Hurrah, hurrah and thrice hurrah!
So a rocky start, with a wobbly middle covered in a smooth and creamy milk chocolate!
Ady appeared home just as we were about to leave for the garage so he followed us and brought us home again which saved the walk back from the garage. 🙂
Had only been home about 20 minutes when the garage rang to say they had finished and it had passed!! 🙂 🙂 And slightly curious as last years garage had told me when they MOTd it that it had barely scraped through on the exhaust and it really, really needed sorting. It’s been to Scotland, Manchester at least 3 times, Devon, Dorset and Cornwall on seperate occassions, Suffolk, Birmingham and all the shorter trips to Reading, Hailsham and round and about and seems to have cured itself as this garage didn’t even mention it 😉
Rang Ali to check her progress on the epic journey to our house (about once every six visits or so Ali and Freya make the long trip over here which requires a walk to the station from their house, a change of trains and then a walk to our house from the station, repeated again in reverse on the way home – a good 3 hours travelling for a 3 hour visit. In comparison we drive there to their house in about 20 minutes! She was still on the first leg so we set off for the garage to collect the car.
Scarlett was adamant she wanted to walk and flatly refused to use her pushchair, which as I am trying to wean us all off it I went with. She did pretty well, its about 2 miles and we were well over half way before she wanted carrying. So we compromised on walking a while, then carrying a while. Got to the garage to find the MOT was even cheaper than I had been expecting (I thought MOTs were a standard fixed charge but it was advertised as £44 something at the garage I had first booked it into and they only charged me £40! Hurrah again. But Ady and I did speculate on whether this was due to me carrying Scarlett into the garage which I later realised would have exposed a large amount of my bra. Pondered further whether showing my pants too would have reduced the cost further and actually infact whether I should ring back and offer various states of undress to see if I could earn some cash!). So we drove home.
Tarly has really struggled with being up since 4am, the walk and is still quite snotty so she fell asleep for a brief period of time and was still very grumpy about being woken up by me when Ali and the Book People order arrived together.
Ali and I were also both suffering from lack of sleep (Ali had been going to bed at 4am when I had been woken up), Freya was also not on top form and Davies is still slightly zombie-fied from the weekend so we were not the most animated and lively of company for each other.
Kids played with the plastic animals, Davies did life cycles of caterpillars/butterflies and frogs for Ali, Scarlett impressed us with her dinosaur identifying skills, Freya played upstairs for a bit then spent ages shut in the bathroom (a taste of years to come Ali?!), they ate most of their sandwiches, we ate all of our pesto pasta, we all ate some sweets to try and perk ourselves up artifically!
The game of russian roulade (anyone else watch that?) I had been playing with the children by leaving Alison’s mini beads still on their board designs on the windowsill by threatening them with all sorts of punishments if they touched them instead of just moving them to somewhere safe and out of reach went horribly wrong when Freya got to them before I had the chance to threaten her, sorry, move them 😉
Fortunately we all know each other well enough to just sit and not feel the need to be super scintillating company all the time. Which was just as well!
So they headed off for the return part of their epic journey (I felt as though I probably should have given them a hanky on a stick with a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese), we returned in to pick up the hama beads, tidy up the animals and open the Book People order. Which was a couple of sets for Ady for Christmas, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and some activity books which the children got stuck straight into. Tarly had a princess sticker book and Davies a dinosaur one which he has made an excellent dinosaur picture with.
So it was a fairly low key end to a very stressy day. My parents have arrived now for dinner, so much as my inclination is to bugger off to bed I will have to sparkling, witty and hostessy while cooking dinner 🙁
Well I left my knickers in my car once (think I blogged it) and I didn’t get any discount!
You need a day of rest my girl! But not tomorrow. BTW 10am!!!!!!!! It’ll be tough but I’ll do my best.
Comment by Roslyn — 10 October 2005 @ 8:58 pm
Phew!
Let me know the garage and I’ll drive mine up there next year- £800 mine cost last time (well, not me exactly…)
Comment by Heather — 10 October 2005 @ 9:32 pm
Passing an MOT always good – i find sitting i their waiting room with 4 irate children works well 😉
Comment by Merry — 11 October 2005 @ 12:09 am