Yep, it’s the school summer holidays and the school children are out in force everywhere! 😉 Eavesdropped with mild amusement to all the chants, goading and teasing I recall from my own playground 20 odd years ago.
So, a catch up then.
Monday Barbara, who we affectionately know as ‘The Babs’ and family were coming to stay. Babs will be reading this so if anyone wants to wave or say hello feel free to use the comments box 😉 😆 Now Babs will be the first to admit she is not known for her being on time. Therefore I felt perfectly safe heading off to Tescos for last minute bits and pieces, stopping in the M&S next door to try on some bras (never such a great activity with a loud and descriptive audience in a changing room with no soundproofing! :lol:) and coming home to get dinner (spag bol in the slow cooker) sorted and on before they arrived. I got a text while trying on the bras (just to add to the loudness eminating from my changing room! :lol:) to say they were about 1.5 hours away so they actually arrived while I was still chopping onions for dinner and had put a box of Rice Crispies upside down back in their home on top of the microwave and had several bowl fulls tip all over my head and everything underneath the microwave.
So the rest of Monday passed in a haze of chatting, drinking tea leading to drinking wine / beer /cider, playing, running around and rather a lot of not sleeping! 😆
Tuesday Lucy had invited us all round to descend on her for the day which is exactly what we did. Her house is perfect for lots of people with a biggish lounge leading through patio doors straight into a safe, visible and enclosed garden. So the 7 – growing to 8 when Lucy’s nephew arrived – children and 4 – growing to 6 when Colin got home and Lucy’s Mum called in – all fitted very nicely and got on with things for a good part of the day. 🙂
We came home for a planned quiet and early night for the children and did everything ‘right’. They had carb heavy dinner, watching a quiet film, followed by baths and bed. And although it felt like something of a ‘process’ they were indeed all asleep by 9pm. We’ll gloss over how long it was before we were all asleep too but suffice to say it wouldn’t do any good to my reputation! 😉
Today Babs and co were amazingly efficient and were away by 9am. Don’t think we’ve ever had guests leave so early or so on time :lol:. I continued the theme and did bed stripping, washing, drying and re-making, cleared all the backlog of washing, tidied except the playroom – which needs a severe going over at some point, utterly unrelated to guests and but long overdue. Oh and I made a cake! Lucy’s mum let slip yesterday that it is Lucy’s birthday today and as we were seeing her for Home Ed group meet in the park I made her a cake and took along candles, matches and a cake slice.
Lovely to have Babs and co here, lovely chatting about HE and otherwise. We realised that our five children stagger very nicely with a 2,3,4,5 and 6 year old currently and it was lovely to see them find extra friendships besides the Davies and Ben combination. Tarly spent some time with Rachael and I watched Beth and Davies find more in common too. 🙂 Thanks for coming 🙂
The rest of today was spent meeting at the park as previously mentioned. Lucy was there with R and R and Julie came along with Jack and Maisie. It’s a really nice combination of 3 adults and 6 children that seems to work really well. So much so that we’re all getting together again tomorrow for story time at the library. 🙂 We were there for 3 hours or so, the children played, we chatted, we couldn’t light the candles for Lucy’s cake cos it was too windy so she had to mime blowing it out for the camera 😆 and as the weather has changed here we all trekked over to our cars for extra clothing. There are several ditches filled with either sand or dirt and the children had played in them gathering sticks and containers to build all sorts of dirt creations so were filthy.
So I made a deal with D&S that they could have a really deep bath with every single bath toy they own right up until teatime (about 45 minutes) if they didn’t splash and didn’t argue. Which let me make the beds back up, cook their tea and spent some time on the internet aswell as having a cup of tea. 🙂
They were both asleep pretty early tonight, unsurprisingly and I’m about to follow them myself…
Well I got here (blog) eventually (to check up on what you’ve written (and not) about me) if not so punctually as I managed to arrive on your doorstep! 😉
Thanks for the hospitality as ever. Thoughts are with Malice tomorrow…
See you next weekend.
Comment by Barbara — 08 August 2006 @ 12:18 am