Baby it’s cold outside…

snow is a-flurryin’ but I can’t do Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow as a title because it just reminds me too much of Alison’s birthday 🙂

A pretty good day today. We had to be out early so I managed to get lunch made and packed and the children and me out of the door not that long after 9am, I think the children were still in shock at being out of pjs even at 11am ish! We were off to an Activeo event which was drama. We had gone once before, way way back last year, or possibly even the year before and the children had quite enjoyed it. It is very cheap (as in a quid a child!) which is probably what will convince me to return as frankly it was fairly uninspiring…

The woman who runs it is apparantly ‘HE sympathetic’ which to me seemed that instead of getting pissed off with the 7 and 8 year olds who basically ignored her she was tolerant and patient because lots of the parents of these children are all for free-ranging them, taking them seriously and allowing them to conduct themselves with no basic manners at all just incase it might stunt their development – or something! Can you tell I’ve been mixing with the area of the HE community that makes me turn on all my educated and closely cherished views on taking children seriously (the concept rather than the actual TCS way) and be out there campaigning for them to be send to military school at age 7 and not let out until they’ve turned into good citizens with something to offer society aged 18! Because OK I accept that if something is not interesting then children should not be ‘made’ to sit and listen to it but I would expect my children NOW at just 3 and 5 to show respect to someone who was clearly ‘leading’ something they were participating in, to listen when someone else is talking and having been asked politely to stop a certain behaviour to bloody well do it if it was a rational and sensible request. Argh! Anyway this puts me in mind of a blog I sometimes read which always puts my back up so I’ll stop ranting, based on the fact I am probably not even making my own point let alone sense to anyone else! 😉

So we arrived early, wandered round in the bitter cold for a while and then finally got let in when the teacher and the organiser of Drama arrived (had forgotten we were on ‘HE time’ so 10am prompt actually means any time after about quarter past 😉 Then we went into the first session which is for under 5s. There was me and my two, Julie with Jack and Maisie, another mother with a baby and a 2.5ish yo girl and 4 yo girl twins who were there without parental supervision. We did sitting in a circle and rolling a ball to each other calling out a colour, then rolling a ball and calling out an animal, then makingourselves tall, small, spikey, wide and so on, then moving round the room to music making shapes (reminded me somewhat of a dance we used to do to the Tetris music that got released as a single when we used to stand in the cages at my frequented nightclub and throw Tetris shapes 😉 Ooh flashback to skinnier days in unsuitable clothing having drunk too many diamond whites! 😉 ). Then she got out some ‘dressing up’ stuff – I use the term loosely as it was more straw hats and various sizes pieces of material – and the children had to choose stuff to wear and move about accordingly – Davies had 4 incarnations actually – a scarecrow, a cowboy, a farmer and finally a peacock. My wunderkind 😉 It was interesting!

Julie then took Jack and Maisie and Scarlett out and I stayed in with Davies while the next age group came in 5-8 yos. I think there was 4 more boys, two small girls and a bigger girl with learning difficulties. The boys were sort of 6-8 age and the two smaller girls were both around Davies’ age. She was not sure about Davies staying but I said I’d like him to, unfortunately he’d been wobbling slightly anyway, what with the others trooping off to do some colouring (which he decided he’d rather do instead) and the group of other children all knowing each other he was nervy anyway. The activity was basically the same with slight changes – the ball rolling was things like ‘something you’d eat for breakfast’ and ‘a country’. Actually I was more impressed with Davies who had his turn last and came up with ‘rice crispies with milk’ when all of the others had copied the teachers suggestion of ‘toast’ but just changed the spread. I then backed away to the edge of the room while they did some miming, some splitting into pairs and mirroring each others hand movements, some more moving round the room to music and finally repeated some text after the teacher and tried to make their voices have emotion in them.

The teacher came over to me about half way through and said she thought Davies was right inbetween the two groups but I explained it was more about him not knowing the children than not being able to do the activities and also that I was keen to seperate him from his little sister and cousins rather than hold him back with them. As mentioned she really struggled to contain the group anyway and I was not hugely impressed with what she had them doing. I know nothing about drama really – I was in all of the school productions but always in the chorus doing singing and dancing roles so I could be being way too critical but when we had a drama teacher come in to WAG once he was excellent at bringing in a huge age range of children and had even the shyest children participating. It is only £1 but perhaps that’s all it’s worth! There is a Drama thing here in Worthing every Friday afternoon so I might look at that and see if it is feasible to take Davies along without Scarlett and see if that is better.

Anyway, after that we had a play in the park outside – Julie had already taken the younger 3 out there and they were all looking purple of nose and watery of eye so after about half an hour more I felt at risk of losing digits due to frostbite and we headed back to Julies for lunch. We went via a little farm shop place run out of a shed in someone’s garden. All organic fruit and veg but sold at pretty much supermarket non-organic prices. I didn’t realise til Julie paid and we were leaving how cheap it was acually but given it is 20 miles away from us it wouldn’t be cost effective to go back really. Looking forward to pick your own re-opening in the Spring though. The children all got out of the cars and ‘helped’ Julie select her stuff though – as ever despite the fact they don’t actually eat them my children’s many trips round supermarkets with me meant they knew the names of everything! We also caught some ‘natural world in action’ education too when the semi-feral cat that was hanging about caught a mouse. She toyed with it for ages and finally ate in. I thought Davies might be disturbed by it (Scarlett was merely fascinated!) but he was quite stoic about it all and accepted it as ‘food chain stuff’.

Chris arrived home shortly after we got back to their house so the children played (noisily – it was mostly bouncing on Jack and Maisie’s bed I think!) while I helped them with some stuff on their new laptop – installing Norton which they’d bought and actually connecting them to the internet – oh how a whole new world is about to open up to them! 😉 Then they brought out a risk assessment form they have had through for one of Chris’ gardening job contracts so I helped them fill that out (I was SuperNic there today, wearing my pants on the outside!) and we headed for home around 3.30pm.

On the way home we listened to Charlie & The Chocolate Factory soundtrack (the original) and we were discussing the new vs the old Oompa Lumpa songs and we created some fusion ones of both:

Augustus Gloop, Augustus Gloop
The great big greedy nincompoop
what are you at getting terribly fat?
What do you think will come of that!!!

And;

Chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing all day long
The way that a cow does

Ah it was fun 🙂

Soup for their tea and then Ady arrived home so I shot out in the snow to go to Tescos to get all the food shopping for next week out of the way. We’re planning a restful and restorative weekend with no plans other than maybe heading over to my parents for a free lunch on Sunday 😉 Don’t know if the snow will settle – it was very wet out there but if it does then I guess there might be a bit of snow playing on the agenca too.