Another day….

another piece of junk mail from Park Resorts. I must get at least two pieces of mail from them a week trying to sell me a static in one of their parks from the time I book Kessingland each year until the end of the season. This has happened for the last three years – considering they only get about 50 quid a year from me they must spend about a quarter of that on sending me glossy leaflets and letters and postage!

I worked this morning – extra hours (hurrah about £30 bonus money -that’ll pay for Africa Alive!) and Ady WFH to look after D&S. It was really busy for the first couple of hours which went really quick but then it really dragged from about 11am-1pm when we had all of about 5 people in for the whole five hours. I spent most of the time ordering cds and dvds in for myself and choosing a couple of films for the weekend and then wandering round the shelves browsing the books. When it is only for an hour or so I can’t really think of any nicer working environment to not have much to do, but a whole day really drags when it’s quiet and I start to miss the children and think of all the things I could be doing at home.

I popped into the CoOp after work for a few bits and pieces and as there was a huge queue for the cashpoint I used my debit card. We’ve not had any plastic for the last 18 months at all but recently our bank sent us Visa Electron cards which have instant authorisation and will only allow you to spend funds available in your account there and then. I’ve only used it a couple of times for things like buying contact lenses online or for small purchases under a tenner when it is better to spend 6 or 7 quid on a card than to withdraw £10 from the cashpoint and waste the change on frittering it away. Except my card was declined. This was (to quote the Wonderpets) ‘sewious’ as I’ve been dead careful with money this month and thought we had about 40 quid left. The cashier tried it again with me having hot and cold flushes and feeling sick at the thought of having cocked up our finances somehow but it wouldn’t go through so I slunk out of there and dashed home. Ady went off to work and I checked the online balance to find we have nearly 80 quid in there so I’ve been even more careful than I thought. Not sure why it got declined but very relieved it is not because direct debits have been bouncing or anything like that.

The children were out in the garden when I got in. Our garden goes all the way round the house as we are a detatched house on a corner. It doesn’t have a back or a front garden and is fairly equally spaced all the way round but with all sorts of differing levels as the house is on a slope. This is the first year I have let the children out there on their own to play as plenty of the garden is utterly exposed to the street, road and passers by which has worried me wrt to snatching, reporting of school age children in the garden during school hours as well as general hideous accidents from all the dangerous split level bits and pieces. But of course all that makes the garden dangerous to an adult is what makes it exciting and adventure packed to a child, with things to scramble over, climb across and risk life and limb over. They have a couple of slides, a mini trampoline, a sandpit and various garden toys (outside toys obviously, not the indoor ones 😉 ) and they have been out there loads this week and really enjoyed it. With the front door and windows open I can hear them playing anyway and I check them every so often and it’s been lovely to have them outside enjoying it this week.

Lucy, Rebecca and Richard came over and the children mostly left us in peace to chat with some indoor and outdoor play. We had some good chats and mutual clog admiration with Tarly bringing hers to join in which was all very lovely.

They left and the children finally came in from the garden and wanted to do some drawing with an oil pastel set I’ve had for ages. Davies wanted some ideas of what to do with such an array of colours so I showed him how to do scribble pictures. He managed to do and colour his own and Tarly got me to do one for her to colour.
mine
Davies’

Then I showed them how to do a design based on something else with the example being my name
and we talked about how art should be individual with no two people’s productions looking the same. Davies is actually quite good at replicas of things – for examples his Wallace and Gromit pictures and models and I can do a passable image of most things in 3d or paper given a bit of practise but actually I think real art is in creation rather than imitation and I was trying to show that from random scribbles with the same colour pastels we still managed to produce differing end results by way of colour selection, how hard we pressed etc. I think creativity is too underrated and wish more had been made of my creative streak in childhood, whether it was drawing or writing and whilst I have massive respect for the applying the certainties of mathematics and science I personally probably place more gravity on creativity of individuals. I was reading Gill’s blog the other day about writing before one can read and that made perfect sense to me – both of my children are far more interested in writing than reading and it seems utterly logical that they would place more value on getting their own message out there than receiving other people’s. Reading is great but when the choice is reading ‘Peter likes the ball, Jane likes the ball, the dog likes the ball’ and committing your own ideas to paper be they words or pictures for me it would be my own work every time.

Then we snuggled up and watched Wonderpets together. I’d watched most of it before I went to work this morning but watched it in entirety tonight as it was a special feature length episode. Oh it was lovely, I wiped away a tear ;). Then pjs for the children and I read some stories. I’d borrowed a children’s book about Anne Frank which I read to them and a book about Creation and one about a trampolining superstar. We all enjoyed all of those and Davies asked loads of questions about the Anne Frank one which I’m sure will lead to further discussion at some point, but took in geography, history, religion and several bits of language when I explained certain terms to him. Ady arrived home then and we finished the children’s days by dancing around all four of us to a Chas and Dave cd I’d brought home from work so the kids could hear such music, specifically ‘Rabbit’!

I had an email from the tent seller today to say our tent has been despatched. Well actually it didn’t say that precisely as it was in German but babelfish translated it for me and that was the gist of it so hopefully it will be here soon. We’d had a mad idea about heading off somewhere local for a nights’ camping when I get in from work tomorrow if it had already arrived this weekend as we’re planning to dig all the camping stuff out of the garage in the morning and see what we need for this summer so I guess that won’t be happening but we have a car boot sale with our names on it on Sunday morning anyway and a long summer awaits with the promise of much camping ahead. 🙂