Blown away cobwebs

We met Julie, Jack and Maisie for a winters walk at Slindon today and it was lovely. 🙂 The sky was blue and it was a clear, crisp winters day, cold but perfect to be out and about in. Most of the mud was still frozen hard (although the children managed to find every soft bit left :roll:) and we had a lovely couple of hours walking round with them running, clambering on trees and generally enjoying being out and about. Julie and I had a good catch up on each others lives and shared a couple of dilemmas / parenting nightmares which made us both feel loads better. She’s full of honest common sense at times is Julie and pretty much entirely agenda-less so her slant on a few things was much appreciated and made me feel very reassured. 🙂

We walked round one circuit including feeding the ducks before going back to the carpark to sit in our cars for lunch and then headed back out again towards the ‘camp’. It is a crater type hole with a big tree offset to one side which way back last year someone had started to build a teepee like structure with tall sticks around and the children really enjoyed playing in. When we went there last a couple of weekends ago it had all been dismantled / blown down so we started to rebuild it. Today we spend a good half and hour or so there gathering more sticks and making it stronger and building two benches inside for sitting on. The children worked on digging out toeholds / steps to make it easier to climb in and out (with Scarlett singing ‘what’s going to work? teamwork!’ from the Wonderpets as she did so :lol:). We walked back with me, Davies and Scarlett slightly ahead of J, J and M so we sat on a log and waited for them to catch up and then as it was so nice sitting there in the sunshine we sat there a bit longer. A lovely couple of hours 🙂

On the drive home Scarlett sat really quietly eating chocolate chip rock cakes and looking really comfy in her new car seat while Davies and I discussed every single traffic sign we passed (and we passed a lot!) and what they meant. He was so interested in it that I’ve promised to get him a book on it from work tomorrow (I’m sure there is a whole section on highway code and signs etc.). Once home I dashed around getting washing hung out while they tidied up some paper and pens from this morning – they are both really into cutting out things at the moment and had been playing a game where the scissors were crocodiles (after Davies cut out and coloured in some Wonderpets for me :lol:) so there were lots of little snippings of paper on the floor.

Lucy arrived with Rebecca for a catch up play and chat which also made me feel better with some mutual moaning about families (thanks Luce x) then Ady arrived home, Lucy and Rebecca left, I served the kids a hasty tea then Davies and I headed off to Beavers. The traffic was awful and as I’d been running on fumes driving to Slindon and back and had to take my car as Ady’s was full of plants I had to stop for petrol on the way too. The petrol station was heaving and I tried to be clever and use a wrong side of the car pump (petrol cap is on drivers side as most cars seem to be but if you park forward and close to the pump you can usually stretch the pump over the car and into the other side) but it wouldn’t reach so I had to reverse and turn round as I’d lost my place in the queue to get to the right side, then I joined the very long queue to pay 🙄 We were 15 minutes late for Badgers and had to knock on the door to be let in 😳 but I did get to sit in my car and finish my book in peace and quiet.

On the way there and back Davies was asking me all sorts of questions about light, why the sky is blue, how rainbows work etc and having given lots of half and uneducated answers I really must keep my promise to follow up on all that with him too. Oh how busy we’re going to be ;). Home for a bath for Davies and continued turning the house upside down to try and find Davies’ camera which seems to have gone AWOL. Frustratingly we all seem to recall having seen it lying around ‘somewhere’ but none of us can quite recall where. We’re almost certain it hasn’t left the house so is lost somewhere in here, tomorrow the search continues!