The amazing non-shouting mother…

was once again in attendance at our house today. It was a concerted and deliberate effort but it really didn’t come so hard to do so somehow we broke the viscious circle today anyway 🙂

The children played with lego pretty much all day on and off which aside from a few foot on lego type injuries made for peace, creative play and nice educationally valuable toys.

While they were playing they watched some Nick Jr, some Class TV and Nightmare Before Christmas – twice! Oh and Shrek 2 again. Scarlett came upstairs with me to get dressed and assist with putting on makeup and then she stayed upstairs in Davies’ room playing with his castle making up stories about dragons and highest rooms in tallest towers (except of course far from the Disney Princess take on such things Tarly is more of a Shrek kinda girl so the princess is likely to beat the dragon up and go on to be Prime Minister than run off into the sunset with her dashing prince – after all the prince would be at work! 😉 ).

I took advantage of them being otherwise engaged to mix up a couple of batches of dough – one for rolls and one for a loaf which took us to about 11.45am at which point my Dad appeared – cunningly well timed for lunchtime! 😉 Davies has been after making jam tarts all week so I made up some pastry and let him do the rolling out, cutting out and jam filling (well with some assistance), got him to set the timer and let him open the over door to check them a couple of times to see if they were ready. Davies always takes responsibilty really seriously actually and we’ve been doing lots of letting him do stuff Tarly is still too small / young to do as sometimes the age gap between them feels non existant and I’m aware that is more because we’re all at home all the time than any real smaller gap than there should be between them. We’re letting him stay up a weeny bit later than her at the moment too – which is no big deal as she falls asleep by 7 at the very latest anyway so she doesn’t know but he feels very mature and special. 🙂

So we had fresh baked rolls followed by jam tarts for lunch, Dad was most impressed at my housewifelyness and we joked about it being all I’d ever dreamt of since girlhood 😉 and chatted generally as much as the children would allow. Nice to see him though and the children were all over him so that was good – I like them having a close relationship with him – when he’s not teasing Tarly or being concerned that Davies is not ‘hard’ enough and should be in school to ‘toughen him up’ he is excellent with them and Davies in particular is very good at drawing him into educational conversations where he ends up ‘teaching’ him stuff ;-). Nice to watch him playing the grandee!

He headed off around 3pm and then I spent some time wrestling with my old laptop and printer/scanner set up, eventually uninstalling and reinstalling all the hardware and software for it until I finally got it to work. Ady’s mother had passed some scanned photos of him as a child to Chris to give to Ady and he wanted them copied so he could see if he could print them off at work on the A3 printer but as they are scans of scans of pictures from the 1960s the quality is crap. We got Sky magazine in the post and there is a kids mag in with it which we gave to Davies to look at and there was a Wallace and Gromit competition in it. You could enter online so we went to the website and you could actually enter all the competitions in one go – about 15 or so. So I read them all out to Davies and he not only answered them all (mostly either kids tv trivia – like what shape are Spongebob’s pants? Or stuff like what doesn’t rhyme with Green? bean, mean, seen, potatoes.) and also managed to select A, B or C by working out what the first letter of the right answer would be and finding the word that started with it. I know there are many children out there his age and younger far ahead in their reading but he really has gotten to where he is in his own sweet time and whilst I might have sneakily put stuff infront of him for him to get learning by osmosis apart from a brief dalliance with 100 EL way way back we’ve not really done any alphabet stuff. I don’t think I could have seen it through to the great ages of 9 or 10 that some autonomous HEers have managed to have faith that ‘it will happen in it’s own time’ for but I’m glad my assurances to my Dad and Ady that ‘it will come’ are starting to hold true. Hope he wins something from one of the competitions too! 😉

Not entirely sure what happened to the rest of the afternoon but suddenly Ady was home and the children were eating their tea and that was their day gone. Scarlett went off to bed, Davies stayed up and watched Masterchef then Ady took him up to bed and he fell straight asleep too. Regular readers (as opposed to the rest of you Johnny come latelys!) may recall that we have a friend who split up with his long term partner last year and is very quickly getting married to his new love. We had yet to meet her despite the wedding being the day after Melrose so tonight he brought her over to meet us. Apparantly we were high on the list of people he was nervous of bringing her to meet and she was scared of meeting (well I say we, actually he said me specifically!) but she actually seemed very sweet. We rushed to get out dinner cooked and eaten (and failed actually, they arrived while we were still eating) before they got to us so that was a bit of a Challenge Anneka moment. They headed off around 10pm ish, Ady’s gone to bed and I’ve been very happily playing at database creation on the camps list 🙂