Send me a postcard, drop me a line

catching up 🙂

Friday I worked, it was a pretty good day, made even nicer by Ady coming to meet me for lunch after his exam. He thinks he did ok – he has the second and third exams this coming Friday and then we just wait until mid August to get his results.

Julie had been here in the morning with Jack and Maisie looking after Davies and Scarlett and they’d had a nice morning, followed by Dad here in the afternoon. Ady came home to find Dad sitting on the garden bench while the children had branched out from their lavendar selling with marketing and advertising ventures. They’d put a sign reading BUS STOP on a stick out on the grass verge infront of their ‘shop front’ (garden wall) to encourage people to stop and linger there waiting for a bus and a sign asking ‘HAVE YOU SEEN THIS DOG?’ with a picture of a very mangy looking dog, also designed to make potential customers slow down so they could engage them in conversation. They’d made £1.40 from lavendar sprigs sales :lol:. At this rate we’ll be selling space for concession stands in the garden – Merry, if you want an outreach BM stall you better book your space early 😆 and Joyce, I reckon there’s a market here for your business too if we pitch it right. We won’t have any problems selling excess eggs if we have any hens our of our five chicks at least.

Saturday A beautiful morning here so having established an ETA from Si & Layla we got the garden guest-ready and then wandered down to the village green where it was the first day of the local village festival. Adur Festival is for the whole first two weeks in June which covers Lancing and Shoreham but Sompting (our village) has a mini festival for the first weekend. We had a good look round, tasted some extremely hot chilli sauces (kids adored chilli chocolate), talked at great length to the representative from the local beekeeping association about how easy it is to keep a hive of bees – very tempting but our garden simply isn’t big enough to give a hive space away from the children – maybe when they’re older or if we ever move though – I’m really getting into this smallholding idea 😉 and Ady’s always fancied the River Cottage lifestyle. If we could just combine it with a Health and Safety consultancy business and set the whole thing up for £100K and no credit required…

We came home with balloons from the local church, two free energy saving lightbulbs for having pledged to save 20% of our energy and a load of leaflets on beekeeping. We’d not long been home with Layla, Si, Claudia and Jasper arrived. Much wine, beer, fruit punch, food and ice pops were consumed, we stayed in the garden until about 8.30pm and gave the chicks their first taste of outdoors with a half an hour run around in the garden followed by their cage placed in a sunny spot for the rest of the afternoon. A lovely evening followed a lovely afternoon with plenty of silliness before I was the last person to bed around 3am.

As Ady and I were sleeping in the lounge we didn’t get much of a lie in as Davies and Claudia were up pretty early despite a midnight bedtime. Ady disappeared for an hour or so having woken really early and gone off to the car boot sale, I had a long bath and we were all eating croissants by about 930am. A lazy morning and then we headed back to the green for the second day of the festival. We arrived before it really seemed to have gotten going so when I overheard someone say the school next to the green was open we decided to go in there for a look around. It is the infant and middle school that Davies would already be at and Scarlett would be starting in September but I’ve never stepped foot in the place before so I was actually quite curious to see inside. None of us had stepped foot in a school since we were pupils and were knocked back by the smell of school that hit us as we walked towards the doors. Inside there was a clay activity to make a clowns face which Davies, Claudia and Scarlett all had a go at and then a circus skills activity going on in the school hall which they all had a bash at too. Pics on flickr.

We went back to the green and they all had a go on some of the rides – Claudia did the inflatable slide while Davies and Scarlett went for the inflatable space rocket thing, then the bigger two went on the Very High Indeed slide and then I went on the fast spinny ride twice – once with Tarly and once with Claudia and Davies. I love the fair 🙂 We had a quick look at the Animal Encounters stall where they had giant millipede, African Land Snails and Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches aswell as a tigers claw and a lions tooth and an emy’s egg to look at and a variety of snakes skins and deers antlers. Then we came home for more garden play, chick worship, food and drink before waving our guests off mid afternoon. A low key couple of hours with the kids in the garden followed by a much needed bath and very early nights, Ady is cooking a lovely smelling roast dinner and I’m about to pour my second glass of wine while sitting with all the windows open and the sun still shining while I can hear the sounds of the fair dismantling in the distance. A lovely weekend. 🙂