We had a plan to visit a car boot sale this morning but further rain of the type that inspires me to start collecting more dismantled pallets to build at ark (I have a drawing for the design and everything, I know where to get the pallets – so if it really does keep raining do all feel free to come to Nic & Ady’s bringing two of every animal you spy on the way :lol:) put paid to that plan. At about 1030am we decided it had stopped sufficiently to go out and see whether the car boot sale was still happening, just as my Dad pulled up outside. His first words were ‘I thought you’d be at work!’ to me, charming! 😆 The reason became apparent when Ady served him coffee and toast anyway ;). The children swarmed all over him and then left us to it having had a Where’s Wally fest both crowded onto my lap before heading off to Davies’ bedroom to play.
Dad and I chatted, he agreed to fund Davies’ next round of swimming lessons, which we’re holding out on a final decision on until after tomorrow. Davies is very keen to go again come September and is aware that it is solely down to how he gets on tomorrow – ooh I guess this would be like SATS – except of course he wants to go again next term ;). We also talked about other, non bloggable stuff which having talked to my mum last week I’m not altogether sure I particularly want to be privy to, I do hope that whatever else Davies and Scarlett grow up blaming us for, being caught inbetween two parents from first living memory won’t be one of them. Sigh.
The rain cleared up so the children went off outside to play with the chickens, Dad left, but it was too late for us to go and do anything before I needed to go to work. Davies wandered back in the house again and saw me looking at the monsterteeny blog so asked to look at his Monster Movie Productions blog to which we started talking about other ideas for films and came up with the idea of a documentary about the chickens for him to do. So in the half hour before I went to work we went outside with the camera and filmed him introducing the chickens, showing us around their home and talking about ideas for the finished film. He then drew a picture and I dictated the letters to spell ‘My Chickens’ to him, then it was time for me to get changed and head off to work.
The four hours went pretty quickly. I did an hour on the Big Wild Read desk but only had a couple of children to talk to – one to register and one to listen to talking about the books they’d already read and issue them with their first set of stickers. I tend to talk about ‘my children’ quite a lot when talking to children. I’m not sure whether that is to put them or me at ease really but I still consider myself to be fairly crap with children generally, although maybe that’s just living with Ady who has a total Pied Piper thing going on and is therefore always likely to thrust me into a bad light! 😆
I came home to find my Mum here, but she didn’t stay long. Scarlett played on Ady’s laptop on barbie.com while Davies and I edited the chicken movie and took some more video clips of him linking between chicken vid clips – the finished project still needs work but I’m waiting for Davies to do it with me. We did stuff like brightening clips, rotating them 90 degrees and trimming them to change the length, including editing out a bit that went wrong, so it was all very good practise for putting together a film. I’ve sent off the consent form today for him to go and participate in a CBBC workshop of making movies in a couple of weeks time. No idea if he’ll get chosen as I imagine competition / uptake will be pretty stiff but it’d be great if he does get to go along. One of the local theatre places is running a summer holidays workshop including an animation workshop day which he’d love to do but only takes 8-12 year olds – if it was next year I’d think about pushing for him to go but he’s still way too young this year. I love working with him on stuff like this though, he has so much creativity, original ideas and articulates it all so well, he’s very imaginative :). We also looked at another reproduction book – Made with Love – which was excellent and answered all his questions except for ‘why are most babies born head first?’ which I could cover myself, so that’s good :).
The children had a bath, I brushed Scarlett’s hair and then I popped to the supermarket while they settled into Davies’ bedroom for a sleepover. They watched Charlottes Web and started Cat in the Hat before Scarlett decided she missed her toys and her own bedroom and came back downstairs again, falling asleep in minutes. Ady and I had dinner and watched another Torchwood and given we’ll all be tried and grumpy tomorrow from likely being woken by an alarm at 8am for swimming I’m off to bed myself.