One word? When seven would do…

Everyone up early today in honour of the MTP returning to finish off the boiler at an indisclosed time ‘after 9ish’, which turned out to be 930.

MTP did his thing which included drinking tea, a spot of tradesman style flirting (always well received ;)), finishing off the brickwork and most importantly making hot water come out of the hot taps and heat radiate from the radiators. Oh how I love him. Still not sure of the final cost and he has to come back next week to do something – once the heat had come back I stopped listening really – but he’ll sort out money with Dad and we’ll start paying Dad back accordingly.

I feel like a cat stretched out infront of a fire, you could smell the air heating back up in the house and the playroom which had been positively arctic as we’d not bothered to try and heat it at all is now part of the house again rather than a sort of cordoned off zone.

Davies spent a lot of the morning on his new-to-him x box games that Ady picked up 3 for a tenner yesterday while Scarlett and I decorated a little box from a kit of Arabic art. Well I say we, I mean she rapidly lost interest and I did most of it while she sat next to me playing her DS actually :lol:. Then they swapped over and Tarly played her Barbie horse x box game which always makes her really bad tempered, while I read the first 4 chapters of Great Glass Elevator to Davies. I can very clearly recollect reading that book myself for the first time and it felt quite strange both to be reading it out loud (kept tripping over all the Grandmas and Grandpas Georges, Georginas, Joes and Jospehines) and sharing it with someone.

MTP left and the kids had some lunch. In celebration of the hot running water and in getting slightly carried away with putting all the various pots and pans and cook books and other stuff we’d cleared from around the boiler back again I cleared out the food cupboards, washed down the shelves, got rid of some stuff and tidied up. I am quite embarrassingly chuffed with decanting all the stock cubes into an old pickled onion jar aswell as slightly disappointed I didn’t have equal amounts of veg., chicken and beef cubes to make the traffic light pattern I’d been planning 😆 I also dealt with the five rapidly dying bananas by making some (very unsuccessful) banana and nut bread in the breadmaker and some rather more successful banana and choc chip cupcakes to which I added a handful of scrapings from the tablet I made that have been in the fridge in a bag waiting for their chance to sweeten something as they were too much just crumbs to make it into the box to be eaten at the time. The results of that were delicious and more than made up for the bread.

Davies and Scarlett played with the toy animals while I did that and watched various stuff on cbbc – at one point I heard The Chuckle Brothers drifting through into the kitchen and was pleased not to actually be in the room. The Chuckle Brothers eh, what Trevor and Simon could have been… 😆

The kids had tea, followed by a very long bath and hairwash followed by stories – the second half of Magic Finger and most of which I stopped under the guise of coughing too much to carry on with when I reakised we were coming to a sad bit that wouldn’t be great just before bedtime for Scarlett at the moment. Will carrry on reading in the daytime tomorrow when we can talk it over and follow up with something cheerier to take her mind off it before bed. They were enthralled though – Morpurgo is amazing. I love how he never dumbs down his wording but the images are so vivid not knowing the meaning of each individual word is irrelevant, rather like looking at a beautiful painting and not needing to know the colour of the sun is called ‘burnt ochre’ as the feeling and the atmosphere created is enough to lift you above that. I remember half hearing Michelle reading to Chloe across a camping field and despite not being near enough to make out the words I knew she was reading Morpurgo just by the pattern and rhythm of the words.

As an aside I’m currently reading which is by no means without it’s faults but I am enjoying nonetheless as many of his basic philosophies are in line with mine. Worth a read if you happen upon a copy I would say.

We were supposed to be hosting the regular local Home Ed grown ups meeting tonight but I have postponed it to next Friday, knowing there would be far too much languishing in hot baths, putting the kitchen back together and enjoying sitting around without wearing coats indoors to be entertaining people as well.

Coughing continues and I have little or no hope of not being joined in bed by Scarlett at some point ‘current catchphrase ‘I just want my Mumma!’ but hey,it’s warm! 🙂

but nothing to sing about.

Work for me today so I went off leaving Davies and Scarlett with Dad and hoping to be coming home later to a snuggly warm house. Ady had suggested I ring in sick as Scarlett had joined me in bed and I’d had a rotten nights sleep, woken with a stiff neck and my cough has peaked today into the spluttering of a bronchal old geezer with a 50 a day habit rather than the genteel young lady I usually portray. But I thought I’d be better off at work, keeping busy and all that.

I’d not factored in that having not been to work for nearly 2 weeks everything would be piled up waiting for my return. As I said to Ady I am pleased my work is challenging and interesting and varied as I’d be very bored if it weren’t but it is tough when by virtue of only working 11 hours a week I am really the most junior assistant there but thanks to the various things I have picked up responsibility for I seem to treated as one of the more senior ones. So a pile of notes, emails, paperwork, course details for various things I’ve been booked on and a load of stuff sent through about Chatterbooks all awaited me. I dealt with the urgent stuff, passed some on to someone else to do for me and brought some of it home. While I was doing all this and alternately coughing and blowing my nose Wendy came to ask me if I could do storytime as Helen, who was supposed to be doing it wasn’t feeling well and didn’t feel up to it.

So with about 10 minutes prep time to quickly read through the stories first I led 18 children in singing, colouring and read them 3 stories. As at Badgers last night the thought did cross my mind ‘what on earth am I doing here???’

And then I had lunch! 😆

The afternoon was rather less fraught and brought the rather excellent news that Nightmare Colleague has handed her notice in. This is a massive relief to one and all and will hopefully have a very quick, very positive impact on the atmosphere at work. Am very pleased :).

Came home to find Mark The Plumber (yes, his middle name is The and his last name is Plumber, he had very little choice but to go into the trade really, we have a Saturday lad at work called James Butcher and are always telling him to choose a career accordingly, I favour serial killer :lol:) had been, removed old boiler, fitted new boiler, left gaping hole in kitchen wall (which Ady has put perspex to cover overnight, it was like having a door open in there!) and is coming back tomorrow to finish off and make it create hot water and central heating. It’s very nice, shiny, compact and expensive looking, which of course is accurate really ;).

Read some stories including the rather excellent , and which had come through for Chatterbooks so I brought home to show the kids and see what they thought and the first half of which was interupted by a phonecall from Caz, as she said ‘calling from the other side of the world. And the future’ where it was tomorrow morning in New Zealand. They have very exciting news which I’ve caught bits of in facebook chats and emails but was desperate to hear the full story so enjoyed a catch up with her :).

Am very much hoping that 12 hours from now all will be warm and cosy.

Cough.

Cough.

Oh yeah……… and cough.

That’d be me and the kids then, in triplicate, surround sound coughing. A ca-cough-ony of coughs. A choir of coughers. We are cough-tastic, coughalicious and cougharamas R us.

Scarlett slept through in her own bed last night although she has now gotten into the habit of wanting me to sit with her while she drifts off to sleep and she fiddles with me hair. Davies did this for years and whilst there are many other things I could be doing of an evening – watching TV, cooking dinner, drinking wine, using the laptop, obviously not having a nice warm bath, coughing, I know I have nostalgic memories of sitting there while Davies went from awake and amimated to asleep and peaceful with his little fingers still tangled in my hair and it didn’t last for ever and there will come a day when quite apart from them having no desire at all for me to be in their bedrooms, let alone play with my hair if nothing else I hope to live long enough to look back fondly on the days when I could sit on the floor and get back up again 😆

Davies has been asking to make flubber, or some sort of Davies variation of it so I’ve been promising a trip to the shops for borax all week. Today we drove into town and parked for an hour, checking out the ice rink being installed near the seafront on the way – it’s back for the month of February only. We had a cheque to pay into the bank where we answered the ‘no school today?’ question and even managed ‘we’re doing chemistry!’ when we had a follow up of ‘so what are you learning about today?’. We then tried the pound shops, hardware store and Wilkinsons for borax to no avail. I dimly recall June talking about it not being sold any more about a year or so ago and people wondering how we’d make flubber now. We did have a couple of boxes of the stuff so might face the cupboard under the sink at some point and see if they are still living there.

Home for lunch and by popular request we went for popcorn and watched Living Free, which after trying to order from the library website last night and getting the same dvd listed that we already have here on loan I realised it’s a double disc with both films on it!

Davies and Scarlett played with the geomags – Scarlett made Elsa and her three cubs represented by rods and balls and I did some more batch cooking of mince, this time to make the base for cottage pie which we’ve all had for dinner tonight – the kids had little individual ones each as Davies only likes sweetcorn, Scarlett likes peas and Ady and I shared one with carrots, sweetcorn and peas in. It’s a bit like Zoombinis round here at times, trying to feed the Nerfs! 😆

Then to Badgers, finally, as we’ve missed the first 3 of this year. We arrived early and while filling out some paperwork for a training course I’m going on in a couple of weeks (which could apparently count as credit towards a btec in youthworking – ha!) Davies, Scarlett and I carried on with a conversation we’d been having about when life starts. Davies had mentioned a moose we’d seen on TV earlier that had been 2 months old and was saying ‘but really it was older because it’d been inside it’s Mummy’s tummy for months before that’ and I said age only counted from birth and we then talked about when you’d consider life to have started. That led to talk of abortions, age of viability, whether regression therapy taking you to before birth could prove you are a soul and if memory alone makes a life count, whether breathing should be the decider or whether conception, viability or actual birth can be clear indicators or if it’s all a bit blurry. We concluded (although I know we’ll come back to this one as Davies has already reminded me we’ve not finished talking about it) that it’s another one of those philosophical questions that has no definitive answer. Realised towards the end that we had an audience of Julie the Badger leader and the other Assistant Leader (who we call Jemima but is actually called Angie – but that’s another story) who were listening avidly. Julie said ‘wow that’s a pretty big deep question’.

Badgers was okay, well actually I hated it really but I’m prepared to concede that’s me being poorly and intolerant. I just don’t really like children and there is so much crowd control and seemingly pointless behaviour mananagement I found myself cringing inwardly most of the time. The group I am with are doing Communication and we had one of the Badger’s Dad in who is a French teacher to do some basic French with them. He was actually very good and had a great relaxed teaching style but the children are just so different to the Home Ed kids I know it is staggering. There is just such a difference between the supportive, caring, non competitive group of kids we socialise with and the constant undermining, showing off and putting others down atmosphere with this group. There are the ‘best friends’ who have to make a constant physical show of their closeness, the ‘naughty little boys’ constantly kicking at each other, calling names and being mean, the sly girl who was putting lots of pressure on one of the other girls in a sneaky way and constantly invading her personal space.

A fire evacuation practise was long overdue so in honour of having all the leaders there that was done tonight, except I was left with all the kids while Julie was off blowing whistles and I’ve never done a full tour of the building. We went to the nearest available fire exit and it was locked, so we went back upstairs, through the building and out of the main door. A farce! I was then left with the group and Julie set us up with a game where one child sits in the middle of a circle of others with their eyes closed and some keys behind them, a child I nominated grabs the keys and all the kids put their hands behind their backs, the child in the middle then opens their eyes and has to guess who has the keys behind their back. It was rubbish – the kids cheated loads by tellling each other who had them, got nothing of the idea of suspense and took the chance to be rough with each other by claiming the middle child was peeking and putting their own hands over their eyes for them.

I suspect I will need to have some tricks up my sleeve for keeping everyone in check at moments like that but I kind of don’t want to. There just seems to be far too much sitting still, being quiet, lining up and not enough entertaining or engaging stuff. Ah well I’m trapped now, will have to work out how to make the best of it.

Back home again we had a chat about how much money comes into the house each month and where it all goes, how we decide what to spend spare money on and what choices we have made about things we want and things we need, where we could save money, what we could spend it on instead and which things are non-negotiable. All very interesting – I like hearing a child’s take on household expenses and what they think are essentials.

Ady had got the fire lit and a bath run while we were at Badgers so it was a nice warm house to come home to. I finished making cottage pie for us and am now feeling pretty rough. I imagine I will struggle with a day at work tomorrow but have everything physically possible to cross crossed that when I get home from work it will be to hot water and heating.

And I’d like to end with a cough.

It’s been over 4 years since we did this

and hand on heart I don’t think I’ve really felt the need to have had one for ’emergency use’ until this week. Cars and boilers all breaking down, in January, a month after Christmas and mere days after a holiday would have been tough at any time but those bits of plastic could have made it all better a bit quicker. Of course they’d still have to be paid back, which was the bit I never quite got my head round – and indeed paid back with interest. But still, I’ve felt utterly powerless to do anything this week, which given I’ve ‘only got myself to blame’ made me feel all the more crappy about it all really. 🙁

Scarlett slept with me again last night, not sure what time she crept in but Ady got out shortly afterwards, he’s not sleeping well thanks to work related angst fretting about money and boilers and having a small child digging her knees and elbows into his back. Then Candle decided to join Scarlett and I in bed too and did lots of prowling about the pillows in the irritating way that only a blind cat can do in the early hours of the morning while you’d like to be asleep!

But I’m setting my alarm for 830am and getting everyone up and breakfasted and dressed by 9am in a bid to a)not get into a rut and b)ensure we break with ‘holiday time’ sleep habits. Frankly in the kids’ case any sort of sleep would be a good habit really… so bleary eyed we all came downstairs and the kids got the lego out to play with.

Dad arrived about 1030am and we had a coffee before realising that his plan to follow me to the garage in his van was all well and good but didn’t really factor in Davies and Scarlett. They begged to be allowed to stay home so with strict instructions to not answer the door or the phone (unless my number flashed up) and with a practise phonecall to me to check they could do it if needed Dad and I headed off leaving them happily engrossed in a lego game. There was some debate over precisely which two tyres the MOT had recommended be replaced as the garage guy reckoned three of them were on the cusp of illegal so as they are second hand tyres at cheapo prices anyway I got him to replace them all. He also replaced the leads which he reckoned was the most likely culprit of the whole not liking the damp issue with the car so fingers crossed it will now be fine. And for the bargain price of £110, which in Centerparcs currency would barely buy you a coffee and sandwich 😆 or maybe half a session of rollerskating.

Home again within about 15 minutes to find the children just where we left them and we rang Mark the plumber. After some debate about whether to go for a cheap boiler or a decent boiler (price range from £900 to £1400 so a fairly big decision),taking advice from Mark himself and of course mindful that in the short term Dad is financing this as we’ll only be able to pay back about £50 a month or so we decided to plump for the decent one. Fingers crossed it is in stock and Mark finishes the job he is on at the moment we are pencilled in for Thursday. Which could mean in just 48 hours I’ll be blogging with warmth in my toes and wrinkled fingers from the hour long bath with fresh hot water top ups every few minutes I am dreaming of. Oh how I will frolick in the bubbles and luxuriate in wandering round the house naked once more.

And you know, it’s only the price of a meal for two at Centerparcs really… 😆

Maybe we could create a glossy brochure of us enjoying the hot water and central heating to justify the cost? 😆

We had lunch, Dad and I nipped out again to Lancing – him to go to the bank, me to buy some tinned tomatoes as Ady got 14 packs of 700g mince yesterday reduced from £4.99 a pack to just 60p a pack so I’ve been batch cooking a-go-go with that. Which is just as well as we were planning gruel for February and March.

Then the car was ready so we went to collect that and I came home to start cooking. We’d already decided to miss swimming today as all three of us are full of cold, runny noses (the kids are really sore) and coughs all round. Fortunately I’m really tolerant of coughs, as you could imagine how badly I’d be dealing with two coughing children on top of feeling cold, ill, poor and sleep deprived myself if they were something that irritated me….and so thought coming out in the dark at 530pm with wet hair home to a cold house was a bad idea. The kids had eggs on toast for tea – we’re all about creative ways with eggs round here this week and both confessed that actually they weren’t that fussed about going to either Brownies or Sea Scouts. Feel a bit bad about that as they missed last week too obviously and Scarlett still hasn’t actually been to a Brownies at all but I didn’t really feel like going out in the cold and the dark either so I didn’t take too much convincing. I’ll ring the leaders of each tomorrow and explain we’ve not left, just not been available for the last two weeks.

While watching Animal Park recently someone was on who worked with the ‘original lion man’ and the film ‘Born Free’ which I realised I’d never seen and Scarlett would probably enjoy. It had come in at the library yesterday so we sat and watched that and really enjoyed it.

Ady arrived home, we read the first couple of chapters of which we quite enjoyed and then Davies and Scarlett went to bed. Not to sleep you understand, more as a sort of temporary holding bay from which they could call out to us and make requests for glasses of water and ‘one more cuddle’.

I made dinner – the whole economy gastronomy continues to go well and tonight was chicken stir fry with leftover chicken from Sunday’s roast. We’ve never had so many tupperware containers in use! We are leftover-tastic round here lately.

which is something I tend not to do. Not sure if this because I hate putting it out there, whether I genuinely am an optimist who talks myself out of being miserable long before I’ve managed a blogpost or whether I just don’t like to wallow but it’s been a fairly shitty couple of days and it’s far from over yet so I’m in a suitable frame of mind to write it all out tonight.

So let’s start with Friday as we left Centerparcs. We’d been planning to head to Leeds when we left Sherwood to stay with friends there for the night but on Thursday morning after Davies had been ill I decided to cancel that on the basis that if he had a bug then we shouldn’t be taking it to someone’s house and if it was simply from sheer exhaustion then that would make for him being a fairly crappy houseguest. Felt sad about that, particularly when he seemed fine on Friday but it proved to be the right decision in the end.

I had in my head that Sherwood was only 3 hours from home so had my first unpleasant surprise when satnav told us it was over 4. The weather had turned and we all got drenched in the rain walking back to the carpark from the pool when we left so we sat in the car in soggy clothing for what ended up being over six hours thanks to Friday afternoon M25 traffic. About an hour from home I was overcome with such tiredness I got special dispensation to close my eyes for a nap and woke to find we were far from the M23 where we should have been and on a diesel hunt which was proving fruitless. The fuel gauge had shown enough for 90miles of journey when we set out and satnav said it was 88 miles so we knew we’d need to refuel before we got all the way home but planned a petrol station near home. Thanks to sitting idling in traffic it had gone down very suddenly and started flashing as 5 miles of fuel left about ten miles before we actually found a garage. So that was fraught.

We finally got home around 730pm with two very tired children and our plan was to run a bath for them while their dinner cooked (promised pancakes that we’d never managed to cook while away), then get them to bed at a still sensible hour,unpack the car, have a bath and dinner ourselves before an early night.The two things I most miss when away -my bath and my bed.

We walked in to find the boiler making very odd noises and a pipe that had been dodgy for a while had burst. Ady shot off to B&Q for a replacement leaving me with nothing very productive to do. He’d taken all the unpacking including the milk and eggs we needed for the pancakes so I couldn’t make those, and due to the boiler not working the house was rapidly getting cold with no heating and I couldn’t run a bath as no hot water. In the end I fed them pasta, which got first complaints and then terrified silence when I shrieked at them.

Ady returned, fixed the pipe, got the pilot light relit but failed to get the boiler to flare up. After a huge screaming row with me stomping off to the bedroom, Scarlett crying, Davies looking terrified and Ady telling me to ‘just shut up!’ which is about as firm as he ever gets things calmed down and we got the car unloaded and put away, the children to bed, dinner cooked and some medicinal alcohol consumed. Ady went to bed and I sat up awhile longer before starting to turn off my laptop ready to go to bed when Scarlett screamed from her room. I knew what it was before I got there and sure enough there was a pile of sick in her bed and a very upset Scarlett :(. She was in dire need of hosing down with vomit in her hair and everything and she threw up twice more in the hall just on the way to the bathroom. I called for Ady and he came and had to start boiling kettles to clean everything up while I took Scarlett upstairs for a shower. Our shower is tiny, in the eaves of our loft conversion and only really suitable for children as I can barely stand full height in it and certainly struggle to lift my arms up to shampoo my hair etc. So to try and get in enough with Scarlett to clean her up was very tricky. And everywhere was sooo cold :(.

Scarlett and I sat up for a while in the lounge and she started to doze off in my arms, it was about 2am by now, Ady had finished clearing up and we were all very cold and very tired so decided to go to bed. Surrounded with towels and bowls Scarlett and I went to our bed and she proceeded to wake every 15 minutes or so to be sick more. She was hysterical, I lost count after 10 of how many times she woke and was ill and we finally went to sleep properly at about 5am.

We woke at 10am when Dad rang on the doorbell to welcome us home.

We then called the plumber repeatedly until he answered his phone and came round at about midday. He quickly ascertained that it was a printed circuit board issue in the boiler and questionned whether it was worth the cost (about £300) or whether we should consider a new boiler given something had gone wrong with ours just last winter and it is now 16 years old. He said it had a couple of leaks and was showing plenty of signs of wear and tear and looking old and tired. He left promising to speak to his mate on Monday and see about a PCB for it.

Scarlett wasn’t sick any more but was understandably very wobbly and infact still is. She is crying at the slightest thing, being super clingy, a nightmare at bedtime needing someone to stay with her til she falls asleep and really just wanting to stay up til I go to bed and then come with me. I know this is all in reaction to having been ill but it is very wearing and I am very cautious of it becomming a habbit if we are not quick to deal with it the right way. Which at the moment is being firm about being tolerant at the moment but allaying all her unfounded fears about nightmares and noises in the dark and so on.

I decided I really did need a bath on Saturday and the kids needed one too having not properly washing the swimming pool off themselves yet so we started boiling kettles and pans and then Ady had the idea of attaching a hose to the shower and running that into the bath. I’d started filling buckets from the shower last year but quickly given up as the running up and down stairs, sorcerers apprentice style was just too crazy. The hose does actually work though. It’s fairly slow and I dread to think what it is costing but if we all four have the bath then the shower isn’t running for any longer than it would be for four seperate showers anyway.

One end goes into the bath
and the hose trails up the stairs
into the bedroom
where it collects slightly as it’s too long really, through into the ensuite
where it connects to the shower hose

For someone like me who baths recreationally aswell as for hygiene reasons this is practically an essential.

Not sure what else happened on Saturday now but it would have involved lots of layers and plenty of sighing. Particularly as my car still wasn’t going so I was spending time reseaching breakdown recovery and reading the small print about how soon after starting a policy you could phone for home start and whether that would be cheaper than calling out a mechanic or horrors – taking my Dad up on his offer of towing me. Both Dad and I agreed we hate towing / being towed and that we only seem to do it with each other.

Sunday was a better day, although I ended up sleeping with Scarlett again. The sun was shining and I took myself off to the laundrette to get all the holiday washing, the few days backed up laundry from before we went away and the fall out bedding and pyjamas from the vomit bug (and I notice the towel which we were using as a bath mat from Centerparcs too – oops! It had been vomited on by Davies so Ady had rinsed it out with his pjs and shoved everything in a bag together, not realising it wasn’t our towel). I suppose it took about 2 hours and cost about a tenner to do two large machine loads and then get it all dry. I went and bought chocolate and a cheap magazine (more to get change for the dryers than anything else) and sat reading, munching and ignoring my fellow laundrette users. Whilst nipping out for change a white car beeped at me and there was Ady in my car which Dad and he had got started with jump leads and much dampstart spray :). It’s still running fine now and is booked in to a garage tomorrow to be checked over while getting new front tyres as recommended in the MOT last month.

Ady cooked a lovely roast dinner, I read a pile of books to the kids at bedtime and aside from needing me to sit with her while she fell asleep Scarlett slept through. Phew.

Today I’d been hoping for news on the boiler front and even holding out an outside hope of it being fixed but having got everyone up and dressed and breakfasted (then washing up with a big pan full of boiled water) for 9am I heard nothing. We watched TV and at 1130am I started ringing my Dad and the plumber, leaving messages for them both. We had lunch and then decided we needed to go out to test my car was still starting so went and bought Scarlett a new pair of boots (her old pair were starting to leak and fall apart and were very smelly) and a new pair of wellies as she has been having Davies’ cast offs for the last couple of years but is now the same size as him. What I spent on expensive wellies for her I saved on her boots being half price so that was fine. Also got Davies some sore throat sweets and nipped to the library to collect a pile of books that had arrived for us. Thanks to the facebook grapevine they already knew we’d had a nice holiday, kids were ill and we have no boiler! 😆

Davies and Scarlett have been stars today, spent ages out with the chickens, tolerated me wiping sudocrem on their poor sore noses (both have colds and are doing a fine Rudolph impression), done some ‘experiments’ which basically means making potions with the various oils and scented waters I got Scarlett for Christmas, watched some TV and generally just got on with it.

They finally had their long awaited pancakes for tea and we read another pile of books at bedtime. Ady and I did the crazy hose thing again for a bath having finally heard from the plumber via Dad that he’s not sure when he’ll next get here but it almost certainly won’t be tomorrow. After some discussion and debate we’ve decided to go for a new boiler and Dad is going to lend us the money so we’ll need to renegotiate with our creditors to add repayments to Dad each month for that. Dad was ringing the plumber back to tell him we want a new boiler as soon as he can possibly come and sort it so hopefully we’ll hear tomorrow when that might be. Fingers crossed for sooner rather than later.

It was our fourth visit to Centerparcs – we went in 2002 and 2003 to the Whinfell Forest one when we were living in Manchester- so with Davies aged 2 and me very pregnant with Scarlett (that time we shared a very posh cabin with an upstairs and everything with my parents)
and with Davies aged 3 and a baby Scarlett, who I mostly recall being most put out at being towed along behind a bike in one of those yellow carriages. She looked longingly at them last week funnily enough…

We also had Davies’ fifth birthday at Longleat Centerparcs, again with my parents, back in 2005. I just went to find the posts and recalled it was when some readers were sent texts to enter in the comments box for each day so I could stay in touch with my blog long before iphones. The funniest are these two.

Now Ady adores CP, was sold on the idea from our very first time and has hankered after the place for the whole of the last 4 years worth of economic circumstances dictating a newly learnt love of youth hostels and campsites. I was never that sold on them really, always feeling pretty resentful at the price of the lodge with EVERYTHING extra incuring an additional charge. I never seemed to see anyone I’d choose to spend my time with and having grown to love camping genuinely, providing we have a view, I can’t see anything better about CP than for example the Sustainability Centre. I sort of sneer at CP as ‘nature lite’ I guess. At a price.

But, I was aware it was something Ady would love, Davies and Scarlett would be thrilled to be on holiday with loads of mates and have unfettered access to a swimming pool and I’d get to be the hero and have a sneaked in extra holiday after Christmas camp and before first camping with my mates too. Result! 🙂

Monday We drove in, passing Ali, J and Freya near the entrance on the road and agonising over whether there was anything we could offer to help with – we quickly realised other than some of us getting out so they could get in there wasn’t really – all seats and available car space were already taken up with us, our stuff and the just purchased food shop which was already on laps and footwells. The snow sprayed on the entrance gave comedy value and had me a big negative about the whole CP experience. Check in was straightforward and we found our lodge, whilst doing the conveyor belt one way drive around the park along with many other cars. I’d watched with amusement as Brightkite had narrated people’s good intentions, slipping to realistic arrival times, falling to ‘we’re leaving now and bloody hate holidays!’ over the course of our own drive there. We were first in our lodge (not sure what to call them, have been trying on chalet, villa, hut, lodge, cabin etc all week and not concluded on any). We’d already said we’d have the twin bed room and leave Marcus and Michelle the double, which meant rooms were easy to sort out – we had the twin and nearest bunk and left them the double with it’s nearest bunk. We unpacked the car, put stuff away and then headed out to take the car to the car park and have an explore, having a quick ‘hello’ to Jo who was also unloading her car nearby.

Parking was tricky and I have a suspicion we ended up leaving the car all week in the staff car park having looked at the signs in daylight on Friday when we left but if they don’t have sufficient parking to fit the guests they allow in at any one time I guess that is their problem rather than ours. We wandered back through the village square, had a quick peek at the pool, checked out the prices at the Parcmarket (way better than we remembered, actually quite reasonable), bumped into the (now famous) Salmon’s and then found our way back to 549.

Michelle and Chloe had just arrived too, bearing gifts of calendars for Davies and Scarlett which were very well recieved and the three children fell straight into their usual ‘for some reason three seems to work quite well rather than being a crowd’ dynamic. Mich went off to take her car back, collect some bits from the Parcmarket and return for the very serious business of wine drinking and dinner cooking. It was a late night for all :).

Tuesday Ady took Chloe and Scarlett off for a Nature Walk – it was advertised and planned and so deserves it’s capital letters. The rest of us lazed in bed. Depsite our best endeavours there was no way we were going to be at the swimming pool for 10am but I think we just about made it for 11am. We met up with Babs and Jo along the way, there was debate about the best route to the Village Square (Ady and I did try and test it later by going different routes and I remain convinced the route we took all week was quickest but am happy to concede that’s because I simply insisted it was rather than because it really was shorter ;)). Ady had put some jacket potatoes in the oven to cook ready for a hot lunch after swimming but in the best traditions of jacket potatoes on group holidays they didn’t cook 😆

We had a great couple of hours in the pool trying out the slides, rapids and dinghy ride, all of which had proper names which I never learnt. We went on all of them and loved them all although I struggle with keeping my mouth shut when going under water so ended up drinking way more pool than I should have done. I sense a sort of theme to my life happening there… I think what happens is I scream or gasp or something and am still doing so when I go under. Back to the hub for lunch – an odd mix for everyone due to the not-ready potatoes.

Ady, Davies, Scarlett and I went off, bringing dry swimming stuff with us to explore for an hour or so and found the nature reserve. Kind of wish we’d made it back there actually as it was pretty good and we didn’t fully explore it but there were nature related puzzles, a cool indoor treehouse to snuggle up and read in, various stuffed wildlife and jaws / skull bones to identify, rangers on hand to talk to you, a couple of webcams of various wildlifey places, some brass footprint rubbings, a touchyfeeling guessing game and more. The nature related activities looked pretty good but I asked about the prices and they were so expensive (£8 per adult, £5 per child – way more than Pulborough Brooks events for example) that we decided against.

We’d lingered so long there that we had to walk apace to get to the Leisure Bowl in time for the arranged meet up to sing Happy Birthday to Beth and Big. The kids squished in but Ady and I stayed on the periphery so I didn’t get to see Big’s face when she opened her gift – looking forward to seeing pictures of that moment. I did see her later at the pool and she was still glowing with happiness though so I’m really chuffed that the group did something so lovely for her :). We’d bought Beth a few girlie bits including some hairslides that I have and she’d admired on NYE, Davies presented them to her and said she looked really pleased with them. Indeed she was wearing them later when I saw her and when I said it looked nice she said ‘Davies gave me these’ 😆 We had cake, I sat and debated CP with Ali and J (we thought they were missing several revenue opportunities such as toll roads and maybe some sort of fresh air tax), Davies and Scarlett had a coke each and we decided to retire to Starbucks. Happily several people retired there along with us and we had a very nice coffee/hot chocolate/chai latte break there before going off for a second swim.

Night time in the pool was ace, sadly I only actually managed it that once during the week but it was very nice. Love being outside in a heated pool in the dark :). Mich had gone off to collect Marcus so we brought Chloe back with us to the den and the race was on to feed the three very sleepy children before they actually fell asleep. Sadly feeding them gave them a second wind and they ended up awake for hours more but there was a brief window that showed so much promise of being early to bed in.

Michelle and Marcus arrived back and dinner was eaten. During a conversation about muscle groups – bought up because some of mine were protesting from the double swimming session – we tried to name as many as we could – pecs, abs, calves, triceps, biceps, glutes…. then we got onto tendons and other such technical stuff which led to a debate about muscles in your foot. I thought there were none and it would be your calf muscle which got worked out by wiggling your toes, Mich reached for her iphone to google and I said we should ring a friend. Said friend was logically Helen so having checked it was earlyish by Helen standards (still before midnight ;)) I rang. I got no reply so rang Chris, was told she was at Alison’s snug so rang Alison. I put Helen on speakerphone and told her to speak slowly and clearly so we could all hear then asked her about bones and muscles and feet.

At the time this all seemed very logical, sensible and fairly educational. Of course we’d drunk lots and I later had brought to my attention the short term panic that me ringing round various friends, hanging up rapidly (I was against the clock as Mich had pressed ‘go’ as soon as I first started talking to Chris) and then asking Helen to speak clearly when it is late at night and she is a doctor might be taken as an indication of something more worrying… I did check with Chris the next day and apologised if I’d freaked him out and he confirmed what I’d assumed he’d think with ‘oh no I wasn’t worried, I just thought ‘it’s Nic being drunk again!” 😆 😆 We did wake Oscar though, so sorry about that.

Bedtime was once more silly o’clock which meant that on Wednesday Mich and I missed the early morning nature walk again 😉 Shame ;).

We seemed to struggle to get going (no idea why ;)) and were sitting at the table chatting while the kids sat on the sofa DSing when Tilda and Lije came to call for anyone wanting to cycle. Chloe went off with them and Marcus went to get supplies from the Parcmarket for dinner later. Alison and Lulah came to visit which cemented not getting out for a morning swim, so after a pot of tea Mich and I decided to have a celebratory holiday glass of lunchtime wine instead :).

Something about the kids sprawled on that sort of patterned sofa reminded me of our static at Hesfes when people came over to watch Doctor Who with us – actually hardly any of the same children were on the sofa but a couple are

and while I was looking at those I found this which leads me nicely to our next caller, young Ben Raine who was staying with us for the afternoon and evening while Babs went home to do some tutoring and collect some underwear 😆

Ben is pure comedy gold (although I understand Beth was doing a rather fine job of her own having lost her bike at being hilariously hopeless. I really don’t know where they get it, their mother is so organised, together and nothing ever goes wrong for her) 😉 😆

The previous day Ben had gone off with Davies and Scarlett and having been told by Babs that the old number I had for her phone was infact now Ben’s Ady reminded him that he had a mobile. He said he didn’t, we said he must have as I had his phone number and he remembered that oh yes he did have one, but only for Centerparcs and only for emergencies 😆 He then said actually it wasn’t his, it was Chris’ but Chris uses it for …erm, er, erm… at which point he faltered. Ady suggested ‘sending texts’, I offered ‘making calls?’, a passing squirrel wondered to himself if it was a vibrating sex toy. We also put forward ‘browsing the internet’ and ‘camera’ but it came back to Ben and he said ‘ALARM CLOCK!’ with triumph. 😆

Ady, Davies, Scarlett, Ben and I went off to the pool. We’d been getting changed in one cubicle and using two lockers (putting coats and shoes in one to collect on the way out and all other clothes in another to be collected as we left the pool) so rather than traumatise Ben by squishing him in with us and stripping off, or putting the kids together, which we suspected might mean they messed about rather than got changed we told Ben to get changed, make sure he put all his clothes in his rucksack and then meet us at the poolside. I checked he understood and could manage that and we got changed. When he wasn’t at the pool side when we came out Ady went back in to find him. He’d been found by Alison in the foyer, in his trunks, crying because he was lost.

So reunited Davies and Ben went off together to go on the rapids and slides having promised to stay together and not leave the pool.

Which left Ady, Scarlett and I to our own devices. We bobbed about for a while, went on the dinghies a few times and spent some time in the whirlpool (hot tub thing) then Scarlett wanted to go on the rapids. I felt I’d drunk enough water the day before so said I’d go and do a few lengths in the lane pool. My arms were aching lots and I thought some proper swimming might help lengthen the muscles and ease that, plus I was aware that while I’d been chucked about a lot and worn out by the pool I’d not really done much actual swimming. So I told Ady and Scarlett to come and collect me from the lane pool when they’d done the rapids and headed off. I did 20 lengths (it’s a very short pool, reckon a length is maybe 15m) and then got bored so sat in the bubble pool with Alison and Merry for a bit chatting. Then I realised Ady and Scarlett had been about half an hour and surely couldn’t still be doing the rapids so went to try and find them.

Cue the best part of an hour wandering around the pool area, getting increasingly more pissed off, then feeling angry that I was now channeling the stereotype of a big fat grumpy woman stomping round the pool (I know that *everyone* is looking at everyone else in the pool gauging how much fatter or slimmer you are than everyone else and whilst I hate both the jolly fat person and the grumpy fat person stereotypes I’d really rather not be conforming to the worst while semi-naked and seething). I found Ben and Davies easily and told them to get out while I found Ady and Scarlett, then had to tell them to get back in again as the poor lads were being tortured by having to stand and watch everyone else having fun.

I finally spotted them and unfairly I admit let rip at Ady about how angry I was, putting on a further floor show for people sitting nearby. Ady claimed not to have realised I’d said ‘come and get me from the lane pool when you’re done’, then tried to say ‘I thought you’d like some time to yourself’ which really made me see red as we’d not 5 minutes beforehand been talking about how on a family holiday I wouldn’t want time to myself. We gathered Ben and Davies and repeated the instructions to Ben about getting changed, making sure he had everything and meeting us back in the foyer but not leaving the pool to go outside.

Ady and I got changed with speech bubbles hanging over our heads saying ‘you fuck off’ and ‘no you fuck off’ in tense silence and then became aware of a small voice wailing ‘AAAAAddyyyyy’ outside our changing room. We exited to find Ben, still in his trunks and sobbing because he’d lost his boots. It took some doing but we finally deduced he’d left them either in the changing room earlier or put them in a locker when he ‘forgot I wasn’t having a locker and started to put all my stuff in one’. I checked with lost property which we assumed would be the place they’d have ended up if someone had come across them and then looked in mounting horror at the sea of changing rooms and lockers (over a thousand) stretched infront of us. Debated shouting loudly ‘can anyone see Ben’s boots?’, considered carrying Ben back to the lodge and hoping he had another pair of shoes and then resigned ourselves to the fact we’d have to check lockers.

Ben was still crying so it was hard to get an answer from him about which locker it might have been – he didn’t recall a colour or number but when pushed to think really hard did come up with ‘it wasn’t one of the top ones’ which given I had to stand on tiptoe to use them wasn’t actually ruling out anything we’d not already deduced. Ady and I started systematically opening and closing lockers, Scarlett faffed around checking for pound coins left in them rather than Ben’s boots and Ben carried on crying. Ady said to Davies ‘come on, help!’ to which Davies casually opened one locker, two lockers, three lockers and then said ‘well they’re here’ in an ‘obviously’ sort of tone. 😆

So Ben, all his possessions and as much sense as he was ever going to have intact we repaired to the hideout to contain him in one secure location until Babs came back 😆

Marcus and Chloe came back and Marcus cooked dinner for kids and adults in shifts.Then Michelle and I skipped off to CampEm&Alison for a rowdy evening with friends :).

It got suddenly very late and we went back seeing all sorts of nocturnal wildlife but not a single human soul which slightly freaked us out. We expected Marcus and Ady and even the children to be asleep but sadly Davies had been up being sick so there was still life in our cabin. This was a slight relief (not the sick obviously) as I had started to question if we were the survivors from some sort of nuclear holocaust, protected in the bubble that was Em and Alison’s dwelling.

Poor Davies wanted to sleep with us so that was three in the man eating bed which was never going to make for a good nights sleep. Indeed Ady did go to the top bunk after a few hours when Davies had been sleeping peacefully.

Thursday Davies felt better if a little quiet and tired so we decided to keep him at the static for the day and maybe take him swimming again later if he felt up to it. I offered to take Scarlett swimming or for a walk (as Davies really wanted Ady to stay with him) and she chose a walk so we had a nice time wandering round the park and the shops together.

Ady had suggested getting everyone together at Starbucks for coffee later in the day so I sent some texts out to coordinate that but when it came to it Davies still wasn’t up to it so I took Scarlett along and at least managed to exchange a few words with most people. It was good to be away with friends but I did feel we didn’t see as much as everyone as we’d have liked to. I wish I’d thought earlier in the week to try and send similar texts for the play areas etc.

I went back to the hovel to take over Davies-tending while everyone else went out for a swim. I had a bath, made Davies some dinner and got started on cooking dinner for everyone else. It should have been delicious but thanks to trying to guess weights for the batter ingredients my toad in the hole was more of a toad in a swamp! The potatoes and gravy were nice though :).

After dinner we had a communal dancing round the room like lunatics to very loud music which was fun. Even more funny was when Mich tried to replicate Scarlett and Chloe’s moves of leaping on the sofa, forgetting she is about 2 foot taller than them and banging the ceiling as she leapt 😆

Ady and Marcus went off to join the gamers at Babs and Jo’s although Ady didn’t last very long. He’s about as into games as I am. I did wonder if he’d occupy himself with some making tea, pouring wine and offering to hoover but he came back instead.

Friday morning we packed up everything fairly easily and then took the car back to the car park. That sentence does not sum up quite how much work was involved in that – not the packing up but the sitting in a huge queue and then driving round the carpark endlessly to find a space. Changeover day is mad busy with the just leaving and the just arriving all around at once. We were half tempted to not bother and I suspect if Davies hadn’t missed the swimming the day before we might have gone straight home. In the end we found a space and went back to the pool.

We had last goes on the various things, had some lunch at the poolside eatery and then left via the gift shop where Scarlett had finally decided on a duck. I’d said they could both have a fiver in the shops at the end of the holiday and she’d been agonising over various things. Davies kept his money and spent it on Transformer toys at the weekend instead.

It was a very nice week away. Really enjoyed sharing with Marcus, Michelle and Chloe although it felt odd knowing so many friends were there but not accessible if that makes sense. I think I prefer camping or youth hostels for holidays with friends. I thought Sherwood was the worst of the 3 Centerparcs we’ve been too. The accomodation was fine, although I thought one bath for eight people was a bit tight and I *really* resented having to buy what I consider basic things like loo rolls. I also thought the message asking us to strip our own bedding was cheeky in the extreme. There was loads of litter around the pathways including a beer can visible from our lodge window (which Ady cleared up) and loads of deflated balloons everywhere stuck in trees and floating on the lake which irritated me both that visitors had done it and that CP hadn’t cleared it up – and we saw the same litter there all week so clearly no one was on that duty.

It was a nice time to go away though, lovely to have something to look forward to so soon after Christmas camp and Christmas itself, the swimming pools are great for the kids and we had good weather all week except for going home day. We’d definitely go again, only if with friends and only if sharing as the cost for lodging alone would prohibit it for us.

Will carry on with the journey home into another post as that was the start of a fairly crappy weekend which I don’t want to taint a post about a mostly lovely week with.

Saturday I worked in the morning so left tidy piles of clean clothes for Scarlett and I ready to be packed in two different bags, a list for Davies to work through to pack and another list for Ady to gather and pack. They dropped me off at work at 9am and had four hours to get everything done which I felt was at least 3 hours more than I would have needed to achieve the same.

Work is a dim memory now so not at all sure what I did but suspect it was displays and the desk as those tend to be what fills my Saturday mornings at work.

Ady and the kids were nearly 20 minutes late collecting me and arrived with tales of wild goose chases to get chicken food and cat food (yes, you would have thought we’d have had that sorted out before the morning we were leaving :rolls:), minus Davies’ bike which we’ve been saying for weeks we’d bring as it fits both children, neither of whom can ride yet, both of whom have expressed a keeness to crack it and at such a perfect flat, car-free, lots of ably cycling friends…

Anyway.

We had an excellent journey up to Lynda’s and were at the Tescos near her house within four hours of leaving Lancing which is very good going (it’s almost exactly 250 miles door to door). We picked up spare swimming costumes for the kids who only had one each and a bottle of wine, then went to Lynda and Stuart’s.

A very pleasant first evening with them and a very happy reunion for Davies and Scarlett with Lynda and Stuart who are like a second set of grandparents to them (yes, I know most children do have two sets of grandparents but D&S only have one set that they see). We had a lovely dinner of casserole, mash, yorkshires and veg followed by apple crumble and custard. Lynda is very aware of and tolerant of my pickiness and always manages to make food I will happily eat and enjoy :).

Previously when we’ve stayed there D&S have slept on air beds / camping mats / readybeds when they were small enough to still use them on the floor in the room Ady and I sleep in but they have now redecorated the little bedroom in their house for their granddaughter Hannah with a single bed and enough room on the floor for an airbed so the kids had their own room. So they went off to bed very happily, played DS in bed for a while and were both asleep by 11pm which is impressive for Davies at home, let alone when having a sleepover away from home. I went to bed fairly early, partially in readiness for late nights for the rest of the week, partially because I know Lynda is a fairly early-to-bed person and sure enough she retired too as soon as I went up, leaving Ady and Stuart to sit up and chat and partially because I was enjoying a book I’d started – a Jonathan Tropper book – so I had a lovely hour or so all snuggled up in the posh bedlinen reading my book feeling all virtuous while the men’s voices drifted up the stairs :).

Sunday We were fed a huge breakfast and had a lazy morning sitting catching up on each others news – Lynda and Stuart know my parents fairly well from their trips up north when we lived up there and L&S’s trips down to us since we’ve moved home so were keen to hear their news and we caught up on how retirement is treating Stuart – he loves it! – and how their two sons are doing- both well :). Then we gave them a couple of hours peace and went out for a memory lane trip past our old house where Tarly was born and on to the Trafford Centre where we worked. We walked all of the shopping malls, looked at the unit we worked in which is now an indoor golf course and had some lunch in the food court.

We also had a look in the Chill Factore which was built long after we left. What an amazing place – and what amazing prices! We’d thought we might have a go at something but when we realised just having half an hour on the rubber ring sledges for the four of us would be over £50 we decided to content ourselves with just watching from the balconies. It did look like excellent fun though and if we’d had the budget, and perhaps not spent the previous 10 days in snowy conditions anyway, we might have been tempted.

On the way back we stopped at Sale water park which is the site of many happy memories as we’d often walk there to feed the ducks and geese and Ady and I had many happy times eating in the two restaurants there, either just the two of us while Lynda babysat the children, or with the fairly steady stream of visitors we had come to stay while we lived in Manchester.
Davies and I there in January 2002.

The lake had been completely frozen on the surface although it was starting to thaw round the edges some boys had gotten some of the ice out and it was so thick I reckon it would easily have been safe for skating on when it was really cold the week before – I can see how lows of minus 18 were reported from that area.

Back at Lynda and Stuart’s we continued in much the same vein as the night before, plenty of chatting, eating and drinking. Ady and I went out for an Indian takeaway for the adults and Lynda cooked some pasta for Davies and Scarlett. The kids went to bed but were not so good at actually going to sleep this time – quiet and not disturbing anyone, but certainly not asleep. We watched The Damned United which Stuart had been given on dvd for Christmas and thought Ady might like. Not a film we’d ever have picked up or selected to watch but was actually quite good.

Monday morning we were up and out earlyish as Lynda and Stuart had Hannah for the day so needed to leave to collect her from nursery and we had arranged to meet our old boss and friend, Miranda, for coffee. We went to Costco for pizzas as we’d belatedly realised the pheasant we’d been planning to take and cook at Centerparcs would be fully defrosted and spoiling by the time we actually arrived at CP if we were leaving home on Saturday, and if you’re going to buy readymade pizza Costco do the best ones.

We then managed to completely miss where we were supposed to be meeting Miranda thanks to me mishearing her on the phone the night before, which meant we were nearly half an hour late and had had several confusing phone calls with her to try and work out what was happening. We finally arrived and had a very nice hour or so catching up with her. I adore Miranda, she is a rich, old money, princess from Rodean who still calls her father ‘Daddy’ and gets regularly hysterical at having to deal with anything in the real world, yet she is warm, generous, caring and very funny. Her and I found an unlikely connection and have remained close friends over the years despite having very little in common on the surface, or indeed that much actual contact in the last few years. She’s not seen Davies and Scarlett for at least 3 years and declared herself enchanted with them and even sent me a text later in the week to tell me they are ‘delightful!’. 🙂 Technically she is still Ady’s employer as her father owns the business Ady works for and she is now the MD as he has officially retired so there was a bit of talking shop along with general exchanging of news including tales of how they’d been snowed in with 7foot snow drifts and 48 hours worth of digging out of their (admittedly over a mile long) drive.

We parted company with Miranda and took the satnav suggested route over the peaks, which was incredibly pretty and picturesque, still a real winter wonderland of sparkly snow with very deep drifts. We drove through the clouds at several points, the temperature outside the car dipped by 3 degrees and there was fog whirling around us. We finally stopped at a Morrisons as I needed the toilet so I did the little bit of food shopping we’d needed to get in advance too and then finally arrived at Centerparcs. Which is where this post shall end to allow the whole CP experience a post all of it’s own.

which is surely one of the best – and most unlikely -product names of all time :).

Davies had a bad dream last night so ended up in our bed. We’re having quite a lot of bad dreams, struggling to get to sleep and other reasons for one or other child ending up in our bed at the moment. Not at all sure why as everything else seems fine and I have no real objection to a child in the bed, particularly as it’s Ady who tends to give up and go and sleep elsewhere, I just welcome the small, warm body snuggling up to me, but it would be nice to pin a reason for it incase something dreadful is going on that we don’t know about.

The snow has all gone, but for dirty looking heaps of ice in places where people cleared their paths and piled it up. My car still won’t start mind you, this despite David the thank you neighbour coming over twice with his mobile jump start unit to try and get it going. The first time he kissed me on the cheek when it wouldn’t start, the second time he said he wished he was a mechanic and could get it going for me and offered to push me anywhere I wanted to go. Bless him 😆 😆 Nutter!

We watched ‘Gimme a break‘ which is our new favourite TV show. Today they had the most miserable parents ever on there, they moaned about everything, hated all the activities and were just so grumpy. I told Davies and Scarlett they should apply for the show and they were horrified ‘But why? The show is for kids who hate the holidays they have with their parents, we LOVE our holidays!’ :).

I did several loads of washing and got it all dry ready to pack for next week and did a sweep of the fridge to make sure there was nothing that needed using up. I found some cream that had been opened and was on it’s last day before running out so poured half in a jam jar and shook it to make butter.I put the other half to one side to let the kids do it later.

I talked to Sheila who was on my Waste Prevention course and is an ex-music teacher (among other things, she had a real varied career) and had offered to do some musical stuff with Davies and Scarlett having met them at the recycling plant, liked both them and the whole Home Ed thing and been keen to get involved, She’d rung earlier in the week to arrange to meet up so I rang back and we chatted through what she is planning to do – a mid-morning to mid-afternoon at her house, letting D and S play with her piano, guitar and folk harp, staying for lunch and then having given them free rein and seen what they could do and liked she will give them some basic first pointers towards learning music and playing instruments. The kids were sat next to me listening in and are very enthusiastic about it so we’re looking foward to that sometime in February with a view to a regular thing if it works for everyone. She let slip that she had had her 81st birthday last week – just 2 days before my birthday – odd to think she was only Ady’s age now when I was born.

I emailed my MP who has raised an amendment to the bill and is sitting on the public bill committee meeting next week to say thank you for his continued support – I had felt he was paying me lip service with his support but not really doing much actively but he does seem to have pulled it out the bag rather now. I am still faintly skeptical and wonder if only now it has been seen to be a bigger deal than MPs might have first thought (certainly a minority in indidvidual constituencies, but perhaps a bigger political issue nationwide) it is worth getting properly involved with? Either way it’s nice to feel heard and represented, although I will withold judgement until after the event. As it goes he got my vote anyway, but I’m glad to see those crosses on ballot papers are now actually translating into my voice making it to parliament in some small capacity.

We had lunch and listened to Katy, Jonathan and Mayuel on the radio and chatted quite a bit about that afterwards. Davies said he would think about something like EF, we talked about what was good about it, what we’d find hard, why I wouldn’t be at all keen on the idea but if either of them really wanted to do it like Jonathan had we would attempt to find a way to make it a possibility. We talked about the logisitics of another child living with us for six months and the impact on all of us of the year of extra child and then minus two children, which would leave us with an only child for six months (neither of them much fancied that it had to be said, being very used to being half of a very close pair of siblings). They both wanted to be sure they’d see Mayuel again before he goes (yes, next week!) and we talked about the times we’ve met him and how it has so clearly been an excellent experience for him, how amazing his English is and what we think it willl be like for Jonathan going, and Kit, Libby and Anna being left without him.

After some debate about whether to watch a film altogether the kids went off upstairs to watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Davies’ dvd player and Davies put on My Sister’s Keeper which I’d borrowed from work for me to watch. Oh how I cried :(. It was just incredibly sad the whole way through. When I first had Davies and was home on maternity leave with very little to do other than watch daytime TV I would often sit and watch those made for tv movies about real life stories and Ady would come home to find me in pieces, sat on the sofa, cuddling the baby, sobbing about how the person had died / been beaten / been kidnapped / found her true love / met the child she had adopted 18 years ago but never forgotten. It was a bit like that.

The kids came and sat in the lounge playing their DSs for the last 20 minutes or so while I choked on snotty sobs and when it had finished and I’d explained what was so sad we talked about cancer and how it wasn’t a true story as such but children dying of illnesses is very true and real. We had to have plenty of cuddles to cement how lucky we all felt to be alive and healthy.

I made their tea and between the three of us we shook up the rest of the cream to make butter, tasting and smelling and checking at each stage of the process. We’ve done it several times before (at least twice at Home Ed groups and at least once at home) but it still sparked conversations.

After dinner I was looking at various online things and booked camping at the Sustainability Centre for the Green Fair and the week in September and happened to look at their campcraft and survival events. Davies and I looked at a day course and an overnight course for kids and he fell in love with the idea of the overnight one – it’s a full day of building shelters, starting fires, navigating, using tools etc, cooking your dinner, star gazing, bat watching, sleeping in the shelter you made and cooking breakfast the next day for a child and accompanying adult. He loved the idea (one of his things he’d like to do this year) so we’ve provisionally booked it as his birthday present. He said he wanted me to do it with him (torn between pleased and disappointed) and it happens to be the Saturday before the Sunday we were planning to be at the Sustainability Centre in September anyway. So the plan will be for him and I to do that Saturday day / night and for Ady and Scarlett to come and join us there with tent etc on the Sunday and all to stay for the week. Think it will be an excellent start to a lovely week there :). We talked about how much better the gift of an ‘experience’ like that is than plastic toys too ;).

We finished reading Mr Gum and also read which we’ve read several times before but learn something new and are blown away by with each reading nonetheless. Then it was bedtime.

I’ve sorted out swimming stuff, clothes for Scarlett and I, written Davies a list to pack with tomorrow but remain not at all ready to leave for work in the morning and not come home again afterwards. Infact maybe we won’t quite pull that off anyway…

My car wouldn’t start this morning. Ady tried it early and I tried it again when I got up, including a hefty spray of damp start on it but it was having none of it. I suspect it is nothing too dreadful and is just a cold / damp / being left standing for over a week type issue, which let’s face it it has endured extremes of cold and damp for. I’m hoping it will start tomorrow during the day now the snow and ice has almost completely thawed and I can take it for a good run and get it happy again (in order to leave it back on the drive for a week while we go away ;)). If not we’ll get it properly looked at when we get back from holiday. As it happens other that meaning we didn’t get to Badgers this week it has not been too inconvenient to not have a car.

So I rang Dad and he dropped me into work (less than a ten minute round trip) before coming back here to look after Davies and Scarlett. Ady had a meeting in Dorset first thing this morning but was hoping to be home around lunchtime so Dad was just supposed to be here for the morning.

My morning was very dossy – I spent the whole time in a meeting with the Children’s Services Librarian and the Childrens Services Development Librarian (Important and Very Important) planning Chatterbooks. After lots of nagging, offering my time voluntarily and constantly pushing it through I have finally got it all signed off and dates set and budgets and everything :). I first asked to do a children’s reading group about 18 months ago and was knocked back but thanks to a very keen young librarian and not giving up even when I’d been told no I have managed to make it happen. It’s not exactly what I wanted which was a monthly kids reading group on the same principle as the adults monthly reading group I go to where we all take the same book away to read and come back the following month to chat about it. But it’s a pretty good initial compromise as what we’re doing is setting up a model to learn from and experiment with which will hopefully open up the door for what I really want in the future. I’ve got approval for a six week, weekly hour long sessions. We’re going for up to 12 children, aged 7-9 years and I’ve done loads of research to plan themes for each session, activities and ideas for how it can run.

So today I delivered all my plans to the Important and Very Important people, approved the posters and leaftlets which are now out on show, wrote letters to go out to parents for permission for their children to attend, talked about what materials we’ll need and worked out a budget for that, looked at various books we could use, talked about what my plan and aims were and how I’d like to run the sessions and then planned the first two sessions properly with the subsequent four loosely planned to be firmed up properly with the actual children at the first session. The Very Important Person will be attending the first two and we bounced well off each other so decided we’ll do it double-act style which I think will work well and then I may well have Guest Appearances from other Important People for the other sessions if I want them (or if as I secretly suspect they continue to fret a little about me and my maverick tendancies 😉 :lol:).

Then it was lunchtime :).

I spoke to Ady at lunchtime and it became apparent that he was having a Very Bad Day at work (he is taking on the role of Tom, who leaves tomorrow, in the interim period before Tom’s replacement starts. So Ady being on holiday next week is a bit of a nightmare for his work as there is noone doing either Ady’s or Tom’s job. There is a sort of mass handover trying to be squashed into these last few days and a meeting with one of their clients had gone very badly with Ady’s MD getting a real dressing down from the buyer which was unpleasant for all who witnessed it.) He was going to be in meetings all day long which meant he wouldn’t be getting home at lunchtime so Dad could go home after all. I told him to ring Dad and tell him and if it was a problem for Dad to ring me back and I’d have to leave work and come home. I didn’t hear back so assumed it had been sorted out. Infact it had and Dad stayed all day which we really appreciated and I think Dad and the children had a nice day together and foraged for food as a pack! 😆

So my afternoon involved a brief stint on the Enquiry Desk before going for another meeting in the office. This time it was the quarterly review of my PDR (Personal development review). That also went well – I’ve been put forward for 4 training sessions in the next 6 weeks or so – a couple of IT based ones to use Word in all it’s full glory, another first aid course and one on family history and geneaology. The Chatterbooks stuff is going down as development despite it being in my own time and having dashed off a quick reply to a plea for volunteers to write for a ‘library blog’ a couple of weeks ago that is also going down as something I’m doing. I did ask, somewhat too late if I should have cc’d Important People in on that and was told I should have so I suspect I may have ruffled some feathers actually but never mind. Even I can’t be a threat to those who really run the library when I’m only there for 11 hours a week ;). I am aware that pushing myself forward for things does put people’s backs up though even though it is always done with the very best intentions (and a bit of self interest of course ;)). But was basically told to carry on doing what I’m doing and thanked for all I do, which is always nice to hear :).

I then did a very brief stint on the counter before it was home time :). Dad had rung to ask if I wanted him to come and pick me up but Ady was almost home by then so I waited for him rather than have Dad leave the kids home along in the dark. I chatted to colleagues while I waited and we got to talking about the kids in the back of the work van the other week and then one colleague told another about our indoor / outdoor snowball fight and snow in the kids’ bath which she had thought was hilarious and had prompted her to comment that Davies and Scarlett would never know what it would be like to have had a ‘normal mother’ 😆

Ady arrived and we got home, profusely thanked Dad for a full day’s Grandfathering and then fed hungry children, tidied up the evidence of a full days home without anyone asking for things to be put away before more stuff was got out and read this rather lovely book (which brought a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat) which led to discussion about apartheid, education, missionary schools, discrimination and being prepared to protest, fight or die for what you believe in. Powerful stuff.

Ady’s bad day was topped off by him leaving the playroom door open and the cat pooing in there so he went to bed feeling the whole world was out to piss him off (except me of course). I’m going to bed expecting sunshine to start my car tomorrow and a day filled with getting everything packed up ready to go away on Saturday :).

you’re TRAPPED!

We woke up this morning to more snow, which hadn’t been expected down here but had come just the same. We’d not really had a plan for the day so we decided to keep to not having a plan and stay home. Scarlett got out a couple of animal books (she got several rather lovely animal books for Christmas including ) and sat looking through those, did some sketches and drew my attention to some of the photos. Davies wanted to have a look at educationcity but when we booted the computer up it recognised us from before and said all our free trials had been used up. I couldn’t be bothered to see if there was a way round it to register again so looked at the BBC bitesize site for him instead. He got upset when trying to do the science stuff that the actual science was far too easy but reading the instructions was very tricky. I refused to sit and read it all for him and we had a long chat about reading. I explained that the only way to progress was to try and yes it would be hard at first but that was how he had learnt everything he knew so far in life, by identifying something he wanted to be able to do and putting in the necessary effort to achieve it. Some of it had come easily and other stuff had been a challenge and along the way there were some things he’d discounted as not worth the effort but that if lack of reading skills now were stopping him doing things he wanted to do then he needed to deal with that by improving his reading skills or deciding not to do the things he wanted to do. I repeated that I am more than happy to sit and listen to him read and help him when he stumbles but I won’t just keep reading everything for him so he doesn’t have to. He agreed that was perfectly reasonable and straight away went back to the game and albeit haltingly read the instructions and carried on with the game.

Scarlett then joined in the conversation and I explained to her that the same was likely to start happening to her soon. I said that she was never going to learn to read because I’d insisted on it and sat her down at a table to learn but because she’d have to come to the conclusion that she did want to learn to read and that I felt she was being shortsighted in her insistance that she didn’t want to learn. I said it was like saying she didn’t want to eat – maybe the act of eating was tedious and not enjoyable but the end result would be you’d die of starvation – whilst she might not want to put in the effort to learn to read the effects of not being able to begin to be more far reaching the further through life she goes. It was all very amicable all round although I did mention possibly clamping down on us laissez-faire Home Educators with our crazy ideas of not sitting our children down at the table and making them conform. I think Scarlett is testing the freedom she has to see what will really happen and I also suspect in the style of those children who were caught smoking by a parent and told it was fine, go ahead and smoke, infact smoke this whole packet while I stand and watch you, went green, vomited and never smoked again she will step up to the responsibility of being in control herself and do it. I know once she has made a decision to do it she will go at it all guns blazing until she succeeds.

I sewed on lots of badges – six onto Davies’ Sea Scout uniform having peered at the rest of the boys yesterday to work out where they all went. Davies and I talked about him doing some more proficiency badges too as they’d been sent home with a letter saying any of the boys could do any additional badges they liked, they just had to let the leaders know. So we’ll get hold of a copy of the badge book and he can choose some to tackle. I also sewed on 3 Badger badges too – 2 for Tarly and 1 for Davies.

Davies and I had a cuddle and decided popcorn would be good for lunch so I went off to make that while they chose a film – we started with Simpsons Movie but the disc is scratched so ended up with Ice Age 3.

I then cut up the rest of the joint of beef we didn’t roast yesterday and bastardized several recipes to make steak pie including Hugh’s ‘rough puff’ pastry. Beef simmering and pastry chilling in the fridge I came back into the lounge and did some work on planning Chatterbooks sessions as I have a planning meeting with the childrens’ librarian at work tomorrow.

Scarlett did some drawings and davies made a 3d house skeleton with the k’nex. I went off and sorted out their tea, constructed the pie, sorted out the shoe box in the hall when Davies could only find one of his Badger shoes and then did chivvying while they ate their tea, got changed into Badger clothes and I brushed Scarlett’s hair.

Ady and I had talked on the phone and he’d misunderstood me saying to let me know early on if he was unlikely to be home in time as I’d go and clear all the snow off my car and check it would start okay (and probably shovel the snow off the path infront of the drive too). I bitterly regretted not doing so anyway when he rang at the time I would have like to have been arriving to say to go and he’d meet us there as my car refused to start :(. Having had various text exhanges with Julie from Badgers through the day as she was considering cancelling anyway I felt really bad. I don’t know if it ran last Wednesday as we’d already said we wouldn’t be there and we won’t be there next Wednesday either so potentially we’ll have missed the first three. Which isn’t a good start for Davies being a Follow Me Badger and me being a new Assistant Leader really :(. I sent Julie a text to say we wouldn’t be there after all and rather grumpily we all came back in the house again :(. Ady did ring back to say he’d be home just after six so we could be there for 1/4 past and only miss the first half an hour but the kids didn;t want to go along for just the last bit and I was worried we’d actually be more of a distraction and nusiance arriving midway through anyway.

So the children got in pjs and we had an extended story reading session (revisiting Mr Gum) which was nice :). Dinner was delicious – another triumph in the kitchen for home cooking from scratch (and served with leftover mash and roasts from ealier in the week so all very frugal).

Scarlett got into bed with me this morning while it was still dark. She was lovely to cuddle up to but less lovely to have conscious conversation with as I’d not got to sleep til nearly 3am, so eventually she got bored of my monosybillic answers (which probably still didn’t make sense) and got up again to wake Davies up instead.

When I joined them they were already immersed in one of their games which I had to interupt to feed them breakfast and persuade them to get dressed. They returned to it again as soon as they could. Happy children :).

I’d emailed the swimming pool to see if there was any chance of their lessons being changed as Tuesdays are going to be crazy with them going to Brownies and Sea Scouts with wet hair from swimming and empty tummies but the only other available times are Saturday mornings (clash with Wildlife Explorers and YACs) and Sunday mornings (way too early – before 9am and we are often away for weekends anyway). So Tuesdays will have to be crazy I guess.

Then we went to Tasha’s. Ady was off with Tom for the day so had left me his car which was good as mine has not been out since before the snow and still has a very thick coating of was-snow-now-ice on the roof and is the wrong side of the still very slippery pavement and drive. Must remedy that tomorrow ready for work on Thursday if it hasn’t all thawed on it’s own.

We had a fab time at Tasha’s. We ate cake and she showed me some more crochet skills while the three older children completely disappeared, playing inside and out and having a ball together :). We resolved to see each other more often and left with time to pop home for a snack before swimming. Ady and Tom arrived back just before us and Tom impressed Davies by being able to turn his transformers from cars to robots and back again :). Ady and I just looked on and thought how very young Tom is, which in turn made us feel very old :lol:.

With Ady home in time to come along to swimming with us I decided not to go in and to watch the kids with Ady. He’s not been around to watch a lesson for quite a while and was really impressed with both of them and their progress. Davies has got a really nice front crawl style now and is looking really good in the water. Scarlett is still slightly haphazard but brimming with confidence and loves it. Her goal is to catch Davies up and be in the same group as him again, which she’ll need to work hard to achieve but I think is within her reach. As Ady and I were both there and she was feeling a bit cheated I told her she could go in the big pool and one of us would watch her all the time if she stayed in the shallow end. I half expected her to be told to get out as she is pretty well known there by the lifeguards but they just smiled and said hello to her :). She is easily as capable as Davies was when he turned 8 and I was confident about him being in the pool alone then and actuallly I barely glance at her when I’m actually in the pool doing lengths so she was more watched today with me out of the pool than she normally is.

Back home again for pancakes for the kids’ tea before I took Davies to Sea Scouts. He was pleased to be back and when I went back for him 90 minutes later and caught the end of a rowdy and riotous hopping game where two boys had to put each other out of a circle with their arms folded he was clearly having a great time. He’d made friends with a lad who’d just come up from Beavers (so must be 8) and was in the middle of a trio of lads all nudging each other and laughing together. He looked right at home. He said no one mentioned school or Home Ed and that it seems to have blown over and been forgotten. He certainly got his fill of same age, same gender, socialising time today :).

Back home after some debate on stories I read the first couple of chapters of a Mr Gum book. I was then persuaded to sing the song printed in the back (sea shanty style nonsense) and Davies and Scarlett danced around to that before it was bedtime.

Ady cooked a lovely roast beef with the joint that didn’t defrost in time on Sunday. We cut it in half and I’m going to make a pie with the rest tomorrow for dinner.

Or maybe even the end of our drive.

Put to the vote Davies and Scarlett both wanted to stay home today. Davies and I had quite a long chat later about what he wants to do more of and I’ll come to that in a bit. But the vote was to stay home and play so we went with it. Saves money on petrol, shoe leather and reduces carbon emissions so all good :).

The children both had Readybrek for breakfast – now there’s a successful TV ad marketing campaign – one of the ads I remember from *my* childhood was Readybrek and although I suspect I’ve never actually tried it – Frazer always seemed to get to choose breakfast cereals and it was always for the giveaway plastic toy inside rather than the cereal itself – the current tv campaign had Scarlett asking to try it and Ady buying it for his own nostalgic reasons. I had my first contact with an open packet this morning and am very skeptical about why it twinkles and looks like Christmas decoration fake snow. Might try and make them some real porridge and see what they think about that.

I let the chickens out and they were actually out and about today having been slightly freaked out by the snow and not braving coming very far from their chicken shed this last week. The little cockerel is making some odd noises which I assume is frustrated crowing rather than anything sinister but I’ll be keeping an eye on him to check he’s okay.

We watched some TV – Gimme a break and a couple of other CBBC shows and Davies did some reading to me. We did look up reading age tests so he could measure his improvement but both decided they were very boring having looked at the first one long before we got far enough to actually measure anything. My very resistant to reading Scarlett seems to be doing quite a bit of sounding out letters under her breath at the moment too ;).

I made cheese scones for lunch after which Davies put on Flushed Away and they settled down to watch that. I decided it would be good to do something productive so having hung some washing out to dry and put another load on I went upstairs and sorted out all of my clothes. I now have very tidy drawers and wardrobes with everything put into tidy organised areas. I have more T shirts than I will ever wear, all my summer clothes at the back, all my Nicola clothes seperate from my Nic clothes and several piles of clothes for various destinations. The first is on the doorstep in a bin liner waiting to be collected by a freecycler in the morning and contained clothes too good to be cut up for rags, not good enough to worth ebaying. The second is the pile that is worth ebaying – that is 3 carrier bags and will have to wait until after Centerparcs as if I list it now I won’t be here for the auction end. Next was a smallish pile of stained or very tired clothes (mostly t shirts and tracksuit bottoms) which I have cut up for rags and are now in the cupboard under the sink for dusters / mopping up spills and a couple ready to go out into my car for wiping the windscreen. Finally I have a pile of ‘sentimental value’ type clothes which are mostly just t shirts I have liked but don’t fit or have stains but I don’t want to give them away or rip them up for rags and the wouldn’t be worth ebaying. I have a plan to somehow make something with them although I’m not at all sure what yet. Only a tiny pile of those though so plenty of room for them to stay stashed away for now.

When I came back downstairs Flushed Away had finished and Davies and Scarlett were playing with geomags. I made a cup of tea and settled down to watch some of the Parliament channel on sky. They watched some bits with me before tidying up the geomags and going to play upstairs. I called them down an hour or so later for dinner and we took a break from Parliament then. I have caught up with the pertinent bits later online anyway including Graham Stuart’s speech.

Ady came home and there was much tickling and general horseplay before it was pj time. We finished How the Whale became and I’d already got the other two books in that series by Ted Hughes so we started the second one . I love reading Hughes aloud, there is such poetry in his writing, such amazing pictures are painted with his words and his whimsical words are reined in by such fantastic storytelling. Davies commented that the Whale book had been a picture book (we actually had both picture book and storybook versions as I duplicate ordered from work but I chose to read the illustrated one as the pictures were quite beautiful) whereas this was just an unillustrated paperback. He said he prefers Ted Hughes without pictures as he likes to paint his own in his head while listening :).

I read the first two stories and the kids went off to bed.

Except they didn’t stay there :rolls:

Davies appeared while I was getting changed and we had a long chat about whether he would like to spend more time with friends. He said he is very happy with the proportion of time he gets to play with friends and he gets to spend as much time as he wants playing with Scarlett anyway. He did say he misses Archie and Elliot lots and that they are his very best friends to play with:( but other than that he is happy with the time he spends with other boys at Badgers and Sea Scouts, seeing local friends like Toby and his cousin Jack. He wishes we lived close enough to see more of Marcus and that he’d usually say that about Ben too but he’s seen lots of Ben lately so hasn’t had the chance to miss him.

Davies then asked (although he’s heard the story before) about how we came to Home Educate and I told him (again) about how I knew Alison online before he and Elijah were born and that Alison, along with June were people I knew who Home Educated long before it was something we thought about. He asked what would change our minds about Home Ed and I said if he or Scarlett wanted to go to school instead, if the goverment dramatically changed how Home Ed works and it didn’t suit us anymore and school somehow became more desireable. I explained that I have no desire to ‘teach’ and that if I ever felt our relationship as mother and child was being damaged by me having to deliver an education to them against all our will we might have to reconsider if school would be a better option for that chunk leaving us free to enjoy the rest of our time together unhampered by educational obligations. I can’t see that being the case at all but it is one possible I suppose.

Davies then asked me about Science and we talked about Chemistry (like all that stuff we’ve seen at the RI lectures?), Physics (like that contraptions game?) and Biology (like what happens inside of me?) and he said he might want to learn more science stuff. I said we’d find some online resources, learn some stuff together and then if he was still wanting more see if we could find some sort of Science club or similar. We then talked about inventors and inventions, I told him the phrase ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ and explained what it meant and he came up with a theory about how he is at his most creative at night because he is processing all the things he has seen and done during the day, spots a need for an invention and wants to create it ready for the next day so he has it ready to go. He is definitely prone to brilliance about 2 hours after I’d like him to be asleep 😆

Meanwhile I thought Scarlett was listening to Bernard Cribbins softly telling her Sophie stories but it turned out she was cutting out counters for an animal board game in an animal annual in her bedroom. It didn’t come with a dice so she’d also cut out six pieces of card, written the numbers 1-6 on them and designed a ‘shake them in your hand and pick one without looking’ instead of rolling a dice. Also prone to brilliance at inappropriate times of day.

I veer between thinking I should give them ever more freedom and stop imposing any sort of anything on them, go with their flow, dance to their beat and be amazed at them as they reassure me that there is nothing whatsoever to worry about on their accounts. And feeling I should probably be doing timelines of British monarchs and learning a third language with them rather than decluttering my wardrobe while they play with geomags! Definitely coming down on the decluttering the house and my worries today :).

I went to bed really early (for me) last night having felt a bit spaced out for most of the day and slept round the clock so I must have needed it. I woke feeling much better which was a relief as I was worried I might be coming down with something.

Ady had taken a joint of beef out of the freezer yesterday for dinner but it became apparent that it was not going to be defrosted in time for cooking today and I needed some more tinned tomatoes, some butter and some gravy granules (all very important, meaningful items) so we decided to trudge into Lancing with the rucksack.

We had a lazy morning infront of the fire with the kids watching several programs of the Total Wipeout ilk – something about Ninja Warriors and another one called something’s kingdom, all of which were eliciting groans from them while watching. I spent some time practising crochet. I think I’ve mastered three of the ‘five basic stitches’ I keep reading about everywhere so well on the way with that. I’m seeing Tasha on Tuesday and she recently learnt to crochet so I’m hoping to pick up some tips to get me properly going and start making some stuff. I quite like the idea of adding some crocheted squares / shapes to my blanket.

We had lunch and then got wellied, coated and rucksacked up and set off for Lancing. Yesterday I’d noticed an odd looking bird which Ady had dismissed as a thrush but this morning there were loads of them swooping about so Ady and Scarlett had got out the bird book and identified them as fieldfares. Ady didn’t manage to get any decent pictures of them but one of my flickr / twitter mates who lives fairly local did. We saw loads more of them on our walk, they are stripping various bushes of berries. I noticed lots of birds about generally all looking very hungry and a robin was in with the chickens feasting on their layers pellets alongside them. We really must sort out a bird table so we can feed and watch them more.

The walk was lovely, plenty of people out walking and playing in the snow, aswell as clearing it – you could hear shovels scraping echoing all around. Scarlett wanted to know why most of the shops were closed so we talked a bit about Sunday trading – odd to think they will probably be able to shop 24 hours a day by the time they are my age and that 530pm closing, half day Wednesdays and closed on Sundays will be but a distant memory of their mother’s.

Got the bits we needed in Co-Op and loaded Ady up with the rucksack. I was slightly concerned he would tip over backwards but he assured me he could barely feel the load at all thanks to the waist / lumbar support straps on the rucksack – he got it at a car boot sale for 50p back in the summer and it it is huge. I reckon Scarlett could get in it! We walked home a different route and paused for a while in the park. I had a brief moan about Davies who is changing from a child to a pre-teen in small, scary steps every now and then and is testing and challenging before running back and wanting to hold my hand and sit on my lap again. Ady decreed that he needs more time spent playing with children his own age and that we fail to offer him that aspect of what school could provide. I flared up rather – particularly because I think it’s a) not true that we don’t provide that and b) a false rosy picture that Ady is still carrying round from his own school days 35 years ago when he was Davies’ age where boys larked about and smoked behind bike sheds and boys were boys and so on. I ran through what we have planned for the coming week and all the children Davies will see and spend time with and then shut up as I could feel myself getting all defensive and ranty. Sigh.

Back home again – having taken out my frustration with several well aimed snowballs 😉 – I finished the batch cooking from yesterday, which has now been bagged, labelled and frozen 🙂 We have already had 3 dinners from it and now have 9 more dinners in the freezer all from £10 worth of mince, about £2 worth of tinned tomatoes, some onions, our own garlic and herbs (will hopefully be more onions too this year), a couple of bottles of cheap red wine, some bacon, a few sticks of celery and some stock cubes. Probably about £25 for 12 dinners – bargain :). I also made an apple crumble with some well past their prime apples that were being ignored in the fruit bowl for pudding tonight.

Then I came out of the kitchen and Ady went in to make roast dinner. Davies and Scarlett were DSing, both snuggled either side of me on the sofa and helping each other out while I did some more crochet practise and we watched various tv junk on a reality type Sky channel including a fat family wanting to lose weight which spawned plenty of discussion.

Dinner was lovely, as was the crumble and then I read a couple of chapters of before bedtime. Scarlett went off to listen to another Sophie audiobook (she listened to Sophie is six last night and has Sophie Turns Seven tonight. I have the rest of the available audiobooks on order from work for her).

Tomorrow we are plan-less. The usual organiser of the monthly Pulborough Brooks meet up has taken a break til the spring and the women who was supposed to be taking over doesn’t seem to have done so. I’m torn between thinking it will be lovely there for a walk anyway and just going and seeing if anyone else turns up, and thinking it would be equally as lovely to have a day at home with no reason to get up and out. I guess we’ll make a decision in the morning based on snow, what time we get up and what the consenus is between the kids and I.

More snow had fallen overnight so Ady and the kids spent some time in the garden playing this morning. I finally finished some online stuff that has taken way longer than I’d expected it to. The morning sort of drifted by and then it was lunchtime.

The kids wanted to go to a charity shop in Shoreham they’d seen some of these toys for 20pence each when they were there with Ady yesterday. We also needed some milk and potatoes so decided to head out.

The carpark at Asda had been de-snowed by piling it all up in huge heaps – 20 foot or so high so the kids felt obliged to clamber up them and slide back down. It did look fun, I was quite tempted to have a go too.


It had started to snow a bit by the time we came out so we came home and settled in for the evening.

The kids watched Willy Wonka which was on TV and then Total Wipeout while I did some batch cooking and got several loads of stuff ready to freeze. I have a copy of on it’s way to me (being held up by snow somewhere I guess) and have been *really* impressed with the recipes I’ve cooked from it so far (I borrowed a copy from the library first).

Ady has been not drinking during the week but has gone slightly crazy with it being the weekend and has just knocked a glass of brandy over his camera and the dvd remote control which has massive comedy value for me, particularly the fact he just ineffectually mopped at it with a tea towel and then said ‘ah, that’ll do’. Very drunk 😆

Work for me today. Ady had been supposed to attend a meeting this morning so I’d arranged for Dad to have the children in the morning rather than the afternoon but at the last minute yesterday afternoon Ady’s meeting was cancelled due to snow so he was just doing local price surveys (a bit like mystery shopping and a fairly large part of his job role – at the moment, it is forever changing) and able to take Davies and Scarlett with him so had them all day.

I’d been intending to walk to work – I should walk more often really anyway as it is just a 15 minute walk but I am so often laden down with books to return on the way there and books coming home on the way back, not to mention the chance of weather being bad and dark on the way home in the winter that it rarely happens. But I’ve not moved my car from the drive since Tuesday evening and our road and all of the roads I drive to work down are side streets that have not been gritted and are therefore great big ice rinks. But Ady and the children dropped me off (sticking to main roads) instead.

I was greeted with the news that as phase one of a three phase budget slashing exercise the opening hours are being ‘rationalised’ which will cut staff costs aswell as lighting/heating costs of buildings. It all makes perfect sense and as someone who only works 11 hours a week I am unlikely to lose more than about 2 hours a week – if anything at all so I am not personally likely to be affected that much but of course the knock on effect on morale and customer satisfaction might prove more of a fall out. Our opening hours are planned to go from Monday-Friday 930am-7pm (with early closing at 1pm on a Wednesday) and 930-5pm on a Saturday to Monday -Friday 10am-6pm (including Wednesdays) and Saturdays 10am-4pm. As my hours are one morning a week (alternate Wednesdays and Saturdays) 9am-1pm and one full day a week (alternate Thursdays and Fridays) 9am -5pm I will obviously lose at least 45 minutes twice a week on that basis which might put me to 9.5 hours a week rather than 11. But I suspect I will be asked to modify to a greater degree than that and there has been talk of hours being totally thrown up in the air and started from scratch. The first stage is a preference form for staff to request hour cuts and specify which libraries they can work in. Given we have very much built our weekly commitments around my working I am actually quite inflexible and certainly don’t intend travelling to other libraries but in the scheme of things this is fairly minor trauma and certainly won’t be keeping me awake at night while I wait to see what the eventual outcome is.

I did the banking, went to the bank, did some work on my display, was supposed to run Baby Rhyme time but unsurprisingly noone came along to attend it. The library has been shutting at 3pm and 4pm each day this week due to snow and the decision had been made to close at 4pm today so it felt very short given I had a late lunch from 1pm-2pm. I did some time on the Enquiry Desk and the Counter and spent some time chatting to one of the librarians. All of the borrowers coming in today seemed in jolly moods and as one of my colleagues said ‘it feels like that odd time between Christmas and New Year has been extended with the snow and kids off school and the library closing early’. It did very much have that novelty feel about it today.

Ady and the kids came in at about 3.45pm to collect me having had a nice day together including having to be towed out of a snow drift in a garden centre carpark (shades of the Shell Island incident from what I gather), fish and chips for lunch and general enjoying being together :).

We came home and got a fire lit and then Ingird arrived. She is Tom (Ady’s soon to be ex-work mate, pheasant dealer and all round thoroughly nice bloke)’s girlfriend and also works with Ady. Tom has been skiiing and was due back on Wednesday but his flight into Gatwick was cancelled so he came back tonight instead. As we are only half an hour or so away from Gatwick Ingrid came here after work before heading off to go and pick him up. So we had a nice couple of hours of her company :).

I finished reading Davies and Scarlett which we’ve really enjoyed and Ingrid liked so much she asked if she can come round for stories every night :).

Davies and Scarlett went to bed, Ingrid left to collect Tom, Ady and I had baths and ate pizza and I’m looking forward to a complete weekend off with nothing at all planned or arranged or scheduled :).

which for some reason always puts me in mind of Milly Molly Mandy although there is every chance she never actually trudged anywhere.

I woke up this morning and laid for a while before I opened my eyes trying to guess what time it would be. I’d woken when Ady got up but fallen asleep again until it was properly daylight. I could hear the cockerels crowing and decided it was 903am. I was quite staggered when I was utterly spot on to the minute 😯 Wonder if there is career potential in such a skill? 😆

So, got up, woke children, breakfasted them, let the chickens out and fed them and broke the ice on their water, put some washing on, put some bread on and sat down with a cup of tea.

I think we may have had a little more snow overnight but it was bright and sunny out. I decided we’d walk into Lancing offering fresh air and exercise all round, some being out in the snow for the kids and some local shopping for the few bits we needed for dinner too. So I got the rucksack out in order to have both hands free to clutch children if needed and we set off.

We hailed neighbours as we went and spoke to everyone we passed which was nice – the snow certainly seems to have brought out people’s community spirit. We walked across the big park but the snow is now more like ice and even the untouched, virgin snow is actually just six inches of loosely packed ice now. Very pretty in the sunshine glistening away but no good for snowballs or walking over really. The tops of my legs ache from adapting my gait to account for it.

Into the Co-Op for various bits, including five tins and two large bags of onions which my back is still protesting a bit about now but at least counted quite considerably as exercise and load-bearing exercise at that. We had a look in the charity shops and the pound shop before trudging home again. This time we walked through the alleyways as my back was protesting and Davies said he had cold feet. I did berate him that as a nine year old boy in the snow he should be in his element. Once he’d ascertained what ‘in his element’ meant he explained that ‘but my life is so good I get to do whatever I want whenever I want anyway. I understand that all the nine year old boys who are usually in school think this is really cool but for me it’s like my normal life. But colder.’ 😆 😆 While we talked about this Scarlett was busy counting litter (I didn’t point out that there was probably a lot more litter than she could see nestled under the snow) and came up with 17 pieces which she said was sad but a whole load less than when we did our litter walk on that route and declared she was proud of us because obviously our clearing up, putting up displays at the library and being in the paper had made a real difference and people had stopped dropping so much litter :). And you never know, she might just be right, it certainly was a well executed campaign :).

Ady rang just as we were nearing home to say he’d called in for lunch and where were we. I said we’d only be another five minutes or so and he got the tea and hot chocolate on for us :). He’d come home in the company van having been delivering stock locally that the artics couldn’t get in or out to do and been passing on his way back to the office and wondered if I’d like to go back with him to Chichester to the Lush shop to spend my birthday money. Except the van is two seater only. On the spur of the moment I rang my Dad and asked if he would be happy to have Davies and Scarlett for a couple of hours while I went and spent the money they’d given me yesterday. He agreed so the kids and I leapt in the back of the van for the mile drive to my parents. It was pitch dark and excellent fun :). We spent the journey trying to work out where we were in the dark and were really good at left and right turns and going up and down hills but rubbish at gauging straight bits of road which felt way longer than they were in the dark being chucked about. Davies said it was ‘like a rollercoaster in the dark’ and Scarlett said ‘we have *got* to do this more often!’ 😆

Kids safely despatched with my Dad -and my Mum on her way home too- Ady dropped me off in Chichester all alone :). I had a lovely couple of hours with a lot more trudging. Lush were doing a £20 lucky dip bag of Christmas gifts free with every £20 you spent so I spent my £40 and got £80 worth of stuff – the pile of free things is bigger than the ones I paid for – 3 bags full :). The shops started to shut around me from about 330pm though so I rang Ady and he came and collected me. I sat in the car outside his work for a while (luckily the kids had left their DSs in the car from yesterday so I played on Davies’) and then we came home via my parents to collect Davies and Scarlett and have a quick coffee with them.

Mum and Dad have just booked a 3 week holiday in China so were full of that :).

Back home Ady made pancakes for the kids’ tea while I had a lovely bath with lush bubbles, soap, facepack and shampoo :). Then I made Economy Gastronomy chilli con carne for dinner.

I went to bed feeling very blessed with lovely friends, not to mention wishing I’d not signed up to quite so many forums and mailing lists that had all bombarded my inbox with automated birthday greetings moments past midnight :). I was a bit disgruntled about lack of snow mind you.

I woke up about 3am and got a drink and noticed it still hadn’t snowed.

Then Scarlett woke me just before 9am to say ‘HAPPY BIRTHDAY!’ and ‘LOOK AT ALL THE SNOW!’ 🙂

Once downstairs I was presented with cards, gifts including some lovely snuggly (rubber leopard print) pjs and five boxes of luxury chocolate liqueurs (it’s the perk of an after-Christmas birthday, excellent sale pickings :)). I got a bottle of Baileys from my brother and £40 from my parents to spend at the Lush shop (had been very firm about not wanting anything other than Lush stuff and said that part of the fun is choosing my own so any cash for that purpose gratefully recieved 🙂 That should buy me a years supply of nice bath bubbles :)). Davies had also modified a cardboard box into a sort of ‘workstation’ for me including tissue holder and contact lens space 🙂 Scarlett had made me a potion. I am so beloved ;).

Ady brought me three cups of tea and several pancakes and we sat and watched the snow falling prettily down. I had loads more texts and emails and messages from friends and colleagues and phonecalls from both parents – Mum at 10am and Dad bang on 10.10am (the time I was born) which was lovely :).

We watched a kids tv show where the children are in charge of a holiday with their parents and get to decide on activities and ban their parents from doing stuff – they banned their mum from eating chilli sauce and shopping 😆 and made their parents do stuff like white water rafting. We all really liked the look of the crazy pursuits (along with the rafting they did being pulled behind a boat in big rubber rings, jumping off cliffs into water, fishing and powergliding behind a boat). The kids said if they were in charge they’d pick a similar holiday for us and ban me from my laptop (which they did concede I don’t have on holiday anyway) and from drinking tea 😯 Scarlett then decided the tea was harsh and I could have tea after all, but be banned from drinking wine!!! Not sure which I’d miss most – actually I am, I could give up wine but tea would be a real struggle. Maybe if I could start smoking or something I’d be okay…

Davies and Scarlett headed outside to play in the snow and an indoor / outdoor snowball fight ensued. I was inside and na-na-nahing at them through an open window but wasn’t quite quick enough to close it every time so snow came in. Which did at least arm me to throw some back. After Davies had a real bulls eye shot in with snow all over the lounge I gathered it up and went upstairs and showered them from above from the bathroom window 😆 They then caught me by ringing on the doorbell and bombarding me when I opened the front door so I went outside to get revenge :).

Ady came out too and we had a walk up one side of the road and down the other including making snow angels, skidding on the road and chatting to a couple of neighbours. We came back in for hot chocolate and a warm up and then decided to go out. We had planned to go to Chichester or Brighton for the day prior to the snow to have lunch out, spend my Lush money and get a few more bits so decided to drive and see how the roads were and made a decision.

The roads turned out to be pretty dire and so we decided to go into town instead. We thought even if we got to Chichester the Lush shop might be closed anyway (plenty of shops were) and we might then have problems getting home again. At least Worthing is only 3 or 4 miles from home and is walkable home if the roads got too bad.

It was really nice seeing so few cars on the road and so many people out and about walking, pulling sledges, out with all the family. It was like Christmas card scenes and how I remember bits of childhood. Like everyone had decided that just for today nothing was more important than being with their family and having fun in the snow. Loved that my birthday was a bit special for lots of other people too :).

We parked in town and decided to visit my Mum in her new shop (she’s managing a charity shop for a local homeless project charity) as she’d said on the phone she was working for a few hours today. The shop is quite small and very lacking in stock so far (it opened a few days before Christmas so stock is still trickling in and in the process of being sorted and priced etc.) but is well located and nicely fitted out. I think she’ll be really happy there and they have no policy on retiring people at 65 so if she wants to carry on working (which she will – she is 63 this year and has no intention of stopping in 2 years) then she can.

We had a wander round town – Poundland for gloves for the kids (theirs had been soaked in the snow earlier so were drying on the radiator at home. Two pairs for a quid means I was happy to buy them another pair each), a silicone butterfly shaped mould for Scarlett who is into making jelly at the moment, some freezer bags for all the batch cooking I’m doing and a new tin opener as we chucked out ours last night in temper when it messed up opening all four tins of tomatoes. Honestly if your sole purpose of existance is to open tins then you really need to be able to manage that! I got some perfume (Sun, Moon and Stars, I’ve worn it for years but my bottle ran out about 3 years ago and I’ve never been able to justify just buying a bottle of perfume for myself since) and that was it. I actually got a huge buzz out of walking round the shops and realising there was nothing at all I wanted or needed :). Still looking forward to going to Lush though ;).

Back home again for a very late lunch of Christmas food leftovers – fancy meats and cheeses etc followed by my birthday cake (Thorntons toffee cake – yum). Ady put 16 candles on it and I was rather shocked to agree that yes, that had been 20 years ago!

The children had a bath to warm up. They complained it was too hot after they’d got in it so Ady went and gathered an armful of snow and dumped it in – cue great hilarity 😆

A very late tea for Davies and Scarlett followed by a very late bedtime as they were still sat infront of the fire playing while Ady cooked a curry and I had a bath. Lovely dinner for us and lots of lazing around in my new pjs pretending to be a grown up :).

it’s my birthday tomorrow.

Up early with alarm clock assistance this morning as I’d said we’d collect Dad from the MOT centre at 9am after he’d dropped his van off there. I got up and dressed, woke Davies and Scarlett, let the chickens out and broke the ice on their water, did the washing up from last night and hung out one load of laundry and put another load on while the kids got dressed. I’d already got the engine running on my car and the ice on the windows defrosting while I got on with everything else. So we were at the garage before the mechanic was. Dad was most impressed :).

Dad had arranged to ring the garage at midday and as there is cricket on Sky Sports and my Mum wasn’t home giving him licence to sit and watch to his heart’s content he asked to be dropped home again and said he’d ring me later to let me know what time he had to be back at the garage to collect the van. As we drove past our house however a fire engine screamed past us, turned into our road and three firemen ran up the drive of Don and Maureen – our opposite neighbours 😯 so we turned up the next road and came back down our road to see what was happening. David (thank you neighbour) was out deicing his car so I sent him off to find out the gossip. It turned out to be no more than a faulty smoke alarm but David shared the information that it is his birthday today. I said it was mine tomorrow and we wished each other happy birthday before we carried on to drop Dad off home.

Back home again properly Davies and Scarlett played in the garden for a bit, this time bringing in a starfish shaped lump of ice that had frozen in one of their sandpit toys. We put it in the chiller to see how long it might last.

I did some more online stuff in various places – slow and steady :). The bath seat and the saucepans both have takers on freecycle so collection has been arranged – hurrah for less tat in our house :).

Davies did some Xboxing, Scarlett announced ‘I feel Arty’ so got her pens out and did some drawing. I drank tea :).

At 11am we headed out having gathered up audiobooks from Scarlett’s room and books from my pile to go back to the library. I’m not working til Friday (should be in tomorrow but noone should ever work on their birthday IMO) and knew I had a couple of books out with waiting lists for them and had had emails to say more audiobooks were in for Scarlett. I also wanted to get some mince and a couple of other bits so intended going to the Co-Op and the butchers along with the library. Library first, then Co-Op and as they had a special offer on mince we by-passed the butcher and came home. On the way we had much discussion about fair trade, buying local, supporting small businesses, eshewing supermarkets, organic, economical and all sorts of other ethical / moral /financial reasons for the way we shop. Interesting having my thought processes on these things questioned and explaining where my real priorities lie when the chips (made from locally sourced, organic potatoes grown by disabled farmers from an ethnic minority while singing U2 songs while they work) are down.

Home again and I started batch cooking the braised mince in batches ready to seperate and turn into spaghetti bolognaise, cottage pie and chilli con carne.

Dad rang to say his van would be ready at 130pm so I arranged to pick him up at 115pm.

I cooked the kids dinner of leftover toad in the hole with some mashed potatoes (using those same potatoes as mentioned in the chips earlier) and vegetables. What a wonderful Mummy I am, I am, what a wonderful Mummy I am :).

Just had time for a speedy round of toast (and leftover Christmas pate) and a cup of tea before needing to go out again to collect Dad. Scarlett had licked her platter clean but Davies was still eating so we left him here and dashed off to collect Dad, drop him at the garage and come home again.I was rather surprised to learn when collecting him that Frazer was home… all that said I suspect even if Mum was home Dad would still have asked me. Never sure if this is because I am somehow easier for him to ask for a favour as he hates asking anyone (I understand that, also hate asking for favours) or it simply doesn’t occur to him to ask Frazer. Either way seems slightly odd.

Davies still hadn’t quite finished eating but he did eventually and I made them fruit salad for pudding. They played while I carried on internetting having finished braising the mince ready for next stage later.

Then it was swimming time. I’d been reading everyone elses accounts of heavy snowfall and feeling envious and very reluctant to leave the nice warm house and go out in the dark to get wet. But we girded loins and galvanized selves and headed off to the swimming pool. I bought the kids a new swimming hat each as their’s had gone mouldy in the swimming bag. I think theirs were rubber and the new ones are latex, what a difference! Easy to put on, not so pulling on their hair and a much nicer feel – well worth £2 each :).

Scarlett was dispatched (rather reluctantly) at her lesson, Davies went off and managed to make friends with a couple of lads in the pool and I got stuck into my lengths. After four I could really feel not having been for weeks but I managed a full 25 in the first half an hour which keeps me about on track for the 50 in an hour I had worked up to (although I know my second half hour is slower than my first). Scarlett then got in with me and swam a length, then walked alongside the pool pacing me for a length, then showed me her underwater handstands… so I lost some time. I’d been aiming for 35 lengths in 45 minutes (had decided to get out after 45 minutes to get Scarlett and I dried and dressed before Davies’ lesson finished) and managed it with a minute to spare so went for 36. It seemed an appropriate number to move up from and to somehow… ;).

Everyone dried and dressed we dashed home, dropped Davies off with Ady for a bath and toast before Sea Scouts and Scarlett and I went round to the church hall for Brownies. Except it wasn’t happening. There was one other Brownie there who’s mum was sure it was starting back today but as there were no other Brownies or indeed people to run it we deduced it wasn’t after all so we walked back home again.

Scarlett had a bath and some toast while Davies got in his Sea Scout uniform and I drove him up there. Except that wasn’t happening either. Despite Ady insisting they had said 5th January and one other Sea Scout turning up (are you spotting the pattern here?). So we came home.

Ady did suggest they had both been cancelled due to weather forecasts and maybe annoucements had been made at local schools which may well be the case.

So unexpectedly earlier night than planned meant pjs and several stories from ‘how the whale became’ for Davies, Scarlett and I.

I turned 2/3 of the mince into bolognaise which was labour intensive and time consuming but really very worth it – now have 1/3 as bolognaise to freeze and 1/3 plain to turn into chillli on Thursday. Am a convert to the mince treatment at least :). It took longer than I expected to reduce mind you so for once it was me creating a very late dinner.

We had a very brief flurry of snow around 8pm which lasted all of about five minutes and has been long since washed away by the on /off rainfall all evening. Given Ady and I have both booked a days holiday tomorrow and we have no real plans it would have been perfect circumstances to have loads of snow here. I have probably had about equal white birthdays to non-white birthdays so I’m still secretly hoping I wake up tomorrow to a big white world :).

just as well it’s a slow, lazy, rather random one ;).

‘Back to school’ yesterday then. Dad was having his van MOT’d at the industrial estate down the road at 11am and had asked if I’d go and pick him up so he could wait at our house for it to be done. The car took a lot of de-icing and I even had to use the ice scraper as the spray just wasn’t working.

Before going out I’d done some laundry, tried to bake some bread but not been able to find the recipe booklet, made some phonecalls (I thought I’d sorted out Scarlett starting Brownies last year having spoken to the leader, confirmed they had a space for her and she’d promised to ring me back late December to let me know times, start date and so on but I’ve not heard from her and I know Brownies is on a Tuesday so am assuming it restarts this week. I couldn’t find the woman’s number so had to ring the Rainbows leader and get it off her, have left a message on the woman’s answerphone but not heard back. I think we’ll just go round there later tonight when it’s on and see if we can sort it out in person) and cleared off the bookcase of everything that isn’t books. I may have kept the table clear for a whole year but there are certainly other surfaces in the house that collect crap and clutter. The bookcase is one. It mostly had paperwork on it so I filed all of that in the relevant places and have found a folder to keep all the children’s various certificates in – it now contains tickets from all the various shows and places we went to last year, swimming certificates, Badger certificates, Summer reading challenge certificates and various other things like that. I’ve no plan to do anything more than that with them really but if we do find ourselves in a situation where evidence is required at least I have a sheaf of papers to throw at someone. Which actually, in my opinion is pretty much all they are useful for anyway ;).
I also sorted out the kitchen wall that contains a pinboard and white board and is therefore another place that things seem to get put – and removed all the old artwork that was pinned to the kitchen door so Davies and Scarlett have a new blank space to put the next load of pictures they present to us. I listed some saucepans and a baby bath seat on freecycle that I had kept out of the cupboard under the stairs when we found the breadbin (yes, we do still own the breadbin after all, it is now in the kitchen containing bread – I know, how radical are we?!). My plan is to declutter a few small steps at a time until that cupboard is empty of stuff.

So that all felt very efficient.

We collected Dad, he came back here and we sat and drank tea / coffee and chatted about chickens while Davies and Scarlett played outside in the ice testing how thick it needed to be before they could stand on it and how easy it was to break. They came in after about half an hour (at least 25 minutes longer than I’d expected them to last) and I made them hot chocolate to warm up.

They went upstairs to play and wanted to stay here while I ran Dad back to collect his van again so I left them to it and was back in ten minutes to find them singing along to Queen songs at the tops of their voices.

I put a loaf of bread on using an old recipe and then battled with the computer on various tasks. My laptop is on it’s way out and I suspect I had too many windows open and was just asking it to deal with too many processes and tasks at once, so it protested.

More laundry, lunch – a pic n mix from the children with all the various Christmas foods we have left over; twiglets, mini chedders, babybels and finished with a fresh fruit salad meaning they had all their five a day at lunchtime :), more battling with the computer, I read some of my book No Impact Man: Saving the Planet One Family at a Time: Saving the World, One Family at a Time which is excellent, I finished it last night and have really enjoyed reading it.

Davies and Scarlett did some drawing, watched Transformers (Toby apparently loves Transformers so Davies asked if I could get the films so he can watch them and know what Toby is talking about :lol:) and played with the geomags (old faithfuls). Davies and I did some more research on Greenpeace and went through the list on their website about their campaigns and Davies wrote a list out, read it back to me and explained all of the issues and campaigns too. We both learnt stuff there :).

Dinner for the children was more leftovers, this time of roast dinner with more vegetables cooked fresh. I’m determined to get them eating better this year and might try hot lunches rather than dinners for them on the days we are home for lunch.

Ady arrived home and I read the children the first couple of chapters of which were very good and even Ady hung around to listen to. We do love Ted Hughes. Told Davies it was by the same author as Iron Man and Iron Woman and he said ‘oh no wonder it’s so good then!’ :).

Both the children have been dreadful at bedtime for the last couple of weeks with all the late nights and lack of ‘routine’ so they were both packed off to bed at 8pm. Scarlett was asleep by about 930pm (which is fine, actually if they were both asleep by 10pm I’d be quite content with that really) but Davies was still awake when Ady went up to bed just after 11pm. I woke them both just after 8am today though and with more garden playing, swimming lessons and Brownies / Sea Scouts I am hopeful tonight will be even earlier :).

Ady cooked pancakes this morning for breakfast. Actually he’s been cooking them most mornings for the children but today I partook of one too.

Davies had ‘homework’ from Sea Scouts as part of his Global Challenge badge and had to choose an international charity and find out some facts about it. He and Ady had decided to choose Greenpeace so we looked at the form he’d been given to fill out. First of all he learnt how to spell Goddard. He’s written it before but only ever with it spelt out by me. Just as he learnt the days of the week in one ten minute sitting when it was relevant and he felt the need he cracked Goddard in just a few minutes and every so often throughout the rest of the day I asked him to spell it again and he could.

Next he read the form out to me and was pretty fluent knowing most of the words by sight and sounding out the odd word like ‘global’ ‘challenge’ and ‘international’ but not really needing any help other than me agreeing he’d got it right. Practise is definitely required to get him really fluent but it is quite amazing seeing him actually able to read now – gives me courage to carry on leaving Scarlett alone too :). We talked about how you would find out the answers to something you didn’t know and he came up with: asking someone (me actually!), looking in a book, checking the internet, trying to find a film or tv programme about it. We checked the bookcase to see if we had any books on charities or Greenpeace specifically but we don’t (I think we have a copy of Dear Greenpeace kicking around somewhere but I wasn’t going to try and dig that out as I’d get all cross about the state of bookshelves ;)) so we booted up the computer and I asked Davies to do it all with me watching. He said he’d use google and type in Greenpeace – he knew how to spell green but wasn’t sure about peace but he already knows to watch the box and see what drop down suggestions it makes so once he’d got to greenp it came up with it and he knew that was right.

We found out when they started, whether they have any patrons, what they do and ‘any other information’. Davies wrote it all down and was very wary of writing too much when I told him he might have to be able to read it out back rather than just hand it in so went for brevity. We talked about genetic engineering, whaling and I read out the brief overview of Greenpeaces issues. Ady has since looked at it and decided he’s not done enough and needs to do more. Personally I think he’s done as much as he wanted to do; if it proves not to be enough then he’ll know for next time, if it’s about right then he won’t have put effort in he will resent later by doing more. I can see how this sort of task really wouldn’t suit Davies. I’ve said we’ll look at it a bit more tomorrow though if Davies wants to.

Scarlett and Ady went off out, ostensibly to get a joint for roast dinner but with theatrical winks about upcoming birthdays ;). Davies played x box and I sifted through photos online organising my flickr a bit better. It was nice to be snuggled up together on the same sofa while doing our own seperate things. 🙂

My parents had arranged to come over in the afternoon so they arrived around 2pm, followed eventually by Ady and Scarlett returning. We had tea and mince pies and then as Ady had got a very large joint of pork and because I was feeling both generous and slightly wanted to show how straightforward it can be to cook a full roast dinner with trimmings for six people without massive amounts of stress I invited them for dinner.

Mum nipped home to get the Christmas puddings we’d taken over there on Christmas Day but hadn’t been eaten. We had a nice few hours and I got Dad to tell Davies and Scarlett about life when he was their age. He had no electricity, TV hadn’t really been invented, the toilet was outside, the bath was a tin one brought in and filled with hot water warmed on the open fire. All cooking was done on the open fire, as was drying the washing. He said they ate lots of rabbit pie and rabbit stew. The kids asked about evacuation (lots of children from Liverpool were evacuated to North Wales where Dad was), what he got for Christmas (an apple and an orange and they were both put back on the sideboard again once he’d taken them out of the stocking!), rations for sweets and chocolate (‘Chocolate! Chocolate! I didn’t see chocolate until I was in my teens! There was a war on!).

Dinner was delicious if I do say so myself and included parsnips from the allotment which went down well.

The children disappeared upstairs to play and had to be coerced to bed around 9pm with Mum and Dad leaving shortly afterwards. Unfortunately neither child went to sleep and I had Scarlett wailing about a scary audiobook and wanting to sleep in our bed (that was a no! I did go and sit with her til she fell asleep though, poor, very overtired little girl) and Davies was still listening to his radio. Definitely some fresh air and exercise tomorrow along with getting them up a bit earlier to try and break the cycle. Scarlett also needs some more light and frothy audiobooks too.