A day of two halves…

So yesterday morning Ady and Davies headed off to work together leaving Tarly and I to our own devices. I offered baking, reading books, doing jigsaws, going to the library for storytime and she wanted ‘everything except going to the library’.

So we got dressed and headed out to the Wizard store to buy bits and bobs for Davies’ party next week – things like paper plates, cups, tableclothes etc. It’s suddenly dawned on me that it is NEXT WEEK and that I still have loads to sort out and will have a houseful of people from Friday leaving no space at all for last minute anythings – Ady is taking everyone who is here on Saturday morning to the park for a couple of hours otherwise there will be no food to eat – the house just isn’t big enough to have about 20 people in it while I fill all available surfaces with sandwiches and rice crispie cakes and have about 12 children asking if they can have one now cos they are hungry! 😆

We came home again and made some banana cakes with the addition of a few chocolate chips. Tarly put all the fairy cake cases in the baking trays, mashed the banana, chopped the chocolate, did lots of stirring and licked the spoon 🙂

Meanwhile Davies and Ady had gone to McDonalds for breakfast and headed off to various B&Q stores, via charity shops and gaming retailers on the way.

Where Davies learnt about what Daddy does at work – goes round inspecting all the various merchandised displays of his company’s product (mainly bedding plants), taking photos, checking the condition of the stock and talking to the staff about any problems with the product. Davies’ observation was that ‘every one of these B&Q stores look the same inside’. 😆

Back at home, Lucy, Rebecca and Richard arrived for lunch bearing pizza. Tarly and Rebecca played – once Tarly allowed Rebecca to :roll:, did each others’ make-up, played with the polly pockets and veered between wanting Richard to come and play with them so he could be the ‘Richard Monster’ for them to run screaming from and not wanting him to play because he was trampling through their games. Richard was fine with either idea and played with the toy cars quite happily during his moments of banishment! Lucy and I discussed the school place form that Rebecca would also be expecting and how the group dynamics work between Lucy’s, Julie’s and my children.

They headed off after a couple of hours leaving Tarly and I to ourselves for the afternoon.

Meanwhile Ady and Davies were back at McDonalds, this time slightly further along the coast having lunch:
The Happy Meal toy (oh joy) is a bit of plastic you can clip on your clothing which plays ‘I like to move it, move it’. Nice. 🙄

Tarly and I continued with our baking, this time making a malteser cake. Tarly did the greasing the pans, the sieving the flour and cocoa and lots of mixing. Oh and the spoon licking. 🙂

While it was cooking we had a speakerphone call with Ady and Davies which mainly involved the children shrieking each others’ names and laughing. Loudly. 😆 Oh and Davies playing his plastic toy down the phone to us.

I showed Tarly how to check if cakes are cooked so she was doing that. I am a firm believer in the giving children chances to try stuff like opening oven doors, stirring hot food, using sharp knives etc, with proper supervision. We were never allowed to do anything like that so consequently you tend to try nad do stuff sneakily and have no respect for stuff that can hurt you either. Also let’s face it a child like Tarly is going to do it anyway so I’d rather she knew how to do it properly than try furtively and hurt herself seriously. So we set the cake to cool and went to do some jigsaws. We’d done some fairy ones in the morning but Scarlett got out Davies’ really long space one with all the planets and we did that, then she got out some really old wooden ones. One is a train with numbers 0-9 on the carriages which you match up to groups of 1-9 animals. I remember teaching Davies numbers and counting with it when we was about 2 but I think Tarly has missed out on some of that sort of thing by being the littlest. She did it my way for a while, putting the carriages is number order and then counting the animals and counting the carriages to match them up, then she suddenly said ‘But we could just match the colours Mummy couldn’t we?’ as in classic preschool child toy style the animals colour matches the numbered carriage so actually there is no need to look at the numbers at all. Grr! Another obvious difference in my two childrens’ learning styles there then. 😆 We also did an alphabet puzzle.

By then it was time to decorate the cake so we made icing and I spead that and then Tarly had free rein with the maltesers, she was so proud of her efforts that she demanded she take a photo of it! You can see the cake and her picture here
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We then finished our day together by me sitting on the floor with her climbing all over me and a very rough and lengthy chorus of row, row, row your boat. And we did some writing on a picture of a butterfly she’s coloured in to send to Maisie. She wrote ‘to Maisie, Scarlett’ very nicely with lots of guidance.

Davies and Ady had finished their day in Dover and work done they spent a while looking at the white cliffs and out to sea. Ady assures me they had very educational chats about things including the channel tunnel (lol – like I’d worry! ;-)).

Scarlett and I read a couple of books and then they were home. We all malteser cake and caught up on each others’ days. The children were delighted to see each other and spent ages dashing round like loons. They played with the move it move it thingy and got all the instruments out to accompany it with and then showed us their new favourite game of Davies giving Scarlett ‘horsey rides’ which I forsee ending badly when they try to take it to extreme levels going downstairs or underwater or something.

We finally got them to bed, I cooked dinner and we sat down to watch The Terminal on dvd. It had actually been one of my choices but it was a bit slow and I ended up dozing through most if it and falling asleep at the end completely.

It was a lovely day actually. It made me realise all the small things that Tarly has missed out on by being the youngest and always having had Davies around. I don’t think she has suffered from it and has certainly had way more positives in having Davies as a playmate than she has missed out on by not having one-to-one with me but there are definite gaps. It made me realise how just having one child around is so much easier in terms of the lack of craziness and being able to manage everything so easily – she was a dream to take round the shops, good company and helpful whilst cooking (in complete contrast to the shoving and worrying about who had most goes at stirring that is baking with two children) and thrived on being able to choose what to do next and in what order to do things her way. But also how one child is so much harder in that they are far more demanding of your time, less likely to head off for an hour or more and play (this is probably specific to a child who is normally used to having a constant playmate on tap than one child generally or course). Tarly is the one who probably gets more time on her own with me anyway as she often follows me upstairs or into the kitchen when Davies is playing something and she is far more likely to sidle up to me with a story book and ask me to read it but it was quite intense to have a whole day dedicated to her. And I did miss Davies lots. I’m sure Ady never considered what we’re doing when he’s at work but I spent the whole time with low level worries about them having a car crash.

Anyway, we’re planning to do it again soon, next time Tarly is going off with Ady which will be a bit experimental as she is more of a handful for him to try and work with but will be nice for me and Davies – and I somehow doubt we’ll spend much time doing baking!:lol: