Badgerlissimo

Busy day today. I did a couple of loads of washing which promptly got rained on 🙄 and made some banana cakes with some very brown bananas which went down very well with the children so will doubtless by the fate of all past their prime bananas from now on.

Granny arrived and stayed for a couple of hours, but as I gave her a big wad of photos of camp to look through and instructed D & S to tell her what was going on in all of them and then buggered off to make said cakes, put on said washing loads and change Tarly’s bed and tidy her room up a bit I didn’t really give her much time to mention whether my arse looked big as it swept out of the room :lol:. She did comment on how happy all the children looked at camp and said (almost with a lightbulb hanging over her head as she did so) ‘and of course they are learning all the time aren’t they!’ And she loved the idea of the Goddard Tour of the North (including Scotland) too! 🙂
The children then got the geomags out to show her and I brought tea and fresh from the oven cakes in which always impresses ( 😉 ) and we made a collaborative geomag campsite with tents, tables and chairs and Tarly made a duck! Plenty of excellent demonstrations of all sorts of skills and knowledge being shown by both children with the geomags too so that was a good PR job all round I thought 🙂

Shame they didn’t maintain it really 🙄 as when Lucy, Rebecca and Richard arrived they managed to prove all I was trying to tell Lucy about how much easier it all gets and how little supervision they require by continually being loud, squabbling with each other and generally interupting every time I got midway through a sentence! Rebecca also reverted to shy and scared and Richard managed to uncover every single baby-unfriendly aspect to the house. :rolls: Never mind, we’re seeing them again later this week. (I think she may well be a blogger in the making Helen and I’ll certainly pass on your hello, she was very full of how lovely SB was when you arrived at Kessingland and said she’d like to spend more time getting to know you. 🙂 )

They left and the children almost instantly became ‘normal’ again, not requiring any input from me at all so I made a couple of phonecalls and pottered on the laptop while they played with lego and watched W&G Were Rabbit and all the dvd extras for about the millionth time.

Ady arrived home and they instantly started again not letting us complete a single sentence but it was time to take Davies to Badgers anyway so I left Ady and Scarlett to it (I think they did some colouring followed by a big bubble bath for Tarly while we were gone. We’ve started letting them have baths to themselves on a Monday which although they enjoy their baths together normally seems to be a ‘treat’ to have once a week alone.

I took Davies in, he didn’t want to kiss me goodbye so I happily went and read my book in the car for an hour. I’m finding that peaceful hour very precious and was sad to realise that for a good couple of months each year it will already by dark by 5pm and therefore slightly less cosy and easy to read in the car. Hopefully by then he will be fine about being dropped off and I can sneak off to the library for an hours’ peace – I’ve certainly got no intention of going home again! 🙂

When I collected him I hung back to tell Lisa (Badger in charge lady) that we won’t be around for the next two weeks and she started telling me that she’ll really miss Davies, he is ‘my star’ and what a lovely, sweet, lovely, lovely, LOVELY boy he is. All the while cuddling him while she said it. She was also saying how much her and the lad who assists her were praising ‘home tuition’ if that is how it effects children. So that was a bit lovely to hear 🙂 🙂 I told Davies how proud that makes me feel and how happy I am that he is loving it so much and is clearly so happy there. Hurrah for Badgers eh?! 🙂 He came home with a passport he’d made there this week with a little self portrait he’d drawn and at one point I had glanced up through the window from the car to see one of the older children helping him with his chair. If he is not the youngest (which he might well be actually) he is certainly the smallest and I imagine he is the darling of the group – and I know how well he responds to that role so I really think he is in his element there – the best possible outcome for his first away from me experience really. And he does look very cute indeed in his little uniform too.

We came home via the shop where I needed a vital ingredient for dinner and spotted a range of old fashioned kids sweets including fizz bombs which had been a childhood favourite of mine. I bought a pack and me and Davies sat in the car in the drive eating them, blinking like mad as they are so fizzy and sour and giggling away. Moments like that are what I’ll treasure forever about motherhood – the smell of their hair when I cuddle them, the feel of their skin as I smooth on suncream, the shared glances between me and Davies when Tarly does something silly, the being there for the ‘firsts’ from the milestones like steps or words to the small but never insignificant first word they read, first realisation of who they are independent of me and being the one to introduce them to sugary teeth rotting junk food! 🙂 I don’t know whether it is them getting older, me getting more into my current role or just a general shift in what’s important to me but I’m getting a huge amount of pride and pleasure out of being the mother to my children just now and I’m really, really enjoying it. 🙂

Tomorrow we need to return library books and I need to pop into town to sign a form at the optician. I think we might go into town on the bus as the cost of the fare (given Davies will be free, he’s short enough and not in school so I reckon he can pass as four!) is not much more expensive than parking and we might be able to go to the main library then instead. With the exception of London buses and open topped tour buses I don’t think Tarly has ever been on one for the sake of transport so that should be fun.