One word? When seven would do…

Was had here today.

Up horribly early before 7am and spent ages snuggled up on the sofa with both children on my lap debating what to do and feeling all nostalgic watching Cbeebies!

Roused ourselves and the kids put James and the Giant Peach on while I went through all the various emails and websites I had saved for Halloween references and pulled out details for games for the party. I’m concerned that I might be scaring people off of coming with all the organisation but please rest assured it is not going to be any sort of military scheduled event, I just want to get everything plotted and prepared in advance so that Ady and I can actually enjoy it rather than feeling obliged to run around hostessing (well OK, I am not very likely to do that anyway, but I’d quite like Ady to relax a bit too!). If anyone wants to come along, find a corner and just sit and chat to friends that will be fine and you will not be dragged into the middle of the room to participate in a Halloween themed conga 🙂 and if you’d rather participate in the general socialising without the full on party experience perhaps you could sneak back to our house and catch up on your sleep 😉

I then had a bit of a rant at them generally about tidying up after themselves, looking after their stuff and putting things away properly. The upshot of that was we all went into the playroom and dragged out stuff from the cupboards and put it all back again in the right places. I get really hacked off about this on several levels. The first is that it simply irritates me beyond belief to not have stuff put back away properly. I am not hugely tidy and houseproud BUT stuff does have a home and if it is returned to it after use then I am less likely to be asked repeatedly ‘where’s my…..?’, I also just loath lack of respect for belongings – either one’s own or other peoples. If I have something then I look after it, I place value on it and I expect the same of the children. They get an awful lot of ‘stuff’ my kids and I don’t want them to lose sight of being grateful for it and treating it well just because they might know there is more ‘stuff’ coming sooner or later. Anyway, they seemed to listen and we had a fairly pleasant time tidying it up and putting it back into some sort of order.

After watching Wallace and Gromit again we headed off to the Wizard store. I didn’t tell the children but I went intending to buy some cheap plasticine and have a bash at making the characters with them. We did get the plasticine and a couple of other bits like some Christmas activities to stash for a later date (like, erm, December!), some craft stuff like crepe paper and tissue paper to prevent me from making a huge Baker Ross order which will escalate into lots of money, a fuzzyfelt-alike alphabet and numbers set (as yet not known about to the children) and a couple of other bargain basement bits and bobs to be brought out at a later time in the manner of a magician and a hat and a rabbit!

Got home to find Ady there with some lunch ready (he’d rung to check where we were and knew we were on our way home) which was nice 🙂 He headed back off to work and the children had an autonomous hour or so playing with a plastic firefighters set and then upstairs with the fort/castle. All seemed to be fairly peaceful and they played nicely together. I’ve been listening to Scarlett talking the last couple of days and realised that under my nose she has gone from stringing words together pretty well to actually talking in complete sentences with all the little joining words there too. She has the funniest conversational words in her vocab which for some reason seem really quaint coming from a 2 yo. She is almost constantly asking what words say everywhere she sees something written and is already aware of whether something is a letter or a number somehow. Amazing period of development this age 🙂 She also totally threw me later with her drawing skill but more on that later.

About 3pm I decided to turn the computer off for a while as I was starting to compulsively check blogs every few moments and even ended up reading some of the ones I’ve not visited for ages – and in some instances remembered why I don’t read them 😉 so I printed off a load of skeleton bits from a website for a Halloween game and started to do some drawings to make some flash cards for a themed memory games. Plugging the laminator in and getting pens out was the siren song to the children who shot downstairs like the Pied Piper had come in with his instrument and joined in. Davies did a couple of really good pictures – a spooky house with red grass, bats flying around, a ghost peering out of a window and various other features. He then drew a vampire, a ghost and a skeleton. I persuaded him to write his name on all of them and wrote out vampire, ghost, skeleton and he was able to work out which was which but refused to copy them onto his pictures. Baby steps though! He then asked me how to write START so he could do a spooky maze. With a fair bit of guidance he more or less worked out what letters it needed, wrote them himself on a scrap piece of paper and then wrote them on his maze and drew it with scary characters down every wrong turning. Finally he drew Wallace, Gromit and some sheep and we laminated them.

Scarlett meanwhile totally staggered me by producing a drawing of a person which I would have mistaken for one of Davies’ drawings. She talked herself / me through it as she drew and started with a head, then did the face, then the body, legs, arms and hands. I should have photographed it at that stage as it was excellent. I didn’t though and inspired by Davies’ spooky house she then drew stuff like a fence and a gate and then coloured it in, all of which was very good but meant that unless you had each bit pointed out to you it had lost its instantly recognisable-ness which had so amazed me. Plenty more time though 🙂 I did some cutting out, laminating, more cutting out, drew some pumpkins, witches, ghosts, bats etc and then realised I needed to back the drawings otherwise the pictures were visible through the paper so did a little logo to go on the back like playing cards have 🙂

Ady came home and found us all still sitting drawing, so he sorted the kids tea out while I badgered them into tidying up and eating and then bathed them.

There have been small incidents of disharmony but really we’ve had a lovely at home day today. I feel like I’ve achieved quite a bit and spent some time really doing stuff with the children too.

Tomorrow is Mad Wednesday but we currently have nothing planned for Thursday either so we might just try another day like today then too.