I *think* I caught up on some sleep last night – I know I was in bed before 10.30 and I know I didn’t actually get downstairs this morning til 9am, but I am also pretty sure I was up at least twice in the night to Scarlett and I don’t feel particularly refreshed and revived. I do feel the best I’ve felt in a couple of weeks though so I’m hopeful I am finally out of the other side of the GirlFlu.
So first thing before I even switched the computer on I had a hissy fit about the state of the house generally. The Christmas decorations felt like they were simply drawing attention to the mess and clutter rather than being all festive and cheery so I went into the playroom, dragged everything out of the cupboards and off the surfaces and then tidied it all away again. I would imagine that Ady has already filled the cleared surfaces again having been home for nearly 3 hours but for a brief time it looked quite crisp! I also cleared and chucked in the recycling a fair amount of stuff from the lounge although it still needs further sorting. I think as Ady is off work between Christmas and New Year and we have no particular place to be with no money to spend there if we went we might well do a sort of grand house tidy really. There will be (admittedly smaller than usual but still here just the same) new piles of plastic to find homes for and we have plans to redecorate at least two of the rooms early in the new year (lounge and Davies’ bedroom – we already have the paint) so that would be a good time to blitz the whole house really.
Anyway I felt fairly industrious and worthy about doing a good hour and a half housework and also making a small but definite inroad into the laundry mountain threatening to eat us in the night, so that was good. Davies still has no clean long pjs though, so I think a Davies pj wash must be tomorrows priority ;-).
The children did lots of TV ed while all this was going on, Scarlett came in and ‘helped’ me tidy for a while which was probably more of a hindrance if I’m honest ;-). She did do a good job of at least moving stuff from one room to another when directed though, even if I then had to go into each room and sort them afterwards. Davies played with the geomags and made all sorts of things – I really like the geomags actually, they both play with them for ages, learn all sorts of things accidentally about shapes, magnets and so on and are forced to be quite imaginative when limited to straight line shapes. Tarly made me a necklace with two different ‘charms’ to hang from it, a diamond and a triangle, and then demonstrated how I could change them whenever I wanted and how the ‘necklace’ undid at the back. Which for some reason put me in mind of a present I had bought with birthday money one year which was a watch with 7 different coloured plastic circles to change it to match whatever you were wearing – I *loved* that watch!
I had intended to walk along with the children to the post office next – I’ve got a couple of Christmas cards to post to Ireland and New Zealand (have prob missed the NZ deadline actually) but as they were not dressed and were not really interested in going I decided we’d do it tomorrow instead so had my half hour online time while they tidied up the geomags under my direction!
Lucy then surprised me by arriving about 15 minutes earlier than planned. I am so used to all my friends being late for everything I tend to allow half an hour after the stated time before I even attempt to shove stuff under the sofa in preparation for them arriving! 😉 We had a really nice couple of hours with them although I ended up sending Davies upstairs to his bedroom to play for a bit. Rebecca is 3 in March so Tarly is her obvious playmate and indeed with Davies out of the way (he was playing with Scarlett in one of their noisier games which simply scared Rebecca off from playing with them at all, made them both fairly boisterous and was drowing out me and Lucy trying to talk) the two of them went off to Tarly’s room to play with the dolls, the dressing table and glittery make up and be thoroughly girlie! Not something I’d normally do and indeed one of the things I usually celebrate is that they don’t tend towards their stereotypical obvious friends, but I thought Davies had done pretty well for friendship and socialising at Okehampton where Tarly had maybe missed out a little so it was nice to see her really enjoying playing with another little girl in a way she rarely gets to do. Davies was actually far happier playing alone with his castle and micro machines for a while uninterupted by Scarlett in the end so it was a bit of a win:win as it turned out.
Lucy had her usual saved up load of questions – I feel like her guru! 😉 She took away a couple of books I had on parenting with more than one child and sibling relationships and we talked through a few things about that and feelings about not having as much time as before for the older child and at the same time worrying that the younger one never gets that individual time and attention. All of those frets which I’d pretty much forgotten I’d ever had but I know I spent lots of time thinking about when Tarly was small. Also had further chats about HE. She is feeling very much at crunch time and getting pressure from other friends and family to get Rebecca at nursery in the new year. She is very convinced by HE but not confident enough to feel she could convince others so she’s planning to join EO and a couple of the local groups in the new year to meet more people doing it so she doesn’t get accused of doing it on the basis of only knowing me – which in fairness would be quite accurate atm as she’d never heard of it before we got back in contact again although it did answer lots of her questions when she did hear about it. I’ve directed her at the blogring too so she can see that other ‘almost normal’ people do it too!
Anyway, they left and we had a post visitors and pre visitors tidy up then we sat and read some library books together I’d found in my earlier tidying frenzy and then finally got round to reading some of the books in the advent calendar with books. So we did some number spotting, read the first seven books and chatted about them (they are just miniature books with 3 pages each, so far we’ve met Scrooge and learnt a bit about him) and then hung those on the Christmas tree – which look good as it was a little bare now most of the chocolate decorations have been swiped off it and I’ve still not got round to making any biscuits to put on it! We should catch up to tomorrow’s date with it tomorrow and then I’m pretty sure we’ve got a dvd somewhere with some version of the story on it which I can see being a hit with Davies at least.
Mel, Liam and Lily arrived as we found book 8. Mel and I managed a fair bit of catching up while the boys went upstairs and played and Scarlett introduced Lily to the joys of her dressing table and glitter make up and painted nails!! So they had some sort of beauty salon going on while the boys were particularly rowdy. They all ate most of their tea and then all leapt all over Ady at once (poor man!) and finally left after a very boisterous game involving all of them and most of the contents of the dressing up box around 7pm.
Both of our two are now in bed fast asleep, all socialled out! I’ve been fairly impatient and shouty at the children inbetween visitors today, Davies in particular has been doing attention seeking silly tricks and then getting yelled at. I’m quite happy to put it all down to tiredness, illness and general ‘stuff’ but I’d still really rather not have him showing out and me reacting badly. Tomorrow night we are off to see Shakin Stevens just the two of us so that should help to get us back on track again. Funny how I never feel the need to rebalance my relationship with Tarly – she’s so much more resiliant about being told off! 😉