boy he once would have been and every year his face lit up with the candles on his birthday cake there is a certain expression which gives me hope that actually, even at 70 you know, we never really grow up.

In other yesterdays news the children and I were up and out early again and visited Tescos for various birthday related items including baking ingredients and components to assemble a meringue, cream and strawberry ‘cake’ for Dad. Once home I got stuck into more wallpaper stripping and we had a brief and rather ill fated visit from Lucy and The Rs. They stayed for lunch but the four children simply couldn’t get on, were bringing out the worst in each other and most of all me. Eventually I suggested it would be better if they left, in a slightly less than calm manner, explained once again to Davies and Scarlett what behaviour I was expecting from them for the rest of the day and shut myself back up in Tarly’s bedroom to take it all out on the woodchip!

I emerged at 6pm when Mum, Dad and Ady had all arrived, had a long restorative soak in the bath and a glass of wine and emerged ready to face everyone again and we had a very nice barbecue. Frazer came over aswell, we all enjoyed the quite spectacular storm, everyone had plenty to eat and drink and a very nice evening was had by all :).

We were supposed to be riding Honey this morning and Scarlett was quite excited about it as Julie was planning on setting up some low jumps and using the ‘lunge lead’ or something similarly named which meant Julie would stand in the middle of the field while Scarlett had more control over the reins etc to guide Honey instead of Julie walking next to her and leading her. We were up and out promptly and lack of traffic meant we actually arrived at the stables about five minutes early. Julie was also amazingly on time (we are both very slack time keepers and even worse when we are meeting each other) but it was absolutely pissing with rain so we quickly decided we’d just feed Honey and then go for a walk instead and it was so not riding conditions.

The children and I fully waterproofed up aside from shoes as they have both outgrown their wellies so we all had waterproof trousers, coats and crocs! We went down to Honey’s field with her feed and moved some dividers that had been set up to give her a smaller patch of the field as she is very overweight. Then we went off on a walk round Slindon, the small village that the stables are in. It had actually stopped raining by that point so in the event we could have at least taken Honey for a walk even if riding in the field wouldn’t have worked but the children were more up for running ahead and playing by that point anyway.

Slindon would be the perfect place to do one of those penny walks where you toss a coin at every junction as there are loads of left, right, up or down type decisions to make but none of us had a coin so instead the children took it in turns to decide which led us on a big sort of circular walk taking in the duck pond twice, leading us through the woods and across a field. It was a nice walk and Julie and I managed some chatting along the way.

We all ate lunch in our cars parked side by side with the windows open just a little as the rain had started back up again by then. I was suffering with a delicate stomach from last night and again this morning so I wasn’t eating so once Davies and Scarlett had finished the food I’d brought for them we headed off. We came home via a town on the way to get some new wellies for them in honour of visiting The North next week where wellies are sure to be necessary at some point.

Once home I made a second lunch for the children and joined them in eating something, I sat and read my book and demanded some peace and quiet as I was still feeling fragile. Then I decided to start tackling stripping the wallpaper in Scarlett’s bedroom. She wanted to ‘help’ and infact did for a while but eventually drifted off to play with Davies. I had a break to put their dinner on and then Ady came home so he was able to take over dealing with them, making up a bed for Scarlett in Davies’ room so she can sleep up there with him while her room is in disarray for a night or two and tidied up.

I managed to strip one wall but it was a pig to get off and I forsee several more hours spent over the next 3 days to get it all done ready to leave for Dad to rewallpaper while we’re away. I was feeling a bit generally melancholy anyway and the introspective nature of literally staring at a wall doing mindless scraping probably wasn’t the best thing for me as I managed to get all sentimental about that room and those walls. It’s the most multiused room in our house that one.

When we moved in in February 1994 it was the second, spare bedroom. As we’d bought a new kitchen and bathroom in the January sale at B&Q in preparation the whole lot got shoved into the spare room and the door shut on it to prevent our kittens getting lost in the room for the first couple of months. When it was eventually cleared of junk we had a single spare bed in there which many, many guests slept in over the years. I slept in there on the night of my 21st birthday as we were putting up friends and gave them our bed that night. I remember feeling slightly stroppy that my 21st birthday had been spent sleeping in my own spare room rather than living it up wildly 😆

It originally had dreadful ‘decorative’ polystyrene tiles on the roof that I spent many hours up a stepladder with a heat gun and a scraper removing along with the super strength adhesive they’d been fixed with. It had anaglypta paper on the walls which I would have been the one to scrape off at some point before my Dad woodchipped it as that was all we could afford.

I was up a ladder in there again when I was heavily pregnant with Davies painting it all blue and setting it up ready to be his bedroom. I spent many hours in that room through the night sitting next to his cot, willing him to go to sleep, staring at the walls and listening to his winnie the pooh cot mobile playing the same tinkly music over and over and over again.

When Davies was 4 months old we built up and his bedroom became the one he is in now upstairs. The bedroom was then an ‘office’ as I worked from home a couple of days a week. There was a sofa, a computer and desk and our chiller in that room. The walls were painted a relaxing green shade. By me.

I think it stayed green while we were away and the house was rented out but with 3 different sets of tennants in here it would have probably had three different uses and even names that room.

Just before we moved home I bought lilac paint and Dad repainted the room before we came home ready for Scarlett to move in and it became her bedroom. Her first bedroom was the little boxroom in our house in Manchester and I’d always been sad that I’d not been able to decorate it and prepare it for her like I had with Davies before he was born. I made her room there as nice as I could but it wasn’t the same.

Predictably the walls have been either covered with posters and pictures or the woodchips have been picked off by Scarlett over the last few years so the room was looking very tatty. We’re currently in a phase of thinking we might stay here awhile longer so we decided to make her room nice again and got some cheap wallpaper from B&Q at the weekend, so I’ve been scraping off that woodchip, along with the layers of blue, green and lilac paint today and thinking about all the times I’ve sat in that room in all it’s different incarnations, either decorating, sitting with a baby, working or sitting with another baby.

I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not going to like the new wallpaper in there when it’s done. It is very dark pink and I think it might be a bit womb like and oppressive but aslong as Scarlett likes it (and if she doesn’t we can paint it a paler colour) I guess it’s time for me to let go of that room really and hand it over to it’s current owner fully.

First thing this morning I wanted to get to the library so the children could get their silver stickers for the SRG. We’re away all next week and I wanted to have only one visit left to do after that, plus Davies is on such a roll with his reading I really wanted him to get that buzz of marching into the library and sharing it with the world :).

Scarlett had chosen ‘A house for mouse’ and decided she wanted to take a Barefoot book we’d had about Chinese zodiac as her second book so we also gathered up various finished with dvds and other books and headed off there well before 10am :). As we got out of the car my phone rang and it was my Mum, very upset that she had just been offered redundancy from her job 🙁 wanting to know where I was. I said we’d be home in 20 minutes and we went into the library.

The children were stars – Davies very confidently talked about his two books and then chose a couple more including reading me the title of one ‘pet to school day’ that he’d chosen because it was ‘the same author as the last book he’d read’ 🙂 :). He then told me in confidential tones his league table of favourite people who work at the library 😆 and yes I was number one ;). He was greeted by name by everyone which made him all glowy and then he got chatting to the two Important Librarians who happened to be in the childrens’ library doing some stock work this morning while Scarlett talked about her two books. She also did well, after an initial pretend shy act :). She then chatted to the Important Librarians too and one of them helped her select a book based on what Scarlett had read and liked before. It was nice :).

We came home and found poor Mum being accosted (not literally) by David the Thank You Neighbour who’d seen her arrive and come over to tell her we’d gone out but he wasn’t sure where to! :shock:- clearly the spycam is faulty this morning! She came in and chatted to me in the kitchen while I made some cupcakes and we drank lots of tea. I was pleased that on this occassion unlike many others when my Mum has called on me to help I was actually able to feel I was being of assistance and saying the right things this morning. I won’t blog more about what’s going on with her as actually it’s not resolved yet and I think it will end up being a positive thing for her but she was upset and in need of comfort, kind words and an injection of positivity this morning, all of which are things I am fairly good at offering.

Davies and Scarlett made cards for Lucy – both with very nice writing and then went outside to play. Lucy arrived and Mum stayed for one more cup of tea before heading off leaving Lucy and I to chat and the children to carry on playing. We had birthday cakes with candles and small children singing Happy Birthday – which I did video but promised not to youtube and then further chatting and playing.

Scarlett fell down the front steps and grazed her leg – it now has scars down the back where she stood on and fell through a plastic box and what will heal to be scars down the front from the steps – that girl will be a great advertisement for the magic of bio oil! Richard got stung by a bee, Davies got sand in his eye and Rebecca got upset by various children not letting her play on the slide or have a blank piece of paper to draw on but actually for 6 hours together they all did very well :).

Lucy and The Rs left, Davies and Scarlett had tea, Ady came home and I nipped out. I had to collect the childen’s new membership cards from the swimming pool that Dad had paid for over the phone but they needed signatures for, get a few bits for dinner and I decided to call over to Mum and Dads and check that Mum was ok and that Dad was being supportive and caring – not necessarily a given :rolls:. Fortunately all was well. I stayed for an hour or so chatting and Frazer arrived home from work while I was there – felt a bit odd to be the four of us and none of ‘my’ family there – funny to think that used to be the whole house filled 16 years ago when we all lived there. It was very quiet! :lol:I think what felt so odd was that it is probably 20 odd years since the four of us stood /sat together and chatted like that, which is strange because it’s something that happens daily at our house and it is odd to think one day it won’t any more.

We had an interesting conversation about whether you ever feel like a grown up and if so what makes you feel that way. Dad is 70 on Wednesday which we all agreed sound properly old but none of us, least of all Dad himself view him as old. Dad was saying he’d been thinking about a job he did and trying to work out when it was and realised it was 1994 and then realised that had been when we bought our house and he was staggered that Ady and I had been together that long – even more staggering was when Mum said that Ady was now the same age as she was then more or less (she’s not quite old enough to be Ady’s mother). Numbers eh?

I got home in time to read a story, have a bath and get dinner ready in time for Dragon’s Den and then watched the last of the 3 part Can’t Read, Can’t Write. That’s been a very interesting watch and I’ve been talking about it loads to people.

Edited to add more information rather than carry on in comments.

Campcraft – No necessity to have adults present, although I think the children being ‘well supported by parents’ meant they deemed we needed less tutors. Given some of us will probably have high adult to child ratios (eg me and Ady would both stay) I’m sure anyone who didn’t want their adult there / any adult who needed to look after younger siblings would be fine to not be around. Does that help?

Camping prices are £5 per tent per night plus £3 per adult per night plus £1.50 per child per night. I have a booking form and I will check with the centre but suspect emailing everyone who wants to come their own copy and getting you to book and pay individually for whatever you’ll be around for is the best way forward. Our plan is to go from Saturday to Saturday and we are open about what days we do campcraft and Butser but I probably need to get those days booked sooner rather than later.

Butser we can do one of two ways – either just go and pay seperately or I can contact them about a group visit and arrange some activities. I’d need some numbers to contact them with to sort out a group visit.

Right – I need to get this booked really or at least slightly more organised.
Here’s the deal 🙂

Camping at The Sustainability Centre, which is in Hampshire from Sunday 7th / Monday 8th September until Saturday 13th. Come for as long or as short as you like but I really need some proper numbers to give them on a booking form.

It is a fab place, it has a hostel and the centre in the grounds very close to where we’ll camp, both of which have showers and toilets which are clean and ok.

They are very green and ecowarrier stylee so are big into things like recycling but are also a fab place to have a great camping experience. We can buy firewood and borrow fire dishes from them which make for excellent campfire evenings. No hook ups or other poncy facilities of course ;).

The campsite is in woodland and is also a short walk away from the South Downs Green Burial site which is lovely. There is a HUGE Asda just 8 miles away and depending on how many of us there are communal cooking might be a good plan?

I want to visit Butser Ancient Farm one of the days we are there – shout if you want to do that too and I’ll look into prices – if we can get a good deal by being a bigger group then feel free to invite people if they are local (I’m thinking of Hampshire, Berkshire, Sussex folk here).

It will be Davies’ birthday on Sunday 14th and for various reasons we’re not doing the big party at the hall this year but will do something while we’re away. If you are local and not planning to come and camp we’d love you to come and join us for his party which will be something woodland based.

There is a campcraft place on site which offer fab activities and I have been in touch with them about a session. They have quoted me £255 based on numbers I told them of 20-30 people which at a tenner or so each isn’t cheap but I reckon would be a great experience. What do people think about that? Are you up for it? It’s wilderness and camp craft skills, stuff like lighting and making fires, building shelters etc. and would last for 3 hours or so. If you think you might be up for that let me know how many of you and I can get a proper firm quote based on those numbers. They reckoned 2 tutors would be needed for a 20-30 people group so possibly it would go down in price if we were smaller?

So I’m looking for numbers, dates to stay, numbers for Butser and numbers for the campcrafts stuff please 🙂

Started with a lay-in. A real proper, slept all the way through til nearly 10am lay in. Lovely :). I really am a 830 or later sort of riser and had at least 5 out of the last 7 mornings earlier than that so I needed to make up my deficit – and going to bed earlier does not count, it has to be staying in it later!

Davies read a book to Ady and I and then Scarlett and I read a book together then Davies wanted to start painting his room. I had this idea of a professional looking mural tying together his various passions and stuff in his room chanelling his path through obsessions such as Wallace and Gromit memorabilia, Doctor Who toys and of course his life size dalek, his current Ben 10 ‘thing’ and so on. Davies on the other hand wanted to take the opportunity to showcase his own artistic talents. And I guess not many 7 year olds get to paint on walls without being yelled at 😆 What we’ve started with is a collaborative effort which sort of takes in both our ideas, sort of, ish. We have a tardis, an army of flying daleks, the dalek spacecraft, various planets (from our imagination, not real ones) and the orange logo from Doctor Who which we’re going to write Davies on instead. It looks pretty good actually, if very definitely the work mainly of a child.

Scarlett sat downstairs and did cutting and sticking. She found a card making stash we’d got off a freecycler crammed with Christmas card making stuff so was happily making Christmas cards when we came back downstairs. Davies decided to do one too and did a lovely one with santa on the front and ‘to mummy, love Davies’ inside 🙂 He then did an amazing card for Ady where he snipped off the corners of the card and used them inside along with various other bits to create a boat on the sea. It’s fab, I must take a photo of it, it’s the sort of thing you’d see at a craft shop made by a proper card maker :).

Ady cooked roast dinner for 3pm ish so we had that and watched The Simpsons then I dragged everyone out for a walk. The weather was warm but overcast so we decided to head down to the beach. We took a detour through the industrial estate where I used to work so it was over half an hour before we actually got to the sea. Davies and I walked together and played a game where we told a story together – one person would start and stop at a crucial mid sentence point when the other one had to take over. It was hilarious as he has the same surreal sense of humour as me so while the story made very little sense we were highly entertained by each others nonsense :). He then had one of those assault on the senses moments that one of the women in the can’t read can’t write programme was talking about last week when we walked past somewhere with road sign, loads of factory names and so on all at once. He read ‘rabbit’ and ‘biffa’ on the skips, ‘bacon’ on a property for sale board, Winston Road on the street name sign and ‘tyres’ on a banner. It’s so exciting!! 🙂

At the beach were a load of kite surfers setting up and going out, it was high tide and fairly rough so probably perfect conditions so there were plenty of cool stunts to watch, some of them go right up in the air on their kites – it looks amazing fun 🙂

Predictably within minutes both children had their shoes off and were in the sea. When I moaned at Davies he said ‘well you didn’t tell us not to’ which was fair enough, but I’d kind of assumed they wouldn’t. They did have great fun though and they were the ones who had to walk home in wet clothes. When it started to rain on the way home and Ady and I got wet too Scarlett said ‘well I knew it was going to rain and I thought I’d rather get wet having fun in the sea than being miserable walking in the rain!’ 😆

We walked home a different way and stopped to get the children chocolate on the way. By the time we got home we’d been out for over 2 hours and felt very virtuous for working off our roast :). The children had a long bath that made their hands and feet all wrinkly followed by hot chocolate and toast. In lieu of a story we watched Mio Mao on youtube as they’d been telling me about it and singing the theme tune and I had no idea what they were on about.