Hurrah for it being the last early Sunday morning for a while! 🙂 I’m going to try and change Davies’ swimming lessons to a weekday evening too so that not every single weekend will be spoken for come September. Ady and Scarlett decided to go for a walk while I watched Davies’ swimming lesson – quite possibly in preparation for another of Nic’s Crap Swimming Lessons Related Rants 😉 having sat wide eyed and shocked last week at it while I went off on one in reception in full view of about 20 people while they both sat trying to pretend not to be related to me. Davies is always quite proud of the fact I’ll shout at anyone if I feel justified in doing so so is quite happy to stand alongside me pointing at me and saying ‘that’s my Mummy!’ 😆
Anyway today was the ‘test’ day really, I’d checked with Dad yesterday that he is up for paying for lessons again for Davies come September, Davies insists he wants lessons, I want him to have lessons as I consider swimming a life skill which is worth being taught rather than picking up as you go along and in full accordance with our autonomous learning principles (for anyone wanting to pick a fight ;)) getting in outside tutorage for something that is beyond me and has been specifically requested by one of the children it totally how I aim to approach HE. There are not many things I consider beyond the combined forces of me, the library, google and a good field trip but swimming is one of them! So fully primed for the idea that whether Davies got something out of this weeks lesson or not would be a big decided in whether he was coming back in September or not Davies set out to prove my theory that if you try hard enough you can do anything ;).
And do anything he did :). The teacher this week was the original girl who is ok, certainly better than last week but not as good as the chief instructor. But Davies was on a roll, with only the occassional glance at me he did everything he was asked, paid rapt attention to her every word, really pushed himself and did brilliantly. 🙂 There are some things he really excells at – going underwater, having a go at anything asked of him, jumping in, holding buoyancy aids in the right places – and others he struggles with – leg positions and kicking in the right way generally being the chief ones. Better than that he clearly really enjoyed it too, I could see various things clicking into place for him this week. The instructor spent the last 10 minutes trying to write things down and whether or not she’d been primed about the angry ginger swimming lesson mum or not I don’t know but she actually said to me ‘oh it was really hard to teach and write all these things out at the same time’ to which I replied that she’d done a really good job and continued praising Davies for doing so bloody well. The things she was writing turned out to be a questionnaire about the swimming lessons, which I will be taking great pleasure in completing with my usual honesty 😉 and a slip to say Davies Goddard has passed swimming level one and can buy a badge for £1.95 at reception if this slip is handed over :shock:. Davies was blissfully unaware of this, is very unmotivated by stickers / badges anyway and I’m buggered if we’ve got £2 to spare for a badge which I don’t actually feel is any mark of achievement other than turning up and paying £60 for the term and wouldn’t know where to sew on anyway. FFS you’d think they’d give the bloody things to the kids rather than try and get another couple of quid out of each family 🙄 So I’ll be completing the feedback questionnaire, trying to find out where Scarlett is on the waiting list and signing Davies up for another term on the understanding that he gives it the same level of effort that he did today, but I really could see some level of value for money today thinking back to where he was at Easter when he started, and of course a weekly lesson for Davies is still cheaper than just a weekly swim for Davies and I let alone paying for Scarlett and Ady to come in too and given none of us are wanting any sort of teacher / pupil relationship with each other it does seem to be the way forward for now.
We left there and as the weather was nice we headed off to the car boot sale. We had planned to go to the New Forest today as we’re camping there in a couple of weeks and had an idea to go and peep at some campsites but the roads being what they are just now with flooding made it seem a crazy idea to go driving off so we stayed closer to home instead. We had a really good day at the car boot sale, getting a box of sea creature animals, a Where’s Wally puzzle, a china hen on a basket for the kitchen to keep eventually home laid eggs on that I’ve been keeping an eye out wanting one of since we got the chickens and finally got today for £1.50, a toy pony for Scarlett, some Tom & Jerry notepaper and envelopes for Davies who’s been wanting to write to Marcus ever since Scarlett got a letter from Alex, and a couple of other bits and bobs. Total spend about £3.70 I think.
As we left we bumped into my old boss from my Recruitment Consultant days and her two children – a boy aged nearly 9 and a girl a month younger than Scarlett. Alex and I always got on really well and have stayed in touch through odd emails and Christmas cards each year although she only lives here in Worthing. She’s had a rough time since we both left the recruitment agency, finishing with the partner she was with when I first met her to start a fairly torrid relationship with a taxi driver some 20 years older than her, which resulted in her son, some crap experiences and him eventually moving to Spain, then she met a man who seemed lovely, had their daughter and bought a house together, but they are in the process of splitting up and selling the house. She has been back working full time in Recruitment again and her daughter starts school in September. It was a very brief five minute catch up but lovely to see her even if her life is as direct a contrast to mine as you could imagine. We made promises to catch up soon, so hopefully we’ll manage it.
We came home and as the weather was still holding out well Ady made lunch and I got a bucket of soapy water and hand scrubbed the groundsheet which still had Kessingland mud caked on it. I then made a start on cleaning up the flysheet which was particularly bad around the porch opening before deciding that it would be far easier to clean and indeed dry if it were pitched, so I got the poles out and put it up in the garden before giving it a good scrub and leaving it to dry. Job well done :), and I packed it all away again this evening ready to be used on Tuesday night.
We spent the afternoon either outside where the chickens free ranged all day or inside watching Doctor Who, applying nit treatment to Scarlett and I who had both been itching although we found nothing at all on either of us and I’ve deduced that my itching is down to using hair gel the last few weeks since I had my hair cut to help it curl rather than frizz and Scarlett’s is due to me talking about nits a lot. We were both very thoroughly treated though, so if there was anything lurking it won’t be lurking any more. I sat and did the Where’s Wally puzzle with Scarlett ‘helping’ and Davies and Ady working on writing a card to Marcus. This took a very long time with Davies working out how to spell ‘To’ (which he knows pretty well from doing so many birthday cards) and ‘Marcus’ – he got as far as M A R C and then stumbled on which letter started the ‘US’ sound getting hung up on ‘OS’ rather than ‘US’ so we left it there as it was dinner time but he is starting to get the idea of spelling words I think. 🙂
The children had dinner, there was an unpleasant episode with Scarlett which I’ll put down to tiredness and possibly lots of socialising this week giving her new tactics in expressing her cross-ness but it all got sorted out and apologized for. Ady bathed the children while I took the tent down and got dinner on. We’ve watched another Torchwood tonight and had a lovely roast beef dinner. Tomorrow is a lazy day with nothing planned other than packing up ready to head north on Tuesday morning for a FP meet up overnight. No MM, no Beavers and no work for me til Friday. Let’s hope the weather holds 🙂
Well done D! We have to pay for our badges too – most of the time I don’t have any money or C forgets.
It is much better not having things on the weekend.
Comment by layla — 23 July 2007 @ 7:15 am
I’ve bought them all and never sewn them on- most people sew them on their swim towels which has been my plan but it’s yet to happen!
Comment by Roslyn — 23 July 2007 @ 7:45 am
well done D!
Will you reply to my emails woman! Assuming you got them.
Comment by Em — 23 July 2007 @ 8:02 am
Well done D!
I’m on a mission to avoid early anything, so feel very vicariously glad for you that that’s finished.
I sort of read quickly and thought the chickens had come in to watch Dr Who.
Comment by Ali — 23 July 2007 @ 9:38 am
Glad the swimming lesson was better. I guess they have to do a good job of the last one to ensure next term fees.
Sounds like S has picked up on some of Rebeccas dreadful behaviour. Sorry.
Comment by Lucy — 23 July 2007 @ 10:37 am
LOL Lucy – or Freya’s?
As long as it wasn’t Archie from soft play
Comment by Ali — 23 July 2007 @ 12:39 pm
Def not Archie from soft play 😆 Not worth rehashing as I’m sure it’s not something I’ll want to read back over in years to come but also not something I wanted to gloss over pretending every day is wonderful either. 🙂
Actually the more I think about the swimming badges the more it pisses me off that they charge for them, espcecially £1.95 – HUGELY overpriced! Beavers and Badgers don’t charge and having worked in the mail order sales office of the Scout Association where all the badge secretaries badge orders are processed for Beavers, Cubs and Scouts I know both the cost and the retail prices for those. I just think that if you pay £60 for lessons and they feel the need to use badges to show achievement then that should be in the price of the lessons. As I said, Davies hadn’t been interested when she talked about badges anyway and if I’d offered him the 2 quid for a Happy Meal or a swimming badge he’d have gone for the Happy Meal anyway 😆 It’s not even as though they were a proper badge of achieving anything other than turning up each week because every child in the class got the slip. I could undertand being awarded a badge to show you could swim X metres and being proud of that for example, a bit like my hard won medal at Sparkys – given for pure achievement 😉
Comment by Nic — 23 July 2007 @ 2:46 pm
Do they follow a scheme? I thinks it’s the Kellogs/ASA one up here, I was actually quite impressed with it; much better organised than I remember from learning to swim. I’m sures C will be much better than me – I couldn’t hope to teach the strokes/style stuff & he absolutely refuses to let Si help 😉
We had one useless teacher but I go for the ones who shout loudest now 😉
Comment by layla — 23 July 2007 @ 3:57 pm
Though I do know that Beavers is a group activity I still read that last sentence as though you were celebrating the absence of furry, dam building creatures. What with all this flooding it is surely only a matter of time before some blogger or other gets afflicted.
Comment by Allie — 23 July 2007 @ 8:48 pm
glad swimming better.I gave SB a good stroke and dive lesson when we went swimming so she at least has an idea of what to do! but i am more school-marmy!!
Comment by HelenHaricot — 23 July 2007 @ 9:21 pm